Page 87 of A Ruse of Shadows
He was stopped at the door by an owlish-looking man. “Mr. de Lacey, I presume? You quite resemble your photograph in the foyer.”
De Lacey regarded the man warily. “And you are?”
“Chief Inspector Fowler of Scotland Yard. How do you do, Mr. de Lacey?”
Fowler. De Lacey remembered that name. The one who had investigated the murder at Stern Hollow last year and mistakenly arrested Lord Ingram.
Chief Inspector Fowler, however, did not look like a man with an egg on his face. Instead, he seemed to be someone who had singlehandedly found all the eggs at Easter and could barely restrain himself from outright gloating.
“If I may ask, what are you doing here, Chief Inspector?”
Only as de Lacey barked the question did he notice that the policeman’s attire was mud-stained. An effort had been made to brush away the splotches, but still, now that he paid attention…why in the world would anyone who hadn’t been crawling around a pig farm have this much mud on his person?
“I am, of course, investigating a serious crime, which then turned out to be a number of serious crimes, Mr. de Lacey, all on the very premises of De Lacey Industries, if you can believe that.”
De Lacey was so staggered he barely heard the alarm clanging in the back of his head. “Chief Inspector, I have no idea of what you speak. This is a most respectable establishment, and there are no crimes of any kind taking place either on these premises or in any activities connected with the running of De Lacey Industries.”
“Oh, I certainlythoughtthis a most respectable establishment, but I’m afraid I’ve had my mind changed for me tonight.” The policeman wagged a finger. “What kind of respectable establishment, Mr. de Lacey, would dig a tunnel from its wine cellar to the strong room of the City and Suburban Bank, where there sit thirty thousand pounds’ worth of napoleons borrowed from the Banque de France?”
If the policeman had told him that he was the long-lost tenth child of Queen Victoria and her prince consort, he could not have been more dumbfounded. What tunnel? What bank? He vaguely recalled that there was a bank on a parallel street, but the business of De Lacey Industries was not bank-robbing. There weren’t even any plans to rob banks, let alone tunnels already dug from the cellar.
Wait, the cellar? Thewinecellar?
Officially, there was no wine cellar. Because the wine cellar was beneath the subbasement, and the very respectable De Lacey Industries, officially, at least, had no subbasement!
But—but—
De Lacey stared some more at the mud stains on the policeman’s clothes. If there had really been a tunnel running from De Lacey Industries to the branch of City and Suburban Bank on the next street, and Chief Inspector Fowler had crawled through that tunnel and reached the wine cellar, then he would have come out of the wine cellar—never mind how he managed that with the wine cellar padlocked from the outside—directly into the subbasement.
And in the subbasement—
“As if it is not egregious enough that you have done that,” continued Fowler, “what should I discover when I came up, butprisonersin your lower basement? Six individuals held against their will, some for months.”
“There—there must have been some mistake. There—”
Dear God,six individuals held against their will, did the policeman say?Six?But there had been only five prisoners in the subbasement.
“Oh, believe me, Mr. de Lacey, there was no mistake. I, as well as my men, even two directors of the City and Suburban Bank, can bear witness to that in court.”
Perhaps this was not real. Perhaps he was in fact being driven to the ruined abbey and suffering from a nightmare featuring an abundance of horrors well beyond what his own limited mind could have conjured.
“And guess what we found in addition to those prisoners held against their will? A dead body kept on ice, a man who had been shot in the back.”
Fowler’s words still ringing in de Lacey’s head, he saw two uniformed men carry out a stretcher. Under the sheet lay no doubt the late Mr. Underwood, now no longer to be breakfast for crows and vultures.
Behind them, four men and two women slowly shuffled out of DeLacey Industries. One of the women saw de Lacey and flashed a sardonic smile, as if to say,Your turn, you knobstick.
And the other woman—he felt faint. The other woman wasLady Ingram, who had been at large since last autumn and never found, let alone brought to him for incarceration.
“Chief Inspector,” he said hoarsely, “I’m afraid there has been a horrible mix-up. There have never been any dead bodies at De Lacey Industries, any prisoners, or any tunnels.”
“Well, Mr. de Lacey, I came via the tunnel, so most assuredly there is a tunnel. The prisoners that I and a dozen men of sound mind freed from the subbasement were certainly there, and they told me not only that you were the one who personally brought them their food every day, but that for months on end, they’d heard digging crews come down to work at night. And that they heard you, swearing profusely, drag something heavy into the subbasement—and then brought in chunks of ice, too, which caused the temperature in the subbasement to drop.”
Fowler smiled, now no longer trying to stop himself from gloating. “Mr. de Lacey, for all those reasons and more, I am placing you under arrest.”
Thirty
By the ruined abbey
