The Labyrinth of Death

by James Lovegrove

  I pretended to pay attention, while widening my examination of the Danaides fresco to its edges. At last I perceived it: a crack in the cavern wall. It was terribly narrow, the thinness of a hair, but discernible. It ran around the outline of the fresco. Where the artwork terminated and bare lime plaster began, there lay the fissure.

  You were right, Mr Holmes. A secret door.

  There must, I assumed, be some kind of opening mechanism. I began gently prodding the fresco in order to locate it.

  “What on earth are you up to, my dear?” Dr Pentecost said, breaking off from his lecture. “I do not imagine the pictures are meant to be touched. Sometimes with frescoes the paint never fully dries.”

  The image boasted no embedded catch, no hidden lever or handle. I began inspecting the wall immediately surrounding it. By now my companion was thoroughly bemused and not a little consternated.

  “Miss Holbrook, this is altogether irregular. What has got into you?”

  I was about to answer him when my fingers fell upon a small rocky protrusion at head height that, when the least pressure was applied upon it, gave. A distinct click was audible, and the next moment the image of the Danaides, landscape and all, swung creakily inward. A roughly square aperture stood revealed, and the sound and fresh scent of rushing water was now strong and clear coming up from below.

  Dr Pentecost gaped in astonishment. “Dear Lord,” he said fretfully. “What… What is this? What did you do? Have you broken something? I told you not to touch the picture. Oh, Sir Philip will not be happy when he finds out.”

  “Calm yourself, Dr Pentecost. Nothing is broken. Look. Do you not see the hinges? All I have done is uncover that which was latent.”

  So saying, I leaned into the aperture. I found myself peering down into a lightless vertical shaft, cylindrical in shape and some four feet in diameter. How far the shaft sank or what lay at the bottom, I could not make out with the unaided eye. I struck a match and dropped it in. It tumbled through the blackness until it was a faint distant star, which all of a sudden winked out. I estimated it had fallen perhaps fifteen yards. I dropped another match, and in its last instant of life saw its flame briefly reflected as a myriad of sparkles, scattered and fragmented, in a moving surface. This confirmed what I had deduced, that the underground aquifer lay directly at the foot of the shaft, racing along in a turbid torrent. Both times the waters had doused the matches and whisked them away.

  I invited Dr Pentecost to lean in and look for himself. He shone his lamp around, its conical beam limning the shaft’s rough-hewn sides but not powerful enough to reach all the way to the aquifer.

  “I fail to understand,” he said. “What is this shaft for? What purpose can it serve?”

  “I do not know.”

  “I can only assume it was sunk relatively recently.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, the picture of the Danaides is a late addition to the gallery of frescoes. I remember Sir Philip asking me – late last summer, I believe it was – if I could think of a further Tartarean punishment to add to the existing ones. The Danaides were not included at the time, so I suggested them. I simply thought he had a space on the walls and wished to fill it. It appears there was more to it than that.”

  “He installed this door and painted the Danaides over it as camouflage,” I said.

  “That can only be the case.”

  “Yet there is no ladder, nor a hook for a rope. No means of descending the shaft. And even if there were, nothing lies at the bottom except for a channel of fast-moving water. It is not a well. It is not a vent or a flue. I cannot for the life of me fathom its purpose.”

  “Nor I, unless it is simply to connect this Hades with its very own river Styx. We should ask Sir Philip about it.”

  “Ask Sir Philip? Oh no. I don’t think so.”

  “Why ever not, dear girl?” said Dr Pentecost. “He is a personable fellow and I count him a friend. I do not believe he would be averse to me enquiring.”

  I felt otherwise. I was sure it would be an imprudent move. The conversation I had overheard between Sir Philip and Edwin Fairbrother had dispelled any last lingering doubts in my mind that there were sinister doings afoot at Charfrome. Both those men were complicit in some heinous misdeed, and I could not help but think this hidden shaft was not unrelated to that, although I could not – and still cannot – guess how.

  “In answer, he will say that it is simply some innocent piece of engineering,” Dr Pentecost continued. “To facilitate the plumbing at the house, perhaps.”

  “And the shaft is intended to provide access. The door is concealed behind a fresco solely in order to allow it to blend in with its surroundings.”

  “Quite so. Sir Philip is fond of such stratagems. I have told you how he admires the mighty Daedalus. Him above all the other noted figures of the Hellenic period does he exalt. In every one of his constructions, be it building, bridge or tunnel, he acknowledges Daedalus somehow.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes. It is his ‘signature’, so to speak, on his work. Often on a façade or a keystone an architect will mount a carved emblem – a lion, an urn, a garland of flowers – something that has some private significance to him. In Sir Philip’s case it is sometimes an image of Daedalus’s head, but more commonly it is a triangular compasses-and-feather symbol. The head resembles others of its ilk, a bearded, high-browed visage that could belong to just about any sage of antiquity. No one observing it would realise whom it represented, not without prior knowledge. The same goes for the compasses-and-feather symbol. If anyone thought anything about it at all, they might infer that it has some link with Freemasonry.”

  “And because Sir Philip venerates Daedalus,” I said, “he would make a door like this one.”

  “Daedalus was famously cunning. His name has become a byword for ingenuity and craftiness. One thinks of the Labyrinth he built at Knossos, naturally, and of the wings of wax and feather he fashioned for himself and son Icarus to escape imprisonment by King Minos. But one thinks, too, of the puzzle with which Minos attempted to ensnare him after he found refuge on Sicily and the method by which he solved it.”

  I could have requested further detail about this puzzle, but did not need to, for Dr Pentecost was, as I am sure I have made clear by now, an educator through and through. He couldn’t help himself. Whatever the circumstances – even in a dingy cavern with but a single “pupil” in attendance – he was only too keen to impart knowledge.

  “Daedalus at the time was the guest of Sicily’s King Cocalus, who had offered him sanctuary after he fled from Crete. Minos was searching for him; he did not wish him to share the secrets of the Labyrinth with anyone. His plan was to lure him out of hiding by travelling from city to city, publicly announcing a puzzle that was so difficult, only Daedalus himself could solve it. Daedalus was unable to resist the bait and, with Cocalus urging him on from the sidelines, accepted the challenge.”

  “What was this puzzle?”

  “How to thread a piece of string through a spiral seashell. Daedalus’s solution was to attach the string to an ant and entice the insect through the seashell by placing a drop of honey at the other end. Minos knew then that he had found his quarry, but luckily for Daedalus – and not so luckily for Minos – Cocalus’s daughters killed him. Playing the hospitable hosts, they drew him a bath and then poured boiling water over him. A ghastly demise, but not undeserved.”

  “Minos was no saint, as I recall.”

  “A despot and a murderer,” said Dr Pentecost, nodding. “His death at least proved Thales’s dictum that the strangest sight of all is a geronta tyrannon.”

  “An… aged tyrant?”

  “Correct! But back to Daedalus. Aside from the things he is best known for – the Labyrinth, the wings – he was an unparalleled innovator. Pliny the Elder credits him with the invention of carpentry, no less. He is alleged to have devised the saw, the drill, glue, isinglass, as well as the pair of compasses. He
also came up with the notion of masts and prows for ships. He was a superb sculptor, by all accounts. He built a sprung dancing ground for Minos’s daughter Ariadne. Perhaps most notoriously, he devised a way for Minos’s wife Pasiphaë to – how shall I put this delicately? – conjoin with a bull for which she had developed an unnatural passion.”

  “Bless me, sir!” I exclaimed, pressing the back of one hand to my forehead and fanning myself with the other hand. “I feel near overcome with a fit of the vapours.”

  Dr Pentecost was amused. “It involved a hollow wooden cow-shaped armature covered in the hide of a real cow. The rest I can leave to your imagination. The offspring of this aberrant union was, of course, the Minotaur. All in all, Daedalus was a master of the technical marvel, an artist of artifice. Why, then, would Sir Philip not seek to emulate his idol by creating a door that does not appear to be a door? He has, after all, been paying tribute to him throughout the course of his professional career.”

  I digested this intelligence, then restated my opinion that our discovery of the door remain between the two of us. “We cannot have been meant to find it,” I said. “No one can.”

  “But we did so by accident. That exonerates us from blame. Does it not? Unless… Was it an accident?” Dr Pentecost arched a sly eyebrow. “Miss Holbrook, I do believe you knew all along this door existed. That is why we came here tonight, so that you might disclose it.”

  “No, I…”

  “You had at least an inkling it was there.”

  “Really, Dr Pentecost, I…”

  “There is something you are keeping from me.”

  “No. No.”

  “Come, my dear. I may be old but I am not senile. Just as I am good at keeping secrets, I am good at sniffing them out. You have been an efficient dissembler up until now, but the mask has slipped. Confess.”

  I saw no alternative. I feared that otherwise Dr Pentecost would go straight to Sir Philip and tell all. And then what? At best, Sir Philip might feel moved to eject me from Charfrome, which would bring our investigation to a grinding halt. At worst? Well, let me tell you, as I stood in that cavern beside that doorway, I had a feeling – a presentiment, if you will – of grave consequences. The shaft loomed, a sheer drop into frigid unseen waters that churned through the bowels of the earth from nowhere to nowhere.

  I revealed to Dr Pentecost that I was in alliance with you, Mr Holmes; that my name was not really Shirley Holbrook; that I was in the throes of investigating Sophia’s disappearance; that as Shirley Holbrook I was writing letters to you, keeping you abreast of my doings; everything.

  “I see,” said he slowly, when I had finished unburdening myself. “Sherlock Holmes, you say? I have some small, tenuous connection to him, not one I am particularly proud of. A former student of mine, a certain John Clay, met his comeuppance at the great detective’s hands.”

  “Wasn’t Clay behind an audacious bank robbery that Mr Holmes foiled?”

  “The very man. He hoodwinked a red-headed pawnbroker called – what was he called? Something Biblical.”

  Familiar as I am with your exploits, Mr Holmes, and with Dr Watson’s oeuvre, the name was at my fingertips. “Jabez Wilson.”

  “That’s it. Took a job as his assistant and duped him into working elsewhere so that he might burrow through from the cellar at Wilson’s premises into the City and Suburban Bank behind. Always a scoundrel, even as a boy, was Clay. I once had cause to send him to the Lower Master for a caning. That was after I had given him three rips – the term at Eton for a black mark – for handing in profoundly substandard work. He vowed revenge, and took it by secreting a dead hare under the floorboards in my rooms, the presence of which I became aware of only when it began to announce itself aromatically. It was never proved beyond doubt that Clay was the guilty party, but I knew, and he knew I knew. He was a braggart, too, forever going on about his royal blood. Despite that, or because of it, amongst his peers he was highly regarded. He was not only a member of Pop but a kind of magnet for similarly roguish young toffs. He would lead a gang of them into Windsor and carouse at pubs and get into scrapes with the townies and the constabulary. It is a wonder he was never rusticated for such behaviour, let alone expelled, but what with his father being a lord, one imagines that that protected him against all repercussions. Remind me, I have forgotten – why am I talking about him?”

  “Clay fell foul of Mr Holmes.”

  “So he did. So he did. A bad sort, and I cheered when I read in the newspaper that he had been gaoled, and I cheered again a year on when I read Dr Watson’s account of the events surrounding his arrest. Such is my one glancing association with Sherlock Holmes. And you, Miss Holbrook, are collaborating with him? You rise further in my estimation.”

  “I would not call it a collaboration. I am more his proxy.”

  “He must rate you nonetheless, to have conferred that role upon you.”

  “Circumstances played a part. It was force majeure. Yet I like to think he would not have enlisted my aid were I just anyone.”

  “Quite. Quite. Now then, are you certain your friend Sophia has been the victim of malfeasance?”

  “Increasingly, ineluctably, I am drawn to that conclusion.”

  “And Sir Philip is somehow involved?”

  “Again, yes, it seems so.”

  Dr Pentecost deliberated for some while.

  “Doctor?” I prompted.

  “Hmmm?”

  “You are silent, and I fear you are troubled. Speak your mind.”

  “You must appreciate that you have placed me in something of a quandary, my dear girl. I owe a debt of loyalty to Sir Philip. You are at Charfrome under false pretences. I must inform him.”

  “I beg you not to.”

  “I have not finished,” he said with pedagogical severity. “From all you have just told me, allied with the evidence of the singular door and shaft before us, it would seem that your and Mr Holmes’s suspicions are not wholly baseless. There are forces at work in this place that even I, a regular visitor, have been blissfully ignorant of. For that reason I am willing to keep mum and not expose you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “In a strange way I feel I have sensed all along that Charfrome was too good to be true. Call me cynical, but why would Sir Philip have created so seemingly beneficent an establishment if he did not have some hidden agenda? Nobody is that civic-minded; even the greatest philanthropists operate out of self-interest, however tiny and deeply embedded. A time-worn phrase of Virgil’s springs to mind: ‘timeo Danaos et dona ferentes’.”

  “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” I said, “or Englishmen bearing the gift of Greekness.”

  “Neatly put. A chiasmus, too.”

  “All this Classicism is rubbing off on me.”

  Dr Pentecost smiled wanly. “Perhaps we should call it a night. You can close that door, can’t you? We must not leave it ajar.”

  “I presume so. No doubt the same method by which it is opened…” I groped for the rocky protrusion and depressed it. “Yes. The catch engages as well as releases.” The door swung shut into its close-fitting frame, becoming once again just a fresco amongst frescoes.

  On the way back to the house we had a close shave. A pair of Hoplites were loitering at the edge of the copse. We might well have blundered straight into them had they not been smoking cigarettes and we not been downwind. The smell of burning tobacco gave us fair warning, however, and the glow of the cigarettes betrayed the two men’s exact position. Dr Pentecost closed the vents of his lantern in time and we crouched amidst the trees, breath bated, until the Hoplites resumed patrolling.

  “Well, really,” my companion whispered. “If you cannot rely on ex-servicemen to keep to a schedule…”

  “We ought to report them to Sergeant-Major Hart.”

  “Agreed. Hart should be told. It is our duty as good Elysians.”

  It felt good to indulge in silly banter like this. It was a distraction from our fast-beating hearts.

/>   Once I was back in my room and abed, sleep did not come easily. My mind was racing. I wondered if it had been unwise to take Dr Pentecost fully into my confidence. Perhaps he may have second thoughts about throwing in his lot with me. Perhaps he will decide he should put his longstanding friend and paymaster Sir Philip ahead of some girl he has known only a handful of weeks. I hope not. I hope you, Mr Holmes, will judge that I have gambled sensibly, the odds stacked in my favour.

  It was as I finally began to drift off into slumber that a nagging thought occurred. Said thought kept me awake a further half-hour and has been itching away in my head ever since.

  I was musing on Sir Philip’s fascination with Daedalus and on the symbol with which he is wont to “sign” his work – the compasses and feather. It struck me that I had seen that symbol sometime during the foregoing few days. I do not mean at the shrine in the grounds, where the statue of the great inventor holds both items, but rather somewhere in or around the house.

  Racking my brains, I could not recall where. I still, twenty-four hours later, cannot, and am resolved to search for the symbol at the earliest opportunity. I would have done so today had final rehearsals for Antigone not filled our timetable from morning to evening.

  With that, I conclude this prolix epistle. Midnight is long past and I can scarcely keep my eyes open. Tomorrow, around noon, I have a rare lull between Elysian commitments and shall use it to steal away to the village and the post office. Notwithstanding your reply, I know that I must bide my time and wait for the full moon and the Delphic Ceremony a week hence. Rest assured that I am of good cheer and that my commitment to seeing this task through is undiminished. I am in fact feeling emboldened, perhaps because, just as you have a confederate whom you can call upon in time of need, so now do I. Sherlock Holmes has his Dr Watson and Shirley Holbrook has her Dr Pentecost. We are both of us reinforced and made braver by virtue of that.