Speaking From Among The Bones (17 page)

Then, in darkness, I would wait.

I was halfway through this simple maneuver when my feet slipped on a pebble.

I dropped down heavily upon my behind.

Worse, I dropped the torch.

CLANG!
IT WENT
,
THE
sound chillingly loud in the darkness.

I held my breath.

The insect buzzing of voices stopped instantly.

I strained my ears, but the only sound I could hear was the beating of my own heart.

And then a grinding noise—a grating of stone, echoing from wall to wall. I crawled forward and touched my fingers to the block.

It was moving!

They were shoving the stone inward—toward me!

I scrabbled for the torch but my fingers could not locate it in the darkness. I was clutching uselessly at bits of rubble, my nails tearing at the hard stone floor.

The block was still moving. I could not see it, but I could hear it grating. In less than a minute they would be climbing through the opening.

If only there were some way to stop the stone: a stout length of timber, for instance, to wedge against the opposite wall.

But there was nothing in this echoing chamber.

Nothing but Flavia de Luce.

The thought came out of nowhere—or so it seemed at the time.

Later, I would realize that my mind had vomited up a sudden memory of snooping through Feely’s unmentionables drawer in search of her diary. Having given up, I was annoyed to find that the drawer would not close completely. No matter how hard I pushed it would not budge.

When I slid it forward and off the tracks, I found the diary taped to the back with strips of sticking plaster. A lesson learned.

I threw myself down onto my back, my feet against the moving stone, and jammed my shoulders against the opposite side of the chamber.

I stiffened every muscle of my body and made myself into a human wedge.

The stone stopped moving.

There was a moment of silence, and then renewed effort from the other side.

Again the stone began inching inward.

Had they brought a lever? I wondered.

Perhaps they were now both shoving.

My knees were beginning to bend. I tried to keep them straight but they were quivering like bowstrings.

Daffy had once read me a story in which the victim was tortured with a device called the Scavenger’s Daughter which, rather than stretching the body like the rack,
compressed it into a ball until its fluids caused it to burst like an enormous pimple.

I stretched out both arms full length, trying desperately to grip onto the floor. Anything to increase the resistance.

A sliver of light appeared. The stone was almost clear of the wall.

Now I could hear their voices.

“Bloody thing’s stuck,” one of them said. “Give me the crowbar.”

There was a metallic clanking and I felt the stone move even more powerfully against my feet. I couldn’t hold out much longer.

And then the light went out—and, a few seconds later, came back on again.

“Someone’s coming!” a voice hissed, and the stone grated to a stop.

“Someone’s at the top of the stairs,” another voice said. “They’ve turned the switch off and on.”

“Let’s get out of here!” the first voice whispered, frantically.

“Go round back of the furnace. Use the coalhole.” There was a scuffling, and then absolute silence.

I knew that they were gone.

I counted slowly to a hundred.

No point in crawling like a Commando all the way back through the Cottlestone tomb, I thought, when I was so close to freedom.

I seized the iron handles of the stone and gave it a hard tug. It might have moved a quarter of an inch.

I sat down on the floor so that the stone was between
my knees, planted my feet against the wall, and pulled again. Perhaps half an inch, this time, or a little more.

If I concentrated on pulling at one end, it would swing in like a door, just far enough, if I were lucky, to allow me to squeeze past.

At last I had made a gap of about four inches: not wide enough to pass through, but enough to have a look outside. I dropped to my hands and knees and peered out into the crypt. The crowbar was lying where they had dropped it, about two feet from the opening.

I got down onto my stomach and shoved an arm through the opening as far as it would go. My face was crushed so tightly against the stone that I must have looked like something from the ocean depths.

My fingers found the beveled end of the crowbar, but just barely. I didn’t want to shove the thing completely away.

A fraction of an inch at a time, I hooked my fingernails onto the crowbar’s edge and pulled it ever so slowly toward me.

Feely had been nagging me about biting my nails since I was in a pram, and quite recently I had decided she was right. A chemist who is going to be photographed by
The Illustrated London News
holding up a test tube and peering into it intently needed half-decent hands.

My nails were not yet as long as I liked, but they were enough to do the job.

The crowbar crept toward me. When it was safely within reach, I hauled it in through the opening and gave thanks to the good Saint Tancred who lay somewhere just a few feet below me.

From there on, levering the stone all the way into the chamber was a piece of cake.

A piece of
rock
cake
, I thought, with what was probably a silly grin.

There was now light enough to spot the torch, which had rolled away into a far corner. I flicked the switch to see if it was still working—which it was—then crawled through the wall and into the crypt.

As I stood up straight I realized for the first time how stiff and sore my body had become. My hands and knees were scratched and scraped.

I was quite proud of myself. I understood how the veterans felt who had suffered war wounds.

Before moving on into the main part of the crypt, I stopped to listen.

Not a sound.

Whoever had been in the crypt was gone. There could be no doubt about it. The place was filled with that special stillness that is found where all the occupants are dead.

Still, I’ll admit that, as I crept past the furnace, the hair on the back of my neck bristled—but only a little.

Now I was at the bottom of the steps that led up to the church. Was there anything else to worry about? Would the crypt’s midnight visitors be lying in wait for me outside the church?

They needed only to hide behind the tombstone where Gladys was parked and pounce on me as soon as I appeared—abducting a girl in a churchyard in the middle of the night would not be difficult.

Perhaps I’d better stay in the church: Curl up in a pew,
catch forty winks, and race home just as the sun was coming up. No one would even know I’d been away.

Yes, that’s what I’d do.

Up the stone staircase I trudged—one slow step at a time.

In the porch, the outer door was closed, but unlocked, as it probably had been since the time of Henry VIII when the churches of England were looted and vandalized.

To my left, illuminated only by the light which shone down through the stained-glass windows, the carpet of the center aisle was a ribbon of red in the moonlight.

I thought again of the poem, and of the Highwayman, who had, at the end, been shot down like a dog on the highway.

And I thought—for some peculiar reason—of the dead Mr. Collicutt.

Mr. Collicutt, of course, had not lain in his blood on the highway with a bunch of lace at his throat—but he might as well have.

It came back to me in a flash like a news reporter’s camera.

He
had
been wearing a bunch of lace at his throat.

Or something very much like it.

The Highwayman had died for love, hadn’t he? To warn him that the inn was swarming with King George’s men, the landlord’s black-eyed daughter, Bess, had shot herself in the breast.

They had both died.

Would there be another victim in Bishop’s Lacey?
Were Mr. Collicutt’s killers already plotting to silence someone else—someone who had loved the unfortunate organist?

I moved slowly up the center aisle, touching the ends of every row of pews with my fingertips, absorbing the security of the ancient oak.

There was just enough light to make my way up the chancel steps to the organ without using the torch.

Back to business
, I decided.

Although the wall panel was nearly invisible, Feely had opened it easily. Would I be able to find the latch?

I ran my fingers over the polished wood and the carved moldings, but they were as solid as they looked. I pressed here and there—it was no use.

The face of a carved wooden imp grinned at me saucily in the shadows. I touched his puffed-out polished cheeks and gave them a twist.

There was a
click
and the panel slid open.

I stepped carefully inside.

Closing the panel behind me, I switched on the torch.

Praise be to Saint Tancred, the patron saint of Evidence!

There on the floor, in the beam of light, were Feely’s footprints and my own in the dust. Nobody had walked over them. The police had seen no reason to examine the organ case. Why should they, after all? It was nowhere near the spot where Mr. Collicutt’s body had been hidden.

Even Mr. Haskins hadn’t been in here to extract the bat from the organ pipe—I could spot the prints of his grave-digger boots a mile away—which meant, most
likely, that the bat’s carcass was still at the bottom of the sixteen-foot diapason.

Rest in peace, little creature
, I thought.

The thing had got in through the coalhole, I supposed, during the nighttime comings and goings of whoever had stuffed Mr. Collicutt into the wall of the crypt.

I gave the pipe a tap with my knuckles, but nothing stirred. The bat was almost certainly dead.

My torch illuminated a couple of fresh gouges in the wood of the organ frame. I dropped to my knees for a closer look.

Yes, there could be no doubt about it—

“Crikey!”

I nearly leaped out of my skin as, in the far corner, the wind chest gave out a dry wheeze. The tombstone of Hezekiah Whytefleet had settled, forcing wind into the organ’s works.

There was also a hissing behind me.

I swung round the torch’s beam and at once spotted the source of the noise. Set into the wooden ductwork was a round, drilled hole, slightly smaller in diameter than a lead pencil, and it was through this that the air was hissing.

On the floor directly beneath it was a dried red stain.

As I took a step forward, something crunched under the sole of my shoe.

I knew even without looking that it was glass.

My own laboratory work had made me quite familiar with the principle of the manometer: that liquid-filled, U-shaped glass tubing which was used to measure air pressure.

It made good sense that the organ would have been fitted with such a device to measure the pressure from the wind chest. The tube, marked in inches, would, until recently, have been partially filled with colored alcohol, its level giving the required reading, very much like an outdoor thermometer.

All that now remained of the manometer, besides the gritty glass crumbs on the floor, was the jagged ring of hollow glass where it had been snapped off level with its wooden socket.

The rest of the glass tubing, if I were any judge at all, I had seen clutched in the hand of the late Mr. Collicutt.

It was here on this spot, in the very heart of the great organ that he had loved and played, that the organist met his death.

I was sure of it.

I didn’t have a pocketknife to scratch away a sample of the red-colored stain, but that wasn’t much of a problem. To avoid contaminating it with my fingers, I would unscrew the back of the torch and use the tin casing as a makeshift scraper.

It was only as I pointed the beam at my knees that I realized what I had done to my clothing. My best black coat looked as if I had been rolled in ashes. It was streaked with slime from the grave, caked with mud from the tunnel, and covered over with a layer of dust. Another item to be consigned to the flames.

My face, I supposed, was no better. I ran the back of my hand across my forehead and it came away darkened with disgusting juices.

Better have a good washup
, I thought. I hoped there was
a source of water somewhere in the church. If so, and given the number of hours until daylight, I might even manage to make myself respectable in time for breakfast.

Of course!
I thought.
The font!

I stepped carefully out of the organ chamber and into the apse, taking care not to wipe myself against the ecclesiastical furniture.

If need be, I might even make a raid on the Communion wine to use as a spotting solution.

I let out a dry snort at the thought of the vicar’s likely reaction. The look on his face—

A piercing scream shattered my thoughts.

I spun round and found myself face-to-face with an apparition dressed all in black.

My blood ran cold. It took my startled brain several seconds to recognize this seeming phantom.

It was Cynthia Richardson.

She had seen me come floating out of a blank wall, my clothing, if anything, more grave-stained than before.

Her mouth was still hanging open from the scream, her eyes bugging out.

“Hannah!” she gasped.

Her eyes rolled up into her head and she crumpled to the floor as if she had been shot in the heart.

My spine was suddenly a trickle of ice water.

“Hannah” had been the name the vicar had cried out in his sleep, the night he and Cynthia had been trapped by a storm at Buckshaw.

“Hannah, please! No!”

I could still hear his tortured whisper in my mind.

I had wondered then who Hannah might be, and I wondered now as I stared down at the unconscious Cynthia Richardson.

Unconscious? Or was she dead?

Had she died of fright? People had been known to do that.

I knelt down beside her and put a finger to the angle of her jaw, just as I had seen Dogger do on more than one occasion. The strong, steady pulsing was impossible to miss.