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She picked up her skirts to avoid tripping and ran after him. He strode across the landing and in through the door of a middle bedroom, now turned into a workroom, which contained two tables covered with papers and pamphlets, at a glance all apparently of a religious nature.
Monk stopped in front of a full-length portrait of a middle-aged clergyman, the portrait being little short of life-sized. He pressed his hand on the right side of the ornate frame, which seemed to release a catch, and then pulled the same edge of the frame forward. The whole picture swung outward on a hinge, revealing a flat wooden board. Very gently Monk leaned his back against it, balancing his weight one way, then another. At last he found exactly the right adjustment of pressure, and the whole panel moved inward. The cavity beyond it was about three feet deep and four feet wide. There was nothing in it whatever.
Hester felt a rush of disappointment.
Monk stopped also. He too had clearly been expecting much more. He looked to one side, then the other. Then he glanced upward inside the cupboard and drew in his breath sharply.
“What is it?” Hester stepped forward to stand almost at his shoulder. “What’s there?” she said more urgently.
“A ladder,” he replied, his voice husky. “It goes up into …” He stopped and raised his arm to grasp the bottom rung and pull it down. It came easily, all the way to the floor.
“We’ll need a light,” Hester said frantically. “I’ve seen an oil lamp somewhere. I’ll go and fetch it. There must be matches still. Wait for me!” She turned back to him as she said the last, to be certain he would not go without her. “William!”
“I’ll wait,” he promised. “Not much point if I can’t see, although it doesn’t look pitch-dark up there.”
“Wait for me!” she said fiercely, then turned on her heel and hurried to look for a lamp.
When she returned more than five minutes later, carrying a lit oil lamp, he was still at the bottom of the ladder. She gave him a dazzling smile, then passed him the lamp.
He took it and began to climb very carefully, testing each rung before he put his weight on it and carrying the lamp in his left hand. When he got to the top he set the lamp down and reached out his hand to help her.
She went up rather more cautiously. Not for the first time in her life she found her skirts awkward: the fuller they were, the more they got in the way. No wonder men did not encumber themselves thusly.
She kept hold of Monk’s hand until she straightened up at the top and stepped away from the ladder. They were in a large attic that stretched at least twenty feet in length to a doorway at the far end; the roof sloped down on two sides. Various boxes were piled up along the edges of the room, presumably from when the Tafts had first moved into the house. Near the hatch and the ladder down were a couple of very old cabin trunks, which, to judge from the dust on them, had not been used in a decade or more. There seemed to be nothing of interest, let alone of relevance to Taft’s death or the murder of his family.
With a slight shrug, Monk carried the lantern to the far end and tried the door. It swung open easily, shedding a little light, as if the new room had led toward daylight.
Hester went after him. There was nothing on the floor to trip over.
Monk stood in the middle of the room, the lantern untended on the floor. He was motionless, as if transfixed by what he saw.
Hester reached him and understood. The room was entirely empty except for a small table on which rested an extraordinary contraption. And yet as soon as she saw it she understood exactly what it was. A gun was wedged between two weights on the table, and above it, joined by a wire around the trigger, was a tin can with a hole in the bottom. Underneath the can was a container, now dry, but with a very slight rime around the edges, as if the hard, local water had left its imprint.
Her eye followed the path a bullet would have taken, but she saw no mark on the wall.
Monk looked toward the window. It was open several inches.
She turned to meet his eyes, waiting, puzzled.
“For the noise,” he said quietly. “It was rigged up to go off at about five in the morning. With the silence of the night and that window open, the sound would carry so the neighbors would be bound to hear it. It fixes the time of death. The bodies downstairs would still be warm, even if they died a bit earlier. When the police came, they found a triple murder and a suicide-a woman, her children, and her husband. They wouldn’t be looking for hidden doors into attics. Why would they?”
“They wouldn’t,” she agreed. She looked toward the gun and its extraordinary mechanism. “It would have taken quite a lot of trouble to rig this up, and whoever did it hasn’t been able to come back to get rid of it. That must mean it’s Drew, mustn’t it? This is what he wanted to come for-to get rid of it before anyone found it.”
“Yes,” he said. “But we can’t prove it. He could affect to be just as surprised as we are. All he has to do is say that he wanted the rest of the church papers, in order to pay the bills outstanding, and carry on. And he can,” he added bitterly.
“No. All London must know about the embezzlement now,” Hester argued. “And if they didn’t with Taft’s trial and then his death, they will with Oliver’s.”
“Then Drew can go to Manchester, or Liverpool, or Newcastle,” he pointed out. “There are plenty of other cities.” He bent to look at the contraption again. “So simple,” he said, tightening his lips into a thin line. “I wonder why no one heard the real shot. Pillow, I suppose. It explains why the daughters and the wife were killed as well. They must have known who else was in the house. He couldn’t afford to leave them alive.”
Hester shuddered. She tried to block out of her imagination the scene as it must have been, the fear and the tragedy. Had Drew shot Taft first, and then gotten rid of the witnesses? Or had he killed them first, separately, keeping them all silent? How loud would you have to scream in the silence of the night to be heard by the neighbors? Someone tired and sound asleep might not hear even a stranger in the room, let alone a woman fighting for her life in the house next door, across fifty feet of garden with trees and bushes. The thought of it chilled her through.
Monk had finished searching. He had found the bullet, lower down in the wall than he had expected. The recoil must have jerked the gun out of alignment. He left it where it was. It would be evidence. He was standing back at the trapdoor again, waiting for her.
She pulled her attention back to the present, glad to be taken away from her imaginings. She walked over to him. “What are we going to do now?” she asked.
“See what else we can find,” he replied, holding her hand while she moved across to grasp the rungs and climb down.
They searched the rest of the house for anything else of significance and found nothing beyond a few goose feathers under one of the chairs in the morning room, which was where Taft had been found. It might indicate that a pillow had been used to muffle the sound of the shot, but it certainly did not prove it.
