Love, Honour & O'Brien

by Jennifer Rowe

  Holly saw Mrs Moss give him a surprised, appraising look. Yes, she thought. Allnut shouldn’t be underestimated. He was a solicitor, after all.

  ‘Those chains could have been for any sort of light fitting,’ she said. ‘It didn’t have to be a chandelier.’ This argument sounded feeble, even to her. She wished heartily that Abigail had experienced a more convincing vision at this moment. No doubt a psychic couldn’t pick and choose, but a pool of blood, for example, or a sinister locked chest, would have made more of an impression.

  ‘It was a chandelier,’ Allnut insisted, suddenly reverting to stupidity. ‘It fell years ago, in my father’s time. He told me.’

  ‘Oh, she must have seen the old pictures in the kitchen!’ Dulcie shrieked. ‘Una, there are pictures in the kitchen showing that chandelier hanging at the foot of the stairs!’

  ‘Shut up, Mum,’ Sebastian muttered, staring at Abigail in fascination.

  ‘She hasn’t been in the kitchen,’ Una said.

  ‘That one probably has,’ Lily put in, looking down her nose at Holly.

  Holly took an angry breath to deny it, but before she could burst into speech, Una held up her hand.

  ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘I think . . . I’d like to try this.’ She looked straight at Abigail. ‘Will you do it?’

  Abigail nodded slowly. ‘There is an unquiet soul in this house,’ she said. ‘We have to set it free.’

  ‘Oh Lord,’ Holly heard Sheena groan. At the front door, Martin slightly adjusted his position and stared down at his boots. Holly felt herself blushing, wished fervently that Abigail could do her stuff without resorting to melodrama, then was appalled at her own disloyalty.

  ‘Do you need something of Andrew’s to help you look, Abigail?’ she whispered. ‘Like with Lancelot?’

  ‘Who’s Lancelot?’ Sebastian asked eagerly.

  Abigail shook her head. ‘The call is very clear,’ she said, and looked up the stairs.

  ‘I knew it!’ hissed Una Maggott, clenching her fists. ‘Go up then! Go and look! Go!’

  24

  Holly had expected the search for Andrew McNish to be similar to the hunt for Lancelot the cat, but it wasn’t. This time there was no indecision at all. Abigail’s face grew more and more sombre as she climbed the squeaking stairs with Holly and Mrs Moss close behind her. At the top, where doors hung open exposing ransacked rooms, and the faint, sweet smell of death drifted in the air, she paused only to catch her breath before turning to the right.

  Swiftly she led the way past Sheena’s room, and the room with the leaky roof. Towards Andrew’s room? Towards the room where Rollo Maggott had kept watch on his gates? Towards the bathroom doorway, where a black leather bag lay gaping on its side like a disembowelled corpse, its contents spilling raggedly onto the chipped mosaic tiles?

  It was when Holly saw that bag, recognised it as Andrew’s, recognised the red T-shirt on top of the pile—never one of Andrew’s favourites, but the very one he had been wearing in the photograph she had given to O’Brien—that everything suddenly threatened to become real, and her heart began to fail her. She found she was panting. The odour of death was making her head swim. The corridor seemed thick with it. She wanted to call to Abigail to wait, to slow down, but the swirling dust motes, gleaming in the light from the bathroom window, seemed to have caught in her throat.

  Abigail stopped abruptly. ‘Here,’ she said.

  She was pointing at the half-open door of the linen storeroom from which Sheena had danced backwards only the day before, and in which Sebastian had tried to hide his stash.

  Andrew can’t be in there, Holly thought, and was disconcerted to feel a wave of relief so powerful that it almost overwhelmed her disappointment. This wouldn’t do. Gingerly she swung the storeroom door wide, releasing a powerful smell of mothballs.

  The little room was in chaos. Skinner, Fen and Bernie had left no pillowcase unturned in their fruitless search for the money they could not believe was gone. The cream-painted shelves that lined the walls had been stripped bare. Bed linen, blankets, quilts, towels, embroidered tray cloths, rust-spotted tablecloths and napkins, a multitude of doilies and a few unsavoury-looking spare pillows encased in brittle, yellowed plastic, lay tangled and trampled on the floor.

  ‘Are you sure, Abby?’ Mrs Moss asked anxiously.

  Abigail nodded, but a little furrow had appeared between her eyebrows. She turned to Holly in mute appeal.

  Holly stared into the uncompromisingly corpse-free space and gnawed at her lip.

  What now, O’Brien?

  And an answer came to her, wafting through her mind like a soft, chill breath. But it wasn’t the ghost of O’Brien who whispered to her. It was the remembered voice of Una Maggott—mad Una Maggott: He’ll be under the floorboards, or walled in by now. They’re not silly.

  Holly bent and gathered up an armful of blankets. Mothballs rained from the scratchy pink folds, making her sneeze. ‘Let’s get this stuff out,’ she said.

  With the three of them working together, it took only a minute to transfer the chaos from storeroom to corridor. When they had finished, they were walled in by a small mountain range of cloth, and a bleak, empty space yawned before them, somehow looking more menacing than it had before.

  Holly crept in, fruitlessly scanning the floor for signs of recent cuts or nailing, shuffling her feet to feel for loosened boards, kicking mothballs out of her way. She looked up at the ceiling, which was cobwebby and mottled with age but otherwise unmarked. She peered at the strips of wall visible between the empty shelves and saw no sign of disturbance.

  Acutely aware that Abigail and Mrs Moss were watching her, she felt the need to do something more positive. She reached between shelves to knock on the nearest wall, the one to her left, felt a raised pattern beneath the skin of cream paint, and realised what it meant. The storeroom walls were covered with the same embossed wallpaper that darkened the corridor, but the paper had been painted over. To make the little room lighter and cleaner-looking, perhaps? It seemed an odd expenditure of effort in a house that had otherwise been so neglected. But what other reason could there be?

  She thought of one, and her stomach gave a little lurch. What if the wallpaper had been painted to conceal the fact that a section of it had been damaged ? Had vanished, in fact, when a body-sized cavity was hollowed out of the wall?

  Holly realised almost instantly that this theory was deeply flawed. The Maggott house was old, and no doubt sturdily built, but surely even a double brick wall, however lavishly plastered, would not be thick enough to absorb a fully grown man without showing a very obvious bulge?

  Once the idea of a wall burial had taken root in her mind, however, it proved impossible to dislodge. She had, after all, found it hard to believe that the cat Lancelot could fit under the divan bed. Yet he had done it.

  She had to check, if only because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. Deciding that if the excavation had been done at all, it would have been done as close to the floor as possible, she crouched, reached under the lowest shelf and edged crabwise along the wall, trailing her fingertips over the paint, feeling for a place where the texture of the wallpaper stopped and the smoothness of new plaster or board began. By the time she reached the corner her thighs and calves were in agony, she had repeatedly bumped her head against the second-lowest shelf, and she had discovered no break in the wallpaper whatsoever.

  Well, of course, she told herself bitterly. The image of Sheena, Lily, Dulcie or Eric huddled in the linen room, chipping away at plaster and brick while the body of Andrew McNish lay cooling in a corner, was ludicrous. It was tempting to give up and admit defeat. But with a kind of masochistic stubbornness, as if completing the search was a moral obligation, a kind of penance for stupidity, she ignored the protests from her thighs and waddled herself into a turn. Stretching forward again, she began on the back wall.

  And felt her fingers glide over glacial smoothness.

  It was like being struck b
y lightning. It gave her such a shock that she yelled, rocked on her heels, and fell backwards. Mrs Moss and Abigail darted forward with little cries of alarm. It was impossible for them to crowd around her in the confined space, but they tried.

  ‘Was it a spider, dear?’ asked Mrs Moss, as Holly clambered to her feet.

  Holly shook her head. ‘This wall,’ she managed to say. ‘It’s different—at the bottom—or maybe . . .’ She ran her hands experimentally over the space between the second and third shelves, the third and the fourth. No wallpaper. Thick cream paint, but definitely no wallpaper.

  ‘Abigail! Can I borrow your scarf?’

  Mrs Moss raised her eyebrows, but Abigail pulled off the long strip of purple silk and handed it over without a word. They both retreated into the corridor as Holly used the scarf to measure the length of the storeroom from front to back. Then they followed her as she ran into Rollo Mag-gott’s room. She could see at once that she was right. The storeroom wall on this side looked longer. She measured, just to be sure, and found that the difference was a little over half the length of the scarf. About a metre. More than enough.

  ‘There’s a cavity at the back of the storeroom,’ she said, putting into words what by now they all knew.

  ‘You are clever, dear,’ said Mrs Moss.

  Abigail shivered.

  Holly felt as if a million butterflies were trapped in her stomach and trying to get out. ‘I should have checked this room yesterday,’ she said, to stop herself from thinking.

  Was it only yesterday? It seemed incredible. She made herself look at the grotesque carved bed that hulked beside the window, in the niche created by the storeroom. She found it repellent. She wondered how Cliff Allnut could have agreed to spend the night in it, however drunk he was. She would have taken the sofa downstairs any day. She would rather have slept on the floor.

  Mrs Moss shook her head. ‘No one who wasn’t actually looking for a difference in the walls would have noticed. The shelves in the storeroom confuse the eye.’

  Abigail moved restlessly. ‘Someone with a very strange mind spent time in this room,’ she said, wrinkling her nose. ‘Someone mad, I think.’

  That seemed as good a cue as any to retire to the corridor and move back to the space encircled by the linen store contents.

  ‘So what now?’ Mrs Moss asked eagerly.

  The fact was, Holly felt reluctant to do anything at all. For two pins she would have lain down among the sheets and towels, pulled something over her head and gone to sleep. But she knew she couldn’t do that. She couldn’t escape. And neither could she breathe a word of the craven fear that, despite everything, they were about to make perfect fools of themselves. She couldn’t express the doubts that still niggled deep in her mind.

  Could mothballs and lavender air-freshener really mask the smell of fresh paint? Could it really be that no one in the house had noticed that the linen cupboard had lost a metre in length, however tightly packed the shelves were? Could an amateur, however determined, really remove shelves and reposition them on a false wall in a single night without disturbing a soul? So when she replied to Mrs Moss, she restricted herself to outlining her most obvious dilemma—one that she knew would be understood and appreciated.

  ‘The minute we tell Una about this she’ll freak out,’ she said. ‘Una will want action. She won’t want to wait for the police. But she should. There might be trouble otherwise.’

  ‘Interfering with a crime scene.’ Mrs Moss nodded knowledgeably.

  ‘But the police won’t believe it is a crime scene unless they actually see the body,’ Abigail protested.

  The body.

  This is Andrew we’re talking about, Holly told herself. Andrew! The man I was going to marry. In what now seemed another life.

  She swallowed. ‘Actually, I was thinking about another sort of trouble. If Andrew is behind that false wall, it means that one of those people downstairs killed him. Who knows what the killer might do if we go rushing down there and announce . . .?’

  She watched the faces before her become extremely thoughtful.

  ‘Too bad,’ said Abigail, after a moment. ‘I think we should take the bull by the horns.’

  ‘Softly softly catchee monkey,’ Mrs Moss demurred obscurely.

  Holly stood irresolute. Monkey or bull, she found herself pondering. Monkey, bull or chicken?

  Raised voices floated up from the entrance hall: Una’s rasp, Dulcie’s high twitter, Allnut’s rumble. The stairs squeaked.

  Sebastian Maggott appeared on the landing. He peered down the corridor at them, at the contents of the linen store heaped on the floor.

  ‘Auntie Una says have you found anything yet?’ he called self-consciously.

  Holly felt the spirit of O’Brien poke her left shoulder–blade. She made her decision. Bugger the monkeys. And the chickens. It was red rag time.

  ‘Tell her yes, we think so,’ she called back. ‘If Martin’s still there, could you ask him to come up? And bring some tools? We have to demolish a wall.’

  And so it was that ten minutes later, Martin was ripping into the back wall of the linen room with the aid of a sledgehammer and a crowbar. Una, her wheelchair forming the apex of a ragged triangle of onlookers that included everyone in the house, watched avidly from the corridor, the giant black torch in her lap.

  Holly, Abigail and Mrs Moss stood a little apart from the others, or rather, the others stood a little apart from them. It was as if the three had been instinctively quarantined, as if an invisible barrier had been set up between the hunters and the hunted, the accusers and the accused.

  Mrs Moss and Abigail, rigid with tension, had their eyes fixed on Martin. Holly, the spirit of O’Brien still hovering at her back, was covertly surveying the cast of suspects, searching in vain for signs of obvious guilt.

  No one had tried to make a getaway. No one was acting out of character. Sheena and Dulcie had protested vigorously about the proposed destruction but, having quickly realised they were powerless to prevent it, now stood silently, wincing at each blow of the hammer, each shelf prised from its moorings, each sound of cracking plasterboard and splintering wood.

  Lily was slightly smiling but watching attentively, as if she were memorising every detail of the lunacy in order to be able to recount it later to an interested audience. Cliff Allnut had restricted himself to pursing his lips and glaring huffily at Holly, as if warning her of retribution to come. Sebastian had passionately resisted his mother’s attempts to make him stay downstairs, but having got his way had remembered his chosen persona and now skulked at the edge of the group, occasionally kicking at the piles of sheets and towels in a bored sort of way that deceived no one.

  Eric stood expressionless behind Una’s wheelchair. He had lugged the chair upstairs, but Martin had carried Una. Una had insisted on that. It could have been because she was genuinely afraid that Eric would drop her accidentally on purpose, as she loudly claimed, or simply because she quite liked the idea of Martin’s strong arms around her. Holly suspected the latter.

  ‘There’s something in here, all right,’ Martin called over his shoulder.

  Everyone leaned forward. Someone drew a shuddering breath, but Holly did not see who it was. The moment Martin spoke she had looked toward the sound of his voice. She felt breathless, and there was a tightness in her chest as if her heart were being squeezed.

  The plasterboard, boldly striped with the pitted white bars that showed where the shelves had been torn away, was now partially broken on the right-hand side. Martin was peering through the gap into darkness.

  ‘Can I have the torch?’ he called, turning a little and stretching out his hand.

  Holly waited for Eric to move, but Eric remained motionless. Una was panting, her face no longer avid but taut with strain. Her hands gripped the arms of her wheelchair, the knuckles white, the veins standing out knotted and blue.

  Holly stepped forward and took the torch from Una’s lap. She had the strangest feeling that
she was standing back and watching herself as she went into the ravaged storeroom, slapping the torch into Martin’s waiting hand like a nurse passing an instrument to a surgeon at the climax of a delicate operation.

  Martin bent to the hole in the plasterboard, turned the torch on and shone the powerful white beam through the gap, directing it down.

  ‘What . . .?’ Una’s voice was strangled, almost unrecognisable.

  Martin’s head and hand, and the stem of the torch, were blocking the hole. Holly couldn’t see what he was looking at. But she could hear him swearing under his breath. When he straightened and turned his face had blanched under the tan, and his eyes had darkened to indigo. He thrust the torch at Holly.

  ‘Wait and give me a hand, will you?’ he muttered. ‘Just stand back a bit.’

  He waited while Holly stowed the torch on the shelf at her elbow and retreated a little. Then he picked up the hammer, hooked the claw end into the gap in the plasterboard, and began breaking the board up, cracking it then snapping broken sections free. He worked rapidly downwards, passing each ragged, powdery piece of waste to Holly for her to put aside. It took only a minute or two before the whole lower part of the wall was gone.

  And then Martin swung the torch around on its shelf and switched it on, so that its cruel white beam shone directly into the cavity.

  The picture was to stay with Holly, vivid in every detail, for the rest of her life. It was as if, like the flash of a camera, the shock had imprinted the image on her brain. Against a background of shredded black satin draperies, through which glimpses of embossed wallpaper could be seen, a statue of a jackal-headed god brooded over a white coffin with a glass lid and tarnished brass handles. Several small, blackened caskets, a flat box tied with ragged ribbon, a flute glass and a bottle of French champagne had been arranged at the statue’s feet.

  ‘It’s a coffin,’ Holly heard Cliff Allnut say from the corridor. ‘Why would they put him in a coffin?’ He sounded primly accusing, as if somehow the discovery was a ploy designed to deceive him.