Crybbe

CHAPTER VIII

Previously, the cardboard box had contained a new kind of foot-massaging sandal from Germany which Max was trying out on the advice of his reflexologist. As a coffin it was not entirely satisfactory.

She'd found the box in Max's bedroom, which was built into the eaves over the far end of the long room where his desk stood. The four-poster bed, facing the mound, had deep-grey drapes. Max had not spent a single night here yet, but it seemed to Rachel that the atmosphere in the room was already foetid with tension and a lingering sense of suffocated longing. Rachel thought of the nights of the Great Beast and the Scarlet Woman, and was sickened and ashamed. She'd snatched the shoe-box and fled.

The box was necessary. There was no way she could carry Tiddles's chest up to the attic on her own. As she knelt in the yard by the rubbish pile, she was worried the mummified cat would come apart or disintegrate while being transferred from the chest. He fell as light as wads of dust under an old sofa.

'Poor little devil,' Rachel said. 'You certainly haven't much energy left to put into Max's project.'

Returning Tiddles to his sentry post in the Court would, she decided, be her last meaningful task in Crybbe.

And she didn't want witnesses.

For over an hour Tiddles lay in his box on the kitchen table in the stables while Rachel waited for the workmen to finish clearing the Court. It was gone 7 p.m.; still she could hear them inside, while a van waited in the courtyard.

At nearly 8 p.m., she threw on her Barbour, picked up the shoe-box, marched purposefully across to the Court's main entrance and hauled open the dusty oak door.

There was a clang from above. A thump. The sound of a large piece of furniture being hurled to the floor.

What were they doing up there? And who exactly were they?

Not – judging by the quality of the stuff they'd tossed out – a knowledgeable antique dealer among them. Rachel decided it was time to throw them out.

Or time, at least, to establish the identity of the smart-arse who was deciding so arbitrarily which items of furniture to discard.

With the shoe-box under her arm, she went in.

'Hello… Excuse me!'

Her voice seemed to go nowhere, as if she was shouting into a wind-tunnel.

The Court was so full of noise. Ceiling-shaking bangs and crashes, as if the entire building was being torn apart. Yet no one had come out of here in at least a couple of hours and the rubbish pile was no higher than it had been when she'd found the cat's wooden chest.

'HELLO!'

She looked around. Half-light floated feebly through the nigh-level slits and barely reached the stone floor.

Rachel followed the sounds and stormed up the spiral stone stair case.

'Excuse me.' Calling out as she neared the first floor. 'I need to lock this place up for the night, so if you could give me some idea how long you're going to be…'

She stepped out into the main chamber, where families had lived and where the Hanging Sheriff, Sir Michael Wort, had held out against the rebel hordes.

'Oh,' Rachel said.

She was alone.

The weak evening light washed through two mullioned windows, but the shadows were taking over now.

Well, she certainly wasn't going to play hide-and-seek with a bunch of silly buggers getting paid well over the odds to clean the place out before morning. She had half a mind to lock them in. Except the keys were in her bag, in the stables.

There was a double crash from above and the sound of glass shattering.

'What the hell…?'

Rachel bounded angrily up the next spiral. Didn't they know how easily they could kill themselves up there, or bring half the ceiling down? Had nobody warned them about the state of the floor?

The heavy door to the attics was ajar. They'd been given keys, then. That bastard Max must have had another set made without even telling her. She thrust through the arched doorway, past the alcove concealing the entrance to the prospect chamber. Up towards the attics.

It was only when she was halfway up the steps that it occurred to her that among the bangs and the crashes there'd been no laughter, none of the usual banter of men working together, no shouted directions, no oaths, no…

No voices at all.

And now she was standing here, on the last stairway, far above her blades of light through broken slates, and it was absolutely silent.

'What,' Rachel demanded, 'is going on?'

What was more disquieting than this sudden inexplicable cessation of bangs and crashes was the hairline crack she detected in her own voice. She cleared her throat and gave it more vehemence.

'Come on, I haven't got all night. Where are you?'

Rachel did not remember ever being superstitious. She did not believe in good luck, bad luck, heaven, hell, psychic forces or the secret power of ley-lines. She found the whole New Age concept not only essentially unsound but, for the most part, very tedious indeed.

Yet – and for the first time – she found the place not just gloomy in a sad, uncared-for kind of way, but in the sense of being oppressive. And yes, OK, eerie. She admitted to herself that she didn't want to go so far into the attic that she might see the rope hanging from the ceiling, even though she knew it could not be a very old rope.

But this was a side issue. Something to be acknowledged and perhaps examined later with a raising of eyebrows and glass of whisky beside the Jotul stove in J.M. Powys's riverside retreat.

For here and for now, there was only one serious, legitimate fear: a fear of the kind of men who, on hearing a woman calling out to them and coming up the stairs, would stop what they were doing, slide into the shadows and keep very, very quiet.

Until this woman appeared at the top of the steps, with nothing to defend her except a dead cat in a shoe-box.

So no way was she going all the way to the top.

Rachel steadied her breathing, set her lips in a firm line, tossed back her hair and began to descend the spiral stairway. If the men in the attic were unaware of the instability of the floor and the danger to themselves, that was their business. They were presumably well-insured.

If they fell, they fell. She hadn't been hired as caretaker of Britain's least-stately home, and she wasn't prepared to tolerate being pissed around any longer. Tomorrow – perhaps even tonight – she would phone Max in London and inform him that she had quit. As of now.

As she descended the twisted stairway it began to grow darker. When she reached the bottom, she found out why. The door sealing off the prospect chamber and the attics must have swung closed behind her, cutting off the light from the first-floor living-hall.

She pushed it with the flat of her hand.

It didn't move.

She put the shoe-box on the stairs and pushed hard with both hands.

It was an oak door, four inches thick and it did not move.

Well, it might have jammed.

'Look, would somebody mind helping me with this door?'

No response.

Or – oh, God, can I really credit this? – the bastards might have locked her in.

It was important to hold on to her anger.

'When I get out of here,' Rachel said suddenly, icily, without thinking, 'you can consider yourselves officially fired.'

Which, on reflection, was a pretty stupid thing to say. They'd never let her out. She tried again.

'Now look, don't be stupid. It's very dangerous up here. The floor's full of holes, you know that. And I haven't got a torch.'

She threw her weight against the door, half-expecting somebody to have quietly unlocked it so that it opened suddenly and she went tumbling down the stairs. Such was the mentality people like this.

But all that happened was she hurt her shoulder.

'Look, would you mind letting me out?'

She stopped suddenly and leaned back against a wall, breathing hard, an awful thought occurring to her.

What if Humble was behind this?

Suppose, as she would normally have expected, the workmen had actually cleared off hours ago. Who, after all, really worked until 8 p.m. on a Sunday evening? Certainly not the kind of unskilled vandals who'd been let loose in here.

What, then, if it had been Humble who had come up here and made a lot of noise to lure her inside? He'd never liked her, and he knew she didn't like him. He might think she was putting the knife in for him with Max. Maybe Max had found out what Humble had done to J.M. that night. Maybe Humble's job was on the line, and he thought she was responsible.

But if Humble was behind this he would have needed an accomplice. One of them up here to make all the racket, one to lock the door after she'd gone through.

Which still meant that someone was up here with her now, on this side of the locked door. Keeping very, very quiet.

Rachel spun round.

It was so dark with the door closed that she could hardly see as far as the twist in the staircase which took it to the attic. Anything could be around that bend, not six feet away.

'Humble!'

Not much authority left in her voice, nor much anger. She was a woman alone in the darkness of a decaying old house, with a man who intended her harm.

Humble, listen… whichever side of the door you are… I don't know why you're doing this. I wish you'd tell me, so we can have it out. But if it's anything to do with what happened the other night with J. M. Powys, I want you to know that I haven't said anything to Max and I don't intend to. A mistake is a mistake. Humble, can you hear me?'

The door didn't have a handle, only a lock. She bent down and tried to look into the keyhole, to see if there was a key in the other side.

She couldn't tell one way or the other; it was too dark. Her own keys were in her bag, on the kitchen table.

'Humble, look, if you've heard what I said, just unlock the door and I'll give you time to get out of the building. I don't want any unpleasantness because…'

Oh, what the hell did it matter now?

'… because I'm handing in my notice tomorrow. I've got another job. In London. You won't have to deal with me again. Did you hear that? Do you understand what I'm saying? Humble!'

Rachel beat her fists on the oak door until she felt the skin break.

She had grown cold. She wrapped her Barbour around her and sat down on a stone stair next to the cardboard coffin and listened hard.

Nothing. She couldn't even hear the birds singing outside, where there was light.

But from the attic, clearly not far beyond the top of the spiral stairway came a single, sharp, triumphant bump.