The Sins of the Wolf - Anne Perry [178]
He pulled a face. “Didn’t think you’d know what it was.”
“I’ve been an army nurse,” she said tardy.
“Oh.” For a moment he was confused, off balance. He did not wish to think of her as being aware of such things, much less to have seen them. It offended him. Women, especially decent women, should never have to see the obscenities of the darkest human imagination. Unconsciously he increased his speed, almost knocking into a man and woman. The man glared at him and muttered something.
Hester was obliged to break into a trot to keep up.
“Are we going to look for it?” she asked, gasping. “Please slow a little. I cannot speak or listen at this rate.”
He obeyed abruptly and she shot a couple of paces past him.
“I am,” he answered. “You’re not.”
“Yes I am.” It was a single, contradictory, pigheaded statement. There was no question or pleading in it.
“No you are not. It may be dangerous….”
“Why should it? They said there would be no one there tomorrow, and there certainly won’t be today. They’d never break the Sabbath.”
“I’m going tonight, while it’s dark.”
“Of course we are. It would be absurd to go in the daylight; anyone might see us.”
“You’re not coming!”
Now they were stopped and causing an obstruction on the footpath.
“Yes I am. You’ll need help. If it really is a secret room, it won’t be all that easy to find. We may have to knock for hollow places, or move—”
“All right!” he said. “But you must do as you’re told.”
“Naturally.”
He snorted, and once again set off at a rapid pace.
It was a little before eleven, and pitch-dark except for the lantern which Hester held, when she and Monk finally stood in the huge print room and began their task. To avoid unnecessary noise they had had to break in. It had taken some time, but Monk possessed skills in that field which startled Hester, though he offered no account of how he had come by them. Possibly he did not recall himself.
For over an hour they searched, slowly and methodically, but the building was very solidly and plainly built. It was simply a barnlike structure, similar to the warehouses on either side of it, for the purpose of printing books. There was no ornament or carving, no alcoves, mantels, sets of shelves or anything else which could mask an opening.
“He was drunk,” Monk said in disgust. “He just loathed Hamish so much he was trying to make trouble, anything he could think of, no matter how absurd.”
“We haven’t been searching very long yet,” she argued.
He gave her a withering look, which was exaggerated by the yellow glare of the lantern and the black cavern above them.
“Well, do you have a better idea?” she demanded. “Do you just want to go back to London and never know who killed Mary?”
Wordlessly he turned back to reexamine the wall.
“It’s straight along the line of the abutting wall onto the next warehouse,” he said half an hour later. “There isn’t any space for a secret compartment, let alone an entire room.”
“What if it’s in the roof?” she said desperately. “Or the cellar?”
“Then there’ll be stairs to it—and there aren’t.”
“Then it must be here. We just haven’t found it.”
“Your logic is typical,” he said tartly. “We haven’t found it, so it must be here.”
“That’s not what I said. You have it backwards.”
He raised his eyebrows. “It must be here because we haven’t found it? That is a deductive improvement?”
She took the lantern and left him standing in the dark. There was nothing to lose by searching a little longer. This was the last chance. Tomorrow they would leave, and either Baird McIvor would face trial, and maybe be hanged, or else live with another “not proven” verdict over his head. Either way, she would never be sure who had killed Mary. She needed to know, not just for herself but because Mary’s wry, intelligent face was still as sharp in her mind as when she had gone to sleep that night on the train to London, thinking how very much she liked her.
She did not find it by accident, but by methodical, furious banging and thumping. A heavy panel of the