The climb seemed to go on forever. I stopped to listen: There was still no sound but that of the bees.
Up and up I went again, shifting my feet carefully from one wooden rung to the next, clutching at the crosspieces with fingers that were already beginning to grow numb.
As my eyes at last came level with the arched opening, the interior of the upper chamber came into view. A figure was hunched over the shrine to Robin Ingleby: the same figure that had fled the farmhouse.
On its knees, its back turned to me, the small apparition was dressed in a white and navy sailor suit with a middy collar and short trousers; the waffle soles of its Dunlop rubber boots were almost in my face. I could have reached out and touched them.
My knees began to tremble violently — threatening to buckle and send me plummeting down into the stony abyss.
"Help me," I said, the words brought up suddenly, inexplicably, and surprisingly, from some ancient and reptilian part of my brain.
A hand reached out, white fingers seized mine, and with surprising strength, hauled me up to safety. A moment later I found myself crouched, safe but trembling, face-to-face with the specter.
While the white sailor suit, with its crown-and-anchored jacket, and the Dunlop boots undoubtedly belonged to the dead Robin Ingleby, the strained and haggard face that stared back at me from beneath the beribboned HMS Hood hat was that of his tiny mother, Grace.
"You," I said, unable to restrain myself. "It was you."
Her face was sad, and suddenly very, very old. It was hard to believe that there remained in this woman a single atom of Grace Tennyson, that happy, outgoing girl who had once so cheerfully conquered the wired innards of Peter the Great, the silver samovar at the St. Nicholas Tea Room.
"Robin's gone," she said with a cough. "The Devil took him."
The Devil took him! Almost the same words Mad Meg had used in Gibbet Wood.
"And who was the Devil, Mrs. Ingleby? I thought for a while it was Rupert, but it wasn't. It was you, wasn't it?"
"Rupert's dead now," she said, touching her fingers to her temples as if she were dazed.
"Yes," I said. "Rupert's dead. He was the Punch and Judy man at the seaside, wasn't he? You had arranged to meet him there, and Robin saw you together. You were afraid he would tell Gordon."
She gave me a half-canny smile.
"At the seaside?" she said with a chuckling cough. "No, no — not at the seaside. Here ... in the dovecote."
I had suspected for some time that the single set of footprints — the ones that had been found five years ago, leading up Jubilee Field to Gibbet Wood — had been those of Grace Ingleby, carrying the dead Robin in her arms. In order to leave only his footprints, she had put on her child's rubber boots. They were, after all, the same size as her own. As if to prove it, she was wearing them now.
Five years after his death, she was still dressing up in Robin's clothing, trying desperately to conjure her son back from the dead. Or to atone for what she had done.
"You carried him to the wood and hung him from a tree. But Robin died here, didn't he? That's why you've made this his shrine, and not his bedroom."
How matter-of-fact it sounded, this nightmare conversation with a madwoman! I knew that if ever I made it safely home to Buckshaw, I was going to be in need of a long, hot, steaming bath.
"I told him to stay down," she said rather petulantly. "'Go back to the house, Robin,' I called out. 'You mustn't come up here.' But he wouldn't listen. Little boys are like that sometimes. Disobedient."
She coughed again, and shook her head ruefully. "'I can do a trick with the rope!' he shouted back. He'd been playing cowboy all day with a rope he'd found in a shed."
Just as Sally had said. Grace must be telling me the truth.
"He climbed up here before we could stop him. Rupert was furious. He grabbed at Robin to give him a shake, but his iron brace slipped on the bricks. Robin — "
Now, silent tears were coursing down her face.
"Fell," I said. There was no need to elaborate.
"Fell," she repeated, and the way she dragged out the word made it echo from the bricks, hovering grotesquely in the round chamber: a sound I would never forget.
With it came an idea.
"Was it Rupert who thought of the Punch and Judy story? That Robin had been playing out the scene with Punch and the hangman?"
"Where did you hear that?" she demanded, suddenly lucid, canny. I thought of Mad Meg's smile in Gibbet Wood; these two women had so much in common.
"Your evidence to the jury at the inquest," I answered. "It's public knowledge."
I did not think it necessary to add that I had heard it from Sally.
"He made me do it," she said, wiping her eyes on the sleeve of the sailor suit, and I realized for the first time how much she looked like Robin. Once noticed, the resemblance was eerie.
"Rupert told me no one would ever know. Robin's neck was broken in the fall, and if we ... if I ..."
A shudder ran through her entire body.
"If I wouldn't do as he ordered, he'd tell Gordon what had been going on between us. I'd be the one to be punished. Gordon's quick with his fists, you know."
As was Rupert. I'd seen the bruises he left on Nialla's arm. Two quick-tempered men. And rather than fighting it out between them, they both had made punching bags of their women.
"Was there no one you could talk to? The vicar, for instance?"
This seemed to set her off, and she was racked by a siege of coughing. I waited until she had finished.
"The vicar," she said, gasping for breath, "is the only one who has made these past five years bearable."
"He knew about Robin?" I could hardly believe it!
"A clergyman's lips are sealed," she said. "He's never breathed a word. He tried to come to Culverhouse Farm once a week, just to let me talk. The man's a saint. His wife thought he was — "
"In love with you."
She nodded, squeezing her eyes tight shut, as if she were in excruciating pain.
"Are you all right?" I asked.
"Wait a few minutes," she said, "and I shall be fine."
Her body was crumbling before my eyes, tipping towards the opening into the shaft.
I grabbed at her arm, and as I did so, a glass bottle that she had been clutching in her fist fell to the brick floor and bounced away, clinking, into the corner, sending a pigeon clattering up towards the opening. I dragged Grace into the center of the chamber and sprang after the bottle, which had come to rest in a mound of ancient guano.
The label told me all I needed to know: Calcium Cyanide, it said. Poison.
Rat poison! The stuff was in common farm use, particularly on those farms whose henhouses attracted vermin. There was still one of the white tablets in the bottom. I removed the stopper and smelled it. Nothing.
Grace was now flat on the floor, twitching, her limbs flailing.
I dropped to my knees and sniffed her lips. The scent of bitter almonds.
The tablets of calcium cyanide, I knew, as soon as they met the moisture of her mouth, throat, and stomach, would produce hydrogen cyanide, a toxic gas that could kill in five minutes.
There was no time to waste. Her life was in my hands. I almost panicked at the thought — but I didn't.
I took a careful look round, registering every detail. Aside from the candle, the shrine, the photograph of Robin, and his toy sailboat, there was nothing in the chamber but rubble.
Well, not quite nothing. On one wall was an ancient watering device for the birds: an inverted glass bulb and tube whose gravity feed kept a dish full for the pigeons to dip their beaks into. From the clarity of the water, it seemed as if Grace had recently filled it.