Did he really believe she was there, after death, listening to him, hovering near the ceiling of the room?
‘And yours?’
He reached into his pocket with a shaking hand and brought out a piece of card folded over and over and creased, a picture of ten men in top hats, leaping over a hedge like so many racehorses.
I nodded. ‘Ten lords a-leaping.’
Reverend James stared at the card he held in his hand. ‘I wanted Suzanne to be ten and me eleven. That was my plan, but somehow the cards got mixed up.’
I gave him a sharp look. ‘Who mixed the cards up?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And who’s number twelve?’
‘No number twelve,’ said Reverend James. ‘It was meant to be a wrap-up of what we learned during the retreat. There are – were only ten of us at the retreat. The partridge in the pear tree was meant to be the beginning – putting Christ at the centre of our retreat. Then ten verses. Twelve drummers drumming were to be the triumphant end of the cleansing, forgiveness of the Lord, all our sins purged. Meant to be. Not this, not this.’ He swallowed and his eyes teared up. ‘I didn’t mean this to happen, I swear. Any of it.’
‘Again, just tell me what you meant to happen.’
‘I sat down with Stephen and we ordered all these days, put The Twelve in order of each day. I thought it would be a neat way of learning about “The Twelve Days of Christmas”. A perfect twelve-day sermon. We even talked about using the torture instruments as teaching visuals. One for each day.’
I stood up in shock. ‘What? You knew?’
His eyes looked terrified as I leaned over him. His lips quivered as he spoke. ‘Yes. Each person had a day, a torture instrument assigned. On the second day I was going to talk about adultery and stoning, the third day I was going to show us all the guillotine to talk about beheading, the fourth day–’ He held his heart. ‘If I had only known that–’
I jabbed him in the chest. ‘So you planned these macabre deaths.’
Emily held my shoulders and I pulled back, winced at the pain. Took a deep breath. ‘Go on.’
‘No. Linda made all the cards, I planned the sermons: they fitted so neatly, and I felt God guiding my thoughts. I never thought… it would really happen. I can’t believe it. And Linda… Linda. We planned the correspondence between the deaths of martyrs and the torture instruments. Sorry, Rafe, the bull… But we never dreamt of actually carrying any of it out. It was meant to be a morality play.’
I faced the large living room mirror and stared at his reflection. ‘So you knew, as each death happened. As if you had foretold each one. It was no surprise to you. You knew what was going to happen next. And you never said anything. That’s despicable.’
He stared into nothing.
‘Who else knew? Who did you tell? Who did you plan this with? The concierge? Did you sit down with the owner and discuss which torture instruments would correlate with each day?’
‘No, no. Only Glen, Stephen and Linda. And now it’s all coming true. Like a prophecy. A ghastly Satanic prophecy. And now we are all going to die, just the way I planned it.’
‘The Pear of Anguish didn’t work, thank God,’ said Emily, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘And Rafe escaped death too. It’s not inevitable. Not predestined, as you used to say in Church.’
He squeezed the blanket over his chest and spoke in a strangled whisper. ‘Linda didn’t escape.’
‘I’m so sorry.’ Suzanne took the Reverend’s hand. He looked a million years old.
Strange this, I thought. This odious man had ruined our lives, and here we were, comforting him.
I, however, was not so merciful. ‘Reverend, tell me what the Foxe’s Book of Martyrs says about the tenth day,’ I said. ‘Who was martyred on the tenth day of Christmas, and how?’
He shook his head. ‘No one. I didn’t plan to expose my own… sins.’
I ran my hands though my hair. ‘Of course bloody not! So what is going to happen today, do you think? What is the torture weapon you planned for today to teach us sinners some God-awful lesson?’
‘Don’t blaspheme, Rafe.’
‘Goddamn. I’m serious. There’s a system here, and whoever is doing all this is going by your book, Reverend James. Your sermon. Has worked it out to the letter. Nine ladies dancing, seven spokes of the Catherine wheel–’
‘I don’t understand the eight milkmaids,’ said Emily. ‘I didn’t see how the bull had eight anything.’
‘I counted,’ I said, ‘while I was inside. Eight apertures: four teats, two nostrils, two eyes. Believe me, I was grateful for those apertures. They kept me alive long enough to escape. I could breathe through them.’
‘So what torture instrument upstairs has ten features?’ said Emily. ‘The rack? It has a number of rungs. Was it ten?’
‘I can’t remember,’ said the Reverend. ‘I wasn’t counting, I can tell you that.’
‘Or that device I saw in the cabinet where each finger is crushed in a device,’ I said. ‘Ten fingers?’
‘Who is this sick person?’ said Suzanne. ‘Who?’
‘The recording said he was one of us,’ I said, looking at each in turn. ‘Which one of us?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Rafe,’ said Suzanne. ‘It can’t be one of us.’ He just wanted to pit us against each other.’
‘I agree,’ I said. ‘Maybe that was indeed a red herring. Reverend, did you meet the owner, the mad collector of these exhibits?’
Reverend James shook his head. ‘It was arranged on a website, advertised as a B&B. Stephen and Glen made all the arrangements.’
But Stephen and Glen were dead.
‘What about the concierge?’ said Emily. ‘We all met him. He organised the whole trip for us, chauffeuring us all in, bringing food. Did he…’
I pictured the small man, with his delicate fingers and birthmark on his hand. ‘But what motive would he have? Unless one of us put him up to this? You, for instance, Reverend James. And now you create your own alibi by having him tie you up on the rack so you look like the victim.’
‘Come to think of it, the concierge was rather creepy,’ said Emily. ‘As if he had some interest in keeping us here.’
I looked at her sharply. She shrugged. ‘Just a feeling. No concrete evidence. Just creepy. Hanging around.’
‘What motive would anyone have to kill all of us?’ said Suzanne.
‘I’m sure you made enemies at some time,’ I said to the Reverend. ‘Be honest. Someone might have had a vendetta against you.’
‘Some disgruntled parishioner who didn’t get his way?’ said Emily.
He pursed his lips. ‘Our only enemy is Satan himself.’
We sat in silence. But I now had a plan. ‘I believe Linda’s body was lowered through the trapdoor in the ceiling. I am going up there to investigate. And you are all going to stay put and let me get on with it, because whether the murderer is among us or someone from the outside, we are all going to be dead soon if I don’t.’
Suzanne and Emily sat at the table, sipping coffee. Reverend James sat between them. I took a flashlight and a butcher’s knife from a kitchen drawer and slipped into the shadow of the corridor. I waited, listened, then climbed up the steps, negotiated the darkness of the corridor to the torture museum and pushed open the door. The place was ink-dark. I switched on the flashlight. Held my breath. Listened for any movement or presence, but heard only the silence of death.
The open window looked out on to whiteness. Stillness. And the room was a fridge. As Emily had said, it made a good morgue, and the dead bodies were being kept cool. I stuck the knife into a loop on the back of my pants and put the flashlight in my shirt pocket so my hands would be free.
Linda’s body dangled slowly in the air, with her eight partners. I positioned one of the display cabinets under the square hatch in the ceiling and climbed up. If I stretched, and held on to the top of the door, I could reach the lip of the trapdoor and push it open. A black hole opened up behind it. I pu
lled myself up and into the ceiling near the doorway.
Catching my breath, I listened.
A gust of cold air blew into my face, and as I shone my flashlight around, the shape of the attic became visible. I could see a criss-cross of wooden beams; this part of the castle had been renovated and bolstered with modern wooden supports. With disbelief, I noted something incredible: along the beams ran a planked pathway that seemed to travel the full length of the space. And running alongside and flush with the path was a metal railing. I realised what this was – some sort of monorail. I had heard of mansions and castles with systems of pulleys and rails so servants and tradesmen could transport goods to the various locations inside. And I knew that some houses had a network of servants’ passages above the vast dining rooms and kitchens to facilitate the movement of goods and food.
And here, to facilitate the movement of dead bodies.
I flashed my light down the line to the left which came to an abrupt stop at the other end of the torture museum where I noticed the top of a ladder. I walked along the rail, balancing myself by pressing my hands against the roof above me, and peered over the edge. The ladder was very long, and I surmised that it must lead down to the trapdoor I’d seen in the living room ceiling.
I shone my light to the right and the line gleamed silver. It looked used, not rusted or dull. I decided to follow it. I edged my way along, balancing on the rail and steadying myself by pushing my hands along the roof beams, and came to a fork where the rail bifurcated. I remembered the layout of the rooms. The left branch led to the women’s wing, the right to the men’s. I was about to take the left fork, when I saw that the left rail was blocked by a dark rectangular shape.
I stopped. Caught my breath. Listened. Touched the object. It was metal. A trolley, I saw now, an open carriage. I gave it a shove and it slid along the rail easily. Well oiled. Well used. Silent. And, I thought, it was strong enough to carry a dead or unconscious body. Now I knew how he – they – had done it all.
Seeing as this passage was blocked by the trolley, I inched my way along the right fork, above the men’s rooms, I guessed. Was it my imagination, or was I seeing little flashing red lights at odd intervals? And then I saw the next thing that stunned me: not just one, but a whole series of trapdoors on either side, which I presumed led down to the various rooms below – the Reverend’s, Danny’s, Stephen’s, Mike’s, mine.
In each trapdoor I spotted a tiny spyhole in the middle, a lens grouted into it, wires leading to a flashing red light to the side. I crawled along, checking each trapdoor, trying to guess which room it led down to.
I was amazed. It seemed that each room in the castle had access from above, even the ground-floor living area.
I saw it all now. The castle had been chosen because it allowed precisely this secret mobility for the killer.
I followed the rail line to the end of the passage where I guessed the men’s bathroom was, and stopped suddenly. A flat rectangle of light seeped from underneath a door at the end. I held my breath. Listened. Tried to make out what this was.
I heard the hum of some equipment inside.
I pulled the knife out, held it in my right hand and flattened my body against the door. It was, of course, possible that the killer was not one of us. That he was in this room, at this very minute.
I was shaking badly, my heart racing, my breathing shallow.
I counted to three and pushed on the door, gently. But it would not open. I shoved it harder and though it clicked and rattled, it would not budge.
Damn. I backed away, watching for any movement.
I could try smashing it. But I knew I would not get far enough if someone was inside. If someone already knew I was here. I turned and tracked back, and as I got to each trapdoor, I yanked out the wires and the cameras, and the flashing red lights died. One room, two rooms, three rooms, four rooms, five rooms – all the men’s bedrooms. Then I crawled along the other fork, pushed the carriage silently ahead of me and took out the cameras spying on the women’s rooms: one room, two rooms, three rooms, four rooms. The bathroom at the end.
Then I turned back, found the trapdoor where I had climbed up, and pulled out those wires. Opposite the rail was another trapdoor – leading down to the library, I presumed, as that was adjacent to the torture museum, and I pulled out that camera and wires too.
Whew. I was trembling, but glad I had done this. I peered down the right fork again to see if I had been observed, but the rail was silent, and the door at the end still shut.
I peered down and readied myself to climb back into the torture museum, to lower myself and jump onto the desk I had placed below, when my sixth sense – my intuition, that finely tuned scientific and rational machination of the brain – told me that something was amiss.
The air was different under me; a foreign smell, the sound was different, as if something had been displaced. All this told me to stop. As I shone my flashlight down and made sense of what I saw, I flicked off the light and pulled myself up quickly, my heart thudding in my ears.
The desk had been removed below. In its place, the killer had positioned that deadly torture device, the Judas Cradle, directly underneath the opening in the ceiling. If I had dropped down, I would have been impaled on it.
The Judas Cradle was a tall, four-legged wooden stool with a sharply pointed metal pyramid on top. Used primarily in the Spanish Inquisition, victims would be lowered onto the ‘chair’, making the pyramid enter the vagina or anus.
The only way down without being impaled on that device was to climb down the rope where Linda was hanging. My fall would not be that long if I used her as leverage. I pocketed the knife, and then made sure the beam would support my weight by hanging on to the rope that was tying her to the beam. So far, so good. I slithered down, felt her icy face and shoulders as I threw myself wide of the cradle and landed hard on the floor.
I immediately sprung up into attack position, pulled out the knife. The killer could be in the room waiting for me.
I listened. Could hear nothing.
What I was feeling – apart from shock and pain from landing on a cold stone floor from the height of the ceiling – was outrage. Not fear. Not terror. Anger. How dare this person try to do this to me? And was this killer in the close inner circle of survivors, or an outside madman hiding in these castle walls? What sadistic bastard would think of this? The owner of the castle, a mad collector of torture instruments, itching to use them on an unsuspecting group of guests? His concierge a gleeful accomplice? Whoever it was, this was personal now. This killer had stalked me, knew my every movement, had declared war on me. In that instant, I made a vow to get this person, no matter what it took.
Harnessing that anger was easy. My will swelled to righteous size. I was capable of anything now. I could kill with my bare hands if necessary.
He could still be in the room, or could have returned to the living room. Call me paranoid, but for a moment I thought all three remaining could be in on this.
I shone the flashlight in every corner of the room then edged towards the door, aware that there might be other booby traps set here for me. I checked for wires across at throat level, metal traps at my feet. But I reached the door without incident. Maybe the killer was an outsider in the control room, watching his cameras go out one by one. Or lurking somewhere in the passage planning his next murder.
The exit door from the torture museum was closed.
A cold chill of claustrophobia shivered through me. I pushed against it.
The door was locked.
Of course.
I slid along the wall, felt my way to the library door. But that was also locked.
The killer knew my every movement. He had locked me in. Maybe it was my turn to die now.
But not yet. I looked for a better weapon. I browsed the various implements. Tongue-remover. Fingernail-gouger. Spiker. Then I found my weapon of choice. A wooden hammer with a spear-like spike on the fore-end of the haft. ‘War hammer, or
maul’, read the label. ‘Fourteenth century’.
I gripped the maul tight in both hands and raised it above my head. Let’s see what you’re made of, hammer of Thor.
The door was hard and would not splinter or break. I made no dent on the lock at all.
I looked at the wide-open window. An obvious exit. But it was on the first floor and there was a sheer drop to the courtyard. And the cold was inhibitive.
But the snow was deep.
Here goes. Ten lords a-leaping.
I flew out of the window, the maul in my right hand. Felt for a second that deceptive buoyancy before gravity kicks in, then I was plummeting straight towards the courtyard. I hoped the snowdrifts would be deep enough.
I crashed through an icy layer and sank up to my armpits in snow. Quickly, I struggled up so I would not be buried. Beneath the surface, the snow was powdery. I crawled, pushed, waded towards the front of the castle.
The cold was starting to bite and I was wet. And freezing.
I hunted for the maul. I had let it go as I landed and it was buried somewhere in two metres of snow. No hope of finding it now. I dug my way across the courtyard, around the side of the castle, towards the front door.
I was so intent on getting there that I almost missed it – a single garage, tucked away at the back of an old horse stall. The garage doors were ill-fitting, rusted away, and chained together with a new padlock – but they had been pushed half-open by a snowdrift. At eye level I could see a glimmer of red inside.
I saw the gleam of a bumper, a licence plate, a tyre.
First thought: we drive out of here! Emily and Suzanne and me. Or just me. Get the police. But as I wrestled through the snow, I could not imagine anything but a snowmobile getting us very far at all. And this did not look like one. But still. I waded through the snow and peered into the garage, where drifts had piled up inside the doors.
And then I felt giddy. I stared again, not quite believing what I was seeing.
The car was a Fiat Uno. If I was not mistaken, the very same car I had arrived in ten days ago.
But the concierge had driven away. Or so Reverend James had told me.
Twelve Days Page 22