‘Suffocation, I assume,’ said Phoebe. ‘Painted to death: I suppose we should have guessed it.’ She frowned. ‘Isn’t that from a film as well?’
‘Shirley Eaton in Goldfinger,’ said Michael. ‘Mortimer’s certainly been doing his homework.’
‘I still don’t see how he could have got in. The key’s been in my trouser pocket all night. Unless he’s got another copy, of course.’
‘This used to be Lawrence’s bedroom,’ said Michael. ‘Which means there’s a secret door somewhere, and a passage which leads downstairs. Come on, let’s see if we can find it.’
They circled the room, knocking on each of the panels to see if any of them gave off a hollow sound. When this produced no result, Michael unlocked the double-doored wardrobe which had been built into one of the walls, and peered inside.
‘Hello, what’s this?’ he shouted.
Phoebe ran over. ‘Have you found it?’
‘Well, I’ve found something.’
He reached into the wardrobe and pulled out a pair of garments — a jacket and trousers, in navy blue. On closer inspection they turned out to comprise the uniform of a police sergeant.
‘What did I tell you? That wasn’t a policeman at all. And look, here’s the rest.’
He handed Phoebe a peaked cap, and as he did so, a small glass vial was disclosed on the shelf behind it.
‘Potassium chloride,’ he read slowly, examining the label. ‘Have you ever heard of this?’
‘It’s a poison,’ said Phoebe. ‘Mortimer used to keep it in his medicine chest. Only the last time I saw it, it was full.’
She pointed at the level of the liquid, which now filled only about a quarter of the bottle.
‘Is it deadly?’
Phoebe nodded. ‘I remember now — the day he sent me away, just before I left, he was asking me where the syringes were. I didn’t think anything of it at the time. Perhaps this might have something to do with it.’
‘Could be.’
‘Hang on, then — I’ll go and check if they’re still there.’
She hurried off in the direction of her former employer’s sick chamber, where it took very little time to establish that at least one syringe had gone missing from its case. But when she returned to inform Michael of this news, a surprise awaited her. Roddy’s naked corpse was still lying on the bed, but otherwise the room was empty. Michael himself had vanished.
It had been instinct, more than anything else, which had drawn him to the elaborately gilt-framed mirror on the bedroom wall. A mirror was a doorway to the underworld: Michael had learned this by now, and so it was the work of only a few moments to slide his fingers behind the frame and ease it away from the wall. The mirror swung open on a stiff hinge, revealing a black, rectangular cavity; and as soon as he stepped through into the darkness, it closed behind him widiout a sound. When Michael tried to push it open again he could obtain no purchase, and he knew that, for the time being, the only way to go was forward. He could see and hear nothing; but there was a stale, musty smell in the air, and the bare-bricked walls to either side of him were dry and flaking. Very tentatively, he put one foot in front of the other, and immediately realized that he was standing at the top of a staircase; but he had descended only three steps when the floor beneath him levelled out, and he could sense that he had now entered upon a wider space. He took six paces to his right, and found himself touching a walclass="underline" this time it was smooth and plastered. He started edging around this wall, and after taking two changes of direction and bumping into something heavy — a table, perhaps — his hands touched upon the very thing that he had been praying for: a light switch. And, miraculously, it worked.
Michael was standing in a very narrow but high-ceilinged chamber, apparently built into the thickness of the wall. Besides the short staircase he had just descended, there was also a tiny doorway leading off to the left. Standing against one of the walls, but large enough to take up most of the available space, was a desk; and placed on top of it, a heavy, unwieldy set of radio apparatus. The desk and the radio were thick with dust, and in the four or five decades (so Michael hazarded) since they had last been touched, whole dynasties of spiders had been busy weaving blanket upon blanket of fine, powdery webs. The room was windowless; but a thin trail of aerial wire could be seen running up the wall and through a hole in the ceiling, presumably to emerge on the roof of the house itself.
‘So this is where you did it, you cunning devil,’ Michael muttered. ‘A regular litde back room boy!’
Impatiently he swept aside most of the dust and the cobwebs. The radio seemed to have been battery operated and, unsurprisingly, it did not respond when he tried flicking the various switches; but a quick search of the desk drawers proved more rewarding. There were maps, almanacs and railway timetables from the 1940s, along with a German — English dictionary and what appeared to be some sort of address book. Leafing through it, Michael came across not only BISCUIT, CHEESE AND CELERY but also the codenames of other double agents — CARROT, SWEETIE, PEPPERMINT, SNOW, DRAGONFLY — all with addresses and telephone numbers written alongside tliem. Personal details of many high-ranking figures from the military, the War Cabinet and the coalition government had also been noted down. A leather-bound accounting book was filled with parallel rows of figures in pounds and Deutschmarks, while a page at the back listed the names and addresses of several British and German bank accounts. And there were, in addition, some loose sheets of paper, one of which in particular caught his eye. It was headed:
L 9265–53 Sqn.
This, Michael knew, had been the number of Godfrey’s plane and squadron. Most of the figures which followed were incomprehensible to him, although ‘30/11’ was clearly an indication of the date, and some of the other numbers looked as though they might refer to positions of latitude and longitude. It was certain, in any case, that he had at last stumbled upon the proof of Lawrence’s treachery: his calculated betrayal of Godfrey for financial gain.
Michael was now torn between two conflicting impulses: to return to Phoebe (if he could) and explain his discovery, or to try his luck with the other doorway and continue exploring. For once, his spirit of adventure won the day.
The second exit led directly on to another staircase, this one steeper and more uneven than the last. By leaving the door to the little room wedged open, Michael found that he had just enough light to illuminate his progress, and before long he calculated that he had descended to the level of the ground floor, at which point the steps ended. He was now standing at the entrance to a narrow passage. Darkness began to encroach.
In the wall of the passage, after only a few paces, he came upon a wooden door. It was bolted at the top, but the mechanism was well oiled and seemed to have been in recent use. He opened it without difficulty, and found himself looking out, as he had expected, into the billiard room. Dawn would not come for an hour or two yet, but a certain amount of moonlight was peeping through gaps in the curtains, and in the shadows he could make out Mark’s corpse, which had now been covered with a bloodstained sheet. His severed arms still rose grotesquely, like savage totems, from the pockets of the billiard table. Michael shuddered, and was about to withdraw when he noticed a metallic glint at the table’s edge. It was Mark’s cigarette lighter. This was too useful to pass up, so he stole across the room and grabbed it before beating a grateful retreat into the tunnel, the entrance to which was seamlessly concealed behind a rack of billiard cues clamped to the oak panelling.