I was in a cellar, certainly, a big cellar with arched stone alcoves all about me, filled with pyramids of dusty claret, fine brandies, vintage port. But the cellar door, naturally enough, was firmly locked on all these riches. And there was nothing I could see inside that would help me open it.
Nine
Of course, I was safe enough now, I realised, in the locked cellar. The police, if they’d bothered to check it at all, must have done so some time before. On the other hand, unless Alice came to fetch some of the fine wines, which was unlikely, I was incarcerated here. Letting myself down on the dumb-waiter had been easy enough: the pressure on the mechanism had not been extreme. But tugging the whole thing upwards would be another matter altogether: the ropes and pulleys would probably take the strain on any return journey, but I would hardly have the strength for such continuous effort.
I looked around me more carefully in the light of the single dim bulb. On a table by the door was a cellar book, together with several empty decanters, a few tulip-shaped wine glasses, a candle for checking the vintage colours and another of those old pub-counter cork extractors, a mate to the one I’d seen upstairs in the butler’s pantry. And, of course, there was the wine itself, carefully but generously chosen, with champagnes, ports, sherries and brandies to go with it.
I looked in one of the stone alcoves: Tättinger. Blanc de Blanc, 1967. The bottles were held in a metal rack here, given their bulbous shape. Further along was a great pyramid of Haut-Brion, 1961 — and beyond that there were a lot of Burgundies: Chambolle Musigny, 1971 and Les Charmes from the same year. There was some superb drinking here, I could see that, with all the necessary decanters, glasses and a most suitable corkscrew to start things moving. But there was no one to share it with …
And then, to one side of the dumb-waiter, I noticed two bell-pushes that had been let into the wall. One was marked ‘Pantry’ — the other ‘Smoking Room Tower’. Of course: having loaded the clarets and vintage port into the serving-hatch in the old days, the cellarman would thus warn the staff on the floors above to expect the lift’s arrival.
If I waited here for an hour or so, until I was sure the police had left — and if the bells still worked — I could write a message on a page of the cellar book, put it in the lift, haul it up and sound the alarm. There was a good chance that Alice would hear it, either in the pantry or up in her tower.
I tore a page out of the back of the cellar book. There was a ballpoint next to it. ‘Am locked in the wine cellar,’ I wrote, and then to make sure she saw the piece of paper I stuck it onto the partly released wire surrounding the cork on a bottle of Tättinger. Then I added a P.S.: ‘Come on down and join me!’
I was rather pleased with myself.
About an hour later I sent the lift upwards, straight up to the tower first, and rang the bell. I couldn’t hear if it sounded or not, that high up. Nothing happened in any case. So I brought the lift down then, to the pantry level on the first floor, and rang the ‘Pantry’ bell. Now I heard the sound, quite clearly, not far above me. And a few minutes later, after I’d rung a second time, the hatch doors opened and I heard the champagne bottle being taken out.
‘Alice?’ I called up the shaft. ‘I’m here!’
But there was no reply. She was obviously coming down to me straight away. I was saved.
I stood by the cellar door, waiting expectantly. Some time passed. Eventually a key was pushed into the Yale lock outside and the door finally opened.
‘Alice!’ I said.
But it wasn’t Alice. It was a very large, almost gross, woman in a pink twin-set and tight skirt, smartly got up, with too much powder and lipstick, who held the door open for me. Her size made her seem older. But she couldn’t have been more than forty. Her face was quite creased in fat, but the brown eyes were sharp and small and set close together, like chocolate buttons on a big sponge cake. She was large … Of course, I realized then: she was the same woman I’d seen spying on Alice down by the lake a week before.
I said nothing. I was speechless.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said entirely self-possessed. ‘Miss Troy must have gone outside. I’m the housekeeper, Mrs Pringle. I just got back. I heard the bell ring.’
‘Stupid of me,’ I said, for want of anything better to say. ‘I–I locked myself in.’ I thought I might bluff it out. ‘I was looking …’ I turned and gestured vaguely at the wine behind me.
‘Yes, of course,’ the big woman said easily, sympathetically. ‘You’re not the first person to get locked in here: the door, it swings to without your noticing.’ She had a London, not a Cotswolds voice; not Cockney London or South Kensington either, but the voice of someone trying to rise from one of the grey areas in between. Then to my great surprise she said, ‘You’ll be Mr Conrad, from London. Miss Troy said you’d be coming down some time this week. She must have shown you your room already. I don’t know where she is at the moment, out round the park looking for you, I expect. She wasn’t here when I got back.’
I followed Mrs Pringle along the basement passage. She clipped along the flagstones in her high-heeled shoes, with the neat-sounding rhythms of a Guardsman on parade, though she looked, on her small feet with her body rising out dramatically above, like a ninepin upside down. She seemed a very competent, authoritative woman, almost too familiar with her employers, I thought. But I assumed this might just be a reflection of an American domestic equality imposed on the household by its new owners.
We walked up some steps and round into the big kitchen. A kettle was already singing on the great black range.
‘Yes, Miss Troy can’t be very far away. I’m just getting tea ready. Perhaps if you’d like to take a look round the gardens? I’m sure you’ll find her. I’ll serve tea in the small drawing-room.’
‘Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’
‘Not at all. It’s no trouble at all. And I hope you enjoy your stay here.’ She turned and took some cake tins from a cupboard. A big currant loaf was already out on the pinewood table, several slices cut and gone from it. Mrs Pringle obviously liked her tea early, I thought.
I left the kitchen and went out by the back door and through the yard into the parkland to the west of the house. I was dazed, light-headed. Did Mrs Pringle really think I was Mr Conrad? And who was this Mr Conrad?
The grounds to the west of the house sloped away in a series of formal Versailles-style herbaceous terraces, enclosed with box hedges. Romantic, mythical statuary — the Muses, the Four Seasons — lined a broad flight of steps leading down to an ornamental pond at the bottom, where a big Neptune fountain sent rainbows of fine spray from the mouth of a dolphin up into the dazzling summer sky. Alice, her back to me, was walking slowly round the circumference of the pond.
I surprised her with my footsteps. She turned, twenty yards away, and I’m sure she would have run towards me, full of relieved welcome, had I not whispered across the space to her: ‘Be careful! She’s probably watching.’
‘What happened? What happened?’ Alice was like a child again, a desperate child whose companion in some frightful mischief has just returned from a visit to the headmaster’s study.
I told her all that had happened. We walked slowly round the pond and then moved further away, almost out of sight of the house, towards the croquet and tennis courts beyond the formal gardens. There was a dry-smelling wooden summerhouse here, with steamer chairs, where we sat down, completely hidden from any view.
‘Well,’ I said, when I’d finished my tale, ‘what do you think? About Mrs Pringle?’