by Lorna Gray
‘Florence,’ he said and directed Mrs Abbey to collect up the lamps before proffering the matches with shaking fingers.
Mrs Abbey’s expression was stony as she reached out a hand. She took the matchbook and led us to the doorway. The Lagonda stood there and it waited patiently while she poured the contents of the first lamp over the back seat. Under Duckett’s whispered instructions she lit a match and cast it, spinning, to join the spreading sheen of oil. I startled her when I shook off my supposed stupor and snapped out, ‘Release the handbrake at any rate, would you?’
Surprised, she braved the creeping fire enough to reach in and release the handbrake. Now I understood the value of a car whose doors were hinged at the back. It was easy enough for her to step clear as the car began to slide gracefully backwards down the slight slope. It was carrying that fire away from the ancient timbers of the house. It was just in time too, because while the flames had seemed content at first to simply lap away within the patch of oil, now they were investigating the leatherwork and their newfound freedom.
I was bustled across the yard with the detective and Duckett was hiding in the midst of us – in case anyone should be looking, I supposed, since he made sure Abbey was placed in an incriminatingly prominent position. Duckett was shouldering open the door into the tithe barn and then I was stepping of my own volition before him into the blinding dark after all that sunshine. The last thing I saw before Abbey shoved the door shut was his wife’s fear-bleached face, flooded in an unguarded moment with hate, which passed over Duckett and moved, slowly but surely, onto me.
I watched, spellbound, as hate merged with a determined kind of triumph. She still believed in her blackmail. She still thought Richard could save us.
Chapter 32
‘Tell me about the warehouse, and quietly.’
The detective’s whisper was an urgent request in my ear. He must have heard my exclamation in those last few moments before the Colonel’s final collapse. Detective Fleece didn’t know the details of Abbey’s original downfall, of course. He had been brought here by his interest in anything that touched upon John Langton’s estate. Now he was frantically trying to understand the history of these people while we hurried along at the head of the group, moving quickly along the row of stables through the harsh shafts of light coming in through the narrow lancet windows. He had a hand on me still, but lightly now, at the midpoint of my back. He wasn’t clinging to me any more. This was more the automatic guidance of a person who wanted to chivvy me into a run but didn’t quite dare. His touch was nothing like the comfort that Richard would have brought. And there was always the blood.
Today the row of empty stables in this ancient barn looked like prison cells. They had iron bars rising from shoulder height to the low beams that supported the rough-hewn floor of the hayloft overhead.
The detective steered me rapidly along the row. He was instilling a sense of ordered haste into our movements and he was doing this when any sudden move might have made Duckett decide to cut his losses and finish this swiftly. This, at last, must have been a mark of the policeman’s training – the training of war, I thought, rather than that of a newly commissioned detective. This was the veteran’s ability to break through the incapacitating bonds of fear into constructive action, and the experience to know what happened to people when they dived headlong into doing too much. There was no room for a stand-off here, nor negotiations. Duckett didn’t want to be talked down, so it was a very good job that no one had disturbed us in our dash across the yard.
In this claustrophobic space, Duckett was panicking still, but clinging once again to that wish that he might yet get away unseen. He was at the back of our group now; secure enough with the door shut upon the outside world so that no one could approach us unawares. He believed there were no secret witnesses who could place him here. I thought he must have forgotten the gasping Colonel, or else put it out of his mind. And it was a good job he had because I was reasonably certain that our survival beyond these immediate seconds depended on the faith that man still had in his power to use fire to sweep away his crimes.
I could see it in the gloom of this passage. I could see his face, lit by harsh angles of dusty light beyond the grim forms of his other captives, sweating and clutching at that weapon while his hand shook.
‘Why did I have to burn the car?’ Mrs Abbey’s voice was a curious drift on the still air. She was scurrying along behind the policeman after a gap of three or more yards. From her tone, she might have been passing the time of day with an old friend. ‘And why, exactly, are we in here when we could have just run?’
The man with the gun was treating her like his friend as well. I imagine he was still attributing her deception as I had; as the frantic deflection of a desperate woman, only he wasn’t really bringing himself to question where the desperation lay. Perhaps he’d seen the bruises on her cheek and about her wrist and knew they were by Abbey’s hand. He told her, ‘If we’d run, someone might have seen us, but thanks to your shrewd idea of letting the car roll, they’ll think Paul bungled an attempt to get the girl away in it. They’ll be trying to pick up their trail for hours now in the valley and all the lanes and trackways that lead to all the outhouses around here. And that,’ he confided, as if this danger needn’t quite reach Mrs Abbey, ‘gives me just enough time to do what needs to be done.’
And while they discussed the way I might have unwittingly sent help further away, I was telling the policeman as swiftly as I could, in a whisper, the idea I had about the origin of the warehouse fire, and the manslaughter of the firemen, even if Duckett mightn’t be fully accountable for their murder.
‘You’re sure?’
The policeman’s serious gaze was a gleam in the last of the light. We were arriving at the foot of the stairs to the hayloft. They were more like a ladder, really. They rose steeply at the end of the row above a void where heavily barred doors had once allowed carriages to slide into the space behind the last of the stables. There was no banister rail, but the left-hand side was made marginally less treacherous by the wooden wall of the goat stable, which rose up to meet the heavy beams that supported the hayloft. The goat was watching us with nervous interest. Above him, the steps veered left at the very last moment into a darkness that smelled thickly of mouldy things. Down here the air was increasingly perfumed with smoke. The sharp tang of poisonous fumes from man-made things such as tyres. The smoke must be sending up a beacon, but I couldn’t hear any trace of movement out there.
The policeman was hurrying me up the first of the steps. I was climbing by keeping hard against that stable wall, because every instinct told me not to go. I was leaning very firmly upon the dirty wooden panels and wishing very deeply that I was leaning against Richard and yet also hating myself because it was a piece of the corruption that I despised in Mrs Abbey. It was with the sour taste of need in my mouth that I told the detective, ‘You need to look again at the evidence of Abbey’s fraud. The police only discovered it after the warehouse was lost in the blaze and the insurance company started getting nervous about the validity of the claim. They said arson. So Duckett put them off by handing in the few surviving records of Abbey’s dealings. He told me the company records were usually stored in the warehouse attics. He said that he’d passed on what he had in his office to the police when Abbey didn’t die. Abbey was lucky to only be convicted of the fraud. Everyone thought he’d been covering up his tracks with the fire. You need to ask how Duckett knew to remove the papers from the archive in the first place unless he’d discovered the fraud and set a lure to bring Abbey to his death.’
‘As simple as that?’ The policeman was grim. His eyes were scanning the stairs, up and down behind us, as if there were any other routes. Head turned away towards the darkness ahead, he said, ‘Whatever happens up there, don’t try to use this to influence Duckett. We’ve got to either get you out or disarm him. Without that gun he’s as harmless as you or I.’
That last part didn’t quite ri
ng true, I thought. I couldn’t help mimicking him. ‘Simple, then.’
His attention abruptly returned to me, utterly serious. ‘As you say. So work with me, would you?’
I nodded. I knew why he was cautioning me to keep quiet. I’d just turned myself from the woman who could prove that Duckett had at least visited this place into the woman who had visited the man at his office and could recount every little detail that had slipped out of his mouth. It was hardly proof enough for a conviction, but it was certainly capable of antagonising an already dangerous man.
I thought we’d done it in the next moment. A sharp command from Duckett wrenched us both round at the turn, heart racing and ready to cringe. ‘Stop right there.’
The policeman had been on the step just below mine, so he was between me and the rest and he was also the first to look guilty. Duckett didn’t see. He hadn’t overheard our exchange. He was nervous because we were moving away from him up the last of the steps, while he was trailing behind Mrs Abbey and had barely reached the little kink where the passage turned past the stable that housed the goat.
The last short flight of steps was there above us and then the blackness of the hayloft. I was high enough to make out the apex of the roof hanging upon its great triangular frames many yards overhead and, beyond, about three or four yards away, there was the ghost of the distant end wall. It was rough stone and at its heart was the deeper shade of a recess that was just tall enough that a person could stoop to pass through. It was barred by a wooden door at present. It was the hatch; the means by which the season’s fresh hay was gathered in. It was the discreet exit that opened onto the patch of ground between the church and the watershed that Abbey had been using for days, safe from notice from the labourers and Danny returning by night to the machine barn.
My heart began beating strong, steady strokes. I thought that was why the policeman had gone to such lengths to uncover the details of Abbey’s route into the hayloft. Detective Fleece had taken care to find another exit that might be forced open and allow us to slip away while Duckett was still climbing the stairs; never mind that it proved that all the time we’d been in the kitchen the policeman must have planning for the likelihood that we must have always ended up in here. And now it was there, tantalisingly close and tempting me.
I jumped when Detective Fleece’s hand met my sleeve. I hadn’t even realised that I’d been bracing for that final impulsive lunge. He was urging me into caution. All the same, he was backing us, step by step, up the last of the stairs, while contradicting it all by saying unexpectedly clearly, ‘We need to get you out of here while there’s still time.’
I couldn’t quite tell whether it was a command to move or more of a wish. And Duckett was smirking like it was a joke and shouldering his way past Mrs Abbey and her husband and insisting that we waited while he lit the second oil lamp. I dithered, every nerve singing for liberty while the detective gripped my sleeve and Duckett fumbled and dropped a match. The metal base of the lamp was heavy, I think, and it was hard for him to manage that and the glass cone that covered the flame and the Webley, all while trying to strike a match with hasty fingers. He managed it, then sent the match spinning down the stairs to the cobbled passage. It landed near Abbey’s feet. It flared for an instant on a scrap of old straw, until it extinguished itself with a sharp plume of smoke. And that was the moment I truly understood the power this man held over his former business partner.
The effect on Abbey was instant. It was as though Duckett had physically assaulted the man. He was suddenly clutching at the wall. He was shuddering from the non-existent flame and suddenly his wife wasn’t looking like Duckett’s friend. She was snarling out a protest while Abbey’s thin and haggard features were being cast into fierce relief by this new lamplight.
I only stared. Various people in my life had quietly wondered if my foibles meant I had been Blitzed. Now I was witness to the appearance of a man who had really experienced the unendurable. Poor Abbey was finally acknowledging the likelihood that he had failed to escape a second time. I understood at last what had driven him to such uncontrollable panic that he had launched unnecessary attacks on innocent passers-by such as Mr Winstone. At this moment, his face was sagging with every memory of gasping breaths and the dying screams of those firemen. And his spirit was collapsing beneath the gaze of the man who had orchestrated it.
Duckett had forgotten him already. He had his lamp lit. It was sending inky lines across his features and upon the wooden panels beside us. He was halfway up the stairs. The policeman had me backing around the bend. The injured man was moving with that deliberation that went with extreme weariness. It wasn’t an act. He had a dark stain on the left sleeve of his grey suit jacket – grey in daylight and even greyer in this light. He was using his uninjured arm to act as a barrier between me and Duckett, pushing me back, but discouraging me from moving so quickly that Duckett should decide we were taking flight.
I was moving in short ungainly jerks. My muscles didn’t know how to behave. My foot missed the last step onto the hayloft’s roughly made floor. I stumbled but caught myself by throwing one hand out against the ancient wooden frame that passed close by my head to the roof and the other onto the detective’s shoulder. Blessedly, it was his unharmed shoulder. I felt the sweat through his clothes. Bullet wounds took a harsh toll upon a person.
But Detective Fleece’s voice remained clear. He uttered what amounted to a desperate plea to the silent rafters. ‘We’ve got to get her out.’ Followed almost in the next instant by a harsh, ‘Too late!’
Duckett was coming. He had discovered the hatch only yards from my side. I saw his beady eyes fix upon it in the ugly yellow lamp light. Everything else swept away into blackness beneath heavy frames that ran in hollow triangles to a distant end. There was nowhere to run. But Duckett pushed me aside anyway. He was up here with us so that I shrank back and collided with the clammy warmth of the policeman when for a brief insane moment I’d thought the detective was bracing to intervene. I believed Detective Fleece had been wildly convinced that help would be on the other side, ready to reach in and snatch us out of range, but no one was there. And anyway, Duckett was in the hayloft with us now. If anyone burst in at this moment, they’d have the terrible experience of finding the man and that Webley between themselves and us.
Instead the only thing that burst in on me was relief when the policeman merely snapped out, ‘The hatch is locked. Abbey used the housekeeper’s key and then put everything back to how it was when the Colonel came home. So it’s still locked.’
Mrs Abbey tried it and it rattled conclusively.
Hay was running along the length of this space like a turbulent sea with a narrow causeway of drowning floorboards at the heart of it. Dried drifts rose to left and right like waves with rotten old partitions acting like breakwaters between one great crest and another. I was waiting for the impact when the tide broke and it came barely three seconds later. The faintest crinkling sound of paper beneath my heel marked the perimeter of the rubbish that had spread from Abbey’s lair. It hadn’t been spotted in all these weeks by Danny on his daily visit to feed the goat because this deepest end of the loft was where the oldest and most damp hay lay. This dark cave hadn’t been cleared out in years. Abbey had added to the rot of time the debris of many lunches and a deep crust of newspaper – because, I supposed, he must have needed something to fill the long hours while he waited for dusk, never mind that sitting with a lighted lamp in this place was tantamount to suicide. Blessedly, he appeared to have been cleaner here and there was no stench of human waste to mask the faint musk of rats.
Duckett puffed along behind us. He wasn’t a fool. He had guessed that the policeman had been attempting an escape of some sort. He didn’t know how, so he concluded that we had Richard hidden in the haystacks. We hadn’t, but Duckett had found a metal bar from somewhere. It looked as if it had been a long handle to a pitchfork at some point in its life. Now he was using it to probe the stacks as he a
rrived and began scoffing, ‘All modern conveniences laid on, I see, Paul. But I’m afraid the stuffing may be coming out of your armchair.’
Abbey had truly made himself very much at home during his weeks here. Unlike the gloomy stables below, this attic was hot and airless because the sun was beating upon the stone tiles overhead. This space also held furniture of a sort because we could perceive by the light of Duckett’s oil lamp that Abbey had sculpted himself an armchair and a footstool out of the last haystack behind the final partition.
Abbey was instructed to sit in his chair. He went quietly. He went like a man for whom hope has long since fled. Mrs Abbey was set down upon the footstool. The policeman was directed into the corner, where the triangle of the end wall met the base of one of the vast frames that supported the roof. Detective Fleece sought my permission to leave me before he allowed himself to be bullied onto the floor to nurse his arm in the corner there. It was the furthest point from me and more particularly from Duckett.
Duckett was breathing jerkily and he didn’t trust that the policeman wouldn’t try for the Webley again. To be honest, though, I didn’t know why he was worrying. I had practically been eager to encourage the policeman to take his place on the floor because the detective’s skin shone terribly in this light. Detective Fleece looked very much like a moment’s pause to collect himself was all that stood between him and collapse.
I was made to stand behind the partition. It was about four feet high and had encountered woodworm.
‘You must really love him.’ Unexpectedly, Mrs Abbey was speaking to me. ‘I saw your face as you read his letter.’
She had already moved from her footstool. She was sorting through the pile of rubbish that her husband had left against the rough stones of the end wall. The heap contained those missing bottles from the Manor’s drinks trolley and discarded items of clothing, which must, presumably, have been more relics of John Langton’s wardrobe. She was tearing the sleeve off a shirt and passing it to the detective to serve as a pad to press over his wound.