Medi-Evil 3 (7 page)

 
“No,”
O’Calligan
agreed. “It could be perfectly innocent.” He turned to Lady
Lightbourne’s
body, now a grisly sight: sickly-white and visibly stiffening. The blood, a black congealed blanket of it, lay down her entire front. “There’s something different about her ladyship too,” he said. “I thought so earlier, but couldn’t place it. Is something missing, Cedric?”

 
Cedric looked the body over. The rings still glittered on the dead woman’s fingers; the string of pearls hung intact across her ravaged throat. However, before they could speak on it further, Judge Prendergast reappeared at the bedroom door. “
O’Calligan
,” he said urgently. “Master Rupert and his shipmate are dead-set against you as it is. You must help us search, or they’ll be doubly suspicious.”

 
The Irishman nodded, and left the room, leaving Cedric to dignify this latest corpse.

*

Feeling more confident with the two naval men present, the search party this time split up into smaller groups and scoured every inch of the property, even the attics and the crawlspaces under the roof. However, Lady
Foxworth
was too distraught to partake, and repaired to her own quarters, supplied by her brother with a fully-charged pistol.

 
It was now past one o’clock, and that ‘graveyard’ hour of the night when one feels most marooned from the rest of human society. Outside, the wintry wind moaned around the ancient walls; there were creaks and bangs, windows rattled in their frames. But it was in the west wing, on a stretch of corridor attached only to empty rooms, that
O’Calligan
, who was alone at the time, heard something distinctly different. He paused and listened, fancying there were voices behind the wainscoting: muffled voices, engaged in some heated debate. He approached the wall in question and put his ear to the woodwork, finding it aged and worm-eaten.

 
“My God,” a man was mumbling. “How could you do this to us? And when everything was looking so fine?”

 
A woman replied: “I needed to secure what at the time looked a perilous future.”

 
“Good God, woman!” The man’s voice rose.
“And the Irishman?
I suppose you took him to your bed as well? Or was that just his master?”

 
O’Calligan
would have listened to more, but the voices faded as though the persons having the dispute had moved away. He considered. Without any doubt, it had been Lady
Foxworth
and her brother Rupert, and though, from that brief snatch of conversation, it was difficult to ascertain what they’d been talking about, the fact that they were in collusion about something – a collusion which had now turned acrimonious – put a different complexion on events. More mysterious still, where had they actually just been? As far as he knew, the west wing of the house was not used; he’d already searched it several times, and had found nothing. This suggested there were regions of this building still known only to the
Foxworth
family, even in the light of recent events.

 
Bewildered, but strangely content – as though he was finally making some ground –
O’Calligan
rejoined the others a few minutes later, and said nothing of his discovery. He wasn’t exactly sure who he could trust here anyway, and it was his intention to return to that disused stretch of passage when everyone was asleep, and force his way through the wainscoting.

 
The men held a further moot in the drawing room, where it was decided that, as Lady
Foxworth
had now withdrawn to her own chamber, they might as well each do the same. Rupert – who seemed a little flustered,
O’Calligan
thought – insisted that anyone discovering an intruder should fire a shot immediately: even if they missed their intended target, they would certainly alert the rest of the house. There was general agreement at this. A series of final checks were made: the cook and her two maids had barricaded themselves into the scullery, while Cedric had his own small room off the kitchen, which he could easily defend. After this, they said their goodnights.

 
O’Calligan
returned to his own quarters and allowed an hour to pass. Then, taking his pistol and
sabre
, he made his way stealthily back into the west wing. The house was now in darkness, so he took a candle as well, which he fixed on a shelf opposite the place where he’d eavesdropped. It was difficult to locate the exact point. The entirety of that wall felt flimsy to his touch. Suddenly he stiffened.

 
He’d sensed a presence come up behind him.

 
He turned slowly, and found the hulking form of the Dutchman, Van
Brooner
, blocking the passageway. Van
Brooner
was fully dressed, though he’d loosened his long brown hair, which hung in unruly hanks to either side of his truculent face.

 
“Your constant mischief,” he said, “is making the household, what remains of it, nervous.”

 
“You too, I assume,”
O’Calligan
replied, “judging by the way your knees are knocking.”

 
The Dutchman smiled grimly and then, without warning, launched a big fist.
O’Calligan
had been expecting it. He stepped nimbly aside and launched a fist of his own, catching Van
Brooner
squarely in the gut. The breath wheezed out of the Dutchman, before an uppercut took him beneath the chin. He staggered backwards, but remained conscious. With a snarl, he went for the hilt of his sword, but no sooner had he grasped it than
O’Calligan
had kicked him in the shin, and slashed down flat-handed, chopping him on the bridge of his nose. Three more swift but telling punches followed, which fractured at least one of Van
Brooner’s
ribs, causing him to squawk in agony. The duo clamped together and began to wrestle, but
O’Calligan
was still getting the better of it. Another brutal gut-thump doubled his opponent over, and, as a
coup-de-grace
, he looped an arm around the Dutchman’s head,
barrelling
him across the corridor and slamming the crown of his skull into the wall – the hollow, rotten portion as it happened.

 
Instantly, the wainscoting was broken through.

 
O’Calligan
dropped the insensible Dutchman, grabbed his candle and poked it into the hole. On the other side there was no room, as he’d been expecting, but a junction between two low passages. They were at floor-level and no more than three feet high.
O’Calligan
crouched. Though he could see little more than horizontal brick shafts leading off into darkness, he had no doubt that these were the priests’ holes with which
Silvercombe
Hall was reputedly riddled. While their exterior entrances might have been obliterated by the refurbishments of thirty years ago, the inner structure of the house was likely still networked with them. Such cavities doubtless conducted sound well, and this meant the conversation he’d overheard might have come from some distant region of the house. Even so, he had no option but to investigate. He tore away the remnants of the wainscoting, and crawled forward, opting to take the left passage first.

 
The going was tough and
unsavoury
. The tunnel system might once have been intended for concealing frightened clerics, but now it smelled as if it had been used by animals. It was matted with rancid straw and here and there great dollops of droppings. In addition, the roof was low, necessitating that he keep his head bowed, which was not easy considering that he also had to hold the candle in front of him. Maintaining a light, however, paid dividends. After he’d been crawling for several minutes,
O’Calligan
reached a point on his left where a wooden panel was fixed to a hinge. When he pushed it, it swung open into a darkened room. He thrust his candle through, and was not surprised to see familiar blood-patterns on a rug, and arterial spray on the oaken walls. To his immediate right, Lord and Lady
Lightbourne
lay in quiet repose on their silent, gore-stained bed.

 
This, then, was how the assailant had twice entered their locked room: a secret hatch concealed in the skirting-boards. Not that
O’Calligan
, for one, would have been able to get through it. His shoulders alone were too wide.

 
Feeling vindicated but increasingly nervous, he proceeded along the tunnel, now passing other junctions. It began to tilt steeply downwards until he was certain he’d reached the ground-floor level, at which point it opened into a cubby-hole of a room that he hadn’t seen before despite his frequent searches of the house. Several things struck him about this room. Firstly, it was tight, compact – so much so that it surely couldn’t serve any purpose other than for storage. Secondly, it was slope-roofed; a curious design-feature by any standards. Thirdly, a series of pull-ropes hung into it through holes bored in its slanted ceiling.
O’Calligan
, who was at last able to stand, gazed up at them. Slowly, a frightful picture of what might be happening here was forming in his mind. He turned: there were two doors, facing each other from opposite corners of the room, but both were locked when he tried them. However, the low passage by which he’d entered continued on the other side. He worked the cramp from his limbs, crouched and proceeded.

 
There were more twists, more turns,
more
ups and downs.

 
And then there was light.
Just ahead.

 
He scrabbled forward and found access to another previously unseen chamber, though the purpose of this one was more evident. He was now looking down through a wire grille into an ornate bathroom. A huge, cast-iron tub sat on a Romanesque-tiled
floorway
. Beside it, a pump and faucet were fashioned from glinting brass. Velvet drapes clad every wall, while flaming candelabra created a scented, rose-red luminescence.

 
My lady’s bathhouse,
O’Calligan
thought to
himself
. This, no doubt, was where the conversation he’d overheard had taken place. He could easily imagine someone as brazen as Lady
Foxworth
sitting naked in her tub while engaged in a heated debate with her brother. It was perhaps understandable that no guest had been allowed into this particular section of the hall – the hostess’s private apartments would ordinarily be her personal domain – and yet while searching for the murderer, he and Judge Prendergast had specifically requested that they be allowed to inspect
every
portion of the building. Lady
Foxworth
had not been honest with them.

 
O’Calligan
pressed on, turning a corner and crawling downhill again, before finding on his right another hinged panel. He paused, asking himself which room this secret entrance gave access to. But before he had the chance to check, the panel was opened. Bright light fell into
O’Calligan’s
eyes. He had to shield them, but that didn’t prevent his being squirted with a fine spray of some pungent, almost noxious perfume. He gasped, coughed, wafted in vain at the substance. The next thing, the panel was slammed closed again and he heard a bolt being thrown.

 
At first he was confused, disoriented. He’d dropped his candle, and it had gone out. As he struggled in the blackness, he cracked his head against the low brick ceiling, which fleetingly stunned him. He wasn’t sure how long passed, probably less than a minute, before he then heard something else: a grinding of what sounded like iron wheels, and the groaning of a pulley-system. Another noise followed – like a
grating
of stone. For some reason,
O’Calligan
imagined a heavy piece of cage-work being slowly lifted. A chill went through him. What exactly was at the heart of this house? What did this twisting labyrinth of passages finally connect with?

 
A second later – when he heard the fast-approaching
skitter
of claws, and the soft brushing of lank, wet fur against brickwork – he
realised
that he didn’t want to find out. Not in this situation, enclosed in a space where he could wield neither gun nor blade, and drenched with some foul
ichor
, the sole purpose of which was surely to mark him as prey. He scrambled around and lumbered frantically back in the opposite direction. Whatever he’d heard, however, was coming swiftly. Claws that were surely the size of eagle’s talons, if not bigger, were fairly
clattering
along the straw-covered brickwork.

 
He rounded a bend and again saw the grille to Lady
Foxworth’s
bathroom. He lunged wildly forward tearing the knees from his breeches, scraping the flesh beneath. The thing, whatever it was, was maybe fifteen yards behind when he actually reached the grille. Without hesitation he folded his knees to his chest and kicked at it with the soles of his boots. Two such blows and the grille went through.
O’Calligan
hurled himself after it, falling full length into the bathroom, landing on the tiled floor beside the tub. He leapt up and staggered away. There would be a door behind one of the curtains, but maybe there was no time for that. He grabbed automatically at the hilt of his
sabre
, but there was still something else he was looking for – and then he spied it! As in all the rooms here, a bell was present, hanging from the bathroom’s ceiling, perhaps nine feet up.