The Heart of Lucifer!
My heart gave a bound and I’m afraid I said something quite unsaintly which I would not be proud of later.
Brought to life by the torch’s beam, the huge diamond lay in my hand, shooting off sparks of light into the surrounding darkness like a new sun hatching.
As I had suspected, Mr. Collicutt had stuck the stone inside an organ pipe.
How clever of him, I thought, and how much more clever of me to figure out how to find it.
The Heart of Lucifer! Imagine!
I could hardly wait to tell Father.
I was holding the giant gem between thumb and forefinger, turning it from side to side, sending reflections dancing in their thousands, when a voice behind me said:
“Seize her, Benson!”
And then everything happened at once. Someone grabbed my upper arm and dug powerful fingers into my muscles. My entire arm went weak.
I spun round, kicking out at my attacker even as I twisted away, having the pleasure of feeling my shoe meet shin.
“Damn you!” a pained voice said. “I’ll teach you to—” And then the torch went out.
My elbow had knocked it from between the organ pipes and it hit the wooden floor with a dull thud.
We were now in total darkness and I opened my mouth to scream. But I did not.
Rather, I did something I expect I will never forget.
Hands grabbed at me and slipped off again as I pulled back and banged among the pipes. The wind chest was somewhere in the corner. Perhaps I could scramble up on top of it and hide behind—
Powerful hands had seized one of my ankles and were twisting … twisting—
And then the torch came on. Someone had retrieved it from the floor and was shining the beam directly into my eyes.
“Where is it?” thundered a voice from the darkness behind the light.
The voice of Ridley-Smith, the magistrate. I was sure of it.
“Hand it over,” another voice demanded, and my arm was wrenched almost out of its socket. I could see strange fingers digging into my whitening wrist.
“Hand it over and be quick about it.”
“Hand what over?” I gasped. “Let go of me. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The stone!” a voice rasped, hot in my ear. I could smell the man’s breath and it was nothing to write home about.
My first reaction was to stall for time. How long would it be before help could arrive?
An hour? It might as well be an eternity.
Benson (for I could now see with my own eyes that he was my attacker) seized my shoulders and gave me the kind of shake a terrier gives a rat.
I could feel my brain slapping against my brainpan.
“No games,” he hissed, his temper short. “Hand it over.”
I held out my empty hands in front of me.
“There must be some mistake,” I told him, trying my best to stare with open-eyed honesty into the torch’s blinding beam. “Honest.”
Another shake, more painful than the first.
“You’re hurting me,” I told him, my head spinning. “Let me go.”
Another bone-rattling shake.
I couldn’t take much more of this. There was no escape. Both Benson and the magistrate were barring the only way out of this hellish chamber.
I needed to change tactics.
Slightly.
“All right,” I said. “I know that the two of you murdered Mr. Collicutt.”
The shaking stopped. First point went to me.
“Right here,” I added, gesturing with my hand to take in the entire organ chamber, my breath coming in gasps. “I know that—you and your men—have been tunneling in from the churchyard—to steal the stone—for ages—maybe years. I know that you, Magistrate Ridley-Smith—came across the account—of the Heart of Lucifer—in the Public Record Office—the documents held at Chancery Lane. You hid it there in a pile of ancient charters. Who else but someone in the legal professions would have access?”
I was breathing heavily—as overwound as a six-shilling clock.
The Magistrate said nothing. I hadn’t been convincing enough.
“Mr. Collicutt was one of your—” (What was the word? Flunkies? Hirelings? Daffy would know.) “Employees,” I settled for, aware even as I said it that it was a pretty weak choice of words. “He double-crossed you. You had a falling-out. You murdered him right here in the organ chamber. Method? Diethyl ether. Murder weapon?”
I paused dramatically. Stretch it as long as you can, I thought.
“A handkerchief soaked in ether and held in place by a gas mask. And then you dragged him off through the tunnel and dumped his body in the chamber on top of Saint Tancred’s tomb.”
There was a dead silence during which Benson let go of my shoulders.
“That’s why you forced the bishop to withdraw his faculty. You knew what they would find when the tomb was opened, and it was too late to move the body again.”
During all of this, Magistrate Ridley-Smith had remained silent. But now he spoke, his words curiously soft in the stone chamber.
“Is that what you think?” he asked. “Is that what you honestly think?”
“Yes!” I shot back, trying to inject a certain tone of accusation into my voice.
“I’m afraid you have sadly misinterpreted the facts, young lady,” he said.
Ha, I thought. I know what he’s up to! Young lady, indeed!
He was going to sneak round the back and try to win me over with fake respect.
“Have I?” I asked, as coldly and condescendingly as I could manage given the situation.
“You have indeed,” he answered, putting such heart into his words that for a moment I was almost tempted to believe him. Had I detected in his voice a sense of being shaken?
“You have indeed,” he repeated. “The truth is quite the contrary.”
I let him see me bite my lip. How much longer could I stall?
“O, blessed ladies of the Altar Guild,” I prayed. “Sprout wings! Now! Fly to my defense!”
“What is the truth?” I heard myself blurt, recalling vaguely that Pontius Pilate had once used similar words but in quite different circumstances.
“The truth is that we tried desperately to revive Collicutt. Benson used a length of hose from the tower. Connected it to some sort of valve in the organ here. Tried to give him air. But it was no use.”
The air hose? I hadn’t thought of that! It would certainly explain the exploded intestines.
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
Even as I spoke I heard a sudden stirring in the church behind Benson and the magistrate, followed by the hollow banging down of a kneeling bench onto the stone floor.
Rescue was moments away!
“Help!” I shouted in as high-pitched and bloodcurdling a voice as I could manage. “Help me! Please help me!”
There was a shuffle of footsteps.
And then a large face appeared over the magistrate’s shoulder—a face with glasses as thick as the Heart of Lucifer.
It was Miss Tanty!
“What’s going on here?” she demanded.