Belchester Box Set

by Andrea Frazer

  Lady Amanda felt as if her head would burst, and Hugo was certain that his heartbeat was as loud as that of a big bass drum. And, as for Enid, she was shaking so much she could hardly stand, and feared that she might faint with fear and trepidation. Only Beauchamp remained calm, out of sheer habit.

  Eight eyes swivelled round in the direction from which the noise had come, their gaze acknowledged by, ‘Meow!’

  ‘It’s the bloody cat!’ exclaimed Lady A, breaking her own rule of never swearing. The object of their relief wandered haughtily over to the range, and flopped down in front of it to worship the source of the heat, then swept a languid tongue over the fur of one of its front paws, having no idea what terror his night-time entrance had caused. He was just glad he had found a way in, and no one had, so far, attempted to eject him.

  Sighs of relief echoed round the scullery, as Lady Amanda handed out the torches, and Beauchamp led the way down the steep stone steps, hissing, ‘Mind your footing. The steps are steeper than you might think.’

  At the bottom of the steps, they thought they were to be thwarted by the presence of a locked door, but Beauchamp was one step ahead of the others, and had spent his free time that evening after they had retired for a pre-adventure nap, searching for any large key that he could lay his hands on, just in case the one he had located earlier did not fit. He had quite a few, in this eventuality, but the original one he had found in the cellars did the job successfully, and granted them entrance.

  Torches were turned on, while the manservant opened the door, surprised to find that, not only had the key turned easily, but that the door swung open without a creak. The hinges must have been recently oiled, to produce no resistance whatsoever. The chances of finding Siobhan suddenly went up several rungs of the ladder of luck.

  The first area that they passed through smelt similarly of damp, earth and decay for, after all, who would think of making dungeons comfortable and sweet-smelling? Piles of mouldering sacks lay around the place, as did broken chairs and tables, with rats scurrying hither and thither, surprised by this unexpected visit to the one place they called their own, by two-legged giants.

  Enid made a series of ‘ee, ee, ee’, noises, in fear and disgust, sounding rather like a rat herself, and hopped around, trying to achieve the impossible act of keeping both her feet off the ground at the same time. To add to this distraction, Hugo was also doing his best to jump around, issuing distressing little noises of disgust. ‘I say, Manda, this place is absolutely crawling with arachnids, and you know I’ve got a phobia about the eight-legged little horrors.’

  ‘Can it, Enid! Be a man, Hugo! They can’t hurt you,’ ordered the less squeamish Lady A, and shone her torch around the dismal chamber.

  ‘But rats can bite and scratch, and they carry disease,’ whined Enid, still doing her best to levitate.

  ‘Just look straight in front of you, and ignore them.’ Lady Amanda was not putting up with this childish behaviour, when they were on an important mission. Fortunately, at that point in the proceedings, her torch hit paydirt, so to speak, bringing to light another stout wooden door in the opposite wall. ‘Over there, Beauchamp,’ she indicated, leaving the yellowish orb of her torch-light to dwell on the further barrier.

  He responded by jingling the collection of keys he had brought with him, and shining his own torch to light his way over the uneven floor. ‘We’ll soon have that open,’ he informed her, with confidence, and proceeded to try the keys again, one by one. While he was thus engaged, they heard a feeble sound from within this second chamber, which sounded very like someone calling for help; someone female.

  ‘By George, I think we’ve got her!’ exclaimed Lady A, rushing over to join him.

  Beauchamp, finding the right key, opened the door gingerly, worried that there might be someone in there with Siobhan, if it was Siobhan, but the moving door caused no calls of alarm or threat, and they followed him into the darkness of a large chamber, in a corner of which was their hostess, in chains and rather grubby, due to her unexpected holiday in this unfrequented part of her domain.

  ‘Thank God you’ve come at last!’ she exclaimed. ‘Mind the commode! You don’t need light to find it; your noses can do that job adequately enough.’

  ‘There are never any commodes in films, when someone’s locked away and kept prisoner,’ commented Hugo, absent-mindedly, to keep his mind off the spiders. ‘I’ve always wondered how they coped, when someone was locked up for a long time.’

  ‘Hugo, don’t be coarse,’ replied Lady Amanda, then added, ‘But you do actually have a point. They’re not like real life, those films. They just ignore the nitty-gritty, which is ridiculous, when you think about it. I mean, everyone’s got to “go”, haven’t they?’

  Picking their way over the uneven earth of the floor, and avoiding the large lumps of masonry that had been dumped down here for some long-forgotten reason, Beauchamp produced a small hip flask and held it to the prisoner’s lips.

  ‘We’ll soon have you out of here,’ promised Lady A. ‘All we have to do is alert Inspector Glenister, and he’ll be here in a jiffy, with something to cut through those chains. Beauchamp can sort that out, and the rest of us will stay with you. Cut along there, Beauchamp, old chap, and fetch the cavalry, please.’

  Beauchamp cut along, and the other three tried to comfort poor Siobhan, who had been cold, hungry, thirsty, and, above all, terrified that she would not live to tell the tale of her abduction. They managed to get her to her feet, leaving their torches balanced on pieces of stone to light them adequately, then Enid and Lady A massaged her hands and arms, and Hugo put his arm round her waist to help her regain her balance.

  As they were thus engaged, there was a noise at the door of the room, and Ralf Colcolough strolled in, not showing any surprise at the presence of the kidnapped woman and her rescuers. ‘Thank God you’re here, Mr Colcolough,’ said Lady Amanda. Perhaps you can help Siobhan regain her balance, because Hugo here’s not very strong and …’

  Looking at the expression on his face, as he crossed the chamber and entered the lit circle, she realised that he was not a member of the cavalry, but a previously unsuspected member of the gang, and her blood ran cold. The ‘third man’ was not a woodsman, after all. He was another of the guests, and he would lock them all in here and leave them. She had to let the others know not to tell him that Beauchamp had gone for help, or he’d hunt him down after he’d dealt with them.

  ‘I wish my manservant had come with us tonight,’ she declared, in ringing tones, with particular emphasis on the wording of her coded message. ‘He’d have known what to do. Such a pity that he stayed in bed,’ she said with even greater emphasis, partly to warn the others, and to make Colcolough think that she hadn’t twigged yet that he was not on their side.

  Hugo began to say something, but received a vicious kick on the ankle, just out of the circle of light, and fell silent in rather a huff. He didn’t know why he’d been silenced and was willing to trust Lady A’s judgement, but did she have to kick quite so hard? Why was she telling this nice man, who had come to their rescue, that Beauchamp was in bed, ill? She must be going mad.

  ‘Yes, that’s a really dreadful cold he’s come down with,’ piped up Enid, who had been quicker on the uptake than Hugo. ‘He was as weak as a kitten when dear Lady Amanda let him off duty early.’ Now Enid was at it as well, and Hugo set his mind to unravelling why both women were determined to deny the fact that Beauchamp had been with them, until just a few minutes ago.

  Suddenly, Hugo realised what was going on, although he didn’t know why the two ladies wanted to conceal the fact that Beauchamp would soon be on his way back, so he put in his two-penn’orth. ‘Poor chap could hardly speak, and his nose was as bright as a beacon, sweat running off him.’ He might not fully comprehend what was in their minds, but the least he could do was support them in their insistence.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come to our rescue. Perhaps you’d be good enough to alert the inspect
or that we’ve found Siobhan, and we can get on with cutting her out of these barbaric irons,’ twittered Lady A, having no intention of alerting him to the fact that he’d been outed as ‘batting for the other side’, in more ways than one.

  ‘Oh, I’m not here to rescue you,’ he drawled, curling his upper lip into a left-sided sneer. ‘I’m here to eliminate you. Did you really have no idea? It was to be only one more death, but now you three have turned up, I don’t see how that’s possible. I think, on the whole, the best plan would be to lock you all down here. This place was built a very long time ago, and, even then, they didn’t want the sounds of suffering from the dungeons to permeate to the living quarters of the castle.’

  The trio of new captives blanched, although this was not obvious in the little light that was available to them They had never suspected this particular guest as being in on the racket, and they all knew they would have to think on their feet, to try to extricate themselves from this perilous situation. Unusually, it was Hugo who girded his loins first.

  ‘You can’t do that, you utter cad!’ he spat, suddenly becoming aware of the whole game that the two women had been playing, and identifying the man as an unexpected enemy.

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find that I can. I don’t know how you got through the door at the bottom of the steps from the scullery, or through into here, but this door opens outwards. I wonder if you realise what that means. All I have to do is to get a couple of the others, and barricade it with the boulders strewn around the place, and you’ll never get out.’

  As he spoke, Lady Amanda’s fear slipped away, to be replaced with a blind, red rage. How dare he treat his hostess like that! How dare he tell them, so languidly and callously, that they were all going to die in this hole, and that there was nothing they could do about it! Well, Beauchamp was on his way back, and that’d stir things up a bit. Little did she know quite how much they would be shaken, in the next half-hour.

  ‘There’ll be no commode services for you; or food and water, as Lady Siobhan has had,’ he continued, with brazen insolence. ‘It’ll be black as night, and if you don’t die of hypothermia, given your ages, you’ll starve, but eventually die of dehydration.’

  Now, he really looked as if he was enjoying himself, the perverted, treacherous oaf, and anger began to stir in Enid, too. She might be an insignificant person in the great scheme of things, but she had plans for the rest of her life, and she had no intentions of being deprived of that time, because of some small-time crook, no matter how toffee-nosed he appeared to be.

  ‘It’s a particularly unpleasant and long-drawn-out way to die, but if you play the game, you’ve got to be prepared to take the consequences, and this was a particularly dangerous game to get involved with. You’re going to die down here, in awful pain, and your last breath will be filled with the stink of your own waste, not that there’ll be much of that, after a day or two, when you’re all husked out,’ he concluded, casually pulling a gun from his jacket pocket, and leering at them triumphantly.

  ‘And I expect this little fellow here,’ he said, brandishing his weapon, ‘will dissuade you from trying to overpower me. The first one who moves in my direction will be signing dear Siobhan’s death warrant.’

  ‘What a bounder you are, sir,’ Hugo growled, now also full of fury at the way they had been trapped. Ralf Colcolough didn’t know it, but he was now holding at bay three dangerously angry old-age pensioners.

  ‘May your black soul rot in hell!’ Lady Amanda cursed him.

  ‘May you have long, dangling external haemorrhoids’ spat Enid, drawing the puzzled eyes of her two companions. ‘Well, it’s the worst thing I could think of. If you’ve ever suffered from them, as I have, you’ll know just what an evil curse that was,’ she justified herself.

  ‘Not a moment without pain, day or night, and a hospital waiting list to get through, before you can get anything done about them.’ She paused after this explanation, remembering the suffering she had gone through, and how surgery had given her the greatest relief from pain she had ever known.

  As Colcolough drew breath to reply, there was a shout from the doorway and, just discernible in the dim borrowed light from the circle of torches, stood two figures, both appearing to hold double-barrelled shotguns. Who had arrived now? Friend or foe? It was impossible to tell until they approached the light.

  ‘Armed police!’ yelled the voice of Inspector Glenister, who was accompanied by PC MacDuff. ‘Drop that gun, or we’ll fire!’ Thank God the cavalry had arrived, but where on earth was Beauchamp? thought Lady Amanda, now thoroughly alarmed for her manservant’s safety.

  Colcolough sulkily complied with the order, as two shotguns outranked one pistol. ‘Now kick it away from you!’ Glenister ordered, as he and the constable moved further into the chamber. Once again the miscreant complied. He’d evidently been thinking, however, for he now didn’t look either crestfallen or defeated.

  ‘I’m going to send PC MacDuff over to you to handcuff you, and if you resist, it will be my pleasure to shoot you, you murdering swine.’ Glenister didn’t mince his words. How dare this fop threaten three elderly people in this way? It was barbaric!

  But before MacDuff could move, yet another voice sounded behind him. It was that of Menzies and, as they turned, they became aware of both him and Wriothesley standing behind them aiming pistols at them. ‘I think not, Inspector. This is way off your beat. You’re in our manor now, and we run things, not you.’ Colcolough retrieved his gun, and it was now three firearms against two, in his favour. The stakes were getting higher, and there didn’t seem to be anyone to trump the enemies’ ace.

  ‘My God!’ exclaimed Lady A. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever seen a real Mexican Stand-Off. I thought they only happened in films. I shall be most interested to see what happens next.’ Her words were brave, and her temper still sky-high, but that still didn’t stop her stomach churning with apprehension.

  There was no way out of this predicament that she could see, without someone being either seriously hurt, or even killed. Yet, she still had a little something up her sleeve that might prove useful, given the circumstances to utilise it. If only Beauchamp were unharmed and would return soon, she thought, sending up a little prayer of forlorn hope, to whoever might be listening.

  Chapter Ten

  Yet another voice, from the now deserted doorway, suddenly rang out round the chamber, refined and confident. ‘Anyone for cocktails? I’ve mixed a good selection,’ and there stood Beauchamp with a large silver tray in his hands, loaded with full glasses of every hue imaginable.

  This unexpected event riveted all eyes on the new arrival, astonishment evident on each of the three criminals’ faces at such an extraordinary thing happening: to bring cocktails to what was going to be either a series of executions, or an incarceration until death. Was the man completely out of his mind? Had he risen from his sick-bed and decided that cocktails were just the thing, if only he could locate his mistress?

  Beauchamp looked Lady Amanda straight in the eyes, and widened his just enough to let her know that it was time for action. They might not have made any verbal plans, but the shared genes must have linked them mentally, somehow, for she behaved exactly how he’d needed her to.

  He had been sidling across the room to the more recent entrants with his tray, as he offered his drinks. ‘Roman Candle? Brandy Alexander? Grasshopper? Manhattan? Blue Lagoon? Can I not tempt any of you with this fine selection of cocktails? They’re on the tray just waiting to be drunk,’ he called out, like a refined fairground barker.

  Lady Amanda suddenly kicked Hugo again, and as he began to yell, turning all eyes in his direction, Beauchamp yelled too (‘Geronimo!’ in fact) and threw the contents of his tray into the faces of Menzies and Wriothesley, and they flicked back in his direction, as his cry had been a fraction of a second after Hugo’s cry of pain and incomprehension, at being assaulted yet again, with no apparent cause, and no warning whatsoever.

  Hugo’s lo
ud acknowledgement of pain was followed immediately by a piercing scream from Lady Amanda, and all the confusion caused Enid to start shrieking too. As the echoes of the sounds of the assault on the silent cavern, of four different voices died away, a completely different configuration held sway.

  Hugo suddenly remembered the hunting horn, and gave a blast on it that would be enough to raise the dead, then descended into a fit of coughing at the amount of breath he had had to use to produce the sound.

  In the confusion, Enid kneed Colcolough in the unmentionables. No way was she going to give up what she had planned for her future, and no one would take that away from her. Beauchamp, his belly aflame with determination, bashed Menzies over the head with his heavy tray, denting it in his enthusiasm, then both he and Lady Amanda drew guns. Lady A held a small mother-of-pearl-handled pistol, and Beauchamp had retrieved a slightly larger version from a special pocket in his tailcoat.

  Both had independently decided to bring along a weapon and, although Beauchamp knew all about Lady Amanda’s dangerous little trinket, she had no idea that he carried such a weapon in his everyday uniform of tailcoat and pin-striped trousers. Neither knew why they had brought their guns with them, but instinct had suggested that something might occur when they would be advantageous. Some hunches should be taken seriously, and this had been one of those, born of shared blood.

  Both Glenister and MacDuff had turned their shotguns towards the two men who were now doubled over, groaning with pain, and Lady A had one well covered. She was feeling very ticked off that none of them had identified Colcolough as being part of the gang, and she took this personally. How dare he fool her for this long!

  ‘In our pockets,’ said Glenister with urgency, ‘we have a pair of handcuffs each. Take them, Beauchamp, and use them to link the three together. That’ll hold them till we get back upstairs where we can tie them up individually, while we get an explanation of what all this has been about.’