The Stone Wife

22

Locked in the tower room, Ingeborg refused to give way to despair. There had to be positives. She was still in the place where she needed to be, Nathan’s mansion, even if she no longer had the guest room. She remained undercover. No one knew she was a police officer. If her hastily concocted story was believed, she was a cokehead journalist on the hunt for drugs. And she still had an ally in the house. By telling Nathan she’d actually entered the bedroom to steal his keys, she’d removed any blame from Lee — provided Lee had the inner strength and wit to deny any part in the incident. But she wasn’t pinning her hopes on Lee. She had to find her own way of dealing with the setback.

That was how it was in her thinking: a setback, not a disaster.

Nathan’s appalled reaction to her suggestion that he had drugs in the house had come over as genuine. And he had revealed more than he intended with his comment that she didn’t have a clue who she was dealing with. He may as well have said that while he was not into drugs, he was still a supplier, but not a supplier of what had been suggested. It was as if dealing in firearms was a clean trade.

His outrage at having his secret bathroom invaded was more than just anger that his privacy was violated. His near panic suggested Ingeborg had come close to exposing him.

But she’d found only soap and towels.

The bathroom remained a mystery and a challenge. Lee had said Nathan often took his visitors in there. Took visitors into a bathroom?

Before tonight, she’d been confident the room was used for storing the guns he supplied to his gangster clients. Lee had appeared to agree.

In her head she reconstructed that bathroom unit by unit: cupboards, drawers, bath, shower, hand basin, toilet. The tiling was sound, the walls and ceiling solid. The floor had been covered in square ceramic tiles that felt firm underfoot, suggesting they were on a base of cement. None were loose. There were no tell-tale gaps between them. So far as she could tell, it was a fully equipped, fully functioning bathroom, except that it didn’t function. It was not in regular use.

Again she asked herself why. Nathan and Lee had the en suite shower and toilet. If they didn’t choose to share, Nathan could easily have stepped along the corridor. Evidently he didn’t, because all the toilet items were shop new.

She was convinced the room was used for something more sinister. The washing facility was just a bluff. Had to be.

She tried putting herself into Nathan’s situation. Suppose she were storing weapons on a big scale. Suppose it was common knowledge that she was an illegal supplier, known to the police as well as the criminal world. Wouldn’t she need a secret armoury tucked away in some part of the house no one would suspect? Suppose it appeared to be a bathroom. Suppose the bathroom was just a front.

An idea dawned.

A big, bold concept.

She was going to need a second inspection of the secret bathroom. And it had to be tonight, before dawn. After being woken in the night, people invariably sink into a deeper sleep. This basic physical reaction would apply to the minders, as well as Nathan and Lee. By defying her body clock and staying awake, Ingeborg could gain an advantage. The remaining hours of the night offered her the best opportunity of not disturbing the others — or being disturbed.

First challenge: how to escape from the tower room. The floor and walls were solid, the window too narrow to squeeze through.

What about the ceiling? Presumably she was in part of the original house, so the ceiling would be constructed of traditional lath and plaster. Logically, this was the escape route. The room was at the top of a virtually free-standing tower with a conical tiled roof over it. She was certain she was the only inhabitant, so it was unlikely she’d be heard. She could scrape, scratch, hammer at the plaster to her heart’s content. But what with?

The ceiling was out of reach, about nine feet above floor level. She upended the latrine bucket and stepped on and off to test the extra height it would give her. Not enough. She tugged the blankets from the primitive camp bed and examined the wooden frame. Hinged at the centre and mounted on six folding legs, it would make a cumbersome battering ram, but it might do. It was not too heavy to lift. She grasped one end and hoisted it to the vertical. Balancing the frame on its end, she stepped on the bucket. Then she braced herself and thrust the bed upwards so that one corner struck the ceiling with a satisfying crunch at a point quite close to the wall.

Some powder came down.

She tried a second time. The noise was louder than she expected, a boom like a bass drum. To hell with that. You can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs, as Lee would say.

She began a regular pounding of the ceiling, hitting it with all the strength she could muster. She was glad of her state of fitness. The weight of the bed worked to her advantage as a destruction implement, but was hell for her back and biceps. And the hinged legs swung loose more than once and rapped her knuckles.

Thankfully, the plaster started coming down in chunks. She used one of the blankets to protect her head.

After fifteen minutes, the progress slowed. Not much more was shifting.

She paused and stared up. So near and yet so far. A sizeable dent had appeared, revealing some of the laths. A few small lumps of plaster hung down, attached to the animal hair once used as a binding agent. She’d removed about half an inch, and she was tiring with the effort to penetrate those close-packed strips of wood. She couldn’t hoist the cumbersome thing to that level and she was tiring with the effort. She needed to get up there herself and force a way through, but how?

Before being locked in, she’d been subjected to another body search. This time the minder had enjoyed himself and it had been a revolting experience. He’d taken her phone, of course, and made sure she wasn’t armed. But in the process of running his hands over every curve and fold of her figure, he’d failed to check inside her shoes — where she had slipped the metal nail file she’d been using as a screwdriver in the bathroom.

Nail files aren’t designed to be cutting tools. This small round-ended strip of metal was impractical for working on the laths, but she had another use for it. The bed frame was held together by L-shaped angle plate brackets screwed into the lengths of wood. They were a handy size. If she could free one of them, she’d have a useful tool.

She lowered the bed to the floor and got to work with the nail file. Difficult. The four screws weren’t round-headed, like those in the bathroom. They were flat to the wood and difficult to shift. The curved end of the nail file got in the slot, but kept slipping out.

Resolved not to be beaten, she jammed the file into the door frame and snapped off the end with a kick of her heel. She was left with a flat tip that made a better tool. Now she had some purchase on the screw and got a little movement that with more effort became a forty-five degree turn and then more. Fortunately she had always had strength in her wrists. The other screws followed and the bracket was freed. As a tool it felt good in her hand. It was at least three inches along each side, thin galvanised steel.

The next task was to get up to a level where she could work on the ceiling, and the only way was by propping the bed against the wall and using it as a ladder, hoping the canvas slats would bear her weight. Removing the bracket had made it a distinctly unsafe structure.

For the present, the frame held together and she climbed within reach of the damaged ceiling and got to work with her new tool. The laths were nailed to the undersides of the joists. They had to be forced downwards if possible. Get one out and the others should follow.

Whoever had made this ceiling had built it to last, using a strong bond. But by probing steadily with the bracket she eventually found a weak point and forced the end right through. By much jiggling and gouging she enlarged the slit and felt a small movement of the lath. She worked at it with such energy that the camp bed bounced against the wall. And at last the lath gave way and split at one end.

Elated, Ingeborg forced the strip of wood downwards, levered out the other nail, and threw it on the floor. With the space to reach through, the others were easy to remove.

In under ten minutes she had made a hole wide enough to scramble through. The bed slid down the wall a fraction when she raised herself to the next slat and it fell all the way and clattered on the floor when she made a grab for the exposed joist and hauled herself into the loft.

She paused briefly to enjoy the moment. She was crouching in the dark, cone-shaped loft.

The next task would be easier: removing tiles from the roof. In fact, she was thinking ahead to how she would cope so high up in the open air. She had a faint memory of the tower’s position at the corner of the house, but she couldn’t be certain of its structure. She needed to break out on the side closest to the rest of the building. Difficult to judge in a round tower.

She could only make the attempt and hope.

The bracket was the perfect tool for ripping through the felt underlay. She rapidly exposed a section between two rafters. Tiles that had resisted more than a century of gales and snow lifted easily from the battens supporting them. A square of grey light was revealed and cool air fanned her face. One row of tiles was nailed and needed some leverage. Two slid into the guttering, but she was able to scoop them up and stack them inside with the others. The opening got larger.

She had got lucky with her choice of where to break out.

An almost full moon gave her a view of the house, mostly in silhouette, with long shadows cast across the drive and lawns below, and streaks of silver light along the extremities picking out the angles of the roof and battlements. She was higher than she expected, but there wasn’t time to dwell on a potential attack of vertigo. Getting started was paramount.

She needed to reach the battlements that linked the tower to the main house and they were at least a body length below. Could she trust the guttering to take her weight?

A scary moment.

She wriggled through the opening and pressed her torso against the tiles still in place, keeping one hand curled under a rafter. Little by little, she allowed herself to slip down the angled roof and over the edge until gravity took over and she slithered into space, made a grab for the curved gutter and hung on. It creaked under the strain and shifted slightly. Please, she thought.

The next stage was crucial and the most dangerous yet. Her feet were some inches short of the nearest battlement, but hanging in mid-air from an ancient gutter she didn’t have the option of waiting.

She let go, dropped, slipped, made a grab and hugged the stonework. With a huge effort, she raised her knee and got astride the battlement as if it was a horse. Not an experience she would ever want to repeat.

Now it was a matter of working her way along the battlement to where it connected with the east-facing side of the main house, a relatively simple manuever. Somewhere below in the grounds a dog was barking. She couldn’t think how she had disturbed it from this far away, and anyway she had to keep going. Concentrating on her footing, she eased round each toothlike projection of the battlement until she reached a rampart and was able to get the support of a wall. The moonlight showed her a drainpipe just within reach. Once again she would need to put her trust in rusty Victorian fittings. There was no other way down.

This side of the house was bathed in moonlight and — wonder of wonders — she spotted a lattice window partly ajar. It was some nine feet below her and she thought she could reach it by transferring from the drainpipe to the ledge below the stone window frame. A chance to get into the house without triggering the alarm system would be a massive bonus.

Hand over hand, she lowered herself until she was level with the ledge. The distance between was not huge, but from her position hanging on to the drainpipe, it was no simple move. She couldn’t leap across. She had to stretch out her right leg as far as she dared and feel blindly for a toehold. At the third attempt her foot lodged against something solid. Without pause for thought, she pushed herself away from the pipe and got a grip on the top of the stone frame.

The sense of relief was profound. Her heart was racing.

The open window was the farthest of three. Still moving mainly by feel, she sidled across the ledge, got a hand inside the open window, leaned down, lifted the stay from its notch, and pulled the whole thing open.

She was so excited to have completed the move without mishap that it wasn’t until she was lowering herself into the house that she had an alarming thought: a window left open at night could well be in a bedroom.

It was.

The muffled sound of someone turning rapidly in bed was followed by a panicky, ‘Who’s that?’

Ingeborg froze. Just as she’d thought the gods were on her side, this had to happen.

The voice sounded female. One of the staff? She hoped so.

The woman in bed fumbled for a light switch.

Ingeborg still hadn’t moved. But when the light came on, she recognised the raised face of Stella, the housekeeper, the woman who had taken her to breakfast. Critical memories flashed through her brain. Stella had been reasonably friendly. She had no cause to make trouble now. She hadn’t appeared in the corridor when half the house found out that the secret bathroom had been invaded. She must have slept through. In which case, she wouldn’t know Ingeborg was enemy number one and was supposed to be locked in the tower room.

‘It’s me, Ingeborg Smith. We met yesterday.’

No response.

This called for some improvisation. ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ Ingeborg said, thinking fast. ‘I was trapped outside and couldn’t find my way in. There’s a guard dog out there.’

Stella said in an expressionless voice, ‘Now I know who you are.’

Ingeborg developed her cover story. ‘I saw the open window and climbed up a drainpipe. I didn’t know it would be your bedroom.’

‘What were you doing outside?’

‘I couldn’t sleep. I needed fresh air. Stupidly I let the door shut behind me and I was stuck. I’m really sorry. I’ll find my way back to the guest room. Where exactly are we?’

‘You turn left outside the door and go up the stairs at the end.’ Stella yawned heavily, sank back on the pillow and reached for the light.

Ingeborg pulled the window back to its original position and secured it, crossed the room, closed the door behind her and turned left. Maybe the gods were with her after all.

But the biggest test lay ahead. She still needed to find her way back into Nathan’s secret bathroom. And this time she must do it without the assistance of Lee Li passing her the keys.

At the top of the stairs in the dim light she confirmed she was back in the corridor where the locked room was — with the door to Nathan’s bedroom facing her at the end.

Could it be, she wondered, that after the ruckus in the small hours Nathan hadn’t relocked his secret bathroom?

It was worth finding out. She crept forward, remembering to sidestep the part of the floor that creaked, and tried the handle.

No short cuts in this mission.

Needing to rethink her strategy, she retreated along the passage, opened the guest room door and slipped inside. The stress of the last half hour was getting to her. A stretch on the big, soft bed was a huge temptation she knew she must resist. She stepped through to the hand basin in the shower room and splashed water on her face.

The keys would be back in Nathan’s bedroom, either out on a table or some other surface or, more likely, secure in his trouser pocket again. Being realistic, she knew it was unlikely she could get in and out without waking anyone.

The bathroom had a solid, sturdy door with a modern cylinder lock, not the sort you can open with a plastic card — if she had one. But there was no other way in, short of using an enforcer. No window. Breaking in through the ceiling wasn’t practical and would wake everyone in the house.

She looked at her watch: 3:25. Time was slipping by. At daylight, the minders would discover the damage to the tower and her chance would be gone. She needed to be away from here before then. How galling if she came away with no evidence after all this effort.

Some lateral thinking was wanted. Understandably, her brain wasn’t functioning at its best. Go back to the practicalities, she told herself. Nathan has the key. Rather than repeating the earlier trick and taking it without his knowledge, there must be some way of getting him out of bed again to unlock that door himself. A sudden noise in the corridor would surely bring him out to make a check. Rattling the door? If he then came out and no one was in sight, he’d be suspicious and want to make sure all was well. He’d unlock the door and go inside.

Was she capable of taking him on? She wasn’t entirely confident. Karate-trained, she reckoned she could defend herself against anyone, but this would place her in the attacking role. She would need to follow him into the room, slam the door behind her before his minders arrived, disable him, locate the hidden firearms and the logbook she was confident he kept, and then, armed with one of his weapons, make her escape.

Not easy.

Even if she got that far, past the minders and out of the house, she’d need transport — which meant hijacking one of his cars.

While these thoughts were still running through her head, the unexpected happened. A piercing two-note electronic alarm sounded in the corridor outside, the sort of signal that means a building has to be evacuated.

She moved fast to the door and looked out. No smell of smoke. The sound was ear-shattering. Maybe somebody had found she’d escaped and raised the alarm. She closed the door again.

An emergency or an opportunity? If all the attention was on the tower room, and Nathan got up and rushed there to check, this could work out better than any plan she had devised.

In the brain-numbing din, it was difficult to hear anything else, but she thought a door opened and someone was shouting in the corridor. She released her door a fraction and caught a glimpse of a figure dashing past, away from the bedroom at the end. She couldn’t tell for certain, but who else could it be but Nathan?

She swung the door fully open and met Lee Li scuttling towards her, tugging on a bathrobe, eyes like searchlights when she saw who it was.

Lee was lost for words.

‘Go with Nathan,’ Ingeborg told her, shouting to be heard. ‘Keep him busy as long as you can.’

Swerving past the bewildered singer, she hared into the bedroom, eager to find those keys. His suit was on a hanger on the front of the wardrobe. She pulled the jacket aside and ran her hands over the trouser pockets. Flat, as if they’d been freshly pressed.

Where then?

The king-size bed stood against a wall unit with lighting and shelving across the centre and matching bedside cabinets. Nathan slept on the side closest to the wardrobe. Some coins were stacked on his cabinet top, probably the loose change he had emptied from his pocket. A leather wallet, card-case and gold Omega wristwatch were with them. There was a digital alarm clock. But no keys. Had he grabbed them before rushing from the room?

She tugged open the cabinet drawer. Only paper tissues, packs of condoms, sleeping pills and baby oil. She ran around the bed and checked Lee’s drawer, just in case. Without result.

More in frustration than necessity, she swept a bunch of paperback thrillers off the shelf above. Nothing was behind them.

Increasingly frantic, she cast around, taking in every surface in the room. If the keys were still here, they certainly weren’t in sight.

She scooted through to the shower room and checked the shelf where the toothbrushes were. And the vanity unit. The only items were those you would expect to find.

Hand tugging distractedly at her hair, she returned to the bedroom. The big bed was in disarray, the duvet doubled over where the sleepers had roused themselves when the alarm started. She flung it back, with no result. Tossed the pillows aside. He wouldn’t leave the bloody keys on the bed, she chided herself. This is desperation.

What does a man do with a set of keys he knows have been removed once from his room? He makes sure no intruder can sneak in and steal them a second time. He can’t rule out the possibility that his sleeping partner assisted in the first theft. He places them within reach, his side of the bed.

Under the mattress?

Ingeborg lifted the mattress, slid her hand in the space above the box spring and found nothing. She dropped to her knees, put her head to the carpet and checked under the bed.

I made a big mistake, she thought. I should have asked Lee.

Then her eye was caught by the glint of something metal. Large mattresses are fitted with handles. This one, tight to the side, was made of padded fabric at least an inch in width. Wedged behind it, so close to where Nathan slept that he could have reached down and checked them at intervals through the night, were the goddamn keys.

Come on!

She tugged them free and ran out of the room, back to the locked door. She found the right one, inserted it and turned the lock. After pocketing the ring of keys, she entered Nathan’s secret bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

Everything was still in place. She knew already what she needed to check. She’d been over and over it in her mind.

The shower unit.

Guns wouldn’t be hidden under the shower floor. If she was right, this was much more ambitious. She stepped up to the curved glass doors and tried them. They glided smoothly aside. The fittings appeared genuine enough: power selector, temperature control, riser rail, flexible hose, soap dish and drain. The two walls forming the corner were tiled in the same duck-egg blue as the rest of the room.

‘All right, you bugger,’ Ingeborg said aloud, ‘let’s see if I’m right.’

She stepped back, closed the doors and put her weight against the metal framework. It didn’t shift a centimetre. With a sharp, impatient sigh, she moved to her right to try from the other angle. The shower was robust and entirely unyielding.

But so was Ingeborg.

She tried pulling instead of pushing, still without success.

‘There’s got to be a way,’ she said. ‘Got to be.’

Outside, the house alarm stopped its nee-na. She didn’t have long now.

She checked along the floor and up the sides for a release switch. Thwarted, she took a step back, arms folded, and tried to bring some intelligence to the problem. There had to be an answer.

And it came.

She forced the sliding doors apart and stepped inside. She pressed her foot on the drain and there was movement. The criss-cross grille with its circular flange disconnected from the floor and sank an inch. It had a spring mechanism. The drain had been acting as the brake.

She stepped out, gave the sides a push and the entire shower unit including the two tiled walls slid forward on rollers. She had found the way in.