I rang again: once … twice … three times.
Even by putting my ear to the door I could hear nothing inside. And yet there remained that uneasy sense of being watched.
Turning my back to the house, I strolled casually out onto what once might have been the front lawn, but which was now a tangle of clods embedded with last year’s weeds. I put a flattened hand above my eyes and pretended to be gazing out at the view, which, from this elevation, really was quite spectacular.
Then suddenly I whipped round.
A white face shrank back from an upstairs window.
I hauled at the bellpull again, this time ringing ever more insistently. But as before, the house remained in silence.
I tried the door but it was locked.
So that I could not be seen from inside, I flattened myself against the wall and made my way slowly, one step at a time, all the way round the house to the kitchen door, where, as Mrs. Mullet had once assured me, “There’s always a key under the mat.”
She was wrong. The key was not under the mat, but it was hidden under a broken flowerpot not two feet away from the doorsill.
I was never more happy that Dogger had taught me so much about the art of locks.
This was no ordinary household skeleton key, but one of the patent Yale variety. Whoever had this lock installed had meant to keep people out.
Odd, though, that they should leave the key so handily under a broken flowerpot.
I slid the key’s jagged teeth quietly into the lock, turned it, and slipped into the house.
The kitchen was a dim box, lighted coldly by a single window high on the wall. The gray slate floor made the room seem like a prison cell. The unlit stove offered no warmth or comfort.
I shivered at the general clamminess of the place and pulled my cardigan tight round my shoulders.
A broad door, designed, I supposed, for the wheeling-in of ancient feasts—boars’ heads and so forth—led into a short corridor and then, on the left, to a breakfast room in which two places were partially set with knives, forks, spoons, and eggcups. Someone was ready for tomorrow, I thought.
I moved silently through into the dim foyer: cracked tiles, dark portraits of sour old men in judge’s wigs, and the faint smell of kippers. A tall clock ticked unnervingly, as if counting the seconds to an execution. Perhaps my own.
What would I do if I were caught? Pretend that I had seen smoke at an upper window? But if that were the case, why hadn’t I called out to alert the house’s occupants? Or, for that matter, shouted to them from outside?
How had I managed to find the key?
Perhaps I needed to use the telephone. Perhaps, while cycling, my blood pressure had fallen suddenly, leaving me dizzy and confused. Perhaps I was in urgent need of a doctor.
A bell went off!—and then another, echoing horribly in the empty foyer. Now my heart really was pounding. Had I set off a hidden alarm? A family of judges was likely to be well up on the subject of burglars.
But no, it was only the stupid clock, bonging away in the corner to keep itself company in the oddly empty house.
I looked into one or two of the rooms and found them much the same: high ceilings, bare floors, a stick or two of furniture, and the tall uncurtained windows I had noticed from outside.
It was evident from the very feel of the downstairs rooms that no one was about, and within a few minutes I was walking round as freely as if I owned the place.
Billiards room, ballroom, drawing room, library—all of them as cold as ashes. A small dark study was stacked to the ceiling with legal papers and folders, the lower, heavier ones of vellum and the lighter upper layers of yellowed paper.
Strata of people’s lives, I thought, heaped up in piles awaiting judgment. Or already judged. How many of these million documents, I wondered, have the name de Luce inked upon their dusty pages?
I sneezed and a floorboard creaked.
Was someone here?
No—not, at least, in this room. It was just a pile of papers settling in the corner.
I made my way back to the foyer. The house was, I thought with a shudder, as silent as a tomb.
“Hello?” I shouted, my voice echoing as if I were in a cave.
I knew, somehow, that nobody would answer, and they didn’t.
And yet someone was here—I was sure of it. That white face shrinking away from the upstairs window had hardly been in my imagination.
A chambermaid, perhaps, too frightened at being caught alone in the place to show herself. Or could it have been the ghost of that earlier chambermaid who had been devoured by Anthea Ridley-Smith’s crocodile? Or the transparent spirit of Lionel Ridley-Smith, who had been made of glass?
Whoever or whatever it was awaited me upstairs.
Did I think of bolting?
Well, yes, I did.
But then I thought of how Marmaduke Parr had bullied the vicar, and of how disappointed the entire village of Bishop’s Lacey would be—most of all myself—not to have the bones of our very own saint visibly present among us at the feast of his quincentennial.
When they finally saw the light, I might even become something of a village heroine, with banquets, etc. held in my honor, with after-dinner speeches by Father, the vicar, the bishop, and, yes, perhaps even by Magistrate Ridley-Smith himself, thanking me for my dogged persistence, and so forth.
I believe Daffy referred to such an extravagant outpouring of praise as an encomium, and I realized that I had not been given an encomium for a very long while.
If ever.
I started up the stairs—one slow step at a time, listening for the slightest sound of life.
Whether it’s a whole house or just a single drawer, there’s a deep and primitive pleasure that comes from snooping through someone else’s belongings. Although part of me was scared silly, the greater part was having the time of my life. I wanted to whistle, but I didn’t dare.
At the top of the stairs, like the passageway of an ocean liner, a long hall led off to the right into some remote distance, its floor covered with pockmarked linoleum. Bedrooms, I guessed, each with a dismal four-poster, a table with ewer and basin, and an enamel chamber pot.
A quick peek into several of these on each side of the hall proved that I was correct.
Back at the head of the staircase, a solid wooden door with a small porthole seemed to promise another long hall running in the opposite direction. The servants’ quarters, perhaps. I cupped my hands and peered through the glass but could see only darkness.
I wiggled the knob and to my surprise, the door swung open.
Behind it hung a heavy pair of green velvet drapes which, by their musty smell, had last been cleaned when Henry VIII was a bachelor.
I pulled them reluctantly aside, dusting my hands, and found myself face-to-face with another door. This one, too, had a circular porthole which, unlike the other, was made of frosted glass.
I wiggled the knob but this second door was locked.
Locked doors seemed to be everywhere, I thought. First, the wooden door in the churchyard tunnel, and now these.
Was it a coincidence?
Ordinarily, I should have skipped down the stairs to the kitchen, pocketed a cheap fork and a bottle brush, and made quick work of the thing.
But again the lock was a Yale.
There was no way of getting into this wing of the house other than by scaling an outside wall. Unless there was another entrance from the back stairs.
In momentary frustration, I stretched my hand wide and flattened my fingers against the cold glass.
There was a flicker—a mere shifting of light—and then the black shadow of a hand materialized, spread itself against the other side of the pane, matching my hand, finger for finger—except that these fingers were webbed!
Save for the quarter-inch thickness of the glass, this whatever-it-was and I were almost touching.
I gasped.
But before I could move, the bolt clicked. The knob turned with maddening slowness and the door swung open, inch by inch.
He was small, and dressed in a Norfolk jacket with baggy plus fours, a yellow checkered vest, and a high white celluloid collar—someone’s cast-off clothing which must have been found in a trunk.
The corners of his eyes and—as I had already noted—his fingers were webbed. He had a round face which rose above a tiny chin and a large tongue which his mouth couldn’t quite contain. His ears, small and round, were set low on his head, and his skin looked as if it had been rubbed all over with candle wax.
Was he a man or was he a boy? It was difficult to tell. His face was young and unlined, but his neatly combed hair was completely white. Like Dogger’s, I realized with a shock.
I hadn’t moved. I stood frozen, my arm outstretched, fingers spread as if I were stopping a runaway horse, my hand still in the same position it had been against the glass.
For an uncomfortably long time we stood staring at each other.
And then he spoke.
“Hello, Harriet,” he said.