After Annabelle left, St. Just turned at last, with palpable reluctance, to the document in which Magretta had captured her experiences on the night of the murder. It was written in purple ink on the castle's stationery, in a large, loopy handwriting that ran chaotically over the pages, at times running off the edge. Holding his head in his hands, he read:
Following a repast of pink salmon, plucked new that day from a sky-blue Lothian loch, and not too overcooked, I repaired to the library to announce my intention to retire for the night. It was indeed a dark and stormy night of the sort described by the deeply misunderstood and underappreciated Bulwer-Lytton and-dare I say it now?-shivers of apprehension raced up and down my spine, in formation, like jack-booted thugs. I knew, in the way a sensitive spirit such as mine will know (my mother was psychic), that Death had come to dwell at Dalmorton Castle.
Filled with a dreadful and eerie foreboding, then, I bravely went to my room to work on Madness and Love on the Moors (working title for my much-anticipated new novel, which will soon be available online and in fine bookshops everywhere. It is the sequel to my best-selling Death Be Not Plowed. I am told my novels make the ideal holiday gift).
Still, upon retiring to my chambers, the feeling of doom would not leave me. I also had a killing head, a migraine of the worst sort. Nonetheless, after laboring at my profession for nearly an hour against these terrible odds, I looked by chance out the window where the storm raged with the sound and fury of souls in purgatory-but I could see nothing amiss. No creature stalked abroad that cursed, cursed night.
But then! Then! At the stroke of ten I thought I heard a prowler trying to break into Kimberlee's room. I clothed myself in green velvet, the color of emeralds in sunlight, and out I crept into the hallway and over to Kimberlee's door. Hesitantly, I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked again. The silence of the dead reigned, apart from the crashing crescendo of the storm and the throbbing pulsation of my heart. Then it was that I felt a ghostly presence, an eerie sense of Someone or Something from Another Dimension. Turning, I saw a vaporous form, draped in white. It was-no more and no less-the Ghost of Dalmorton Castle. I now know it had come to warn me of Kimberlee's impending death.
But what could I do? The figure turned to depart. I called after it. "Wait!" I cried. "Wait!" But the dead need pay no heed to the living.
Quite exhausted now, minutes later I was asleep, sleeping the dreamless sleep of the just.
There was more, but apart from a dramatic description of her discovery of the body, in which she glossed over her shrieking fit of hysteria that had roused most of the castle, it amounted to a rambling promotional spiel on the inspiration for her books. He sighed, putting the sheets back in his pocket. He noted the "killing head" didn't quite go with the dreamless sleep, nor with the fact she apparently felt well enough later to scamper girlishly about the castle.
Precious little real help there, he thought. Curious omission she'd made, though. He dallied awhile, a great weariness washing through him, but in the end he knew it would have to be "once more into the breach" that night. He still needed to talk with Mrs. Elksworthy. Even though he felt he could rely on the thoroughness of the Scottish detectives' report of their interview with her, there was no real substitute for the face-to-face interview.
For now, he decided to skip Magretta, feeling somehow he had just spent many, many hours in her company. But the thought of Magretta and the desire to avoid her, of course, made her manifest. Her voice rang out as he crossed the lobby.
"There you are, my darling Inspector!" she cried. "I have solved the crime! With a little help from dear, dear Portia. You simply must come with me and see."
Latching onto his arm, she began to pull him toward the library.
"Wait until you see!"
Three women were in the book-lined room: Donna Doone, Mrs. Elksworthy, and Portia, but he was surprised to find them crowded behind the small service bar with the bartender. They all stood staring raptly into what appeared to be a large storage room behind a door-a door disguised as a bookcase. The good-sized area-several meters square-held the overflow from the bar: cases of beer and cartons of liquor were stacked against the stone walls.
"Do you see what it is, Inspector?" asked Magretta.
"A storage room?" he hazarded.
All four of them shook their heads. Portia said, "Look closer. Behind those boxes against the far wall."
He stepped inside, stooping under a doorway clearly intended for shorter medieval-era frames. The area was illuminated by a single bare electric bulb overhead. Peering about, he saw that the boxes Portia indicated in fact stood some way out from the wall. Behind them was yet another wooden door. Opening it, he was startled to find himself in a large broom cupboard stocked with cleaning supplies. He twisted the inside handle of that door and ended up in the hallway outside the library. On either side of him were doors to the loos, his and hers.
There was something odd… He turned and looked from side to side. The broom cupboard didn't appear to be as wide as the bar storage room, as would have been expected. Then he realized there was yet another door to his left, disguised by shelving like the one in the bar. Behind it he found narrow stone steps leading down. A failsafe escape, in case the hiding place was discovered. He made his way back into the bar area.
"As you can see, you wouldn't realize there was a room behind that wall in the bar," said Portia. "There's a switch hidden in one of the 'books' that you have to push to release the door. What it is, is a priest's hole."
St. Just addressed Randolph, the young bartender.
"Those steps lead where?"
"There's a passage runs under Reception. The exit is a door into the hallway near the bottle dungeon-the hallway guests take to get to their rooms."
"How widely known is this?"
"Not widely." Randolph had a shock of auburn hair that seemed to be standing straight up from his scalp at the sheer excitement of it all. "We found more than one couple using it as, how would you say, a trysting place over the years. You know the sort of thing. Forbidden pleasures. There's still mention of the priest's hole in the castle's marketing materials, but staff have been instructed for some years to keep quiet about its exact location. The tunnel isn't mentioned at all."
He added: "The loos were installed when Dalmorton became a hotel… they weren't part of the original construction, of course. They just built them out into that wide hallway."
St. Just turned to Portia. "How did you happen to find it?"
She tapped a thin, leather-bound volume sitting on top of the bar. The title, in Gothic script, read: Dalmorton through the Ages.
"There's a complete description in here-it's a family history written in 1925 by a younger son of the castle owners. I found the book misfiled on the botany shelf. I asked Randolph here about it."
Magretta said, "I think it has to be Lord Easterbrook."
"I really don't follow that, Ms. Sincock," said St. Just.
"He's the only one unaccounted for, isn't he? He went missing immediately after dinner. He could have positively stolen into the broom cupboard, nipped to the dungeon, and awaited his chance to attack Kimberlee."
It was Portia who said, "But what on earth would have been the point, Magretta? He could have come down from his room or anywhere else with little risk of being seen by anyone on his way to the bottle dungeon. We, after all, were all in here. What this really means is no one of us has much of an alibi now."
St. Just nodded. It put a whole new light on things. Anyone who knew about the underground passageway could nip out on the pretext of using the facilities, race over to the dungeon to meet Kimberlee, and scurry back, avoiding being spotted in the lobby. And all without the inebriated crowd noticing the absence.
Easterbrook was beside the point. Or was the point-for Magretta-to implicate the one person whose whereabouts were completely unverifiable, apart from her own? In any event, he'd have to get Moor's forensics team to have a look down there.
He turned at the sound of a grunt from across the room. B. A. King, who had apparently taken up a permanent position in the library, was starting to rally, or perhaps the exact phrase was, emerge from his stupor on the sofa. He staggered over to the bar with his empty glass.
"Just a splash more," he told the bartender. "Maybe two."
St. Just, turning to Magretta, said, "Leaving aside your supernatural adventures of Saturday night, I'd like to ask you a few questions about your little alibi."
"Oh, yes? What an enjoyable exercise I found that to be, Inspector. My training as a mystery writer, of course, has made me frightfully observant. And to have the opportunity to express my deepest-"
"It might be truer to say your training as a mystery writer has taught you the art of invention."
She inclined her head graciously. "Quite true, quite true! I am renowned for my imagination! But I assure you in this case-"
"In this case, you've been feeding the police a pack of lies. The opacity of the document you handed us, that farrago of nonsensical invention, was designed to conceal your true whereabouts at the time, was it not?"
Gracious pose forgotten, she began to play nervously with the scarf at her neck.
"I beg your pardon?" Then, recovering swiftly, "How dare you?"
"How dare you lie to the police?"
"I never-"
He decided to chance his arm with a bluff.
"Before you say anything further, I will warn you-you were seen."
At that, she astonished him by turning and fleeing from the room. She was surprisingly fast on her feet and was already in the hallway by the bottle dungeon when he caught up with her. But she was no longer running by that point, merely waiting for him to catch up.
"Not in front of the others," she said. "I beg you."
"Someone saw you that night."
"It was that Florie, wasn't it? She should learn to mind her own business. You're right, I… left some things out of my account."
"The laptop," he said.
"The laptop."