Blood on the Wood (13 page)

At the top of the stairs we paused. Below us the hall in the dim light was silent and empty. Up here, almost total darkness and deep masculine snores from somewhere to the right. They sounded like an old man's and I hoped they were Oliver's. We turned left, the corridor wide enough for us to walk side by side with Bessie in between. By now I felt as if we'd been welded to her for life, like a trio of badly matched Siamese triplets. We went on to the far end of the corridor. The last door on the left was the one I'd seen Daniel disappearing into a few days before, so presumably his room. No sound came from inside it. The corridor ended at the door to Oliver Venn's study. It opened noiselessly and we bundled ourselves inside. Bobbie let out a sigh of relief. A big window faced us with the curtains drawn back and starlight coming through it, dim enough but seeming bright after the dark of the corridor. I took the battery cycle lamp out of my pocket and switched it on. Light of any kind was a risk but we couldn't do without it. The small yellow glow made a kind of cave, with parts of the room still in darkness. A big desk to our right, crowded with papers. Above it, a picture in a gilt frame. The light just reached to the pink cloud of her haunches.

‘Well,' Bobbie whispered, ‘Bessie Broadbeam's twin sister.'

I was annoyed to find the picture still up there on the wall instead of unhitched and waiting for us as Daniel had promised. I signed to Bobbie that she should hold the lamp while I got on the desk to unhook it but she scrambled up herself, brisk as a monkey on a barrel organ.

‘Can you hold the light closer? The wire's all twisted up round the picture hook.'

In the end I had to climb up beside Bobbie, support the bottom of the picture with one hand and hold the lamp with the other while she struggled with the wire. Although we tried to be quiet we must have made some noise. I imagined Daniel, still awake probably and listening on one side of us, Adam and Carol on the other. If Adam woke and heard, how was she supposed to distract him? That idea seemed like another piece of Daniel's breezy optimism that might collide with reality. Although things had gone more or less smoothly so far my heart was thumping with fear that the study door would open and a voice shout out. Once the wire was untwisted we had a bad moment when several thousand guineas' worth of picture nearly fell on us but we managed to get her to the floor safely. Then we unwrapped the false Bessie and used her coverings to wrap up the real one for her journey as far as the summerhouse. By then the lamp battery was nearly gone and we still had to get the false Bessie in place.

‘Can't we just leave her?' Bobbie whispered.

But I needed to buy time for ourselves and Daniel. With the false Bessie high on the wall it was just possible that Oliver Venn wouldn't notice the substitution for some time – until, say, we'd got the proper one safely sold and the money in the WSPU bank account. Unlikely, but just possible.

I hitched my skirt up, clambered on the desk and waited for Bobbie to hand her up. While I was waiting, we heard a noise. It sounded like a door opening and closing some distance away.

‘Miss Bray, somebody's about.'

Bobbie's voice came from the level of my knee. Oh, the wonders of formality. We were burglars together but naturally she, as the younger woman, couldn't use my first name until asked. I signed to her to be quiet and turned off the lamp. It sounded to me as if the noise had come from downstairs but it was difficult to be sure through the closed study door.

‘What do we do now?' Bobbie whispered.

‘Wait.'

I scrambled down off the desk. Even if somebody were still up and about, it didn't necessarily mean we were in trouble. A servant perhaps, checking that doors were locked. Only Daniel had said doors weren't locked and his uncle didn't keep the servants working late. We waited five minutes, maybe longer, but there was no other sound. I thought we could be crouching there all night, losing our nerves, so switched on the lamp again – not that it helped much – and we finished the job of hitching the false Bessie up on the wall. Then we were out in the dark corridor, doing our familiar Siamese-triplet shuffle towards the stairs.

*   *   *

We'd almost got to the top of them when I froze. Bobbie, halting a step later, drove the frame sharply against my ribs but that was the least of our problems. Somebody was still moving about downstairs. It's difficult to say how we were so sure of it. The footsteps, if there were footsteps, would have been muffled by the hall carpet and the person was moving cautiously anyway. Perhaps it was breathing we heard, or even just the animal-like sense of somebody down there. In any case, I could feel the hair on my scalp rising, my heart skittering. Just standing there and hoping not to be seen wasn't possible. The instinct to run and hide was too powerful – but how do you run and hide when there are three of you, inextricably clasped together? To our right were the stairs, to our left a closed door with snores still coming from it loud and untroubled, behind us Adam and Caroline's rooms. I took an instant decision to go forward, past the top of the stairs to unknown territory at the end of the corridor. The snores followed us, blotting out any softer sounds there might be from downstairs. When we got to the end of the corridor there was another door facing us. I opened it and somehow we bundled ourselves through it, into the total darkness on the other side.

We were on level ground at least, a landing probably. When I pushed the door shut the back of it felt soft under my palm. Baize. Green baize, I guessed, to shut off the noise of the servants' quarters from the rest of the household. Miraculously we'd found the back stairs. Now it was only a matter of getting quietly down them and— A gasp from Bobbie, cut off so abruptly she'd probably bitten her lip. A footstep at the bottom of the stairs. A cautious footstep but not muffled, because there'd be no thick carpeting on these stairs. By bad luck or bad judgement I'd chosen the wrong staircase after all and somebody was coming up it. My guess was that one of the maids had been out late, meeting an admirer possibly, but that didn't matter because however guilty her conscience she couldn't fail to set up an outcry if she bumped into two people and a picture in the dark.

I leaned against the wall, judging our chances of abandoning the picture, running back along the corridor and down the main stairs. Then realised that it wasn't a wall I was leaning against but another door, at right angles to the baize-covered one. I found the knob, twisted it and fell sideways into deeper and disinfectant-smelling darkness, taking Bessie and Bobbie with me. I don't think we'd even got the door properly closed by the time the footsteps came up and past us but whoever it was can't have noticed because they went straight through the door to the corridor, and then there was total silence, apart from the thumping of two hearts. It stayed that way for several minutes, broken by a sudden crack of china.

‘Oh dammit,' Bobbie said, too loudly.

I reached for her shoulder, to give it a warning squeeze but she was somewhere around my knees, the weight of the picture was on me and what felt like a damp mop was pressing against the back of my neck. I told her under my breath to leave it for goodness sake, but she only started giggling. Nerves, probably. So much for twitchy fillies.

‘It feels like a bedpan. At least it was empty.'

I kicked her, not hard but to bring her back to her duties. She asked what we did now.

‘Down the stairs, and for goodness sake be quiet.'

If it had been a maid, she'd be in her bed by now, relieved to have got away with truancy. We went down the dark stairs with the picture, coir matting underfoot, elbows brushing against the walls. The last few stairs were lit by a dim red glow and when we negotiated them we found we were in the kitchen, with the light coming from the firebox of the cooking range, left low for the night. It was tempting to find our way out by the kitchen door, but that might lead to collisions with empty bottles or pig bins, so instead I steered us across the room, making for what I hoped would be the family side of the house. Another baize-covered door to negotiate and there we were back in the hall with the dim lamplight gleaming just as we'd left it, then through the door to the studio. After what had happened, it almost felt like home. Not enough, though, to make us want to linger.

In my mind we were already several fields away, making for the railway by dawn and back to town in the early train that carried churns of good Cotswold milk to Oxford and London – milk and us and Bessie. It had been harder than I'd expected but we'd done it. I even felt quite kindly towards Bobbie. Until, that is, she tripped over a footstool, landed on a rug, went skating across the polished floor windmilling her arms and crashed against a carved oak sideboard with a noise that would have woken a hibernating tortoise. The only good thing was that she'd let go of the picture by then so that wasn't included in the wreckage, but I was past caring. The fates had been against this from the start or they wouldn't have sent her. Now the only thing to do was save ourselves. I put down the picture, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her up.

‘Out. Run.'

She went for the picture.

‘No. Leave that.'

But she was still argumentative. In spite of my anger, I had to give her marks for determination.

‘If we hide it somewhere we can come back for it.'

She went to the dark oak chest and pulled the door open. Voices from upstairs were asking each other what was wrong, what was happening? A man's voice and a woman's, Adam and Carol I thought.

‘It's big enough, and—'

Footsteps coming fast down the stairs now. Bobbie's voice died away. I had her arm again, trying to pull her away from the cabinet, but she seemed frozen. Then I looked over her shoulder and in the dim lamplight saw what she was seeing.

‘Leave that,' I said. ‘Get away from it.'

There must have been something convincing in my voice because she did. The footsteps reached the studio door and Adam's voice, sharp and angry, asked what was happening.

Chapter Nine

A
T FIRST, IN THE SHADOW INSIDE
the cabinet, it looked as if it might have been a figure carved from black oak like the rest, wedged at an angle with one foot sticking out. Then my hand touched something rough but yielding. Wool, some kind of wool fabric. There was a musty smell. Dried sweat, dead leaves. Something else, sharper and metallic.

‘Who's in there? What's going on?'

The door from the hall was opening wide, a dark silhouette standing there speaking in the same angry voice. By then I had the bicycle lamp out of my pocket and was fumbling with it.

‘Daniel, is it you?'

As Adam came towards the cabinet I got the lamp switched on and shone it on the thing inside. Her head was turned away from us into a corner, sideways on as if trying to escape from the light, but the neck was bent in a way no neck could ever be in life, her whole body propped on the diagonal across the width of the cabinet, one foot sticking out a little way and upturned so that light glinted on metal segs in the sole of the clumsy boot, newish segs put there to make the boots last longer. The shin coming out of the boot, even in its thick woollen stocking, looked as thin as a bird's. When I shone the lamp up again I saw dead leaves and grass in her red hair. Shrivelled brown oak leaves from last winter. Adam had recognised me by now.

‘What's happened? What have you done?'

I stood back to let him look.

‘Oh God,' he said. Then, fiercely to me, ‘Who is it? What were you doing with her?'

‘Nothing. We've just found her.'

‘Adam. Adam, what is it?'

Carol's voice from out in the hall.

‘Don't come in,' he shouted at her. Then, to me again. ‘Is she…?'

I nodded.

‘We'd better get her out,' he said.

It was the wrong thing to do, I know that of course. Yet somehow, even though I knew very well she was dead, it seemed out of the question to leave her stuffed in the cupboard that terrible, casual way like something unwanted. Bobbie moved forward to help. I waved her back. So far Adam gave no sign that he'd noticed her. He shuddered, reached into the cabinet, and took hold of the hunched shoulders.

Together we got her out. It wasn't easy. Her body bent a little but the arms and legs felt as stiff and brittle as wood, the bent neck rigid. We laid her on one of the rugs. I'd left the cycle lamp standing on the floor and by its waning yellow light we could see the blood on her hair and neck. The iron smell of it was clogging the air. There must have been a lot of it to smell so much, but her thick dark clothes had soaked it up. Silently Adam stretched out his palms to me, dark red from where he'd taken hold of her shoulders. There was a gasp from the doorway. Carol was standing there carrying a lamp. She wore a blue velvet dressing gown, crinkly hair down to her shoulders, feet bare. The lamplight wavered over the carved panels, the hanging demon figure with its lolling tongue, the murdered lady and her surprised wooden O of a mouth.

‘What's happened? Is somebody hurt?'

Then she must have seen the body on the floor, because she screamed and would have dropped the lamp if Bobbie hadn't jumped forward and taken it. She went on screaming, not loudly but with a terrifying concentration, like an injured stoat. Adam ran and took her by the shoulders.

‘Stop it. Please.' Then, to us, ‘Cover her up, for goodness sake.'

There was a beautiful embroidered cloth on one of the tables. Bobbie and I gathered it up in armfuls and put it over the body. It settled as lightly as leaves. Adam was sitting on a sofa, Carol curled against him, not moving. He asked me, ‘Who is it?'

So he'd never met her, I thought. Discussed her, dealt with her as a family crisis, settled her immediate future and never as much as set eyes on her. For some reason – shock, probably – that made me desperately sorry for Daisy and furious with the Venns.