The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  She felt the towels and the facecloths. They had the fluffy texture that you only find straight from the shop. The toothpaste tube was new. The shampoo and the shower cream hadn’t been used. Did he insist on everything being fresh each time he came in here?

  Her suspicion grew that this bathroom wasn’t all it appeared.

  What if the guns were stored out of sight? They could be in the vanity cupboard or behind the cladding around the bathtub or even in the toilet cistern.

  There were drawers and a cupboard in the vanity unit below the hand basin. The cupboard contained spare toilet rolls. Too bloody obvious, she told herself. If this was built to frustrate a search, you wouldn’t use the cupboard. That was the first place anyone would look.

  She opened each of the drawers and found more towels. As silently as possible, she removed all three drawers completely from the unit and stacked them on the floor. The space inside was dark. Kneeling on the mat, she reached inside and felt with her hand. Her palm flattened against the solid wall. She probed up and down. Nothing was hidden there. Nor was there any kind of opening in the floor.

  The wood cladding was more promising. The bath had been plumbed into a corner and had substantial space around it. Moreover, it was set into a platform at the end of the room with two low steps up from the floor level, all built with the same veneered board. Behind and out of sight there was enough room for several rifles and assault weapons as well as handguns.

  Was there a simple way of getting inside? Presumably Nathan needed easy access to show his wares to his customers.

  On hands and knees Ingeborg made a search for a panel that could be lifted, or a hidden hinge. She spent the next fifteen minutes examining the joins. Everything appeared to be tightly screwed in and each piece was flush with the next. Whoever had made this had done a professional job, which encouraged her to think there must be a clever way in, a sliding panel or a loose board that lifted up.

  She broke two fingernails trying.

  Finally she accepted that if there was a trick, she hadn’t detected it. The only way she would get a look behind the cladding was by forcing a piece out. Any damage would then be obvious.

  It didn’t take long to come to a decision. Tonight’s opportunity wasn’t likely to be repeated. But what could she use as a tool?

  In the toilet bag was a manicure set, with scissors and a nail file.

  The nail file would make a serviceable screwdriver. She chose a large panel in front of the bath and got to work. Getting the screw to move at all wasn’t easy, but with strength born of desperation she got it to turn. Out it came.

  She started on the screws directly below. They would have been driven in using a power tool and she had only muscle power and a four-inch nail file. Each one was a brute to move. Only the extreme urgency and her persistence finally brought a result. The two extra screws came out and she was able to prise out one end of the panel. It made a horrible squeak and she gasped and froze.

  No sound came from along the corridor.

  She got her fingers behind the panel and tugged. The gap widened.

  She put her arm right in and groped in the space. Nothing was there. Her fingertips made contact with the underside of the bathtub.

  No guns. All this effort had achieved nothing.

  In despair now, she pushed the panel back into position. It would have to be left without screws. She didn’t have the strength to replace them.

  One last possibility remained: the cistern. Every police officer who has ever done a drugs raid knows water tanks are favourite hiding places for items wrapped in waterproof bags and strapped to the sides.

  Maybe a handgun or two could be secreted in this one.

  She stepped close and lifted the heavy porcelain lid.

  It was a normal, functioning cistern filled with water. Nothing was in there that shouldn’t be.

  At this of all moments, the cramp in her leg returned, rock-hard and agonising, sending a shockwave through her entire body. Her fingers flexed and lost their grip on the cistern lid. It slammed down with an impact loud enough to wake the entire population of Bristol.

  In panic and in pain, Ingeborg’s reaction was to get out fast. She limped to the door and started along the corridor towards her own room.

  Before she’d hobbled more than three steps, she heard the door at the end thrust open, followed by Nathan’s voice yelling, “Stop right there,” followed immediately by a shout from Lee: “Don’t run, Ingeborg. He’s got a gun.”

  She wasn’t stupid. Hand-held guns are never wholly accurate, but there was a strong chance of being shot or hit by a ricochet. She raised her arms and waited. Ahead of her, someone else appeared, one of Nathan’s minders wearing nothing but boxer shorts. He, also, was pointing a gun.

  “Grab her,” Nathan ordered.

  She backed against the wall, hands spread in a calming gesture. “It’s okay. I’m not in for a fight.”

  The minder made sure by stepping up to her side and pressing the muzzle of the gun into her neck.

  The bathroom door was still open and the light was left on. Nathan—in silk floral pyjamas—padded towards it and looked inside. Lee, in a baby-doll nightdress, was framed in the doorway of their bedroom looking terrified.

  “I should have known better than to let a fucking journalist sleep in my house,” Nathan said. “How the fuck did you get hold of my keys?”

  Before Lee could say a word, Ingeborg said, “You were both asleep so I crept in and took them. I need drugs. I thought you must have some hard stuff hidden in the locked room.” In the situation, this was the best story she could think up. If nothing else, it shifted any blame from Lee.

  “You’re a bloody junkie?” Nathan said. “You came to my house looking for drugs? I don’t believe this. Roll up your sleeves and show us your arms.”

  “Cocaine,” she said at once. “I snort coke.”

  “Cobblers. You wouldn’t come here if you wanted coke.”

  “It’s got to be somewhere,” she said, at full stretch to sound convincing. “You live in style. Everyone says you’re importing. How else could you make it so big?”

  “Someone’s been stringing you along,” he said, giving just a suggestion that he believed her. “Drugs are a filthy trade. I wouldn’t lower myself to deal with the scum who take them. Tell her, Lily. She’s got it all wrong.”

  In a strained, small voice, Lee said, “Nathan doesn’t sell drugs.”

  Nathan advanced on Ingeborg and she thought he was going to strike her. Instead he put his face so close that she could feel and smell his bad breath. “You made one hell of a mistake coming here, Miss so-called Smith, telling a load of shit to Lily about getting in the papers, when all you wanted was to invade our privacy, abuse my hospitality, nick the keys from my trouser pocket and look for flake in my bathroom. You don’t have a clue who you’re dealing with. I ought to feed you to the dogs, but I’ll think of something better.” To the minder holding the gun, he said, “She can go in the tower room for the rest of the night. Get her out of my fucking sight.”

  22

  Locked in the tower room, Ingeborg refused to give way to despair. There had to be positives. She was still in the place where she needed to be, Nathan’s mansion, even if she no longer had the guest room. She remained undercover. No one knew she was a police officer. If her hastily concocted story was believed, she was a cokehead journalist on the hunt for drugs. And she still had an ally in the house. By telling Nathan she’d actually entered the bedroom to steal his keys, she’d removed any blame from Lee—provided Lee had the inner strength and wit to deny any part in the incident. But she wasn’t pinning her hopes on Lee. She had to find her own way of dealing with the setback.

  That was how it was in her thinking: a setback, not a disaster.

  Nathan’s appalled reaction to her suggestion that he had drugs in the house had come over as genuine. And he had revealed more than he intended with his comment that she didn’t have a clue who she was deal
ing with. He may as well have said that while he was not into drugs, he was still a supplier, but not a supplier of what had been suggested. It was as if dealing in firearms was a clean trade.

  His outrage at having his secret bathroom invaded was more than just anger that his privacy was violated. His near panic suggested Ingeborg had come close to exposing him.

  But she’d found only soap and towels.

  The bathroom remained a mystery and a challenge. Lee had said Nathan often took his visitors in there. Took visitors into a bathroom?

  Before tonight, she’d been confident the room was used for storing the guns he supplied to his gangster clients. Lee had appeared to agree.

  In her head she reconstructed that bathroom unit by unit: cupboards, drawers, bath, shower, hand basin, toilet. The tiling was sound, the walls and ceiling solid. The floor had been covered in square ceramic tiles that felt firm underfoot, suggesting they were on a base of cement. None were loose. There were no tell-tale gaps between them. So far as she could tell, it was a fully equipped, fully functioning bathroom, except that it didn’t function. It was not in regular use.

  Again she asked herself why. Nathan and Lee had the en suite shower and toilet. If they didn’t choose to share, Nathan could easily have stepped along the corridor. Evidently he didn’t, because all the toilet items were shop new.

  She was convinced the room was used for something more sinister. The washing facility was just a bluff. Had to be.

  She tried putting herself into Nathan’s situation. Suppose she were storing weapons on a big scale. Suppose it was common knowledge that she was an illegal supplier, known to the police as well as the criminal world. Wouldn’t she need a secret armoury tucked away in some part of the house no one would suspect? Suppose it appeared to be a bathroom. Suppose the bathroom was just a front.

  An idea dawned.

  A big, bold concept.

  She was going to need a second inspection of the secret bathroom. And it had to be tonight, before dawn. After being woken in the night, people invariably sink into a deeper sleep. This basic physical reaction would apply to the minders, as well as Nathan and Lee. By defying her body clock and staying awake, Ingeborg could gain an advantage. The remaining hours of the night offered her the best opportunity of not disturbing the others—or being disturbed.

  First challenge: how to escape from the tower room. The floor and walls were solid, the window too narrow to squeeze through.

  What about the ceiling? Presumably she was in part of the original house, so the ceiling would be constructed of traditional lath and plaster. Logically, this was the escape route. The room was at the top of a virtually free-standing tower with a conical tiled roof over it. She was certain she was the only inhabitant, so it was unlikely she’d be heard. She could scrape, scratch, hammer at the plaster to her heart’s content. But what with?

  The ceiling was out of reach, about nine feet above floor level. She upended the latrine bucket and stepped on and off to test the extra height it would give her. Not enough. She tugged the blankets from the primitive camp bed and examined the wooden frame. Hinged at the centre and mounted on six folding legs, it would make a cumbersome battering ram, but it might do. It was not too heavy to lift. She grasped one end and hoisted it to the vertical. Balancing the frame on its end, she stepped on the bucket. Then she braced herself and thrust the bed upwards so that one corner struck the ceiling with a satisfying crunch at a point quite close to the wall.

  Some powder came down.

  She tried a second time. The noise was louder than she expected, a boom like a bass drum. To hell with that. You can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs, as Lee would say.

  She began a regular pounding of the ceiling, hitting it with all the strength she could muster. She was glad of her state of fitness. The weight of the bed worked to her advantage as a destruction implement, but was hell for her back and biceps. And the hinged legs swung loose more than once and rapped her knuckles.

  Thankfully, the plaster started coming down in chunks. She used one of the blankets to protect her head.

  After fifteen minutes, the progress slowed. Not much more was shifting.

  She paused and stared up. So near and yet so far. A sizeable dent had appeared, revealing some of the laths. A few small lumps of plaster hung down, attached to the animal hair once used as a binding agent. She’d removed about half an inch, and she was tiring with the effort to penetrate those close-packed strips of wood. She couldn’t hoist the cumbersome thing to that level and she was tiring with the effort. She needed to get up there herself and force a way through, but how?

  Before being locked in, she’d been subjected to another body search. This time the minder had enjoyed himself and it had been a revolting experience. He’d taken her phone, of course, and made sure she wasn’t armed. But in the process of running his hands over every curve and fold of her figure, he’d failed to check inside her shoes—where she had slipped the metal nail file she’d been using as a screwdriver in the bathroom.

  Nail files aren’t designed to be cutting tools. This small round-ended strip of metal was impractical for working on the laths, but she had another use for it. The bed frame was held together by L-shaped angle plate brackets screwed into the lengths of wood. They were a handy size. If she could free one of them, she’d have a useful tool.

  She lowered the bed to the floor and got to work with the nail file. Difficult. The four screws weren’t round-headed, like those in the bathroom. They were flat to the wood and difficult to shift. The curved end of the nail file got in the slot, but kept slipping out.

  Resolved not to be beaten, she jammed the file into the door frame and snapped off the end with a kick of her heel. She was left with a flat tip that made a better tool. Now she had some purchase on the screw and got a little movement that with more effort became a forty-five degree turn and then more. Fortunately she had always had strength in her wrists. The other screws followed and the bracket was freed. As a tool it felt good in her hand. It was at least three inches along each side, thin galvanised steel.

  The next task was to get up to a level where she could work on the ceiling, and the only way was by propping the bed against the wall and using it as a ladder, hoping the canvas slats would bear her weight. Removing the bracket had made it a distinctly unsafe structure.

  For the present, the frame held together and she climbed within reach of the damaged ceiling and got to work with her new tool. The laths were nailed to the undersides of the joists. They had to be forced downwards if possible. Get one out and the others should follow.

  Whoever had made this ceiling had built it to last, using a strong bond. But by probing steadily with the bracket she eventually found a weak point and forced the end right through. By much jiggling and gouging she enlarged the slit and felt a small movement of the lath. She worked at it with such energy that the camp bed bounced against the wall. And at last the lath gave way and split at one end.

  Elated, Ingeborg forced the strip of wood downwards, levered out the other nail, and threw it on the floor. With the space to reach through, the others were easy to remove.

  In under ten minutes she had made a hole wide enough to scramble through. The bed slid down the wall a fraction when she raised herself to the next slat and it fell all the way and clattered on the floor when she made a grab for the exposed joist and hauled herself into the loft.

  She paused briefly to enjoy the moment. She was crouching in the dark, cone-shaped loft.

  The next task would be easier: removing tiles from the roof. In fact, she was thinking ahead to how she would cope so high up in the open air. She had a faint memory of the tower’s position at the corner of the house, but she couldn’t be certain of its structure. She needed to break out on the side closest to the rest of the building. Difficult to judge in a round tower.

  She could only make the attempt and hope.

  The bracket was the perfect tool for ripping through the felt underlay. Sh
e rapidly exposed a section between two rafters. Tiles that had resisted more than a century of gales and snow lifted easily from the battens supporting them. A square of grey light was revealed and cool air fanned her face. One row of tiles was nailed and needed some leverage. Two slid into the guttering, but she was able to scoop them up and stack them inside with the others. The opening got larger.

  She had got lucky with her choice of where to break out.

  An almost full moon gave her a view of the house, mostly in silhouette, with long shadows cast across the drive and lawns below, and streaks of silver light along the extremities picking out the angles of the roof and battlements. She was higher than she expected, but there wasn’t time to dwell on a potential attack of vertigo. Getting started was paramount.

  She needed to reach the battlements that linked the tower to the main house and they were at least a body length below. Could she trust the guttering to take her weight?

  A scary moment.

  She wriggled through the opening and pressed her torso against the tiles still in place, keeping one hand curled under a rafter. Little by little, she allowed herself to slip down the angled roof and over the edge until gravity took over and she slithered into space, made a grab for the curved gutter and hung on. It creaked under the strain and shifted slightly. Please, she thought.

  The next stage was crucial and the most dangerous yet. Her feet were some inches short of the nearest battlement, but hanging in mid-air from an ancient gutter she didn’t have the option of waiting.

  She let go, dropped, slipped, made a grab and hugged the stonework. With a huge effort, she raised her knee and got astride the battlement as if it was a horse. Not an experience she would ever want to repeat.

  Now it was a matter of working her way along the battlement to where it connected with the east-facing side of the main house, a relatively simple manuever. Somewhere below in the grounds a dog was barking. She couldn’t think how she had disturbed it from this far away, and anyway she had to keep going. Concentrating on her footing, she eased round each toothlike projection of the battlement until she reached a rampart and was able to get the support of a wall. The moonlight showed her a drainpipe just within reach. Once again she would need to put her trust in rusty Victorian fittings. There was no other way down.