High Rhymes and Misdemeanors Read online

The message on the answering machine of Monica’s friend Calum informed all and sundry that the professor had gone to Scotland for the weekend.

  “Monica, I could murder you myself,” Grace muttered inside the red kiosk. She hung the phone up with a bang.

  Now what? she wondered. Climbing back into the battered mini, she unfolded a road map, blearily studying it. She was not at her best and brightest this afternoon. She had blisters on her feet, scratches on her face. She looked like a bag lady. She felt like something a bag lady would turn up her nose at.

  Surely her “responsibility” to Peter Fox (assuming she had any) ended once she had gone to the police? She had told P.C. Kenton everything she knew, which was not much, and P.C. Kenton informed the chief constable of the county. The matter was now in the hands of the local authorities.

  Initially, P.C. Kenton professed to believe Grace was the victim of an elaborate but random tourist mugging. He seemed sure Grace was leaping to all kinds of wild conclusions in connecting Peter Fox’s accident to her own misadventure. And it did sound awfully far-fetched, Grace had to admit. She rested her forehead on the steering wheel and tried to think. She was so tired. She wanted to believe the constable. She wanted to believe it was all over. But she couldn’t quite convince herself.

  They had taken her passport and airline tickets. Why? So she couldn’t leave the country? They had to know that she didn’t have whatever it was they were looking for. Had they taken her tickets and passport for spite? Was this the reaction of the thwarted criminal mind? Grace sat up.

  So now what? She couldn’t get hold of Monica and she couldn’t get hold of Peter Fox. The police told her she was perfectly safe, but unless she drove straight to London and grabbed the first available flight out of the country (which she could hardly do without her passport and airline tickets), Grace feared she might still be in jeopardy.

  She smothered another tearing yawn that was half exhaustion, half nerves. What she wanted was a hot bath, a thick steak with all the trimmings, and twenty-four hours of undisturbed sleep.

  P.C. Kenton had alternately believed Grace to be the victim of a prank—given the Guy Fawkes masks—the impulse mugging of a helpless tourist. At one point he had even suggested a terrorist attack, though he’d given up on that angle quickly.

  “They were probably drunk, miss,” he had offered by way of comfort, so maybe in the end he had believed Grace was the victim of crazed alcoholics.

  But they had not been drunk and they had not mistaken Grace for anyone else. They had been dead serious, and Grace knew they were not going to give up so easily. With a sigh, she put the key in the ignition and began driving once more.

  It was late afternoon when Grace stopped in Innisdale, a storybook village of white cottages with slate roofs. Pots and window boxes bursting with Fall flowers decorated stoops and sills. Smoke from cozy hearths drifted into the darkling skies. Grace found the tourist information center without trouble. A two-story pink building with a giant one-armed clock facing the village square, the center shared cramped lodgings with the post office. Her inquiry brought the welcome news that her quest was nearly done. Craddock House lay less than ten miles away.

  Grace got back in her car and crossed a stone bridge beneath which swans glided on peaceful water. Leaving the village behind, she drove on through a small, dark wood. Grace came upon Craddock House at the precise moment the sun drifted out from behind thunderclouds to bathe the glen in golden radiance.

  For a moment Grace simply sat there blinking. It was the most beautiful house she had ever seen. From the road the ground level was half hidden behind trimmed hedges and banks of flowers, both cultivated and wild, a riot of color against the whitewashed walls and silver slate roof. Grace could count at least three chimneys and numerous diamond-paned windows. Behind the house hedges and shrubs gave way to more forest.

  Grace parked well off the road under the low-hanging trees, got out of the mini and walked up the hillside path of flagstones. The afternoon smelled of wet grass and cool flowers. There was the bite of wood smoke in the air. As Grace drew near she realized the first floor of Craddock House had been given over to a shop. A long rectangular sign hung over the door. Gold script on black wood pronounced, “Rogue’s Gallery.” In a huge bow window pranced a full-sized merry-go-round charger, black mane flying, gilt hooves pawing.

  An antique shop, Grace realized. She read the placard in the window beneath the charger’s hooves: CLOSED.

  What had she expected?

  Automatically she tried the door handle. To her surprise the door swung open with a soft jingle of bells, as though it had not been latched properly.

  Grace stepped inside the shop, looking about herself uneasily. She was a law-abiding woman, and breaking and entering was not part of her makeup.

  The room was an antique lover’s dream. A book lover’s dream. Directly over the shop the entire second story was paneled in towering bookshelves, accessible only from the narrow landing. A staircase led up to the second floor; a doorway on the landing led into what must be Peter Fox’s living quarters.

  Grace’s eye fell on a fan-shaped display of war axes and pikes hanging above the staircase. One set of hooks was conspicuously bare; a recent sale perhaps.

  The room felt cold and smelled of old books. Grace absently chaffed her arms as she stared about herself. There was no sign of anyone. The room, the building, felt empty. She glanced up. A ship’s figurehead hung suspended from the high vault ceiling—a full-breasted mermaid in dark wood appeared to be diving down into the room.

  Grace tried to connect all this with what she knew of Peter Fox. An antique dealer? Somehow that didn’t seem to fit, and yet this hodgepodge of collectibles and curiosities did.

  There were Chippendale and Prince of Wales chairs, a muffin stand supporting a large Egyptian resin cat. On the wall by the bay window were several Japanese kabuki masks. Directly across hung a very old map in muted tints, beautiful and highly inaccurate, Grace thought with a mental smile.

  Her eyes fell on a squat oak dresser supporting a variety of Staffordshire pottery in blues, reds, and browns; four sixth century Grecian urns, and two grinning skulls. Memento Mori. Grace shivered and walked toward the counter at the back of the shop.

  “Hello?” she called. “Anyone here?”

  Her voice sounded loud in the vintage silence. For some reason Grace began to feel anxious. Although the shop seemed empty, there was something peculiar…

  She turned, starting up the stairs to the doorway on the second landing. The stairs creaked and Grace glanced over her shoulder half expecting to see some shadowy figure detach itself from the corners of the showroom below.

  Reaching the top landing, she tried the door. This, too, opened. The man was clearly uninterested in security, she decided.

  For what felt like a long time Grace simply stood on the threshold, weighing her options. And then she walked into an airy whitewashed room with high ceilings, dark, open beams and bare wood floors. It was an elegant room but at the same time a masculine room. The furniture was comfortable and old, dark woods and red leather. With unabashed curiosity she gazed about herself. There was a glass-topped curio case serving as a coffee table. A huge moon-faced grandfather clock stood against one wall. A mounted telescope aimed out of white-framed Georgian windows at the road and woodline beyond. Books were everywhere: on shelves, on the polished floors, on a seven-foot tall chinoiserie cabinet. A pair of Wellington boots stood beside the door.

  Grace’s brows rose. “Hel-low?” she called, but more softly. Although she was here on a mission, in Peter Fox’s private rooms Grace was unhappily conscious of being an intruder.

  She walked quickly through the rest of the flat, a couple of bedrooms, a bath, laundry room, pantry and kitchen. The kitchen, like all the rooms, was large and airy. Gleaming kettles hung from above. Scrubbed pine table and chairs were ensconced in a cozy nook overlooking the rose garden below. Oak-leaf china shone from behind glass-fronted cupboards.
An answering machine sat on the counter, blinking away in the tidy quiet.

  After a hesitation Grace pressed playback.

  “Peter, you naughty man,” trilled one of those imperious feminine voices. “What do you mean leaving town without a bye-word? You never said about the Huxleys on Wednesday, darling. Call me!”

  “Peter,” breathed the next voice in what Grace supposed were dulcet tones, “you are an angel. Thank you so much. I’ll be wearing it Wednesday at the Huxleys’.” This was followed by kissing sounds.

  “Double booking,” Grace muttered. “No wonder he thought he’d better skip town.”

  These calls were followed by several business calls regarding pieces other dealers thought Peter might be interested in, and buyers asking him to scout around for various things. It certainly sounded legitimate.

  Next up, the first woman’s voice, now petulant. “Peter, darling, I know you’re there! The lights are on. Are you avoiding me?”

  When had this been, Grace wondered? Had Peter possibly returned home and left again?

  Two hang-up calls followed, then a voice Grace recognized and which sent chills down her spine. “Nobody home? Pity. I’ve got an item you’ll be interested in, Fox. An American export. I’ll be in touch.”

  Then, another message: “Don’t mess me about, Fox. I’m not a patient man. Ask your mate Delon. The item for exchange has an expiration date.”

  The hair on the back of Grace’s neck stood up.

  There was one more hang-up call before a new voice came on, ponderous and authoritative. “Mr. Fox, this is Chief Constable Heron. We should be obliged if you would ring the station when you get in, sir. Thank you.”

  The machine beeped one last time signifying the end of messages. Her nerves jangling, Grace went back downstairs, closing the door to the flat behind her.

  She had not been imagining things, she had not been mistaken. Her abduction was directly linked to Peter Fox. Apparently he had something the Queen Mother and cohort wanted. Or at least they believed he had something, which was pretty much the same thing.

  Where Mutt and Jeff figured in, Grace could not imagine. Frankly, she didn’t want to know. She was already too deeply involved. These thugs knew her name, had stolen her passport so she could not escape out of the country. They knew what flight she planned to be on. Given the time they’d had to plow through her things they might even have figured out where Monica was staying, Grace thought in alarm.

  With difficulty she reined in her panic. Even if her abductors traced her to Monica, the bright spot was that Monica was undoubtedly in Scotland with Calum Bell. Monica should be safe enough for the time being.

  It also meant Grace was on her own. The one person with all the answers was Peter Fox, and Peter Fox had apparently—as one of the thugs put it— gone to earth.

  But sooner or later he would return home. Should she leave him some kind of warning message? Grace hesitated, trying to think. Her lack of sleep was catching up. Belatedly it occurred to her that the first place the Queen Mum would think of looking for her would be in the fox’s lair. He had believed from the first that they were in it together; so to him it would make perfect sense that Grace would try to rendezvous with Peter.

  She had to get out. Fast.

  Grace made her way downstairs, and hurried along the aisle crowded with furniture and a bronze bust of—for a wonder—Romantic poet Lord George Gordon Noel Byron.

  She couldn’t explain what kept her exploring when she knew that even now her attackers might be closing in on the house. Curiosity, or perhaps some half-formed notion of leaving Peter a note, caused her to slip behind the counter and follow a short hallway into what appeared to be a back office. It smelled…unusual. She couldn’t place the odor. The deepening gloom made it necessary to turn on a light.

  The office seemed to also serve as storeroom. Crates and boxes filled metal shelves. There was a suspiciously neat desk, a computer, and several broken pieces of furniture. Nearly backing into a mounted lion’s head, Grace sucked in her breath sharply. Her nerves had about had it.

  Grace tried to open a drawer, looking for blank paper. The drawers were locked. The desk was locked but he left his front door unlocked? Something odd about that.

  An old Vuitton steamer trunk sat on the floor. Inside a nest of papers was a headless marble torso with an impossibly perfect set of breasts. A somber picture of Dutch windmills stood propped against the trunk. Beside it on the floor lay a leather-bound ledger.

  Grace knelt and picked up the ledger. A bold, elegant hand had scrawled notations a cryptologist wouldn’t have been able to decipher. Grace started to tear a page out of the ledger when something caught her eye.

  She stared at the wall in front of her. At first it appeared that one end of the shelves crammed with china figurines and record books stood out from the wall, but looking more closely she realized that the wall itself was crooked. There appeared to be a narrow opening between the wall and the shelf.

  A secret passage?

  Grace scooted over and examined the opening carefully. The shelf was bolted to the wall, the china figurines and record books glued to the shelving. Grace tugged on the shelf and a portion of the wall swung soundlessly out, revealing a doorway about four feet high.

  The doorway led off into darkness.

  Grace ducked under the doorway and stood, peering into the gloom. She seemed to be in a passage. Grace caught her breath in horror at what she could make out in the light from the storeroom. Now she recognized the dreadful scent stealing through the shop.

  A man lay sprawled on the bare stone floor. This time it was not Peter Fox, and this time the man was definitely dead. His staring eyes testified to that.

  The cause of death was unmistakable as well. Buried in his chest was one of the decorative-looking battle-axes from the stairwell display. There was blood everywhere. Blood on the stone walls, blood pooling beneath the body.

  It looked as though in his dying moments the man had tried to write something on the wall in his own blood.

  Ignoring the buzzing sound in her brain, Grace leaned forward to try and make out what was written. She heard a soft click as she brushed against the doorway. The significance of that sound did not register until a moment later when the door swung silently shut behind her, shutting off all light.

  The last thing Grace saw before the passage plunged into blackness was the bloodstained word Astarte.

  Grace opened her mouth to scream. Nothing came out but a whisper. She tried again. It was like in a dream when no sound would come. Her vocal chords felt paralyzed. She couldn’t seem to get enough air to yell. She tried again, and again there was only a frightened choke of panicked sob.

  Grace turned, falling to her knees and scrabbling at the door.

  She believed it was the door; in the pitch blackness it was impossible to tell. Not a glimmer of light revealed the entrance frame. With desperate fingers Grace felt along the stone. There had to be some clue. She pried and clawed at what felt like an indentation. Nothing happened. But there had to be something, a hidden spring or button…something.

  Grace forced her thoughts away from the thing that lay in the darkness with her. Hysteria would not save her. Tearing her hands to pieces on century-old stone would not help.

  Taking a deep shuddering breath, she made herself stop. She sat back on her heels and tried to think. She was in no immediate danger. Despite the rank smell, she wasn’t going to suffocate. The dead man couldn’t hurt her.

  But what if his killer came back? He would find her trapped here…

  Was she trapped? She tried to visualize what she had seen before the lights went out. Had she seen a staircase in the shadows beyond the corpse?

  Grace scrubbed at the tears blinding her. It sank in on her that she still had her shoulder bag slung over her shoulder.

  With shaking hands she opened the flap and sifted through the contents till she felt her keys. On the key ring was a tiny pocket flashlight. Grace switch
ed it on. A beam of light, about the circumference of a quarter, cut the Stygian gloom.

  The light had an immediate steadying effect on Grace. Yes, there did seem to be a steep flight of narrow stairs winding out of sight but it was not a proposing sight. More calmly, though her hands still shook, she tried once more to find the hidden catch.

  Twenty minutes later she was still trying.

  At last Grace was forced to admit that either there was no way out from this side of the secret panel, or that she had been repeating the same motions for so long she could no longer tell what she was seeing and feeling.

  She got to her feet leaning against the cold stone, telling herself she could step over the thing blocking the stairs. A stairway had to lead somewhere. She might have more luck at the other end of the passage.

  Swinging the pocket flashlight toward the stairs, Grace’s breath came out in a shuddering gulp as she took a long look at the body. He was a small man of about fifty. His artificially red hair was oiled flat. His sunken dark eyes stared up in an expression of terror.

  There was no telling how long he’d lain there—not by Grace anyway, who wasn’t getting any closer to him than she had to. The blood on the wall had dried, the blood pooled beneath had congealed. Grace stared at the word written in blood. What could Astarte, the Phoenician goddess of love and fertility, have to do with any of the events of the past days?

  Had Peter Fox killed this man and then fled on a supposed business trip? Or had this man been killed in mistake for Peter Fox? Grace had no idea and she didn’t care. She wanted only to escape Rogue’s Gallery, get to the nearest police station, and from there to the American Embassy and an airport.

  Passionately she wished she had never met Peter Fox. Never gone for a walk in the woods of Kentmere, never come to the Lake District—or England. It was knowing Peter Fox that had gotten her into this mess. Peter Fox was a dangerous man to know.

  Grace directed the pinpoint of light to the stairs once more. Steeling herself, she stepped over the body, hopping a little to avoid the blood. Her feet echoed emptily on the narrow stone. The steps were deep and there was no railing. Grace kept one hand against the wall to guide herself and climbed cautiously. Her initial surge of adrenaline had faded. She felt she was moving in a haze of weariness.

  Maybe I’m dreaming, she told herself. Maybe I’ll soon wake up and find myself still in bed at the Tinker’s Dam.

  Some way up, the staircase made a sharp turn. Grace’s flashlight picked out a recess like a shelf or a deep window built into the wall. She would have missed it if she hadn’t been climbing so slowly. The stairs wound out of sight in the inkwell of blackness.

  Grace played her flashlight over the recess before her. Was this an opening of some kind? Perhaps another door? Grace crawled on to the shelf, which was about as large as a steamer trunk, and traced the flashlight beam slowly around the corners.

  Grace could detect no latch, nothing like that. But unlike the passage opening downstairs, this panel was wooden. If nothing else, she thought, she could kick it in if necessary. As she felt around the edges, the panel moved. Her heart leapt. The mechanism was so simple, so neatly constructed that she had nearly missed it.

  With delicate fingertips, Grace slid the panel to the side. It moved soundlessly into the wall revealing what appeared to the ray of her flashlight to be the inside of a tall narrow box. “Coffin” came to mind, and she hastily banished the image.

  Grace inspected the box with her flashlight. There was a simple turn latch. Grace flipped it over and the door swung open. Meeting her astonished gaze was a stretch of crimson-and-peacock Oriental carpet. The telescope pointed at the white Georgian windows indicated that she was back in Peter Fox’s living room.

  She crawled through the case of the grandfather clock, and got to her feet. The weighted door swung shut behind her. At the soft click Grace nearly jumped out of her skin.

  Dusk now shrouded the still rooms. She could hear rain brushing softly against the windows. Grace snapped off her flashlight and headed for Peter’s kitchen. She was just lifting the phone receiver when she heard a door shut downstairs. The sound of whistling carried clearly through the wooden floor, floating nearer.

  Grace froze. Her eyes flew around the room seeking another exit. She heard the scrape of a key in the lock. Carefully Grace replaced the phone and darted behind the kitchen door. She wasn’t sure if her reaction was guilt or fear.

  Through the crack she spied the living room door swinging open. A light switched on, bathing the room in homely glow.

  Peter Fox was home. Grace relaxed a fraction.

  He wore Levis and a brown leather flight jacket.

  He carried a black Gladstone bag. He was staring down, frowning at his keys. The rain spangled his fair hair and the shoulders of his jacket. From behind the door Grace caught a hint of wet evening and clean male.

  She tried to decide what to do. The body in the basement changed everything. She couldn’t be sure Peter had not killed the man. Warning Peter now seemed second priority to escaping this house and getting to the police.

  Fox’s light, restless gaze swung around the room. He’s wondering why the door wasn’t locked, she realized, holding her breath.

  But he seemed to find nothing amiss. He dropped the Gladstone, and pulled some envelopes out of his pocket, shuffling through them absently. Grace, her thoughts flying ahead in panic, concluded, he’ll come into the kitchen to check his phone messages…

  Her eyes raced desperately around the kitchen. There was no way out. Even if she could get to the window without being seen, she couldn’t leap two stories down.

  Grace’s eyes zeroed back to Peter Fox. She watched him toss his mail to the glass-topped curio table. He walked out of Grace’s line of vision. She waited tensely. Where was he? What was he doing? Should she make a run for it now?

  Her tension spiked as he began whistling that same jaunty tune. He must be in the bedroom, she decided, gauging the sound. The whistle faded. Grace heard the muffled rush of running water, the rumble of old plumbing.

  It took every ounce of courage she possessed to slide out from behind the door. She stuck her head out the kitchen doorway and peeked around.

  The light in the bedroom was on. There was no sign of Peter Fox, but she could hear him walking around, opening and closing drawers.

  Slipping off her shoes, Grace sprinted noiselessly to the door, every moment expecting to hear a yell behind her. Fingers unsteady, she turned the knob and eased the door open. Not daring to close it she hurried, still on the balls of her feet down the staircase. Her legs trembled with both fear and exhaustion.

  Below her, the showroom lay in darkness, the eyes of the merry-go-round horse glinted in the light from above. Grace was just tiptoeing past the display of pikes and axes—with that conspicuous bare spot— when a voice floated down from above, “Well, well. If it isn’t Miss Hollister, wandering lonely as a cloud.”

  With a squeal of panic, Grace bolted down the rest of the stairs toward the front door.

  But she had not realized how fast and silently he moved, so silently that he seemed to barely stir the air. Grace’s fingertips grazed the front door handle as his hand fell heavily on her shoulder.

  She screamed and whacked at him with her shoes. Her shoes were yanked from her hands so hard she nearly fell. She tried to fight back, but was hindered by the sliding strap of her purse. It was happening so fast. Grace screamed again, and tried to swing her bag at her attacker. Everything she had ever learned about self-defense came to her in a confused rush. She kicked, trying unsuccessfully for that most vulnerable part of the male anatomy. She flailed furiously. But above all, she screamed, breathlessly, hoarsely for help.

  From a distance she heard Peter Fox yelling at her to shut up—shut up or else. Somehow he held on to her, his hands punishing as Grace turned and twisted frantically, still kicking out. She was fighting for her life. Yesterday she had been unprepared for violence; today was another stor
y.

  “Damn you, stop it!” swore Peter Fox. “What the hell is the matter with you?” He shook Grace so hard that her head bobbled back and forth.

  “Let go of me!” She clawed at his face.

  He slapped her.

  As a slap it was not much. The Queen Mother could have taught Peter Fox a few things about hitting women. However, it was the second time in as many days that a man had struck Grace, and instead of seeing stars, this time she saw red.

  Like a professional boxer, she hauled off and swung, her fist connecting to Peter’s jaw with a force she felt all down her arm.

  The silence that followed was as shattering as the previous pandemonium. It didn’t take Grace long to get her breath back. She was way past fear.

  “Don’t you ever, ever hit me again, you swine!”

  “Why, you bloody lunatic!” Peter broke off, uncharacteristically at a loss for words.

  By now it had sunk in on Grace that if Peter Fox had killed the man in his secret passage, he would not have been yelling what was the matter with her. He would not have wasted a minute wrestling with Grace when he had plenty of other weapons within grasp. She was not naive enough to imagine she had actually held her own in physical combat. The fact that even now, following their impromptu brawl, he merely stood there rubbing his cheek and glaring, told Grace all she needed to know about Peter Fox and the dead man in his stockroom.

  “You were hysterical,” he stated.

  Voice wavering, she got out, “I don’t care if I’m foaming at the mouth, no one is ever laying a hand on me again!”

  Peter quit rubbing his cheek and gaped indignantly. “You silly bitch, you’re lucky I don’t wring your neck. Who do you think you are?” He took a menacing step toward Grace. “And what the hell are you doing in my house?”

  All at once Grace felt perfectly calm. Rational. She willed away the vision of how she must appear to him, Mr. Rochester’s crazy wife in her livelier moments, and pronounced, “I came to warn you.”

  “Of what?” Clearly he thought the warning had to be as bad as whatever she was warning against.

  “It’s a long story. I think you’d better…” Like a figure of doom, Grace pointed toward the back office.

  Peter stared, following the traverse of her finger, then glanced back at Grace. “If this is some kind of joke…”

  Grace shook her head.

  Keeping a wary eye on her, Peter started toward the back room. Grace followed. She saw him pause a fraction of a second when the smell hit him. He muttered something she didn’t catch.

  Flicking on the light, Peter stared around the office with narrowed eyes. Grace hung back in the doorway; he crowded the little room. She gestured toward the shelves with their faux ledgers and glued-on gimcracks.

  “In there.”

  He looked pale. She thought, he already knows what that scent means. Tersely, he asked, “How do you know about the passageway?”

  “It was open when I arrived this afternoon.”

  “Make yourself at home,” he muttered, crouching down before the shelf. Reaching behind, he released some catch and swung the case toward himself as though he were opening a door.

  The passage mouth gaped blackly before them.

  “Well?”

  “He’s in there.” She shivered, hugging herself against the memory of the thing at the foot of the stairs.

  “He?”

  Frowning, Peter reached in, and to Grace’s chagrin, snapped on an overhead light. She could not see his face, but she saw the set of his shoulders go rigid. His whole body was perfectly still for a moment and then he moved toward the stairs and out of Grace’s line of vision.

  Footsteps dragging, Grace entered the stockroom and dropped down at the bare desk. She could not see what was happening in the passage, but Peter’s out-loud thought reached her ears, “You greedy little sod, what have you done?”

  She waited, staring unseeingly at the painting of Dutch windmills. How had she not known that unmistakable smell the first time? The pungent, metallic odor of blood and other. The less definable scent of death.

  A moment later Peter ducked out of the passage. His eyes, meeting Grace’s, looked electric blue in the pallor of his grim face.

  “Would you mind explaining how you figure into this?”

  All the lazy charm of their first encounter was gone. This, Grace thought, was the real man: tough and rather cold.

  “I was hoping you could tell me. Since I pulled you out of that stream, I’ve been run off the road, abducted by men with guns, and held prisoner in an abandoned farmhouse. Today I found a dead man in your secret passage.”

  Peter’s eyes flickered. “What were you doing in my secret passage to begin with?”

  “I told you, I came to warn you.”

  “Warn me of what?”

  Grace spluttered, “Of—of that!” She waved at the passageway with its gruesome contents. “I heard them talking—”

  “Heard who?”

  “The Queen Mother and the other one.”

  “The…!” Peter’s expression said it all.

  “A man wearing a party mask,” Grace corrected with asperity. “Look, I know I’m not telling this very coherently. There isn’t time. One of the men who grabbed me said—well, actually I overheard him talking about ‘icing Fox.’ You.”

  A strange expression crossed Peter’s face.

  Grace said impatiently, “I’ve gone through this with the police. They didn’t believe me, which is why I had to come myself.” She put a hand to her forehead. “What are we wasting time talking for? We’ve got to phone the police now!”

  She reached for the phone on the desk.

  Peter’s hand covered hers, forcing the receiver back in its cradle.

  “What are you—?” she broke off, frightened by the odd look in his eyes.

  “No police,” Peter said in a flat, still voice.

  Chapter Four