by J. A. Lang
In one corner, a towering stack of wooden wine crates, each containing a dozen bottles and branded with various winery names, stood ready to take up their rightful place on the shelves.
Chef Maurice was now wandering up and down the rows, pulling out bottles at random and admiring their labels. Gilles followed him at a discreet distance, wiping the bottles down in fear of kipper contamination.
“Monsieur Gilles, tell me, what is the meaning of these dots of yellow?”
Arthur leaned in closer to the rack. Sure enough, here and there he could spot little round yellow stickers pressed to the bases of a seemingly arbitrary selection of bottles.
“I do not know, sir. Possibly Sir William was marking out wines to serve at future events.”
Arthur pulled out the nearest yellow-stickered bottle. “An ’82 Pétrus. Well, you can’t deny that Sir William was a fantastically generous host.”
He walked over to the display cabinet, which, in addition to the magnum collection, housed a dozen or so bottles from the much-fêted Burgundian vineyard, la Romanée Conti, along with various bottlings from a cult Californian wine producer with black circular labels apparently only legible under ultraviolet light.
There were quite a few yellow stickers on the magnums too, but, more importantly, there was now an extra empty podium in addition to the two blank places he’d noticed there yesterday.
“What happened to this one?” asked Arthur, pointing to the missing third exhibit. A little white card announced it as a magnum of ’34 Chateau Ausone.
“Sir William had arranged for that particular bottle to be valued today, and I saw no reason to deviate from his wishes,” said Gilles. “I would have taken it to London myself, as per usual, but due to obvious circumstances, I chose to remain here with our guests. A representative from the firm collected the bottle this morning.”
“That’s rather speedy,” said Arthur.
“Not at all. There is an auction of fine and rare wines taking place at Sotheby’s next week. Sir William had wished to have an estimation before considering whether to place the bottle up for sale. Of course, this will no longer go ahead, but the inheritor of Sir William’s estate will no doubt still be interested in the valuation.”
“The contents of the will of Sir William, is it yet known?” asked Chef Maurice, who was on his hands and knees, peering under a rack of half-bottles.
“I believe the execution of the will is being undertaken by Sir William’s solicitors, the firm Cranshaw, Cranshaw & Handle in Cowton,” said Gilles. “No doubt they will soon be in contact with those whom it concerns.”
“Did Sir William ever mention to you who he was bequeathing the estate to?” asked Arthur.
“Sir William was a very private man in those respects, sir.”
“He has much family still?” asked Chef Maurice, his voice echoing as he stuck his head into an empty wine barrel which had been serving as decoration and, given the cat hairs, a playhouse for Waffles.
“I believe there is only his nephew, Lady Margaret’s son, and of course Lady Margaret, though both are related by marriage only. The young Mr Burton-Trent being her son from her first marriage, you see.”
There was something in the way Gilles spoke . . .
“But you don’t think he’ll inherit, do you?” said Arthur.
Gilles paused. “I don’t believe Sir William had seen Mr Timothy Burton-Trent for many years, ever since the gentleman emigrated to the Americas as a young man of twenty.”
“Bit of a wild one, eh?” said Arthur.
“One expects his character will have matured over the years,” was Gilles’s diplomatic reply.
“And Lady Margaret? She is his sister-in-law, after all.”
“We shall know in due course, I am sure.”
Arthur wandered over to Chef Maurice, who was now standing arms folded, contemplating the dusty silver candleholder screwed high into one wall.
“Found what you were looking for?”
Chef Maurice shook his head. Still frowning, he reached up and tugged at the candleholder, which came away from the wall in his hand.
There was a flurry of fine dust and an unimpressed cough behind them from Gilles, but no further result.
Chef Maurice handed the candleholder to Arthur—who examined it, then handed it on to Gilles—then continued his walk around the cellar, now staring at the ceiling.
Arthur had known Chef Maurice for enough years now to know that whatever the chef did, he did for a reason. It might not always be a well-thought-out, sensible, or even vaguely coherent reason, but at least there always was one. And the explanation for his friend’s rather strange behaviour thus far was slowly dawning on Arthur.
“You’re looking for a secret passageway, aren’t you?” he hissed. He knew he sounded ridiculous, but one often did when one hung around Chef Maurice for any length of time.
His friend beamed at him. “Very good, mon ami! If Sir William still had the key, then it is most likely that it was he who locked the door after Monsieur Paloni, not the murderer. And so, I conclude that the murderer must have entered from another way. Now if you will help me lift this crate—”
“Maurice, you really have got to stop watching all those detective shows. Not every old house is riddled with hidden passageways leading up to some cunning sliding stone behind the gardener’s shed and all that. And even if there was one, don’t you think the police might have found it when they searched the place yesterday?”
“Pah, it would be too hard for the police to find,” said Chef Maurice, as if this was obvious. “That is why it is secret, n’est-ce pas? Aha, you see this?”
He pointed to a high shelf, on which rested yet another row of bottles. The one at the end, though, looked remarkably free from dust. Chef Maurice tugged it down off the shelf.
Mysterious springs declined to ping, no concealed mechanisms whirred into life, and a secret entrance behind the wine racks completely failed to swing open.
“Hmph,” said Chef Maurice, and replaced the bottle.
“You know,” said Arthur, “there is a simple solution to all this.”
“Oui?”
“A third key.”
Chef Maurice gave this idea due consideration, then shook his head. “Non, I think not.”
“Why not?” demanded Arthur. “It’s a perfectly reasonable explanation. Far more reasonable than anything you’ve come up with so far.”
“Sir William once said to me, he had kept his pair of leather gloves for more than thirty years. He showed them to me, a very fine pair, I recall. A man who does not lose his gloves after thirty years, mon ami, is not a man who makes more than one spare key.”
There was a mewing sound at their feet, and Arthur looked down into the big, pleading eyes of Waffles, who was staring at the kipper sandwich tucked into Chef Maurice’s jacket.
“Ah, bonjour, petit chat. You wish for more of Madame Bates’ excellent kipper?” Chef Maurice placed the sandwich on the flagstones, and continued on with his search.
“Haven’t you had enough kippers for the day?” said Arthur sternly to the cat. “And how did you get down—” He stopped, and stared back up at the stairs. He was almost certain they had closed the—
“Maurice!” He turned around, looking for the chef. “The cat, how did it—”
But Chef Maurice had disappeared.
Chapter 10
“So when’s your next date with that hunky chef of yours?” PC Sara spun her chair around to face PC Lucy’s desk.
“Next Tuesday. And he’s not ‘my’ chef—”
“—hunky chef, don’t forget that part—”
“—thank you very much. It’s still early days, remember?”
“Well, I’d get things wrapped up if I were you. A man who can cook and likes washing up? Snap him up quick, I say.”
“I never said he likes washing up. It just bothers him to see it all piled up.”
PC Lucy sorely wished she’d never told Sara about that
particular event. It had been after the naked-photography debacle, when she’d invited Patrick up for a highly apologetic coffee. She’d popped to the bathroom, and next thing she knew he had filled the kitchen sink with hot, soapy water and was getting through the embarrassingly large stack of plates and pans that had been colonising her counter for over a week.
In truth, he’d looked rather attractive in her yellow washing-up gloves, but she wasn’t about to tell PC Sara that.
“So when do I get to meet this domestic god?”
“Uh-uh, no way. Not anytime soon. You’ll give him the third degree, I know you will.”
“Shame. Especially as I’ve just been on that Advanced Interview and Interrogation Techniques course.” PC Sara held up a ring binder.
“Exactly. Anyway, one step at a time.”
PC Sara tilted her head. “Ah. So I take it you haven’t told him yet about . . . ”
“No! And thank you for bringing that up again.”
“You’re welcome. I just think it’s ridiculous for you to pretend—”
“Look, I’ll tell him eventually. We’re still in the dating stage, it’s not like he’s my official boyfriend.”
PC Sara grinned. “‘Yet’, you mean?”
“I’m still deciding,” said PC Lucy, with as much aloofness as she could muster.
“Sure.” PC Sara rolled her eyes. “Well, you better get on with it, or I might have to pop over to Beakley for lunch to take my own look. How about the other chefs? Any potential there I should know about?”
PC Lucy thought about Alf and Chef Maurice. Her mind rebelled as she tried to picture either of them on a date.
“Not your type,” she said firmly.
“Pity.”
Across the room, the main phone line started to ring. PC Alistair sprawled himself over his desk in an effort to get to the receiver.
“Cowton and Beakley Constabulary . . . Yes, she does, why? . . . You might be better phoning the fire brigade if . . . Sorry, what? . . . Just a moment . . . ”
He put his hand over the mouthpiece. “Um, PC Gavistone, I think you’d better get this one . . . ”
PC Lucy walked over and took the phone off Alistair. “Hello, Gavistone speaking.”
She listened carefully to Arthur’s convoluted babbling. Eventually, she thought she had the gist of things. But—
“Hang on, slow down, Mr Wordington-Smythe. Say that again. He’s got himself stuck where?”
One of the important considerations in the design of a secret passageway is that it should take up as little space as possible. Some people, especially the meticulous type who own their own retractable tape measures, get suspicious when they find that their house is significantly smaller on the inside than out. Thus, over the ages, cunning architects have learnt to sequester little pockets of space into the floor plans where no one is likely to notice.
The more complicated and rambling the building, the easier this is—which probably explains why one does not often find hidden passages in your typical two-bedroom terraced maisonette.
The construction of this particular passageway, which appeared to date back at least a few hundred years from the look of the stonework, had been commissioned by some previous owner of Bourne Hall, who—to get to the pinch point of the problem, as it were—had clearly been a gentleman of somewhat slimline stature.
Halfway up the winding, dusty steps, the staircase narrowed to make room for the rear portion of a chimney stack or some other type of recess. It was at this point in his explorations that Chef Maurice had come to an abrupt halt.
“Turning sideways would have worked for most people,” said Arthur, as he led PC Lucy down the cellar stairs. “To be fair to him, the stonework isn’t exactly helping. It’s too rough, too much friction to just slide on through.”
“Can’t he just come back down the way he went?” asked PC Lucy.
“We tried that. But he seems to have got himself completely wedged in.” Arthur led her over to a stack of wooden wine crates in the corner. On closer inspection, she noticed they had been nailed together and placed atop a set of small castors, allowing the whole construction to be wheeled aside to reveal the archway through which Chef Maurice had disappeared.
PC Lucy rubbed her eyes and stared at the rows and rows of bottles surrounding them. Just being down here was giving her a hangover from passive alcohol proximity. Either that, or it was the singing. If you could call it singing.
“Why is he . . . doing that?” asked PC Lucy, as Chef Maurice launched into yet another verse of ‘La Marseillaise’.
“Gilles is upstairs, looking for the other end of the passageway. We know Waffles must have got in that way. It’s now just a matter of finding it.”
“I see.”
“—sous nos drapeaux que la victoire—”
“I do feel our own national anthem rather short-changes us on the rousing lyrics,” commented Arthur. “At least the French one has some ooomph.”
PC Lucy gave the air a sniff. “Is it me, or does this cellar smell of kippers?”
Arthur explained Chef Maurice’s kipper-cat-secret-passageway idea.
“Impressive,” she said at last. “If you knew the cat would try to get down here, you just had to watch for where she appeared. Completely barmy, of course, but effective, I’ll give him that.”
She gave the fake pile of wine cases a little push. She could see now that the whole contraption wasn’t quite as tall as the archway, leaving a cat-sized gap at the top through which Waffles had squeezed.
“Did Gilles know about this hidden staircase?”
“He claims not to.”
“Really? Hmmm.”
“—ton triomphe et notre gloire— Ah, Monsieur Gilles! You have had success!”
Gilles’s voice echoed down the stairway. “Apparently so, sir. Thanks to sir’s extremely vocal efforts, I located the other end of this passageway behind the bookcase upstairs, next to Sir William’s bedroom. This does rather neatly solve the question of the occasional empty half-bottle I would find by his bedside in the morning. Now, if sir would take the end of this rope . . . Mr Wordington-Smythe, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear.”
“If you could assist by applying an upwards force on, ahem, Mr Manchot from your end, and I will pull on the rope from up here. Together, I trust our efforts will free him.”
Arthur looked at PC Lucy, who gave him a ‘I’m not paid enough to do this’ shrug. He sighed and disappeared up the stairs.
“All right, Gilles, I’m here. Ready when you are.”
“Very good, sir. On the count of three . . . ”
There was a thump, a yell, and a certain amount of French swearing.
“Is everything okay?” called PC Lucy.
Arthur came back down the stairs, brushing dust off his sleeves. “All present and correct.”
“Ah, is that Mademoiselle Lucy I hear?” Chef Maurice’s voice floated down the stairwell. “I must tell her about my—”
“Oh no, you don’t! Don’t you dare try coming back down this way!” yelled Arthur. “I’m not getting you unstuck again. We’ll come up the other way and meet you on the landing.”
A few minutes later, the little group congregated in the corridor outside Sir William’s bedroom. Chef Maurice was covered in dust and a few cobwebs, but otherwise no worse for wear. At his feet, Waffles circled and purred, on the off chance there was another kipper sandwich to be had.
The bookcase had been slid aside to reveal a narrow archway, similar to the one down in the cellar. From the castor marks on the floorboards, PC Lucy could see that the bookcase did not sit quite flush with the wall, allowing yet another Waffles-sized gap behind. So this was how the cat had got in.
As well as the murderer.
“There’s been quite a bit of traffic,” said PC Lucy, shining her torch down into the dusty entrance. “Impossible to make out any individual footprints, though.”
Gilles was regarding the hidden staircase
with pursed lips, though whether this was due to its existence or the lack of cleaning was hard to tell.
“We had the upstairs carpets relaid last year. The fitter was insistent that the measurements did not add up, but in the end it was all laid perfectly. This certainly explains that little mystery.”
“And the mystery of how the murderer got out of a locked cellar,” said Arthur. “Sir William must have locked the door after Paloni left him. Rather scuppered our perpetrator’s plans, that. We’d have never thought to look for another way in otherwise.”
“We?” Chef Maurice looked indignant.
“You honestly didn’t know anything about this passageway?” said PC Lucy to Gilles, trying to keep the scepticism out of her voice.
“I assure you, madam, I hadn’t the slightest inkling. If I had, I would have insisted most strongly that Sir William brick it up for security reasons. It quite invalidates our insurance policy, I’m sure.”
PC Lucy glanced around the corridor at the row of closed guest room doors. Any of the visitors could have slipped out that evening and hurried down these steps . . .
“Well, clearly, someone else knew about its existence.”
“So it seems,” said Gilles. He looked a trifle ill.
“Which of last night’s guests would be most familiar with the layout of Bourne Hall?”
“Lady Margaret has been visiting the Hall for decades, of course. Mr Lafoute too,” said Gilles, with some reluctance. “Mr Resnick has stayed with us several times in the past few years, and Mrs Lafoute, though she has not been a frequent visitor thus far, did spend a fortnight at the Hall soon after her marriage to Mr Lafoute.”
“So, all of the guests, except for Monsieur Paloni, had been often enough a visitor to have the potential for knowledge of this staircase?” said Chef Maurice.