Cherringham--The Secret of Brimley Manor

by Matthew Costello

  He looked at Sarah. It was time they went into the house, its secret exposed.

  Time to go.

  But then Jack happened to glance at what lay under the plans.

  An aged photo album, from the looks of it. Also leather-bound: a deep, dark green.

  “Family album?” Jacks said.

  And Brimley answered quickly, shaking his head.

  “Oh, no. Not that one.”

  He reached down and picked up the book, a much less weighty item.

  Flipped it open.

  The pages showed a large faded Kodachrome of each room in the manor house, all its treasures revealed.

  Brimley flipped through it.

  And he said, again with the tone of someone possessing irrefutable logic: “My grandfather had it made. So I could use it to select my gift, each year you see—”

  Jack smiled, interrupting.

  “I know. For your birthday. One item. May I?”

  He handed the album to Jack as Sarah came close.

  And Jack flipped page after page until …

  He came to the music room. All the instruments. Not just hanging on the walls, but stacked in groups, families almost — brass, strings, wind. Great double-basses, trumpets, timpani, serried ranks of piccolos, flutes, tin whistles even.

  “Grandpa’s pride and joy,” said Brimley. “He told me once that he could play every single one.”

  “Amazing collection,” said Sarah. “So sad that …”

  Jack saw Sarah pause, and he looked at Brimley. His eyes were watering.

  He looked back at Sarah who put her hand on Brimley’s arm.

  “Perhaps you can start the collection again,” she said.

  “Do you think so?” said Brimley. “Really?”

  “Nothing to stop you,” said Jack.

  “Wouldn’t be the same though,” said Brimley. “Some of those pieces. Well. Grandpa used to say — the music room — that’s my real treasure, Perry. That’s my real treasure.”

  Jack caught Sarah’s eye. Then:

  “Perry — mind if we borrow this photo?” she said. “Just for a bit? Might help?”

  Jack saw confusion, of course, on Brimley’s face. But Sarah’s warm tone — and probably their appreciation of what his old sea chest held — had won the heir over.

  “Um, well — okay. But do take care, won’t you? No copies exist, I am afraid. Vintage. Like everything, like the house. The plans. The chest.” Then an almost sad grin. “Me.”

  Jack put a hand on Brimley’s shoulder.

  “You have been a great help, Perry.” A small, reassuring squeeze to the shoulder. “Thank you.”

  And at that — they were done, with just one thing left to do.

  Go inside the house itself.

  16. The Secret Room

  Outside, steps away from the manor house, Sarah had stopped, and sent a text. Then she turned to Jack.

  “Okay, just sent a text off to Gibbons. Asking if Sophie Scott’s with him — and if he can send a picture of the music room she did for the evaluation. That famous Jack Brennan intuition telling you something?”

  Jack smiled at that. “This time? About the photos? Maybe yes. Or — maybe not anything there. Still—”

  Sarah nodded and looked down at her phone.

  “Nothing yet, hmm?”

  “Nope,” said Sarah. “Though Chloe’s got back to me about that guy Karl.”

  “And?”

  Sarah shrugged. “All she says is, the guy’s definitely bad news.”

  “Nothing else?”

  Sarah shook her head. “Doesn’t really help much, does it?”

  She turned to the door of the house. Clifford had supplied them with his key card.

  The place would be theirs. All on their own.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “Yup.”

  And they left the warm afternoon sun, and entered the dark musty interior of Brimley Manor.

  *

  Through the halls, and up the stairs they went, until they reached the room at the top, firmly locked.

  Jack pulled out his small pick-lock kit.

  “Work your magic,” Sarah said.

  She watched him select a thin bit of metal with a small hook on the end. Like a set of hexagonal wrenches, there seemed to be a pick for every size and type of lock.

  He placed it at the opening, and began to work on the lock.

  Like using a needle to thread a hole blindfolded, he made the small pick twist, left and right, then left again—

  Until—

  A click.

  “Nearly there,” he said, grinning. “Just a couple more tumblers to go.”

  She watched him work the lock again, his head pressed against the door, the pick twitching back and forth.

  And then she heard that oh-so-satisfying click.

  “Open?” she said.

  “Let’s find out.”

  Then, as if he had cracked a safe at the Bank of England, he stood up, turned the door handle … and the door to the locked room opened.

  First thing Jack noticed: the laptop that he had seen when he peered through the keyhole the other day was gone. As well as a yellow pad that had been on the small table in the centre. Kettle, though — still in place.

  Apart from that, the room was empty.

  Four wood-panelled walls. No furniture, just a tiny fireplace on one wall and that lone table in front of a single window.

  A single window …

  “This doesn’t make sense,” said Sarah. “Why come up here to work? I mean, if Ben was here what was he doing?”

  “Oh, I think he was working on something, all right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Jack walked over to the wall with the fireplace.

  “Remember how I couldn’t figure out the third window on this floor?” he said. “I think there’s another room, next to this one. Gotta be. A secret room.”

  And he started to tap on the panelled wall with his hand, listening for a different sound.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Sarah. “The pictures on my phone. The plans.”

  Sarah quickly got the phone out, swiped to the attic layout.

  “You’re right. Look.”

  Jack looked at the phone. On the plan he could see a shaded area next to the room they were in.

  “Secret room,” he said. “Has to be.”

  “All we have to do is find how to get into it,” said Sarah, looking up.

  “Sliding panel of some kind? Can’t be obvious. Would defeat the purpose.”

  He started feeling around the panel edges where wood moulding on the floor met the wall, and the corners; and pressed his hands under the small mantel above the tiny fireplace.

  Sarah worked the other side of the fireplace.

  But then—

  He heard a metallic click then a groan from Sarah’s side.

  And he turned to see an opening had appeared on the other side, a small door, just to the right of the stone fireplace.

  “I just had to press this panel, push it open, and here we go.”

  He watched her bend low and step through the doorway — and he followed, the air becoming musty and stale as he entered the room, a dim shaft of light coming from a single window.

  The third window that he’d seen from the garden below.

  *

  Inside the room, as her eyes adjusted to the light, Sarah could see shelves with books, ledgers of some kind. And in one corner, on old wooden tables, with the varnish cracked and peeling, stacks of documents, letters, and even maps.

  “Look,” Sarah said, reaching out and picking up one of the documents. “This map here. ‘Brimley Plantation, Tortola, BVI,’ it says. What’s BVI?”

  “British Virgin Islands,” said Jack. “In the Caribbean. Tortola’s one of the islands.”

  “This shows the plantation layout and—”

  She spotted a large book nearby — open: one side with lines for what looked like tallying things;
and on the other facing page, notes.

  She read it to herself … then turned to Jack.

  “Listen to this. ‘Three slaves need be replaced due to gunshot wounds’.”

  But Jack had wandered close to another table covered in a scattering of yellow newspapers. She walked over to him.

  One cover story: Slave riot put down by Nathaniel Brimley. Then in a lower font: Production unaffected.

  “The Brimley fortune?” Jack said. “From all this … looks like … sugar cane?”

  “Yes, must be,” Sarah said. “In the ledger book, I saw entries for that and also rum to be shipped to England. But, Jack. The notes on the side, dated, perfect penmanship … page after page regarding slaves acquired, sickness … Even — God — punishments! And here’s the words used — ‘meted out with utmost force’.”

  Suddenly, for her, this house no longer felt like a silly museum — it felt evil.

  The secret repository of the dark history of the Brimley fortune.

  “You know,” Jack said taking a step closer to Sarah, “I never thought of, well, your country and the slave trade.”

  “Not something we talk about. When slavery ended, we just walked away from those plantations, the slaves freed, but uprooted from their lives, their culture.”

  “And centuries later, we’re still dealing with the aftermath.”

  Sarah went back to the ledger book. Another flip of a page: more accounting of sugar cane, more reports from the distillery, more punishments.

  She turned to Jack. “Ben. His passion. Restitution. Needing people to answer for all this.”

  And Jack nodded.

  Sarah stopped for a moment. The room, dark, with so little light coming through the cobwebbed window. But something — she thought — was suddenly so clear. There could now be no doubt: Ben had a powerful motive to burn this place down.

  Especially with his own family coming originally from the West Indies.

  “Appears that way, Sarah.”

  “I sense you’re not totally convinced?”

  “Maybe I don’t want to be,” said Jack. “I just can’t see Ben setting the fire when Charlie was about to begin his rounds.”

  “All of these papers, though — he must have felt so angry.”

  “True. But he volunteered the information that he saw Brimley. Steering us right to him. Where — well — we were bound to end up nosing around here. If this was a place where Ben found out about the family’s past, the blood of slaves providing the money … and wanted to do it all harm … why help us?”

  “Maybe he was trying to pin the whole thing on Perry?”

  For a moment, both of them said nothing.

  “Hey, lucky us! We currently have more questions than answers,” Sarah said.

  “Not for the first time. And pretty good questions, hmm?”

  “Why don’t we see if we can use the hidden passageways to go from here, to the rest of the house.”

  “To the music room?”

  “Bingo.”

  Sarah took out her phone, swiped the screen so she could look at the plans again.

  “If I’m not mistaken, there should be a staircase somewhere around” — she walked over to the corner of the secret room where she could see a gap between the tables — “here.”

  She pressed on the panels and, once again, one gave way, this time revealing a dark corridor.

  “Looks from the lack of cobwebs as though somebody else has been using this, hmm?” she said.

  She saw Jack dig out his phone, and turn on the light.

  Sarah looked into the intimidating darkness and took out her phone too — switched on the light. She turned to Jack.

  “Ready?”

  “Sure — but best we stay close.”

  And Jack, his phone’s glaring light held in front of him, entered the secret passage.

  17. Trapped!

  Sarah stuck close to Jack as they slowly moved along the narrow, winding passageway — too narrow to let them walk side-by-side. The light from their phones barely showed the next few feet ahead.

  They came to that passageway’s end, and saw even narrower steps leading down.

  “Think those stairs are safe? Look at them!” Sarah said.

  She was half-kidding, but the planks of the stairs in the narrow stairwell looked rather homemade.

  Jack turned to her, the light now on his face — inches from hers.

  That closeness reminded her of another time when they’d been pressed together tight in a railway tunnel alcove … a roaring train screaming towards them.

  Her light now picked up his reassuring smile.

  “I think we’ll be okay. Anyway, I’ll go first. My weight on those steps … we’ll see how I fare, hmm?”

  And she smiled back at that as Jack turned and started down. If these stairs were used to spy on things, it surely wasn’t done under cover of silence; each step howled out an exaggerated groaning creak!

  And though she knew there was no one else in the house, it still made Sarah want to tread as lightly as she could.

  Then, a few steps from the bottom, Jack stopped.

  “So — the music room, hmm? Have to admit, I’m lost.”

  Sarah nodded. Navigating a maze like this — for that’s what it really was — with dead reckoning would be impossible,

  But she had her pictures of the plans.

  “I’ll see where we are. Least, where I think we are, and then—”

  But the phone vibrated in her hand — made her jump.

  A new email.

  She looked at the name.

  “Guy Gibbons,” she read.

  “And?”

  “An attachment.”

  “Ohhh. Better open it …”

  Sarah hit the notification, and read the email.

  “He says Sophie’s not with him, no idea where she is — but he found the photo of the music room,” she said. She passed the phone to Jack.

  “Looks just like the photo from Brimley. But let’s take a careful look …”

  And Jack slid the old photo out of his shirt pocket — put it next to Sarah’s phone — and they both leaned in, studied the images.

  At first, she thought, nothing.

  Save for the faded, washed out colour of the Kodachrome, no difference at all. Just as Brimley said, the rooms were kept in original condition, all items in the same position over the years.

  But then—

  “Jack — look to the left side, there …”

  She pointed to the image on her phone. It filled the screen but still was smaller than the Kodachrome.

  Jack rubbed his eyes, leaned in even closer.

  “Something missing, right? That thing there against the wall — what is it?”

  Sarah brought the Kodachrome close. “The stringed instrument? I don’t know — a lute of some kind? Looks old.”

  “Old, yes,” said Jack. “And maybe … valuable.”

  She turned to him.

  “It’s not in Sophie Scott’s picture.

  “But it is in Brimley’s.”

  Again, they both became quiet, letting the significance of that rattle around.

  Something that had been in the music room, where the fire broke out, had been removed.

  Removed — or stolen?

  She looked at Jack in the shared light of their phones. He had that look on his face — a look she’d seen before when he cracked a case.

  Had he suddenly cracked this one?

  “You going to share your thoughts, Jack Brennan?” she said.

  “Sure,” he said, smiling. “Soon as we get out of this tight little spot, hmm?”

  Sarah opened her photos app, and flipped to one of the second-floor schematics.

  Then she looked up, and pointed the light of her phone ahead. “We go that way, take that corner. Just a few steps — and the music room should be straight ahead.”

  “I’ll follow you,” Jack said.

  And Sarah started again down the impossib
ly narrow passageway.

  Until she stopped, turned left.

  And aimed the light.

  *

  “Should be just” — she rapped on the wall to her left — “on the other side of here. That is, if there is an opening, but I—”

  She started searching the wall, looking for some indication that they’d find another sliding panel.

  And then—

  To the right, a small indentation.

  “There you go,” Jack said, “no need to hide it on this side. Should be—”

  She watched Jack grab it, and tug. Nothing.

  “Guess,” he laughed, “doesn’t get much use. Needs a little oil but—”

  Another big tug, and then, with an “oomph”, the panel moved, jerkily sliding open a mere foot.

  And their phone lights now picked up the still-charred room.

  “Well, we made it here from the attic room. Which means that someone could have—” Jack started to say.

  But he stopped.

  Sniffed. And Sarah did as well, in that moment — as primal as they come — when you get a whiff of smoke.

  Smoke, fire — and here they were stuck on an upper floor, trapped in a half-open sliding wall.

  “Jack—” she said.

  Jack grabbed the panel again, a big tug. But the sliding wall still refused to budge.

  *

  Then Jack threw his entire weight into tugging on the panel.

  Has someone jimmied it, he thought. Made it so it won’t open?

  “Jack,” he heard Sarah just behind him. “We have to get out of here. Maybe go back — down the passageway?”

  He turned quickly. “Looking at floor plans, stumbling around, while this time the whole place burns down?”

  He shook his head. “One more shot?” he said, turning back to the wall.

  And now, feet wedged against one part of the wall opening, and leaning back, ready to literally tear the wall panel down if needed, he used his full body weight.

  For seconds, nothing. Immovable.

  Then, like a creature giving up a fight, the panel flew open, sending Jack rolling backwards.

  But he scrambled to his feet, Sarah grabbing a hand to help.

  “As fast as we can,” Sarah said, already moving through the opening, Jack in tow, pulling him along.

  No argument there, Jack thought as they raced into the music room and bolted through all the weird rooms.