Take No Farewell - Retail (48 page)

Rodrigo struggled to his feet, stooped to wipe the blade clean against the grass, then took the sheath from my hand, slid the knife back into it and replaced it in his pocket.

‘I … I’m sorry,’ I murmured. ‘I just couldn’t … couldn’t bring myself to …’

‘Keep your apologies for later, Staddon! I do not want to hear them now.’

‘But—’

‘
Fique quieto!
Forget the dog. It died without making a noise. That is all that matters. Now, get us to the house!’

I hurried ahead, found the path and began to walk along it as quickly and steadily as I could, aware that the trembling in my hands was slowly abating, the hammering of my heart subsiding. I thanked God there had been no daylight by which to see what Rodrigo had done and winced with shame at the memory of how little I had helped him. I wondered if there was much blood on him, or any on me, wondered what, in the morning, I would think about this night’s work.

So preoccupied was I that I did not notice the outline of the house looming above me, more densely black even than the sky behind it. I reached the foot of the steps without realizing it, stumbled against the lowest tread and fell up them.

‘What is wrong?’

‘Nothing. These steps lead up to a lawn behind the house.’

‘Then go on, Staddon. What are you waiting for?’

I turned and hastened up the steps, through a gap in the beech-hedge at the top and so out onto the lawn. Now the rear of the house was clearly visible beyond the ornamental garden. The ground-floor windows were blank and shuttered. As for those on the first floor … Yes, there was the Catherine wheel window of the nursery, looking, at this range, as firmly closed as the rest. I was gaping up at it when Rodrigo appeared behind me.

‘That is it?’ he whispered, following the line of my gaze.

‘Yes.’

‘Is it open?’

‘Don’t worry. Jacinta won’t have let us down.’

‘I hope you are right.’

‘Wait here while I cross the garden. Follow when I signal.’

I moved as swiftly and silently as I could across the lawn, clambered over the low stone wall separating it from the ornamental garden, then steered a path between the rosebushes and the fountain to the terrace running past the ground-floor windows. Now the nursery was directly above me. Peering up, I could see that its window was indeed ajar. I turned and waved to Rodrigo.

A few minutes later, we had succeeded in propping the ladder beneath the curving sill of the Catherine wheel. Rodrigo held it fast while I began to climb. I paused at each rung, determined to make no sound that might raise the alarm. The ascent seemed to last an absurdly long time. I remembered the pleasure I had taken from designing this fenestral conceit, remembered the coy explanation I had given Consuela of its purpose, one blazing afternoon in the
summer
of 1909 as we sat in camp-chairs on what was now the lawn. ‘
It will supply a circular view of a circular world, Mrs Caswell, for the son or daughter you and Mr Caswell will one day
—’ I reached the top and there, as a dim reflection in the glass, met myself fifteen years later, peering in like the intruder I had always been.

Jacinta had opened the window just wide enough for me to squeeze my fingers between it and the sill. It swung out smoothly until it was almost horizontal, then stopped, leaving an aperture sufficient for me to crawl through. Sufficient or not, though, it was a scramble, with a drop of four feet inside which I had to negotiate without making any noise. At length, I lowered myself to the nursery floor confident that nobody could have heard me.

I took the torch from my pocket, switched it on and moved its beam round the room. Clearly, it was no longer used for anything but storage. There were a couple of mats covering the boards in the centre, a large wooden chest in one corner, some cardboard boxes piled on top of each other, a rocking horse, a play-pen, two large cupboards, and over all a musty air of collective abandonment. Turning back, I leaned out through the window and waved Rodrigo up.

Alone, I doubt Rodrigo could have managed the entry. As it was, I hauled him bodily through the gap and did my best to break his fall. After a few stifled oaths, he pronounced himself ready to proceed. I led the way to the door by an indirect route, hoping to avoid creaking any of the boards. The policy seemed to work, for we reached the door in silence. I opened it cautiously, but there seemed no cause for alarm. The passage outside was quiet and empty.

To the right lay Jacinta’s bedroom. I wondered if she had stayed awake and felt sure, in that instant, that she had; if so, she must surely have heard us by now. To the left the passage curved and descended by a short flight of steps to the gallery above the hall. From there the shapes and alignments of every room fanned out in my mind like diagrams leaping from a page. For a moment, I could believe I was both outside
and
inside a doll’s house of my own construction, stooping to squint through a tiny window at its still tinier occupant just as I was turning to see a huge eye blinking at me through the glass.

‘Staddon!’

‘Yes, all right. I know what I’m doing.’

‘Then do it.’

I started down the passage, keeping close to the left-hand wall. The gallery was empty and silent, but less dark than the passage; the windows looking out over the courtyard were uncurtained, admitting a meagre ration of moonlight. We reached its far end and there, I knew, a decision would have to be made: whether to go downstairs first or search some of the bedrooms. The obvious room in which to install a safe was the study. The library was another possibility. They both had the additional advantage (from our point of view) of being remote from the staff quarters. I signalled my intention to Rodrigo and eased open the door leading to the stairhead.

We descended slowly, the darkened hall opening up beneath us like a cavern. The height of the treads and the dimensions of the quarter-landings were exactly as I remembered, but for Rodrigo’s sake I shone my torch behind me as I went. Below, some embers were still smouldering in the fireplace, casting across the room a faint yellow light that could have been a failing afterglow of its gaudy inauguration thirteen years ago.

At the foot of the stairs, more memories flew to meet me from a lost time. To my right were the doors to the drawing-room, where she had waited for me that July afternoon before the house-warming. How grateful I was that we did not need to enter. Instead, I turned left, leading Rodrigo out of the hall and into a branch of the lobby that led to the library, study and billiards-room. With luck, we would soon have found the safe and I could set all thoughts of the past aside.

But it was not to prove so easy. The library was unaltered.
That
became obvious to me as I cast my torch-beam round the well-stocked bookshelves. We hurried on to the study, only to find that the same applied. It was a small enough room for anything as significant as a blocked-off alcove to be immediately obvious, but its proportions were exactly as I had designed them. The only doubt raised by its contents was whether it still served as a study. It had more the appearance of a schoolroom and I wondered if this was where Jacinta received her tutors. If so, obviously the safe must be elsewhere. But where?

Victor was as cautious as he was secretive. In his mind, as much as the architecture of Clouds Frome, the answer surely lay. As I stood and thought of how devious yet logical he was, Rodrigo started to say something in my ear, but I cut him short.

‘I have it! It must be upstairs. Come on.’

I led the way back to the lobby, opened the double doors leading to the hall and was about to step through when there was a noise ahead of us, not loud but quite distinct, something between a snap and a creak. I pulled up at once, my every sense alert, but nothing followed. The wavering glimmer from the fire reached the shuttered windows and played weakly across the furniture. Otherwise there was neither sound nor movement. Rodrigo touched my elbow and whispered: ‘The fire, I think.’

I nodded. Subsiding ash in the grate was indeed the likeliest explanation. Perhaps the acoustics of the unusually high ceiling accounted for the noise seeming to come from a different direction. I headed across the room to the stairs and started up them, theorizing as I went. According to Hermione, Victor retained use of the master bedroom, whilst Consuela’s bedroom was what had originally been dubbed the Wye suite. So, where better for Victor to conceal a safe than in a room only he had the use of and where, as an additional precaution, he slept every night? Except this night, of course, when he was in London and we had a chance we might never have again to learn his best-kept secret.

The master bedroom was directly above the hall, reached by a dog-leg passage from the head of the stairs that led nowhere else. The privacy this was intended to bestow was ideal for our purposes. I opened the door carefully but without hesitation, willing myself to disregard all the memories I knew would be lying in wait for me of the last time I had been there, and why, and with whom.

All trappings of femininity were gone from the room, plain wallpaper and striped curtains replacing the colourful fruit and flower patterns favoured by Consuela. I stood a few feet inside the door and swept the torch-beam methodically round the walls, reconstructing in my mind every detail of the angles and proportions I had planned and setting them against what I saw. Nothing had changed. The recesses either side of the fireplace were not only the same as each other but the same as my recollection of them. There were no tell-tale tamperings with skirting-boards or picture-mouldings, no signs of any kind that a partition had been constructed.

‘Nothing,’ I said, turning back to Rodrigo.

‘You are certain?’

‘Of course I’m certain.’

‘Those doors—’ He pointed across the room. ‘Where do they lead?’

‘Dressing-rooms, communicating with the bathroom. Not very promising, I’m afraid, but we’ll look.’

Twin dressing-rooms, both leading to the same bathroom, had been Victor’s idea. Entering what had been Consuela’s, I realized from the arrangement of brushes, clippers, colognes and razors on the table beneath the mirror that Victor had taken it over, presumably for the sake of its superior view over the orchard. Rodrigo waited in the bedroom whilst I walked round through the bathroom into the second dressing-room. It was unfurnished and clearly no longer used. In fact, the door leading back into the bedroom was locked. I turned round to retrace my steps, glimpsing a stray reflection of myself in the mirror as I did so.

Then I stopped. Something was wrong, different,
inconsistent
with the plans I had meticulously drawn up for this house so long ago. I looked in the mirror, shone the torch at it, moved the beam away to the door, then back at the mirror. This dressing-room was smaller than the other one, rectangular where it should have been square, narrower by at least two feet. I stepped closer to the wall on which the mirror hung, and tapped it with my knuckle. It was hollow, nothing but a plasterboard partition fashioned to resemble the real wall which stood two feet behind it.

‘What is it?’ whispered Rodrigo from the bathroom doorway. He must have heard the tapping and followed me in.

‘I think we’ve found it.’

‘Where?’

‘Behind here. But I can’t—’ I had moved the torch-beam up and down the wall without seeing any crack or crevice that might be part of a hatch. Then, as the beam flashed back at me from the mirror, I realized why. Reaching out with both hands, I tried to lift the mirror away from the surface behind it. It would not budge. It was not suspended, then, but firmly fixed. I ran my fingers carefully round the rim and, as they neared the bottom right-hand corner, felt something catch them. It was a tiny lever and, as I pushed down against it, it moved and clicked. Then the mirror, and the section of wall behind it, swung slowly open.

We had found the safe. It stood on a shelf linking the false and real walls, somehow smaller than I had expected, no more than two feet in any dimension, but as solid and unyielding as one three times its size, black and gleaming, with the manufacturer’s name proudly scrolled in red and gold. There was a handle to open it, raised in a locked position, and, in the centre of the door, a dial with numbers inscribed around it, running from zero to a hundred.

‘You have done well, Staddon,’ said Rodrigo.

‘Can you open it?’

‘Of course. Shine your torch on the dial.’

According to Gleasure, the combination was a set of three two-digit numbers representing the years of birth of Victor,
Mortimer
and Hermione, with the thousands and hundreds omitted in each case. From the Hereford registrar, Rodrigo had established that Victor was born in 1868, Mortimer in 1864 and Hermione in 1858. The combination was therefore 68–64–58. If this safe operated in the same way as the one used at the office, the first number would need to be dialled four times anti-clockwise, the second number three times clockwise and the third number twice anticlockwise. Following this, it would only be necessary to ease the dial back in a clockwise direction to release the locking mechanism before turning the handle.

As Rodrigo stooped forward, I trained the torch-beam on the dial. He rested his fingers on the knurled boss at its centre for a moment, then began to rotate it, muttering instructions to himself as he did so. ‘
Sessenta e oito … Em sentido anti-horário … Um, dois, três, quatro … Agora, sessenta e quatro em sentido horário … Um, dois, três … Por fim, cinquenta e oito em sentido anti-horário … Um, dois … Agora, se Deus quiser
…’ Gingerly, he turned the dial for the last time. There was a click. Then he lowered the handle and pulled the door open by an inch. Then he looked back at me and grinned. ‘Maybe I should have done this for a living, eh Staddon?’

‘What’s inside?’

‘The will, I hope and pray. Let us see.’

He stepped back to open the door wide. The torch-beam fell on three shelves filled with neatly stacked documents. To my surprise, on the top shelf, there were also several bundles of freshly minted bank-notes. Peering closer, I saw they were five pound notes. Each bundle must have contained several thousand pounds. The strangest and most irrational thought sprang into my mind. I reached forward, slid the top note out of one of the bundles and slipped it into my pocket.