The Corpse with the Silver Tongue (27 page)

What the hell was going on? Where was I? Why was I there? How had I got there—wherever
there
was?

Not being able to see anything, I felt my body parts, just to make sure that everything was where it should be, and that it was all still working. It was. Nothing broken, or twisted. Well, that was a relief. I felt about me and located my handbag on the floor a few feet away. I scrabbled about inside it until I found a lighter, which I flicked into life. Its brightness blinded me, so I let it go out, then waited a moment and lit it again, this time away from my eyes.

In front of me was another wall just like the one I was leaning against. To my right and left the two walls continued into blackness. Okay, so I was in a tunnel.

I let the flame go out and listened. Could I hear anything? Only my own breathing. Could I smell anything? Not much—but there was something . . . what was it? It wasn't dampness, and it wasn't soil. I couldn't put my finger on it—though I
knew
that I knew what it was. I let it go. It would come to me.

I pushed myself up the wall until I was standing. My whole body ached. How long had I been there? I couldn't see my watch, so, again, I scrabbled around in my purse and found my phone. It told me that it was 10:09. I assumed it was Sunday—though, frankly, I could have been there for more than a day and I'd have been none the wiser. I checked my phone again, but there was no signal. I guessed that would have been too much to hope for, and further surmised that whoever had dumped me here had left my bag with me because they knew it wouldn't help me. And they must have been familiar enough with my location to know that there was no phone signal.

I tried to kick my brain into a higher gear. What was the last thing I remembered?

Drinking a beer in Tamsin's kitchen after lunch on Sunday.

Okay.

Did I feel hungry?

Yes, but not ravenously so. Okay, I was more certain that this was the same day as the day I had drunk the beer, because otherwise my tummy would have been telling me otherwise.

Was my headache the result of having been hit on the head? Or not?

I felt all over my head and I couldn't pinpoint any part that was more tender than any other. I'd probably been drugged, not hit. It must have been the beer.

I was good so far.

There was something on my neck—a wide, flat, metal hoop, with lumps on it. I didn't own anything like it. I felt it a bit more carefully and tried to unhook it behind my neck. I couldn't work out the way the clasp worked, and I couldn't turn the thing around either. What on earth was it? I felt it again, then I knew. I had never seen it, and I'd only heard a vague description of it, but I knew it was the Collar of Death.

Wonderful! I was wearing the necklace that had always been the harbinger of doom. That cheered me up no end. Why the hell was it on
me
? I resigned myself to the fact I could do nothing about it. I was only making my neck and my arms sore, so I stopped. I was
not
happy. But I had to apply my energy to what really mattered. Getting out!

Where was I? I told myself to not waste the lighter fuel, but to use my brain.

If someone had drugged me, then I'd have likely collapsed. If I'd been drugged to the point of collapse, I had to admit it would have taken someone with a lot of strength to move me—I'd have been a dead weight. It would have been a big job to move me far. Or maybe not. Quite a few modern drugs allow the person who's taken them to move about, albeit with help, and then remember nothing about it. Maybe I'd been “roofied.” If so, then I'd have needed support and steering, not carrying, and I could have been moved quite a long way—by car even. I could have been taken anywhere, then drugged again, so that I'd become unconscious.

What is it they say? Three minutes, three days, three weeks.

A person can survive for three minutes without air. There seemed to be lots of that, and I was pretty sure I'd been conscious for more than three minutes already. Three days without water? I supposed I'd be able to manage that, if I had to, but I was already very dry and thirsty. Three weeks without food—the thought horrified me! I had quite a while to find my way out of wherever I was without expiring. Good.

I shouted for help as loud as I could. My voice reverberated off the stone walls around me. I thought I might as well keep trying, but I suspected I was wasting my time. Given the stone walls, the funny smell—
what the hell was it
—the dryness of the air, and the coolness of the temperature, I must be underground. As the thought came to me another one occurred: what if I was in the cellars underneath the gardens of the Palais? They'd been built out of stone, then covered over with tons of earth. That could be it.

What had Beni said? Ah yes, “they built a web of cellars.” I wondered if he'd meant that literally—an actual web-shaped set of cellars, all converging on a central point. I felt along the wall behind me, and I could sense a slight concave curve. I pulled out my lighter again and held it up: I could just make out both walls and, sure enough, they had mirror curves. The one in front of me was the inner wall of the curve. I decided to feel my way along that one. Surely I could manage in the dark, and I let the lighter go out.

I took my time because the ground was uneven. I felt as though I was inching my way along, but I supposed I was making progress. Nothing around me changed, not the light, not the sounds, and not the smell or the airflow, so I just kept going. I didn't think about crying out again, as it didn't seem to make sense. As I felt my way along, I kept thinking about who might have put me there, but I knew the only way I'd work that out was to work out who had killed Alistair and Madelaine, and who'd stolen the necklace. I was now convinced that it was all the work of one person. Otherwise,
why
would I be wearing the precious necklace?

The wall was my main focus, and that was a good thing because it abruptly stopped. It disappeared around a corner. I almost fell forward, but managed to stop myself. I used the lighter to establish that, while the wall behind me continued around, the one in front of me now turned left, and was faced by another wall—yes, it was like the spoke of a wheel running away from the wall behind me . . . maybe a spider's web
was
the pattern they'd adopted after all. I had a choice to make: stick to the outside wall, and hope to eventually come to an exit, or head off to the center of the web.

I sat down, carefully, to think. If
I'd
been dumping someone, I wouldn't leave them anywhere near an exit, would I? No, of course not, because then they'd be likely to find the way out—or maybe make themselves heard. Would I have the time and energy to take them as far as possible from the entrance? Maybe, maybe not—it all depended on who'd been doing the dumping and how long they'd had to do it. If I
was
in the cellars for the Palais, which had been built to house the wine when the place was a hotel, it would make sense that there'd be an entrance to them inside the building itself—they wouldn't want to send people outside in order to get wine, would they? No, of course not. Such an entrance would have to have a tunnel from the Palais to the actual cellars because they didn't connect with the place itself, and the Palais was higher than the cellars, so there'd either be steps or a sloping exit.

Having worked through this, I decided that my only course of action was to follow the outside wall, and to not be tempted to try to walk through the center of the web. It might well be a shorter route, but I was, quite literally, in the dark, and I didn't want to misjudge things and inadvertently get side-tracked. I stood up, pulled my bag back onto my shoulder—checked my cell phone again just in case there was a signal. There wasn't, and the battery was getting pretty low—why the hell hadn't I charged it up before I went to bed the night before? I pushed myself over to the outer wall and carried on going, hoping that I hadn't already missed the vital tunnel away from the web . . . if that was, in fact, where I was.

As I moved slowly along, I had hoped that my eyes would become acclimatized to the darkness. Maybe they had, but it made no difference—I couldn't see a damned thing! I was beginning to feel a bit hopeless, and to wonder if my bright ideas about where I was were just stupid, because I didn't seem to be getting anywhere, other than farther forward. I couldn't feel
any
change in the angle of the ground below my feet, and, for all I knew, I was walking along a tunnel that was miles long and wasn't the cellars at the Palais at all!

I looked at my phone again. It was 10:52. My God, was that all the time I'd been at it? It felt like much longer. I sat down, with my back against the wall again, pulled out my packet of cigarettes, and lit one. I reflected on how strange it was that I was sitting God only knew where, smoking a cigarette as though I was relaxing. The red tip hissed as I sucked in the smoke, which hit my dry throat and made me cough. Well, it served me right, I supposed.

I could see the smoke as it left the glowing tip, before it disappeared into the darkness. I held my breath . . . was it me doing that, or was it being wafted toward my left, the direction from which I'd come? I sat and watched the smoke intently. I moved the cigarette from position to position.

Yes! The smoke was
always
moving toward my left! Yeah! I felt immediately revived. Air was definitely coming from the right. Maybe there was a way out not much farther along. I got up and held the cigarette in front of me, like a tiny little torch, and moved onward, using one hand to feel along the wall.

Suddenly I tripped over something, fell forward, and almost broke my ankle and my wrist at the same time. The cigarette fell from my hand. I reached down to hold my ankle, and my hand found something cold, smooth, and hard. It rolled as I touched it, and it sounded like . . . glass. Yes, it was a glass bottle.
Yes!
Another victory—you find bottles in a cellar, don't you?

As soon as I felt the bottle I knew what I'd been smelling since I'd opened my eyes—the lingering aroma of wine that had been spilled a very long time ago—almost a metallic smell. I grabbed hold of the bottle and felt it all over: yes, wine. I was so thirsty I'd have given anything for a drink right about then, but what was I going to do about opening it? I knew I didn't have a corkscrew in my bag, and I couldn't convince myself that trying to break the bottle's neck against the wall would result in anything but a bloody mess—with
my
blood being involved.

I pulled out my lighter again and held it up. Along the wall I'd been following stood floor to ceiling racks containing a lot of bottles—the racks weren't full, and they looked as though they were in use because while the bottles were dusty, they certainly didn't look as though they'd been there since the war. I took this as a good sign.

I realized I'd have to keep using the lighter because I couldn't really follow my wall anymore, and didn't dare lean into the bottles to support myself. I kept my eyes peeled and followed along the racks, hoping that their presence meant I was getting closer to the parts of the cellars that were more accessible from the Palais. Eventually, I came across a whole stack of bottles with gold foil tops.

Oh goody—champagne! Yes, I can guess what you're thinking, but what
I
was thinking was that here, finally, was something I could drink because I could
open
it! I pulled out a bottle and removed the cork. It really did open with a sigh, not a pop, which I know champagne is supposed to do. I swigged from the bottle . . . and it was
bliss
. I'm going to say it was the best champagne I'd ever tasted, but, frankly, a bottle of water would have been just as welcome at that point. I stood for a moment, greedily slaking my thirst and enjoying the taste.

The bottle was heavy, so I sat myself down again and lit another cigarette. I felt almost festive. That lightness of spirit, or maybe it was lightness of head, set me to thinking . . . Five minutes probably wouldn't make much difference in the whole scheme of things—what if I just gave myself a few moments to think about the whole thing . . . try to get the “big picture” sorted out in my mind?

I couldn't make notes, and, frankly, I didn't feel particularly able to organize my thoughts. I decided to try another technique that can sometimes be helpful for problem solving. I closed my eyes—not that there was any real need to do that, but it's what you're supposed to do—and I opened my mind to allow visual images to form, almost as though in a dream. It's called “wakeful dreaming.” It wasn't something I'd done often in the past for myself, but I'd helped others to do it.

The first thing I had to do was to concentrate on each of the people involved in this in turn. I had to allow each person to “gather about them” things that my mind somehow related to them. It sounds odd, but it's one of those techniques that allows the mind to do what it
wants
to do, rather than having your consciousness imposing order upon things. It encourages subliminal connections to be made. It's pretty much the same process as when we are dreaming, when our brains take the opportunity to sort through things that have made an impression upon us and file them away.

First I saw Tamsin. She was wailing, waggling smoking sticks, and wearing dozens of huge necklaces, all of which were dripping with blood; she was standing in a pile of clothing that was heaped about her, then she threw a big bunch of keys at me and shouted “You'll never find it! They're all the same.”

Next I saw Beni looking handsome and well groomed as usual, except that he was wearing a toga, rather than his normal clothes; he smiled as he held open his car door for me; when I got into the car I could see that ancient scrolls were strewn all over the floor, along with loaves of bread and broken glass. He leaned toward me and, very close to my ear, he whispered, “They'll never find us here,” then he kissed me.