The Stone Wife

by Peter Lovesey

  This side of the house was bathed in moonlight and—wonder of wonders—she spotted a lattice window partly ajar. It was some nine feet below her and she thought she could reach it by transferring from the drainpipe to the ledge below the stone window frame. A chance to get into the house without triggering the alarm system would be a massive bonus.

  Hand over hand, she lowered herself until she was level with the ledge. The distance between was not huge, but from her position hanging on to the drainpipe, it was no simple move. She couldn’t leap across. She had to stretch out her right leg as far as she dared and feel blindly for a toehold. At the third attempt her foot lodged against something solid. Without pause for thought, she pushed herself away from the pipe and got a grip on the top of the stone frame.

  The sense of relief was profound. Her heart was racing.

  The open window was the farthest of three. Still moving mainly by feel, she sidled across the ledge, got a hand inside the open window, leaned down, lifted the stay from its notch, and pulled the whole thing open.

  She was so excited to have completed the move without mishap that it wasn’t until she was lowering herself into the house that she had an alarming thought: a window left open at night could well be in a bedroom.

  It was.

  The muffled sound of someone turning rapidly in bed was followed by a panicky, “Who’s that?”

  Ingeborg froze. Just as she’d thought the gods were on her side, this had to happen.

  The voice sounded female. One of the staff? She hoped so.

  The woman in bed fumbled for a light switch.

  Ingeborg still hadn’t moved. But when the light came on, she recognised the raised face of Stella, the housekeeper, the woman who had taken her to breakfast. Critical memories flashed through her brain. Stella had been reasonably friendly. She had no cause to make trouble now. She hadn’t appeared in the corridor when half the house found out that the secret bathroom had been invaded. She must have slept through. In which case, she wouldn’t know Ingeborg was enemy number one and was supposed to be locked in the tower room.

  “It’s me, Ingeborg Smith. We met yesterday.”

  No response.

  This called for some improvisation. “I’m really sorry about this,” Ingeborg said, thinking fast. “I was trapped outside and couldn’t find my way in. There’s a guard dog out there.”

  Stella said in an expressionless voice, “Now I know who you are.”

  Ingeborg developed her cover story. “I saw the open window and climbed up a drainpipe. I didn’t know it would be your bedroom.”

  “What were you doing outside?”

  “I couldn’t sleep. I needed fresh air. Stupidly I let the door shut behind me and I was stuck. I’m really sorry. I’ll find my way back to the guest room. Where exactly are we?”

  “You turn left outside the door and go up the stairs at the end.” Stella yawned heavily, sank back on the pillow and reached for the light.

  Ingeborg pulled the window back to its original position and secured it, crossed the room, closed the door behind her and turned left. Maybe the gods were with her after all.

  But the biggest test lay ahead. She still needed to find her way back into Nathan’s secret bathroom. And this time she must do it without the assistance of Lee Li passing her the keys.

  At the top of the stairs in the dim light she confirmed she was back in the corridor where the locked room was—with the door to Nathan’s bedroom facing her at the end.

  Could it be, she wondered, that after the ruckus in the small hours Nathan hadn’t relocked his secret bathroom?

  It was worth finding out. She crept forward, remembering to sidestep the part of the floor that creaked, and tried the handle.

  No short cuts in this mission.

  Needing to rethink her strategy, she retreated along the passage, opened the guest room door and slipped inside. The stress of the last half hour was getting to her. A stretch on the big, soft bed was a huge temptation she knew she must resist. She stepped through to the hand basin in the shower room and splashed water on her face.

  The keys would be back in Nathan’s bedroom, either out on a table or some other surface or, more likely, secure in his trouser pocket again. Being realistic, she knew it was unlikely she could get in and out without waking anyone.

  The bathroom had a solid, sturdy door with a modern cylinder lock, not the sort you can open with a plastic card—if she had one. But there was no other way in, short of using an enforcer. No window. Breaking in through the ceiling wasn’t practical and would wake everyone in the house.

  She looked at her watch: 3:25. Time was slipping by. At daylight, the minders would discover the damage to the tower and her chance would be gone. She needed to be away from here before then. How galling if she came away with no evidence after all this effort.

  Some lateral thinking was wanted. Understandably, her brain wasn’t functioning at its best. Go back to the practicalities, she told herself. Nathan has the key. Rather than repeating the earlier trick and taking it without his knowledge, there must be some way of getting him out of bed again to unlock that door himself. A sudden noise in the corridor would surely bring him out to make a check. Rattling the door? If he then came out and no one was in sight, he’d be suspicious and want to make sure all was well. He’d unlock the door and go inside.

  Was she capable of taking him on? She wasn’t entirely confident. Karate-trained, she reckoned she could defend herself against anyone, but this would place her in the attacking role. She would need to follow him into the room, slam the door behind her before his minders arrived, disable him, locate the hidden firearms and the logbook she was confident he kept, and then, armed with one of his weapons, make her escape.

  Not easy.

  Even if she got that far, past the minders and out of the house, she’d need transport—which meant hijacking one of his cars.

  While these thoughts were still running through her head, the unexpected happened. A piercing two-note electronic alarm sounded in the corridor outside, the sort of signal that means a building has to be evacuated.

  She moved fast to the door and looked out. No smell of smoke. The sound was ear-shattering. Maybe somebody had found she’d escaped and raised the alarm. She closed the door again.

  An emergency or an opportunity? If all the attention was on the tower room, and Nathan got up and rushed there to check, this could work out better than any plan she had devised.

  In the brain-numbing din, it was difficult to hear anything else, but she thought a door opened and someone was shouting in the corridor. She released her door a fraction and caught a glimpse of a figure dashing past, away from the bedroom at the end. She couldn’t tell for certain, but who else could it be but Nathan?

  She swung the door fully open and met Lee Li scuttling towards her, tugging on a bathrobe, eyes like searchlights when she saw who it was.

  Lee was lost for words.

  “Go with Nathan,” Ingeborg told her, shouting to be heard. “Keep him busy as long as you can.”

  Swerving past the bewildered singer, she hared into the bedroom, eager to find those keys. His suit was on a hanger on the front of the wardrobe. She pulled the jacket aside and ran her hands over the trouser pockets. Flat, as if they’d been freshly pressed.

  Where then?

  The king-size bed stood against a wall unit with lighting and shelving across the centre and matching bedside cabinets. Nathan slept on the side closest to the wardrobe. Some coins were stacked on his cabinet top, probably the loose change he had emptied from his pocket. A leather wallet, card-case and gold Omega wristwatch were with them. There was a digital alarm clock. But no keys. Had he grabbed them before rushing from the room?

  She tugged open the cabinet drawer. Only paper tissues, packs of condoms, sleeping pills and baby oil. She ran around the bed and checked Lee’s drawer, just in case. Without result.

  More in frustration than necessity, she swept a bunch of paperback thrill
ers off the shelf above. Nothing was behind them.

  Increasingly frantic, she cast around, taking in every surface in the room. If the keys were still here, they certainly weren’t in sight.

  She scooted through to the shower room and checked the shelf where the toothbrushes were. And the vanity unit. The only items were those you would expect to find.

  Hand tugging distractedly at her hair, she returned to the bedroom. The big bed was in disarray, the duvet doubled over where the sleepers had roused themselves when the alarm started. She flung it back, with no result. Tossed the pillows aside. He wouldn’t leave the bloody keys on the bed, she chided herself. This is desperation.

  What does a man do with a set of keys he knows have been removed once from his room? He makes sure no intruder can sneak in and steal them a second time. He can’t rule out the possibility that his sleeping partner assisted in the first theft. He places them within reach, his side of the bed.

  Under the mattress?

  Ingeborg lifted the mattress, slid her hand in the space above the box spring and found nothing. She dropped to her knees, put her head to the carpet and checked under the bed.

  I made a big mistake, she thought. I should have asked Lee.

  Then her eye was caught by the glint of something metal. Large mattresses are fitted with handles. This one, tight to the side, was made of padded fabric at least an inch in width. Wedged behind it, so close to where Nathan slept that he could have reached down and checked them at intervals through the night, were the goddamn keys.

  Come on!

  She tugged them free and ran out of the room, back to the locked door. She found the right one, inserted it and turned the lock. After pocketing the ring of keys, she entered Nathan’s secret bathroom and slammed the door behind her.

  Everything was still in place. She knew already what she needed to check. She’d been over and over it in her mind.

  The shower unit.

  Guns wouldn’t be hidden under the shower floor. If she was right, this was much more ambitious. She stepped up to the curved glass doors and tried them. They glided smoothly aside. The fittings appeared genuine enough: power selector, temperature control, riser rail, flexible hose, soap dish and drain. The two walls forming the corner were tiled in the same duck-egg blue as the rest of the room.

  “All right, you bugger,” Ingeborg said aloud, “let’s see if I’m right.”

  She stepped back, closed the doors and put her weight against the metal framework. It didn’t shift a centimetre. With a sharp, impatient sigh, she moved to her right to try from the other angle. The shower was robust and entirely unyielding.

  But so was Ingeborg.

  She tried pulling instead of pushing, still without success.

  “There’s got to be a way,” she said. “Got to be.”

  Outside, the house alarm stopped its nee-na. She didn’t have long now.

  She checked along the floor and up the sides for a release switch. Thwarted, she took a step back, arms folded, and tried to bring some intelligence to the problem. There had to be an answer.

  And it came.

  She forced the sliding doors apart and stepped inside. She pressed her foot on the drain and there was movement. The criss-cross grille with its circular flange disconnected from the floor and sank an inch. It had a spring mechanism. The drain had been acting as the brake.

  She stepped out, gave the sides a push and the entire shower unit including the two tiled walls slid forward on rollers. She had found the way in.

  23

  Neat.

  On small wheels set into twin tracks, the shower unit had glided forward from the bathroom into another room: Nathan’s gunroom. To enter, you stepped in and made your exit on the right. Ingeborg found herself in a space not much larger than a holding cell, narrow in depth, but appreciably longer in width, that must have been created by partitioning when the bathroom was installed.

  Efficient use had been made of the space, amounting to about twenty square metres. Rifles and submachine guns were racked vertically at head height along the walls, and handguns and ammunition displayed in glass-fronted cabinets. Two wooden crates at the far end contained more handguns. She picked one up and it was lighter in weight than she expected, clearly a replica. Firearms manufacturers turn an extra profit by franchising out their designs to dealers in imitation weapons. These “air-soft,” pellet-firing guns are marketed as collectors’ pieces, but in practice are often used in armed robbery. They can be modified to fire live rounds. When a villain takes aim, the shopkeeper doesn’t ask if it fires real bullets. He opens the till and hands over the cash.

  The range of weapons in the cabinets was impressive. Ingeborg was no expert, but she had done the firearms course and recognised the Glock 9mm self-loading pistol as a type she had fired. Five of them were together on the top shelf, along with Smith & Wesson revolvers, Berettas, Walthers and, yes, some older handguns, including two tarnished silver Webleys. She opened the cabinet and—taking care not to handle it—used one of Nathan’s keys to lift a Webley by the trigger guard and feel the weight. This was no replica. The metal was chipped in places and it had the look of a much-used weapon. She replaced it.

  The police ballistics experts would have a field day with this collection. No wonder Nathan’s storage facility was so cunningly disguised.

  For now, Ingeborg focused on the mission she’d taken on, linking Nathan to the shooting of Professor Gildersleeve. Having got this far, she wasn’t leaving without the evidence and—if possible—the name of the killer. Where was the paperwork? She’d persuaded herself Nathan kept records of his dealings. Surely it was sensible to store the log in this secure place.

  Out of the corner of her eye she spotted something hanging from a hook high on the wall behind her. She reached up to a clipboard loaded with several sheets of what looked like accounting paper. Found! Elated, she allowed herself a yelp of self-congratulation.

  The handwritten entries were made in columns. They weren’t headed, but to Ingeborg’s eye they were easy to decipher. The date of each transaction appeared in the left column, then abbreviations for the make and type of the weapons (the giveaway was H&K MP5 for the Heckler & Koch carbine), more initials for the hirer, followed by the date of return and space for a tick when the transaction was complete. Nothing about the money that had changed hands. No doubt Nathan kept that information in his head.

  She didn’t study all the sheets. After unclipping them, she folded them roughly and stuffed them in her pocket. High time she thought about getting out of this place alive.

  She took a Glock 17 from the display and loaded it. The seventeen-round magazine capacity and the lightweight polycarbonate body would help anyone’s confidence in a shootout. She helped herself to a shoulder holster and strapped it on, leaving both hands free if she was scaling walls.

  From now on, she would have to wing it. There were too many unknowns. Any plan was likely to run into trouble straight away.

  Pity she no longer had her iPhone. Some pictures of this place would have been strong evidence. She took a last look round and then re-entered the shower cabinet and crossed the bathroom to the door and opened it a fraction.

  The corridor was eerily silent. Nathan’s bedroom door remained ajar, as Lee had left it. Lights were on along the corridor, but outside it would still be dark. She needed to make her escape now.

  She stepped out, down the stairs and past Stella’s room. No one could have slept through that alarm. Was the entire household gathered obediently at some assembly point? She couldn’t picture it.

  From this point, she would rely on instinct to orient herself. Another staircase would bring her to ground level and she’d need to be extra cautious there. She drew the gun before taking the last steps down. Ahead she saw the armour displayed on the walls that meant she’d reached the entrance hall. Not the preferred route. She’d be crazy to make her exit from the main door. Instead she started along an unlit corridor she hoped would bring he
r to a less obvious way out of the building.

  Then she froze. She could hear someone coming towards her.

  This wasn’t one of those helpful corridors with doors on either side. It was probably the route to what had once been the servants’ quarters, a narrow passage not much wider than the telescopic corridor used for boarding an aircraft. Faced with the choice of turning and running or taking a stance, she drew the gun and took up the classic position she’d been trained for, legs astride, knees slightly bent, both hands steadying her aim.

  “Hold it!” she called out, heart stuttering.

  The footsteps ahead stopped.

  “Stay right there. I’ve got a gun and I’m coming towards you.”

  The brief, tense silence was broken by Lee Li’s shrill voice. “Ingeborg, is that you?”

  “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  Ingeborg lowered the Glock and stepped forward.

  Lee, still in her white bathrobe and flip-flops, stared like a choked thrush at the pistol. “Where did you get that?”

  “Never mind.” She shoved the thing back in the holster. “What’s going on outside?”

  “Some trespasser broke into the grounds. The dog found him and woke people up with all the barking. They were saying he fell from a tree. I think he’s dead. Nathan told me not to look and sent me back to bed.”

  If some unfortunate had come to grief, he wasn’t Ingeborg’s concern. “Do they know about me? Does Nathan know I got out?”

  “He didn’t say anything. I don’t think he knows.”

  She made a rapid assessment. Lee’s knowledge of the house could be useful, even though she would add to the risk of being spotted. “Do you still want to get away?”

  “I’m not dressed,” Lee said.