Death Penalties

by Paula Gosling

  At the very end of the long passage was a wooden door, and Tess knew that behind it lay the wine-cellar, hollowed out beneath the garden, and so far untouched by the workmen. When she turned the handle and opened the door, it came towards her accompanied by a cool, earthy breath of dark air.

  Like a grave.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, stop trying to scare yourself,’ Tess said aloud, and the echo of her voice made everything immediately worse. It seemed to stir rustles and whispers in the rooms behind her, causing her to glance back over her shoulder in some trepidation. But no-one was there. Back at the beginning of the passage, beyond the old kitchen, the sound of a car driving by on the street impersonally confirmed her solitude, its occupant humming past in total ignorance of her existence, the warm purr of its engine coming, passing, gone, leaving an even greater silence behind.

  Of course, she should have waited until Monday, when Ernie and the men would be around to assist her. The floor within the cellar was uneven, she could sprain an ankle, lie there for days, there might be rats, there definitely were spiders . . .

  But she had wanted to meet Adrian, counter any disapproval or disappointment he might feel about her work. In order to be here to do just that, she’d had to call Mrs Grimble to come over and look after Max, because John had previously arranged to meet someone at the V&A this morning. So for better or worse, she was on her own.

  ‘Good God, woman, get on with it,’ she muttered, and entered the vast but strangely oppressive space beyond the wooden door.

  Almost immediately she came up against the end of the first empty rack, crumbling and grimy. Beyond it stood another, and another, rank and file, some ten in all, their cobwebbed honeycombs now empty where once hundreds of green, brown, and crystal bottles had glittered and waited in the cool dark for a summons from above. After all, Victorian gentlemen prided themselves on their cellars, and according to Mrs McMurdo the builder and first owner of the mansion had been a noted collector of fine vintages.

  All gone now.

  Just the empty racks, sentinels of an earlier grandeur, guarding an empty treasury. For wine was valuable – and old wine, fine wine, even more so. But of course, that was it. ‘Harry’s little treasure’!

  Poor old Harry, writing blearily to his relatives in Australia about the family ‘heritage’ could simply have meant the hoard of wine kept here. The last of the English McMurdos probably drank his way to oblivion on some of the rarest wines in the world. Many might have turned to vinegar during their long incarceration, but perhaps he’d been beyond noticing. Or perhaps he’d been cannier than that – perhaps he’d found out the value of some of them and had sold them off to an eager dealer. That certainly made sense. And if that was true, it meant that Harry’s little ‘treasure’ was no more – for not a bottle remained. She played her torch over each rack to verify what she knew already to be true. Not one produced a reflected wink of glass.

  Tess frowned. If the wine had indeed been the ‘treasure’, she need look no further. But if it was not, there was not much further she could look, for the wine cellar was the last room in the house.

  True, she had stood in the doorway – as she did now – to do her sketching, and had not explored the room further, leaving that to the architect. But he, too, had seemed reluctant to remain in the oddly claustrophobic room, and so their examination had been rather superficial, a matter of quickly estimated measurements, no more.

  ‘Last hope,’ Tess muttered, and reluctantly entered.

  She walked between the first two racks to the rear wall, and then did a quick perimeter of the room, counting her steps out of habit.

  The left wall was five steps shorter than it should have been. And on the floor below it, there was a scraped mark just visible under the accumulated dust of years.

  So, she’d been right. A false wall had been subtly built in on a slant in front of the original wall, creating a wedge-shaped space between them. But how to get into it? She played her torch across the stone work, and saw that it was not stone at all, but some kind of modern artificial surface that had been rubbed over with dirt to aid concealment. She caught a brief, reflective flash in a line of ‘mortar’, and leaned closer. A ring was embedded there, made of steel or brass. It had been painted over in an attempt to blend in with the mortar, but the paint had flaked away. She rubbed at it, then inserted two fingers and tried twisting it. No. She pulled and was rewarded with a scraping sound. She pulled again, harder.

  With a groan of unoiled and unused hinges, the wall swung towards her. It was surprisingly light for its dimensions, which in a way confirmed its modern construction. When there was space enough, Tess stepped through and used her torch.

  More racks. Not for wine, but for books.

  Shelf upon shelf of books. Her heart gave a thump. First editions? Rare illuminated manuscripts? Now that she thought back, wasn’t there something about the original McMurdo who built this house being some kind of collector? Where had she seen it, that oblique reference?

  She went forward and, propping her torch to give her light, she took a book at random and opened it. Turned a few pages. Returned it to the shelf and took one from another shelf. And another.

  After a while, she began to laugh.

  And laugh, and laugh.

  There was a step behind her.

  Behind her.

  She turned, went to the opening between the real and the false wall, and saw the dark silhouette of a man outlined in the entrance to the wine cellar. But she was not afraid.

  ‘Here’s your “treasure”, Archie,’ she giggled, holding out a large, copiously illustrated volume. ‘Uncle Harry’s family heritage. No wonder he wanted to keep it hidden. About two hundred dirty books. As fine a collection of Victorian pornography as I’ve seen. I don’t know what they’re worth, but you’re certainly welcome to them.’

  ‘Bitch.’

  She couldn’t have heard correctly. ‘What?’

  ‘Stubborn, stupid, silly bitch!’ The voice was like a rasp against her, the hatred in it was salt in the wound. The figure took a step forward, out of the faint twilight of the corridor into the blackness of the wine cellar. She could hear his shuffling steps, and tried to put the torch beam onto him, to find his face, but before she could, there was a grunt, and then a most extraordinary sound.

  Like huge dominoes, falling.

  And she knew, although she could not see them, that the wine racks had been pushed and were falling towards her in the dark. She cowered back against the crumbling whitewash of the stone wall behind her.

  There was a splintering, crunching, thudding sound as the wine racks began to hit the side wall and one another, still falling towards her. Some instinct made her look up into the darkness over her head and she saw, for an instant, in the light of her rolling torch, the loom and rush of a great dark shape. She held up her arms for protection, but they were not enough against the weight of the rack. Broken, rotten wood cascaded around her as the massive bulk of the rack crashed against the frail barrier of the false wall, but kept falling, taking the new wood down with the old.

  She screamed, but her voice could not be heard over the splintering crash of the successive wine-racks as they broke over her, one after another.

  Afterwards, there was only silence.

  And then footsteps, walking away.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Tess opened her eyes and saw only roses and honeysuckle – a bright flowery print on the folds of waving curtains. Turning her head, and clenching her teeth against a wave of pain and nausea, she encountered a barrier of chrome bars through which the calm blue eyes of a nurse were watching her carefully.

  ‘Hello,’ the nurse said, with a smile. ‘Decided to rejoin the living, have you?’

  ‘Wha – what happened . . . ’ Tess’s throat was raw and her lips were dry. The nurse stood up and lowered the bars to cradle her h
ead while she sipped some water. Then she moved the protective sides back into position.

  ‘You just rest and I’ll fetch the doctor,’ the nurse said. ‘You’ve been in an accident, but you’re safe in hospital now, and you’re going to be just fine.’

  She went out, and there was a brief and confusing pause, during which Tess was certain her head had fallen off. Then the curtains moved aside and John Soame stood there, white-faced. ‘Thank God,’ he said. ‘I thought you were never going to wake up.’

  ‘What happened?’

  He came over to stand awkwardly beside the high table onto which she was both blanketed and fenced. ‘We’re not exactly certain,’ he said. ‘We expected you back well before tea. We waited and waited, but when you hadn’t appeared by four, and hadn’t called, I left Max with Mrs Grimble and went over to the house. I finally found you under about five hundredweight of fallen wine racks.’ He took a deep breath. ‘You were so damned lucky, Tess. The racks fell against some kind of false wall, propped themselves over you like a house of cards, supporting each other and leaving you trapped but pretty well untouched, underneath. I called the fire brigade. I could see you under there in the light from my torch but I couldn’t shift the damn things. An ambulanceman crawled in to make sure you were alive . . .’

  ‘Sorry I missed all the excitement,’ Tess said, in a dry voice.

  ‘More like it all missed you,’ John pointed out. ‘How did you manage to pull it all over on yourself like that?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ Tess said. It was coming back now, the shadowy figure in the wine-cellar, the crash, the sound of the footsteps going away, and then the blackness closing in. ‘Archie did it for me.’ She told him about the dark figure in the doorway. ‘I don’t understand why he didn’t bother to look at what I’d found, because I’m certain that’s what it’s all been about.’ She explained the theory that had taken her to the house in the first place. ‘Instead he seemed incredibly angry, for some reason. He knocked over the racks out of sheer bad temper. That’s what it seemed like, anyway.’

  ‘Well, he’s obviously mad. He might have killed you.’

  ‘Well, in a way he did us a favour – the racks had to be demolished anyway,’ Tess said, wryly. ‘Did you see the books?’

  He smiled. ‘I was more interested in making sure you were alive, but I couldn’t resist a quick glance at one or two, since I assumed they were why you were there.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘An interesting collection. Possibly quite valuable.’

  ‘What does Adrian say about it?’

  An odd look crossed John’s face. ‘Nobody seems to know where Adrian is,’ he said. ‘Once they were certain you were alive, I called him, but there was no answer at his house. I tracked down his secretary at home. She was under the impression Adrian had also intended to go to the McMurdo house this morning, but there was no sign of him when I arrived.’

  ‘Or when I arrived,’ Tess said. ‘One of the reasons I went over there was to talk with him. I thought if I could find what Archie was after, it would prove to him that my work wasn’t the problem at all. He was so cross and almost frantic about the possibility of losing Mrs McMurdo as a client.’

  ‘Well, he’s been having real financial difficulties since his partner left.’

  ‘But we’ve got lots of commissions,’ Tess said, in some puzzlement. ‘We’re very busy.’

  ‘Are you? Or is it just Adrian flapping around the place saying there isn’t enough time to do anything, that he must get on, must get on?’

  ‘Oh.’ She had forgotten how well John knew his ex- brother-in-law. His picture of Adrian was a familiar one. Perhaps too familiar. ‘He hasn’t fired anyone – he even took me on when he didn’t need me.’

  ‘Oh, he needed you, all right. It’s been a long time since Adrian did a full commission himself, and he wanted someone “special” to give him the cachet he’d lost when Jason left.’

  ‘I’m no replacement for Jason,’ Tess said.

  ‘Ah, but you’re American, and attractive, and – according to Adrian – very clever. But his problem is more immediate than that. As I understand it, the perfidious Jason took quite a chunk out of the company’s bank account when he left, saying it was a return on his original investment. It might have been, I suppose. He was the one who handled the books. Adrian doesn’t know anything about keeping accounts. I gather some creditors have been baying at the door. Adrian is getting desperate.’

  Tess was confused – and it was getting worse. She felt very odd, talking to him while lying down like a baby in a cot, and her head was thudding painfully. He kept fading away, like a bad television picture. ‘But he never said anything about all this to me.’

  John nodded. ‘It’s a Brevitt trait, I’m afraid, keeping your actions – and your intentions – a secret. They’re not exactly the most stable of families, either.’

  His tone was both sad and bitter, and she remembered his wife had been a Brevitt. Suddenly another and very horrible thought occurred to her. What if the figure in the doorway hadn’t been Archie at all?

  What if it had been Adrian?

  The curtain was swished back, and a white-coated doctor appeared with the announcement that there was no skull fracture, but because she had been unconscious for so long they were going to keep her in overnight for observation.

  ‘No,’ Tess said. ‘I want to go home.’

  The doctor, a young man with a top-knot of very curly blond hair that made him resemble a benign sheep, told her that would be very dangerous under the circumstances. ‘Should there be a lesion, there might be subdural bleeding, a build-up in pressure—’

  ‘I think you should do as he says,’ John advised.

  ‘I’m sure you do, and I’m sure he’s right,’ Tess said, struggling to sit up. ‘But I’m still going home.’ She got down from the examination table and struggled to get her feet into her shoes. Why was it so difficult? They were just shoes. Damn. DAMN!

  For another thought had come plunging unbidden into her aching brain. What if the figure in the doorway had been neither Archie, nor Adrian, but the owner of the voice on the phone? The one who had said ‘look after your little boy’?

  John Soame’s hand was under her elbow as he put his key in the lock of the front door. ‘I’m sure everything is just fine,’ he told her, soothingly.

  ‘But she didn’t answer the phone,’ Tess wailed.

  ‘Perhaps they were watching television and she didn’t hear it—’ John began, then stopped. The door had swung open onto chaos.

  ‘My God,’ Soame gasped, and held Tess up as she sagged against him, her eyes wide with disbelief.

  ‘Oh, no, no, no!’ she moaned.

  The house had been torn apart. Pictures had been taken from the walls and smashed, furniture was slashed and stripped, rugs were up as well as floorboards. There didn’t seem to be a single thing left whole or untouched anywhere.

  ‘Max!’ Tess screamed.

  There was an answering wail from upstairs. John Soame’s long legs took him up the stairs three at a time, and he was in front of Max’s door in seconds. The door was locked. ‘Max! Mrs Grimble!’

  ‘Saints alive, it’s the Perfessor. We’re all right!’ He could hear Mrs Grimble within, and there was a scrabbling as the door was unlocked. He was nearly knocked flying as she erupted like Vesuvius into the hall. ‘Where is he?’ she shouted.

  Tess had managed the stairs, and her heart nearly stopped at the old woman’s words. Then she saw Max’s face peering around the doorjamb, and she sank down onto the top step, suddenly legless with relief.

  ‘What happened?’ Soame was demanding.

  Mrs Grimble glared at him, as if it had all been his fault. ‘About ten minutes after you left, he come. We were playing Snap, and I heard the front door open. I called down, but there was no answer. Something warned me. Somet
hing told me!’

  ‘I told you,’ Max said, clinging to Tess. It was difficult to see who was comforting whom.

  ‘I heard noises, footsteps coming up the stairs. I didn’t like it, so I slammed the door and locked it,’ Mrs Grimble announced, melodramatically. Two red spots of colour shone high on her thin cheeks, and the flowers on her hat seemed to tremble with indignation and excitement. ‘He come to the door, he rattled the knob, he said he wanted to talk to Max. Said he wanted to take him to his mother, because she was badly hurt and was asking for him. Well, if that had been true, he would have been a policeman, wouldn’t he? With a woman constable, because of the boy. Even I know that. So we didn’t say a word, Max and me. We just sat there, and he just stood outside the door there for a while. It was as if we could hear him thinking. I suppose he could have knocked the door down, but he didn’t. He went away. A few minutes later, the crashing and the banging started up.’

  ‘Did you recognize the voice?’ Soame asked.

  ‘No,’ said Max, over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s he done?’ Mrs Grimble demanded, starting towards the stairs. Now assured of personal safety, she could afford to enjoy the dramatic aspects of the situation. Her name might even get into the paper. Weeks of being the centre of attention at the launderette beckoned her on. She paused by Tess.

  ‘We might have been killed in our beds!’ she announced, rather inaccurately, and edged past her, grumbling.

  ‘You’d best get back into bed,’ John said to Max.

  ‘I don’t want to get back into bed. I want to look after Mum. What happened to her? Who was here? Who . . . ’

  ‘Hooligans! Hooligans!’ Mrs Grimble was shrieking from down below. ‘Omygod! Omygod!’ She could be heard going from room to room, freshly shocked by every new discovery.