“Stay right behind me, love. Don’t go wandering off.”
“Oh, I have no intention of that.”
They took a route that joined up the jigsaw of the house a little more for Amelia, via a mixture of family entrances and servants’ doors, through rooms that looked vaguely familiar from her stoned wanderings with Tom. They came to a closed door, and Duncan checked their surroundings before opening it. Amelia followed him into a darkened room and yelped. There, on the floor, was a severed head.
Afakesevered head.
Duncan looked at her sharply, and she mouthed an apology. How loudly had she cried out?
They were in a bedroom draped with black velvet wallcoverings—not original—and a metal bed straight out of an old-school asylum. Fake candles in red holders glowed from a mantelpiece. The dark curtains were drawn.
The haunted house tour.
Duncan opened a large wooden armoire inset into a wall, and beckoned her. “The tunnel,” he whispered, parting a dark curtain at the back of it. She could just make out a narrow brick-walled passage. Tom’s Narnia. “Goes right out to the grounds. It’s set up to be all spooky-like, but it’s fake—for the visitors—so don’t be fooled. Nothing to fret about.” He stepped through. “Close the wardrobe behind you and stay quiet.”
“It’s very dark,” she whispered as she followed, unable to keep the fear from her tone. An icy dampness hung in the air, and a smell of wet brick. She had that feeling again that a handwas about to clamp on her shoulder. She’d left the flashlight Tom had given her in the priest hole.
“There’s a torch on my phone, I think,” Duncan said. She heard a swish, like he was pulling it from a pocket. The screen dimly lit his face as he hunched over it, his narrowed eyes almost disappearing into his eyebrows. “I forget how the blasted thing turns on.”
“Here, let me.” She grabbed it, aware she was being rude, but her fear instinct was ping-ponging off the walls like sonar.
He held the phone for a second before releasing it. She found the flashlight icon and switched it on. The light did little to dispel the gloom, though she could see the cobwebs were taped to the ceiling. Long, thin papery strips also hung down. Flypaper? Designed to stick to your face as you walk through? Ugh. Peoplepaidto do this?
Duncan took a step, and a fat dripping noise started. Something scratched at the wall, and she swung the light around, finding a small speaker. A cat’s strangled meow cried from it.
“Don’t worry, love,” Duncan said. “Silly old sound effects, nothing more.”
“I just don’t get why people…”
She turned back, accidentally shining the flashlight into Duncan’s eyes. Shivers crawled down her arms. The way the light snagged on his face… It reminded her of something. Something she couldn’t place but didn’t want to be reminded of.
The stern expression, the harsh beam throwing contours onto his features—she’d seen that look before, on that very face.
Under a miner’s headlamp.
Chapter 21
Tom
Tom ran down to the basement, fast and silent. So theyhadbeen wrong about the body. But then, why were the Pritchards so determined to hunt them down? For money, as they’d said in the forest? From where? From who?
Maybe the brothers were on a bad trip of their own. The important thing was that Duncan was alive, Amelia was safe, and within minutes they’d be on their way to the police station.
At the gun room, he shoved open the door. His boot crunched on the broken decanter glass, and he winced at the noise. He waited half a minute but heard only the abbey’s usual clunks and wheezes. Nothing he wouldn’t dismiss without a thought on a normal day. The anemic light of the old torch from the tree hut barely illuminated the cave-like space. He entered the code into the first safe. It double-beeped—an error. He tried it again. Double-beep. It was definitely the code Duncan had told him. He tried the second safe. Same result. And the third.
He leaned back against the last safe, swearing quietly. Duncan must have got the codes mixed up—he certainly hadn’t seemed himself. Today was the first time Tom had ever looked at him and seen an old man. And, yeah, he was objectively an old man. But his confused expression when Tom had startedtalking… It seemed at first as if Duncan hadn’t recognized Tom. Not an ideal time to lose your marbles.
Tom crept out of the room. Nothing stirred in the basement. Usually, he found the stillness of the house comforting, like a cathedral. Now it made the back of his neck crawl. The basement was a very different space from the adventure playground it had been in his childhood, where he and Eddie had set up their Thomas the Tank Engine set, or their Hot Wheels. He glanced at the storage alcove, frowning. There was no carpet back then—they’d raced their cars along timber planks slotted roughly over the dirt floor, occasionally crashing one down a gap. When had a stupidly valuable carpet been placed there? As Amelia had pointed out, his family hadn’t demonstrated much respect for valuable furnishings, but it was still odd.
He halted. Aware he needed to get back to Duncan and Amelia, he quickly doubled back and kicked aside a corner of the carpet. The old floorboards were underneath. He went to replace the carpet, and caught a glimmer of something between the planks, glinting in the low light. He picked it up—a gold cufflink, like the one in Duncan’s study, but dirty and missing its stone. He cradled the torch between his chin and shoulder, and fished into his jeans pocket for the emerald. It fit neatly into the setting. He turned the cufflink over in his palm. There were initials on the back.
“Shit,” he whispered.
He yanked back the carpet and knelt for a closer look. The packed-dirt floor underneath the boards had been recently dug up and turned over, leaving it pale brown rather than the dried-out gray you’d expect. He laid down the shotgun and lifted one of the planks. Fresh rake marks were visible along the dirt, where they hadn’t been flattened by the timber. Come to think of it, there had been a lot of dirt in the basement robot vac, alongwith the hair and the emerald. More than could be explained by muddy foot traffic.
Someone had been digging in here, the same night they saw the men carrying the rug.
He picked up the shotgun and went to sling the strap over his arm. A thought struck him. He tore it away, holding it at arm’s length while he turned it over. There, near the handle: a small engraving. The same initials as on the cufflink, worn almost smooth from decades of use.
