Still nothing. Tom would need to provoke him into engaging. “He was your best mate, Duncan.” Tom let a little emotion show in his voice, which wasn’t hard.
“Mate? My best mate? He was my boss, my ‘better’ and he never let me forget it, all those years.”
“He was loyal to you. He gave you everything.”
“He gave me the wages I was due, and he scrimped even on those. And what do I have to show for it? What does anyone have to show? A lifetime of hard labor. Not just one lifetime, either. My father, his father. All for what?”
The metallic scraping came again. Tom braced for the clunk but instead there was a low, thick thud—the hatch hitting the grass outside. Amelia had got it open. Tom had to buy her just a little more time.
“Why kill him when he’d kept food on the table all your life?” Tom called.
“The likes of you could never understand.”
There was a crunch—a boot hitting broken glass. Shit. Tom nosed the shotgun around the corner and fired another warning shot. His last. But he had to keep Duncan’s attention—and rifle—faced his way. Duncan released a booming volley. Tom flinched. It was wild, a chancer, hitting the walls and firing stone around like shrapnel. A chunk smacked into Tom’s knee. It hurt, but no harm done—except to his hearing. Tom peeped out, just as Duncan disappeared around the corner. A hollow clunk sounded, and echoed—Amelia, dropping the hatch behind her. For a second, Tom allowed his stinging eyes to close. She was away, but how much of a head start would she get? He had to force Duncan into finishing him off first.
Unarmed or not, it was time Tom took control of the situation. He and Amelia had been playing the mouse. Time to play the cat.
“My grandfather’s cufflinks,” Tom called, retreating up the stairs. “The night he went missing, he was dressed for dinner. He always wore cufflinks with a suit. One fell out the other night in the basement, when you were moving him. Did you know that? It had his initials on it. You found the other one, didn’t you? Kept it. Too cheap to toss it, but too scared to hock it?”
Another volley cracked out, thwacking into the walls. Hot pain blasted through Tom’s left ankle. A hunk of debris had smashed into it, slicing deep into the skin just above his boot. He sucked in air through his teeth. You could tell how bad an injury was by how long it took for the initial bolt of pain to pass. This was … not good. Blood dripped onto the stone step. He went to wipe it off. It was never wise to let on to your enemy that you were wounded.
Or … maybe he could make it work in his favor.
Quickly, he smeared the blood over the step.
Another burst of fire, closer. Tom yelled, as if in great pain, and scrambled up the steps towards the kitchen.
Amelia
After Amelia hauled herself out of the tunnel and dropped the hatch closed, she spent way too long trying to decide whether to weigh it down with something. Bricks? Rocks? But then she’d be trapping Tom inside with Duncan. Another burst of gunfire decided it. She sprinted away. Better if Duncan followed her—once she’d had a chance to take cover.
Not that she had any idea where to hide.Duncan knows every blade of grass by name, Tom had said. Should she set out for the village? More gunshots boomed. They seemed to reverberate through the ground under her feet. Was that a yell of pain—from Tom?
She needed to lure Duncan out. But how? What could possibly—? Her gaze snagged on the brick wall that enclosed the kitchen garden. The air raid siren.He can’t stand the sound of it, Xanthe had said. Plus, there was a chance it’d be heard in the village—by Xanthe, maybe, or the cop. He might not want to risk letting it wail for too long, in case someone came out to check. Worth a try.
She ran to a wrought-iron gate inset into the brick wall and slipped inside the garden. Another burst of gunfire—louder, less muffled—followed by an agonized scream. Tom. Definitely Tom. She flattened against the brick, her chest tightening.Stay focused.
She would have to cross in front of the kitchen windows to get to the siren. If Duncan was in the kitchen, he’d have a clear shot. She crept to the side of the windows and peeked in. No movement. She took a longer look. Definitely empty. A weak light spilled in from the corridor. She was about to pull back when something caught her eye: a dark-red puddle spreading across the flagstones, right under the arched entranceway. Blood—a lot of it. There was a boot print stepping out of it. Tom’s?
She fisted her hands by her sides, fighting to control her breath. There was no time to freeze. Even less time to freak out. Their survival might well be all up to her.
Once she switched on the siren, she’d need to hightail it, in case Duncan came out of the kitchen door that led to the garden. She scurried past the window, keeping to the overgrown grass beside the pebbled path to muffle her tread, and stopped at the post with the siren on it. Xanthe had mentioned a switch…Amelia located a small metal box attached to the post and tugged it open, her hands shaking. Inside was a single lever. She flicked it on. Nothing happened. Just as she started looking for another solution, fans began to spin inside the twin turbines.
Now to get clear before it gave away her position. If Tom was badly wounded, she needed to find him—stop the bleeding, get him somewhere safe. As the siren began to hum, she took off at a run, heading for an open gate at the other end of the walled garden. She could sneak back in through the hatch, if necessary. She flew through the gate, turned, and thumped straight into a man’s chest. He grabbed her upper arms. She looked up, hoping against hope to see Tom’s face, but it was … a cyclops.
She yelped, struggling, but she was pinned. As she stared at the hideous single eye, it morphed into two regular eyes. Not a cyclops—a man, wearing a dark coat. As the hallucination dissolved, so did the one in her memory, of the cyclopses carrying the carpet.
This man was the other cyclops.
Tom
Tom crept into the entrance hall, his fast-swelling ankle throbbing out of time with the echoing tick of the grandfather clock. Sucking up the pain, he synced his breathing with the clock—in for three seconds, out for three. Running was no longer an option, that much was clear.
Outside, the air raid siren wound down to silence. Was Amelia trying to raise the alarm? He was confident Duncan was still in the house, following the trail Tom had left, but he’d swear he heard a cry. An animal, hopefully.
He quietly opened one of the main entrance doors, and then silently limped back across the tiled floor, this time taking care to leave no blood trail. He backed in behind the plinth with the broken bust. From here, he’d spot Duncan before Duncan saw him.
He pictured the old groundskeeper sweeping through the rooms along the corridor. First the kitchen, where he’d see the pool of blood—actually a mixture of real blood from Tom’s meaty ankle wound, and the remains of the blood-red Château Delphine that had spooked Amelia when they were cleaning up. The trail of bloody footsteps and droplets would lure Duncan along the corridor, through the antechamber, and into the great hall. If the trick had worked, he’d assume Tom was mortally wounded.
