“It’s locked,” he said. I could hear a thin note of returning panic in his voice.
“You’ve got to give the secret signal,” I said. I joined him at the door and gave the familiar “shave and a haircut—two bits” knock.
“Who’s there?” Rob called.
“Open the damned door,” I said.
The door flew open and Horace and I stumbled out into the basement corridor. Normally I’d have found it a little cramped and claustrophobic, but it looked as spacious as a palace after the tunnel and the cramped little cell where the tunnel came out. The ceiling was a lofty seven and a half feet. The walls might be cold stone, but they were lined with so many file cabinets and boxes of files that hardly any of the stone was visible.
Sammy, Rob, and Mr. Throckmorton waited in a tense semicircle. Rob and Mr. Throckmorton were holding their hands up like prisoners, apparently to show that they were doing their best not to touch anything before Horace tested their hands. But their arms were drooping, as if they probably couldn’t keep it up much longer. Sammy and Rob, who were both over six feet, loomed over Mr. Throckmorton, who was about five feet four, skinny as a rail, and had been shortchanged at birth in both the shoulder and chin departments. I knew he’d been at school with Randall, which meant he was probably in his early forties, but he could have passed for any age from twenty-five to fifty. He was dressed in gray slacks, a white shirt, red suspenders, and a neatly knotted bow tie. I had a feeling that under normal circumstances he’d have been wearing a coat or at least a sports jacket, and that the slightly retro-looking suspenders made him feel less underdressed in his shirtsleeves. He peered at us through thick bifocals and squinted as if he might be overdue for new, more powerful lenses. He radiated a sort of precise, prickly formality, which probably accounted for my strange reluctance to think of him as “Phinny” instead of Mr. Throckmorton.
“What’s going on out there, anyway?” Rob asked. “Is Sammy pulling our leg or was someone really murdered out there?”
“Someone really was murdered,” I said. “Shot right outside the barricade, and at first glance it certainly looks as if she could have been shot from behind the barricade.”
“They’re trying to frame me,” Mr. Throckmorton said.
“I’m a witness that you can’t possibly have done it,” Rob said. He started to give Mr. Throckmorton an encouraging pat on the back, stopped just in time, and used his elbow instead, still managing to knock the breath out of him.
“Of course, they will try to claim you two were in cahoots,” I said.
Mr. Throckmorton, still breathless from the force of Rob’s encouragement, shook his head in despair.
“How can we possibly prove they’re wrong?” he wheezed.
“That’s what I’m here for.” Horace drew himself up to his full height and held his forensic bag in front of him as if it were a chain saw and he were about to fell a forest of unjust accusations. “Lead me to the barricade!”
If anyone noticed that his voice was a little shaky, or wondered why he had reverted to wearing his gorilla suit, no one said anything.
“Do their hands and clothes first,” I suggested. “And you’ll probably find it easier if you shed the suit.”
“This way,” Mr. Throckmorton said. He turned and led the way down the corridor. We had to walk single file to get past the file cabinets and boxes on either side. At regular intervals a gap in the file cabinets marked the doorway to another cell. A glance through each barred window showed that the cells were also filled with file cabinets and boxes.
“What is this place, anyway?” Horace asked.
“Used to be the jail,” Mr. Throckmorton said over his shoulder. His voice was thin, dry, and precise. “Now we use it for the archives.”
“I mean, why does it look like a castle dungeon?” Horace asked.
“Now that’s an interesting question,” Mr. Throckmorton said, his voice growing a smidgen more animated. “During the Revolutionary War, there was a small prisoner of war camp here in Caerphilly. Mostly German mercenaries. Apparently there were a number of stonemasons among them, and the town government put them to work building the courthouse.”
“Wait—I thought the Yankees burned down the courthouse during the Civil War,” Sammy said. “How could they burn down a stone courthouse?”
“The German prisoners didn’t finish the whole building,” Mr. Throckmorton said. “They got a little carried away with the elaborate stonework in the basement. By the time they finished that, the war was over.”