The Stone Wife (29 page)

In a strained, small voice, Lee said, “Nathan doesn’t sell drugs.”

Nathan advanced on Ingeborg and she thought he was going to strike her. Instead he put his face so close that she could feel and smell his bad breath. “You made one hell of a mistake coming here, Miss so-called Smith, telling a load of shit to Lily about getting in the papers, when all you wanted was to invade our privacy, abuse my hospitality, nick the keys from my trouser pocket and look for flake in my bathroom. You don’t have a clue who you’re dealing with.
I ought to feed you to the dogs, but I’ll think of something better.” To the minder holding the gun, he said, “She can go in the tower room for the rest of the night. Get her out of my fucking sight.”

22

Locked in the tower room, Ingeborg refused to give way to despair. There had to be positives. She was still in the place where she needed to be, Nathan’s mansion, even if she no longer had the guest room. She remained undercover. No one knew she was a police officer. If her hastily concocted story was believed, she was a cokehead journalist on the hunt for drugs. And she still had an ally in the house. By telling Nathan she’d actually entered the bedroom to steal his keys, she’d removed any blame from Lee—provided Lee had the inner strength and wit to deny any part in the incident. But she wasn’t pinning her hopes on Lee. She had to find her own way of dealing with the setback.

That was how it was in her thinking: a setback, not a disaster.

Nathan’s appalled reaction to her suggestion that he had drugs in the house had come over as genuine. And he had revealed more than he intended with his comment that she didn’t have a clue who she was dealing with. He may as well have said that while he was not into drugs, he was still a supplier, but not a supplier of what had been suggested. It was as if dealing in firearms was a clean trade.

His outrage at having his secret bathroom invaded was more than just anger that his privacy was violated. His near panic suggested Ingeborg had come close to exposing him.

But she’d found only soap and towels.

The bathroom remained a mystery and a challenge. Lee had said Nathan often took his visitors in there.
Took visitors into a bathroom
?

Before tonight, she’d been confident the room was used
for storing the guns he supplied to his gangster clients. Lee had appeared to agree.

In her head she reconstructed that bathroom unit by unit: cupboards, drawers, bath, shower, hand basin, toilet. The tiling was sound, the walls and ceiling solid. The floor had been covered in square ceramic tiles that felt firm underfoot, suggesting they were on a base of cement. None were loose. There were no tell-tale gaps between them. So far as she could tell, it was a fully equipped, fully functioning bathroom, except that it didn’t function. It was not in regular use.

Again she asked herself why. Nathan and Lee had the
en suite
shower and toilet. If they didn’t choose to share, Nathan could easily have stepped along the corridor. Evidently he didn’t, because all the toilet items were shop new.

She was convinced the room was used for something more sinister. The washing facility was just a bluff. Had to be.

She tried putting herself into Nathan’s situation. Suppose she were storing weapons on a big scale. Suppose it was common knowledge that she was an illegal supplier, known to the police as well as the criminal world. Wouldn’t she need a secret armoury tucked away in some part of the house no one would suspect? Suppose it appeared to be a bathroom. Suppose the bathroom was just a front.

An idea dawned.

A big, bold concept.

She was going to need a second inspection of the secret bathroom. And it had to be tonight, before dawn. After being woken in the night, people invariably sink into a deeper sleep. This basic physical reaction would apply to the minders, as well as Nathan and Lee. By defying her body clock and staying awake, Ingeborg could gain an advantage. The remaining hours of the night offered her the best opportunity of not disturbing the others—or being disturbed.

First challenge: how to escape from the tower room. The floor and walls were solid, the window too narrow to squeeze through.

What about the ceiling? Presumably she was in part of the original house, so the ceiling would be constructed of traditional
lath and plaster. Logically, this was the escape route. The room was at the top of a virtually free-standing tower with a conical tiled roof over it. She was certain she was the only inhabitant, so it was unlikely she’d be heard. She could scrape, scratch, hammer at the plaster to her heart’s content. But what with?

The ceiling was out of reach, about nine feet above floor level. She upended the latrine bucket and stepped on and off to test the extra height it would give her. Not enough. She tugged the blankets from the primitive camp bed and examined the wooden frame. Hinged at the centre and mounted on six folding legs, it would make a cumbersome battering ram, but it might do. It was not too heavy to lift. She grasped one end and hoisted it to the vertical. Balancing the frame on its end, she stepped on the bucket. Then she braced herself and thrust the bed upwards so that one corner struck the ceiling with a satisfying crunch at a point quite close to the wall.

Some powder came down.

She tried a second time. The noise was louder than she expected, a boom like a bass drum. To hell with that. You can’t make an omelette without cracking eggs, as Lee would say.

She began a regular pounding of the ceiling, hitting it with all the strength she could muster. She was glad of her state of fitness. The weight of the bed worked to her advantage as a destruction implement, but was hell for her back and biceps. And the hinged legs swung loose more than once and rapped her knuckles.

Thankfully, the plaster started coming down in chunks. She used one of the blankets to protect her head.

After fifteen minutes, the progress slowed. Not much more was shifting.

She paused and stared up. So near and yet so far. A sizeable dent had appeared, revealing some of the laths. A few small lumps of plaster hung down, attached to the animal hair once used as a binding agent. She’d removed about half an inch, and she was tiring with the effort to penetrate those close-packed strips of wood. She couldn’t hoist the
cumbersome thing to that level and she was tiring with the effort. She needed to get up there herself and force a way through, but how?

Before being locked in, she’d been subjected to another body search. This time the minder had enjoyed himself and it had been a revolting experience. He’d taken her phone, of course, and made sure she wasn’t armed. But in the process of running his hands over every curve and fold of her figure, he’d failed to check inside her shoes—where she had slipped the metal nail file she’d been using as a screwdriver in the bathroom.

Nail files aren’t designed to be cutting tools. This small round-ended strip of metal was impractical for working on the laths, but she had another use for it. The bed frame was held together by L-shaped angle plate brackets screwed into the lengths of wood. They were a handy size. If she could free one of them, she’d have a useful tool.

She lowered the bed to the floor and got to work with the nail file. Difficult. The four screws weren’t round-headed, like those in the bathroom. They were flat to the wood and difficult to shift. The curved end of the nail file got in the slot, but kept slipping out.

Resolved not to be beaten, she jammed the file into the door frame and snapped off the end with a kick of her heel. She was left with a flat tip that made a better tool. Now she had some purchase on the screw and got a little movement that with more effort became a forty-five degree turn and then more. Fortunately she had always had strength in her wrists. The other screws followed and the bracket was freed. As a tool it felt good in her hand. It was at least three inches along each side, thin galvanised steel.

The next task was to get up to a level where she could work on the ceiling, and the only way was by propping the bed against the wall and using it as a ladder, hoping the canvas slats would bear her weight. Removing the bracket had made it a distinctly unsafe structure.

For the present, the frame held together and she climbed
within reach of the damaged ceiling and got to work with her new tool. The laths were nailed to the undersides of the joists. They had to be forced downwards if possible. Get one out and the others should follow.

Whoever had made this ceiling had built it to last, using a strong bond. But by probing steadily with the bracket she eventually found a weak point and forced the end right through. By much jiggling and gouging she enlarged the slit and felt a small movement of the lath. She worked at it with such energy that the camp bed bounced against the wall. And at last the lath gave way and split at one end.

Elated, Ingeborg forced the strip of wood downwards, levered out the other nail, and threw it on the floor. With the space to reach through, the others were easy to remove.

In under ten minutes she had made a hole wide enough to scramble through. The bed slid down the wall a fraction when she raised herself to the next slat and it fell all the way and clattered on the floor when she made a grab for the exposed joist and hauled herself into the loft.

She paused briefly to enjoy the moment. She was crouching in the dark, cone-shaped loft.

The next task would be easier: removing tiles from the roof. In fact, she was thinking ahead to how she would cope so high up in the open air. She had a faint memory of the tower’s position at the corner of the house, but she couldn’t be certain of its structure. She needed to break out on the side closest to the rest of the building. Difficult to judge in a round tower.

She could only make the attempt and hope.

The bracket was the perfect tool for ripping through the felt underlay. She rapidly exposed a section between two rafters. Tiles that had resisted more than a century of gales and snow lifted easily from the battens supporting them. A square of grey light was revealed and cool air fanned her face. One row of tiles was nailed and needed some leverage. Two slid into the guttering, but she was able to scoop them up and stack them inside with the others. The opening got larger.

She had got lucky with her choice of where to break out.

An almost full moon gave her a view of the house, mostly in silhouette, with long shadows cast across the drive and lawns below, and streaks of silver light along the extremities picking out the angles of the roof and battlements. She was higher than she expected, but there wasn’t time to dwell on a potential attack of vertigo. Getting started was paramount.

She needed to reach the battlements that linked the tower to the main house and they were at least a body length below. Could she trust the guttering to take her weight?

A scary moment.

She wriggled through the opening and pressed her torso against the tiles still in place, keeping one hand curled under a rafter. Little by little, she allowed herself to slip down the angled roof and over the edge until gravity took over and she slithered into space, made a grab for the curved gutter and hung on. It creaked under the strain and shifted slightly. Please, she thought.

The next stage was crucial and the most dangerous yet. Her feet were some inches short of the nearest battlement, but hanging in mid-air from an ancient gutter she didn’t have the option of waiting.

She let go, dropped, slipped, made a grab and hugged the stonework. With a huge effort, she raised her knee and got astride the battlement as if it was a horse. Not an experience she would ever want to repeat.

Now it was a matter of working her way along the battlement to where it connected with the east-facing side of the main house, a relatively simple manuever. Somewhere below in the grounds a dog was barking. She couldn’t think how she had disturbed it from this far away, and anyway she had to keep going. Concentrating on her footing, she eased round each toothlike projection of the battlement until she reached a rampart and was able to get the support of a wall. The moonlight showed her a drainpipe just within reach. Once again she would need to put her trust in rusty Victorian fittings. There was no other way down.

This side of the house was bathed in moonlight and—wonder of wonders—she spotted a lattice window partly ajar. It was some nine feet below her and she thought she could reach it by transferring from the drainpipe to the ledge below the stone window frame. A chance to get into the house without triggering the alarm system would be a massive bonus.

Hand over hand, she lowered herself until she was level with the ledge. The distance between was not huge, but from her position hanging on to the drainpipe, it was no simple move. She couldn’t leap across. She had to stretch out her right leg as far as she dared and feel blindly for a toehold. At the third attempt her foot lodged against something solid. Without pause for thought, she pushed herself away from the pipe and got a grip on the top of the stone frame.

The sense of relief was profound. Her heart was racing.

The open window was the farthest of three. Still moving mainly by feel, she sidled across the ledge, got a hand inside the open window, leaned down, lifted the stay from its notch, and pulled the whole thing open.

She was so excited to have completed the move without mishap that it wasn’t until she was lowering herself into the house that she had an alarming thought: a window left open at night could well be in a bedroom.

It was.

The muffled sound of someone turning rapidly in bed was followed by a panicky, “Who’s that?”

Ingeborg froze. Just as she’d thought the gods were on her side, this had to happen.

The voice sounded female. One of the staff? She hoped so.

The woman in bed fumbled for a light switch.

Ingeborg still hadn’t moved. But when the light came on, she recognised the raised face of Stella, the housekeeper, the woman who had taken her to breakfast. Critical memories flashed through her brain. Stella had been reasonably friendly. She had no cause to make trouble now. She hadn’t appeared in the corridor when half the house found out that the secret bathroom had been invaded. She must have
slept through. In which case, she wouldn’t know Ingeborg was enemy number one and was supposed to be locked in the tower room.