The Stone Wife
- Автор: Ловси Питер
- Серия: Peter Diamond #14
- Год: 2014
- Язык: английский
- Год: Sphere
- ISBN: 978-0-7515-5405-2
- Жанр: Полицейские детективы
Электронная книга - «The Stone Wife». Краткое содержание книги:
In under ten minutes she had made a hole wide enough to scramble through. The bed slid down the wall a fraction when she raised herself to the next slat and it fell all the way and clattered on the floor when she made a grab for the exposed joist and hauled herself into the loft.
She paused briefly to enjoy the moment. She was crouching in the dark, cone-shaped loft.
The next task would be easier: removing tiles from the roof. In fact, she was thinking ahead to how she would cope so high up in the open air. She had a faint memory of the tower’s position at the corner of the house, but she couldn’t be certain of its structure. She needed to break out on the side closest to the rest of the building. Difficult to judge in a round tower.
She could only make the attempt and hope.
The bracket was the perfect tool for ripping through the felt underlay. She rapidly exposed a section between two rafters. Tiles that had resisted more than a century of gales and snow lifted easily from the battens supporting them. A square of grey light was revealed and cool air fanned her face. One row of tiles was nailed and needed some leverage. Two slid into the guttering, but she was able to scoop them up and stack them inside with the others. The opening got larger.
She had got lucky with her choice of where to break out.
An almost full moon gave her a view of the house, mostly in silhouette, with long shadows cast across the drive and lawns below, and streaks of silver light along the extremities picking out the angles of the roof and battlements. She was higher than she expected, but there wasn’t time to dwell on a potential attack of vertigo. Getting started was paramount.
She needed to reach the battlements that linked the tower to the main house and they were at least a body length below. Could she trust the guttering to take her weight?
A scary moment.
She wriggled through the opening and pressed her torso against the tiles still in place, keeping one hand curled under a rafter. Little by little, she allowed herself to slip down the angled roof and over the edge until gravity took over and she slithered into space, made a grab for the curved gutter and hung on. It creaked under the strain and shifted slightly. Please, she thought.
The next stage was crucial and the most dangerous yet. Her feet were some inches short of the nearest battlement, but hanging in mid-air from an ancient gutter she didn’t have the option of waiting.
She let go, dropped, slipped, made a grab and hugged the stonework. With a huge effort, she raised her knee and got astride the battlement as if it was a horse. Not an experience she would ever want to repeat.
Now it was a matter of working her way along the battlement to where it connected with the east-facing side of the main house, a relatively simple manuever. Somewhere below in the grounds a dog was barking. She couldn’t think how she had disturbed it from this far away, and anyway she had to keep going. Concentrating on her footing, she eased round each toothlike projection of the battlement until she reached a rampart and was able to get the support of a wall. The moonlight showed her a drainpipe just within reach. Once again she would need to put her trust in rusty Victorian fittings. There was no other way down.
This side of the house was bathed in moonlight and — wonder of wonders — she spotted a lattice window partly ajar. It was some nine feet below her and she thought she could reach it by transferring from the drainpipe to the ledge below the stone window frame. A chance to get into the house without triggering the alarm system would be a massive bonus.
Hand over hand, she lowered herself until she was level with the ledge. The distance between was not huge, but from her position hanging on to the drainpipe, it was no simple move. She couldn’t leap across. She had to stretch out her right leg as far as she dared and feel blindly for a toehold. At the third attempt her foot lodged against something solid. Without pause for thought, she pushed herself away from the pipe and got a grip on the top of the stone frame.
The sense of relief was profound. Her heart was racing.
The open window was the farthest of three. Still moving mainly by feel, she sidled across the ledge, got a hand inside the open window, leaned down, lifted the stay from its notch, and pulled the whole thing open.
She was so excited to have completed the move without mishap that it wasn’t until she was lowering herself into the house that she had an alarming thought: a window left open at night could well be in a bedroom.
It was.
The muffled sound of someone turning rapidly in bed was followed by a panicky, ‘Who’s that?’
Ingeborg froze. Just as she’d thought the gods were on her side, this had to happen.
The voice sounded female. One of the staff? She hoped so.
The woman in bed fumbled for a light switch.
Ingeborg still hadn’t moved. But when the light came on, she recognised the raised face of Stella, the housekeeper, the woman who had taken her to breakfast. Critical memories flashed through her brain. Stella had been reasonably friendly. She had no cause to make trouble now. She hadn’t appeared in the corridor when half the house found out that the secret bathroom had been invaded. She must have slept through. In which case, she wouldn’t know Ingeborg was enemy number one and was supposed to be locked in the tower room.
‘It’s me, Ingeborg Smith. We met yesterday.’
No response.
This called for some improvisation. ‘I’m really sorry about this,’ Ingeborg said, thinking fast. ‘I was trapped outside and couldn’t find my way in. There’s a guard dog out there.’
Stella said in an expressionless voice, ‘Now I know who you are.’
Ingeborg developed her cover story. ‘I saw the open window and climbed up a drainpipe. I didn’t know it would be your bedroom.’
‘What were you doing outside?’
‘I couldn’t sleep. I needed fresh air. Stupidly I let the door shut behind me and I was stuck. I’m really sorry. I’ll find my way back to the guest room. Where exactly are we?’
‘You turn left outside the door and go up the stairs at the end.’ Stella yawned heavily, sank back on the pillow and reached for the light.
Ingeborg pulled the window back to its original position and secured it, crossed the room, closed the door behind her and turned left. Maybe the gods were with her after all.
But the biggest test lay ahead. She still needed to find her way back into Nathan’s secret bathroom. And this time she must do it without the assistance of Lee Li passing her the keys.
At the top of the stairs in the dim light she confirmed she was back in the corridor where the locked room was — with the door to Nathan’s bedroom facing her at the end.
Could it be, she wondered, that after the ruckus in the small hours Nathan hadn’t relocked his secret bathroom?
It was worth finding out. She crept forward, remembering to sidestep the part of the floor that creaked, and tried the handle.
No short cuts in this mission.
Needing to rethink her strategy, she retreated along the passage, opened the guest room door and slipped inside. The stress of the last half hour was getting to her. A stretch on the big, soft bed was a huge temptation she knew she must resist. She stepped through to the hand basin in the shower room and splashed water on her face.
The keys would be back in Nathan’s bedroom, either out on a table or some other surface or, more likely, secure in his trouser pocket again. Being realistic, she knew it was unlikely she could get in and out without waking anyone.
The bathroom had a solid, sturdy door with a modern cylinder lock, not the sort you can open with a plastic card — if she had one. But there was no other way in, short of using an enforcer. No window. Breaking in through the ceiling wasn’t practical and would wake everyone in the house.