Footsteps in the Dark Read online

  He sat for a few minutes trying to collect his thoughts. ‘Poor kid!’ he said. ‘Ghastly for you. And a fat lot of good I’ve been to you!’

  She laid her cheek against his arm. ‘You’re here, and that’s all I care about. You don’t know what it was like to be alone. At least we’re together now.’

  ‘If only my head didn’t ache so much I might be able to think,’ he said. He looked round, and blinked. ‘Where the hell are we?’ he said. ‘Electric light?’

  She glanced up at the bulb that had caught his attention. ‘So it is. I haven’t had time to notice it till now. Then we can’t be in the Priory, can we?’

  He got up, and began to move round the small room. It was like a square cave cut out of solid stone, all except the door which was made of thick wood. ‘No window,’ he said. ‘We must be underground.’ He went to the door, and slipping his hand sideways between two of the bars of the grille, tried to push back the shutter by inserting a finger into one of the ventilation holes. He could not move it, nor could he manage to see anything through the holes.

  ‘If we’re underground that accounts for the coldness and the smell of damp,’ Margaret said. ‘Peter – you don’t think – they’re going to leave us here – to starve?’

  ‘Of course not,’ he said instantly. He stood by the door, listening. ‘That noise,’ he said. ‘That’s a machine and an electric one, or I’ve never heard one!’ He stared across at his sister, dawning suspicion in his eyes. He seemed about to speak, then checked himself, and went up to one of the walls, and closely inspected the stone blocks that formed it. ‘I believe we’re under the cellars,’ he said. ‘I’m no geologist, but this looks to me exactly the same sort of stone as that one that moved and we sealed up. We are in the Priory!’

  ‘Right under the ground?’ she asked. ‘Below the cellars even?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but I think we must be. The place feels like a tomb, much more so than the cellars did.’ He looked round again. ‘Why, what fools we’ve been not to think of it! Didn’t those old monks often have underground passages leading from the monastery to the chapel?’

  ‘Yes, I believe they did,’ she said. ‘You think that’s where we are? But this is a room!’

  ‘Cut, if I’m not much mistaken, in the foundations of the house. I don’t know much about monasteries, but I suppose the monks must have had a use for an underground room or so. Storing valuables in times of stress, and all that sort of thing.’

  ‘But the light!’ she objected. ‘There’s no electricity at the Priory.’

  ‘It must be worked by a plant. Good God!’

  ‘What?’ she said quickly.

  ‘At the Bell! That big plant I saw there! But it can’t possibly…’ He broke off, utterly bewildered.

  ‘Did you see a plant there? You never told me.’

  ‘I forgot about it. It was one day when Charles and I were there. I got into the engine-room, and I was just thinking what a ridiculously big machine it was for the work it had to do when Spindle hustled me out. Yes, by Jove, and I wondered at the time why he seemed so upset at finding me there. But Wilkes gave a plausible sort of explanation, and I never thought any more about it. Why, good Lord, do you realise that if I’m right, and it’s that plant that produces this light, and works the machine we can hear, Wilkes must be in this, up to the eyes?’

  ‘Wilkes?’ she repeated incredulously. ‘That fat, smiling landlord? He couldn’t be!’

  ‘I don’t know so much. And that throws a fresh light on it. Strange! He’s staying at the Bell. For all we know he and Wilkes are hand in glove over this.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she said. ‘It isn’t Michael Strange! It can’t be! Not after what he said to me! No, no, I won’t believe that!’

  He did not press the point. He stood still, listening to the throb and the muffled roar of the machine, trying to think what it could be. The noise it made stirred some chord of memory in his brain. Margaret started to speak, and he signed to her to be quiet, with a quick frown and a finger held up.

  Suddenly he remembered. Once, a couple of years before, he had been shown over a model printing works. He swung round, and exclaimed beneath his breath: ‘Margaret! I believe it’s a printing press!’

  She waited, searching his face. He seemed to be listening more intently than ever. ‘I don’t see…’ she began.

  ‘Forgers!’ he said. ‘I can’t see what else it can possibly be – if it is a press.’

  ‘Forgers?’

  ‘Probably forgers of bank-notes. I don’t know.’ He came back to the table and sat down on the edge of it. ‘Let’s get this straight. I believe we’ve hit on the secret of the Priory. If there’s a gang of forgers at work here that would account for the efforts to get us out of the house. Jove, yes, and what a god-sent place for a press! Empty house, reputation for being haunted, only needed a little ghost-business to scare the countryside stiff, and to scare the former tenants out! I can’t think why we never even suspected it.’

  ‘But Peter, it’s fantastic! How could a gang of forgers know of this underground passage, and that sliding-panel?’

  ‘Not the gang, but the man at the head of it. The man who stole the book from the library, and tore the missing pages from the copy at the British Museum. The Monk, in fact.’

  ‘You mean Michael Strange, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know whether I mean him or not, but it’s clear that the Monk’s no ordinary forger. He’s someone who knew something about the Priory, someone who’s devilish thorough and devilish clever.’

  She caught his hand, pressing it warningly. The bolts were being drawn back from the door of their cell. Peter thrust her behind him, and turned to face the door.

  It opened, and the first thing they saw was the blunt nose of an automatic. A rough voice said: ‘Keep back, both of you.’

  They obeyed; there was nothing else to do. The door opened farther, and they saw a man standing there in the rough clothes of a country labourer. A handkerchief was tied round the lower half of his face, and a cloth cap was on his head. He had a bottle of water in his left hand, and this he set down on the floor. ‘Keep as you are!’ he warned them, and took a step backwards, feeling behind him. He pulled a second chair in, and thrust it into the cell. ‘You can have that, and the water,’ he said. ‘And I wouldn’t waste my breath shouting for help, if I was you. No one’ll hear you, not if you shout till you’re black in the face.’

  ‘Where are we?’ Peter said, not that he had much hope of getting an answer.

  ‘You’re where no one’ll ever think to look for you,’ the man replied.

  Margaret said: ‘But you can’t keep us here! Oh please, don’t go! You couldn’t leave us here to starve!’

  ‘It’s none of my business,’ was the callous answer. ‘And there’s precious little the Monk stops at, I can tell you. You’ve interfered with him. That’s what happens to people as cross the Monk’s path.’ He drew his thumb across his throat in a crude descriptive gesture.

  ‘Look here,’ Peter said, ‘I’m a pretty rich man, and if you get us out of this there’s a fat reward waiting for you, and no awkward questions asked.’

  The man laughed. ‘Me? No bloody fear! Know what happened to Dooval? I’ve got no wish to go the same road, thank you kindly.’

  ‘I’ll see nothing happens to you.’

  ‘Oh, you will, will you? Think you could stop the Monk? Well, there ain’t a soul that knows him, and if you had a guard of fifty policemen he’d still get you. You wouldn’t clear out of the Priory, you kept on nosing round after the Monk. And he’s got you, and you talk about escaping! You won’t do that, my fine gentleman, don’t you fret. Nor no one won’t recognise you if ever they finds you, for you’ll be no more’n a skeleton. You crossed the Monk’s path.’ With that he gave another of his brutal laughs, and went out, and shot the bolts home again.

  Margaret sat down limply. ‘Peter, he can’t mean that! No one could be as awful as that!’

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