Property of a Lady

But it will be all right. The builders will be back on Monday (how far away is Monday?), and I’ll hear them and I’ll be able to make them hear me. I’ve only got to sit it out and wait. I’m dreadfully hungry. Worse, I’m dreadfully thirsty.

At this point the writing deteriorated so badly and was so damaged by damp or age that, although Michael spent almost an hour poring over the faint marks on the pages, he finally had to admit defeat. Harriet had certainly written more – there were two and a half pages left – but it was plain that by that time she had been writing in what must have been virtual darkness, perhaps striking a match every so often. What demons had gibbered at her while she huddled up there?

But she got out, he thought determinedly. Of course she did. They’d have found her body when they broke that wall down if she hadn’t. I was there when they did that – I’d have seen her body. Her own builders would have returned and heard her calling for help. Or she would have managed to finally break the glass of the tiny window and attract someone’s attention.

The window.

He turned back to Harriet’s description of the small space in which she had been imprisoned. He would deal, afterwards, with the question of why and how she had been imprisoned. For the moment he would focus on the practicalities. On the window. A tiny, round window, she had written. Barely a foot across, hardly more than a ventilator.

A round window. Round. His mind presented him with the memory of the small window that had been uncovered when the builders broke through the attic wall. It had been small, but it had been a traditional oblong, perhaps eight by ten. He had looked through it on to the shrubbery directly below. He had not seen the kitchen garden, as Harriet had. Because the window she had looked from was on a different part of the house?

He switched on the computer and, after a few false attempts, found the photographs he had mailed to Jack and Liz. Which one was it Jack had joked about? ‘You should have told your girlfriend not to stand at the window while you photographed it,’ he had said.

Michael opened the first three, and then, suddenly and heart-stoppingly, the one he wanted was there. The slightly shadowy figure of a dark-haired female, one hand raised as if waving to someone on the ground. Or was she trying to bang on the glass to attract attention? It was exactly as he remembered it. What he had not remembered, though, was that the window itself was round. And he was as sure as he could be that he had not seen a round window anywhere inside Charect House.

He sat back, his eyes still on the screen, remembering how he had been vaguely surprised when the demolished wall had disclosed such a small space, and how he had expected it to be larger. Jack, working from a ground plan the builders had supplied, had seemed to expect it to be larger as well.

Was it possible there was another attic? An attic that had a small, round window?

‘Well, Michael, you’ve handed me an odd one with this,’ said the head of the History Faculty. ‘Where on earth did you dig this up? Oh God, you didn’t actually dig it up, did you? Because it smacks of mist-shrouded graveyards and heroines walled up in crumbling dungeons, and—’

‘Did you manage to decipher any of it?’ said Michael, who had spent a virtually sleepless night before delivering the remaining pages of the diaries to the History Faculty Head at half-past eight, and had paced the college impatiently until lunchtime, waiting for the results.

‘Only about three-quarters, but enough to get the gist of it.’ He reached for a large envelope on the edge of his desk. ‘I’ve put a rough transcript in here for you, but some of it’s guesswork. Michael, tell me you haven’t been cavorting around sepulchres in your spare time? Or was it a macabre treasure hunt you went on for Halloween?’

‘It’s something that turned up in an old house a friend’s renovating.’ Michael had to restrain himself from snatching the envelope out of the man’s hands.

‘Oh, I see. Simple as that. Interesting though. It’s a genuine document, then?’