At that moment, a bell sounded and the clock above the mantelpiece lit up. Over some sort of tannoy system, a voice intoned: ‘Assemble the pieces to begin the next chapter.’
‘That’s not much to go on,’ Hannah griped.
‘No,’ Jude agreed. ‘I guess we should start searching for anything that looks like it comes from a jigsaw.’
They scoured the room for puzzle pieces but came up with nothing. When three full minutes had disappeared off the clock, Hannah murmured .?.?. ‘Why “begin the nextchapter”? Do you think this could have something to do with books?’ She was clutching what looked like a torn-off corner from the page of a novel.
‘Oh my god, you arebrilliant,’ Jude said. ‘I bet there are more scraps like this. What about in the fireplace? In the desk drawers? On the window ledge?’ Between them, and in less than a minute, they’d found four more chunks of text.
They laid them out on the surface of the desk, aware they still had some missing but keen to try and solve the clue as soon as possible. Three of their five paper fragments connected together: a long, horizontal piece and two square-ish ones. Joined up, they roughly formed the shape of a number seven.
‘Ay me!For aught that I could ever read.?.?.’ Jude said, his eyes focused on the top scrap. He cast his gaze over the others and read the remaining words in order: ‘hear by tale or history .?.?. love never did run smooth’.
‘Is that Shakespeare? It sounds like it is,’ Hannah said.
Jude rushed over to the bookcase. ‘Bollocks. This whole thing is full of Shakespeare plays.’ He began pulling books off the shelves and opening them at random. ‘Have you any idea which play that quote’s from?’
Hannah groaned. After a pause, she repeated, then managed to complete the line from memory: ‘The courseof true love never did run smooth! I’m sure that’s fromA Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ she said. ‘We did it in year nine. Does that sound right?’
Jude reached for the play, which was on the very top shelf of the bookcase.
‘Yes!’ he cried. ‘Amazing work.’ Inside the dusty cover of the book was their next clue.
While a further thirty minutes of their allotted hour elapsed, Jude and Hannah managed to complete three more puzzles: a mathematical one, which Jude solved with characteristic speed, and then a geography question, which involved following visual clues that eventually led them to open up the globe on the head teacher’s desk. Then, they faced another numerical challenge – but this was really an art-themed colour-matching exercise, which Jude would never have realised if Hannah hadn’t been with him.
They deduced that the final clue required them to identify a historic battle, and the year in which it had happened. Guesswork wasn’t going to help them, Jude surmised; there were far too many battles and dates to choose from. ‘I think it’s something Tudor-ish,’ Hannah said. ‘We had the Shakespeare play, the artworks in the last clue were all from that sort of era. And the answer to the geography question was America—’
‘Where Tudor explorers tried to set up a colony,’ Jude finished. ‘And look – isn’t that a portrait of Henry VII?’ He pointed at the doorway, above which sat a gilt-framed image of a serene-looking man in a black hat.
Hannah moved closer and looked up at it. ‘No, I don’t think it is. But it might be Richard III .?.?.?’
‘Yeah? OK,’ Jude said. She’d always been better at history than him. ‘Which battle are we looking for, then? And is one of those textbooks likely to help us?’
‘Yes!’ Hannah said brightly, picking up a dishevelled old volume from the stack on the table beside her. ‘And I reckon it’s the Battle of Bosworth we’re after.’ She opened the back of the book and began poring over the index.
‘Fourteen eighty-five!’ she shouted. ‘That’s the code to get out. The year of the battle Richard III lost – the start of the Tudor era.’
Jude launched himself across the room and punched 1, 4, 8 and 5 into the keypad beside the door, which immediately unlocked. The timer above the fireplace froze as they burst back into the corridor, which was entirely deserted. They’d escaped from the room with nineteen minutes and forty-two seconds to spare – and they were definitely the first team out.
‘You arecompletelyincredible,’ Jude heard himself say, as he swept Hannah into a hug he one hundred per cent hadnotthought through. ‘I couldn’t have done that with anyone else. Never so well, or so fast.’ Forgetting himself entirely, he kissed the top of her head, greedily inhaled the fragrance of her hair and lifted her off her feet.
She was laughing, similarly unguarded, and buried her face in his neck. A second later, he felt the brush of her lips there – the slow, deliberate motion of her mouth on his skin – and thought he might die.
He set her back down but kept her close, encased in his arms, chasing her lips with his. They were kissing again, and it waseverything: hot and hungry and too much andnot enough.
Hannah sighed – almost moaned – and it made him want to press her into the wall and kiss hermore, deeper and harder until—
She pulled her face away from his, flushed and panting, eyes wild.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said immediately, more than a little breathless himself. ‘I’msorry. I shouldn’t have – I know you said—’
‘It’s OK,’ Hannah said, placing a hand on his forearm. ‘That was all me.’
‘It wasn’t,’ he protested. ‘Hannah, I—’
Jude heard the sound of a door opening, then a throat clearing from a couple of metres away. Joe had just emerged from a room further down the corridor, and Ed was close behind him.
Hannah stepped away from Jude and shoved her hands in her pockets – seemingly keen to avoid awkward questions from her brother, whose view was currently blocked by his fiancé. Joe’s expression was one of barely concealed triumph, which seemed odd given he’d just discovered that he and Ed had lost the escape room game.
