“Obviously something,” I said. “If only I knew what it was.”
The simplest theory of the crime was that Geoffrey Toobin had drugged Brené McClaren, stashed her in the basement, murdered her, probably in the basement, then disposed of her corpse in one of the many convenient body-dumping sites afforded to those who live in the outer suburbs. Then he’d cleaned out the basement and scrubbed every surface as a forensic counter measure.
“Then you turn up on his doorstep,” said Colombo, “he loses his composure and ends it all.”
He had officers out doing door to door and at Geoffrey Toobin’s office trying to timeline his activities back from now to the day before Brené McClaren went missing.
There were no obvious signs of a second basement, but a house as big as the parsonage would have had one matching the area of its ground floor. I have my artistic limitations, but even I can draw a rectangle and measure its sides. And I estimated that the current basement only covered one third of the potential area. It wasn’t much but it was enough, with Nightingale’s help, to get Colombo and DS Transcombe down into the basement.
“And you think there’s another room behind that wall?” said Colombo. “And that Brené McClaren is in there?”
“It makes sense from an architectural standpoint,” I said.
“But there’s no door,” said Colombo. “Or any sign of recent brickwork.”
“That we know of,” said Nightingale.
“And you want to pull down the wall?”
“If she’s dead, then we can wait to pull it down slowly,” I said. “But if she’s still alive…”
“Do we have any reason to believe that?” asked Colombo.
I considered telling him that Alice Bowman, even more late than late of this parish, had intimated that the “princess” still needed rescuing. You know how sometimes things sound better in your head than when you say them out loud—this line didn’t even sound good in my head.
“Information received, Vincent,” said Nightingale, who was allowed to call strange DIs by their first name. “The same information that brought this case to light in the first place.”
Colombo nodded slowly.
“Fine,” he said. “We’ll have to get some workmen down here, then.”
“That will not be necessary,” said Nightingale, adjusting his cuffs. “If you’d like to stand back?”
“And turn off your mobile phones,” I added.
The last time I saw him do this spell I was a bit distracted, what with the shotguns and the imminent fear of death and everything. The trick, Nightingale told me later, is being precise with inflectentes, the sub-formae that change the way the principal forma act upon the material world. Also, the last time he done it he’d done it fast—this time it was slow enough to watch.
Nightingale made a short chopping motion with his hand. There was a loud crack and dust sprang from a split down the midline of the wall from ceiling to floor. The open hand became a fist and the bricks along that line twisted outward and the greyish brick dust fountained out as they ground noisily against the mortar trying to hold them in place.
Colombo and Transcombe took an involuntary step backwards.
“Bloody hell,” said Colombo.
When the line of bricks had all turned out ninety degrees, Nightingale paused to let the dust settle.
He told me to see if I could see anything.
I sidled up to where the twisted bricks had left a gap up the centre—it looked like a gigantic, half-open zip. I touched one of the bricks—it was warm under my fingers. Friction, I wondered, or an interaction between it and the force that moved it?
“Peter,” said Nightingale. “If you wouldn’t mind…”
I tried various points of view, but even with light leaking in from my side all I could make out were angular shadows in the darkness.
But there was the acrid winter bedroom smell of old sweat, breath and ancient farts.
I stood back and said I couldn’t see anything.
“But there’s definitely somebody in there.”
“Alive?” asked Colombo.
“Let’s find out,” said Nightingale.
His fist twisted and I felt the power as the smell of white willow and mown grass, as the sensation of rough wool and a young voice singing something choral—high and sweet.
And behind it the impression that I stood amidst the precision gears of a vast clockwork orrery—smoothly and patiently reordering the cosmos to match its creator’s design.
Give him a place to stand, I thought, and I believe he could move the world.
He certainly made short work of the wall.
I watched as bricks divided like a herd of sheep and bounded left and right to form neat piles in the corners of the room. Dust rolled over us and I had to cover my mouth with my hand. Back at the Folly I have filter masks and eye-protectors for just this eventuality.
Nightingale flicked his hand with an almost negligent gesture and the dust cloud parted like a curtain. A last few stray bricks clunked down onto their piles.
“Light, if you will, Peter,” said Nightingale.
I conjured a nice low-powered yellow werelight which revealed the space beyond the now-missing wall. For a moment I thought we’d uncovered nothing more than a hidden wine cellar, but the shelves that lined the aisles were the wrong size and the glass vessels they held were shaped like small demijohns.
There were three aisles between the shelves and behind the leftmost one a woman was stretched out on the floor, lying on her side, head resting on one outstretched arm. Nightingale surged forward, stopping beside her to check pulse and breath.
“She’s alive,” he said.
Colombo snapped his fingers and sent DS Transcombe running up the stairs.
The paramedics had been on standby upstairs and as they came thumping down the steps I moved into the centre aisle to avoid my werelight messing with their equipment and had a closer look at the individual jars. Most of them were filled to the neck with a cloudy liquid, although some had visible cracks and were empty or part drained. I tapped a couple with my fingernail—cautiously, just in case there was a facehugger lurking inside.
I could hear the paramedics in the next aisle lifting Brené McClaren onto a stretcher. Their voices were unhurried and lacking the urgent edge that is the harbinger of bad news at the scene of an accident.
A flicker of light at the far end drew me up the aisle. At first I ought it was a reflection of my werelight, but as I approached I saw it was a genuine glow from inside the centremost jar. I reached out and placed the tips of my fingers against the cool, green glass.
And I was for a moment in a palace of glass, standing on a formal lawn bounded on all sides by shifting planes of crystal. Standing before me was a man in a velvet frock coat who I later identified, from the portrait hanging in the billiards room at the Folly, as George Buckland.
“You have certainly been tardy,” he said.
“Your messengers went a bit astray,” I said. “Are you the only one left?”