Jamie dropped the makeshift weapon clattering to the stone floor and ran to Kingston. For a moment they embraced, her head resting on his chest. Kingston felt a huge surge of relief, followed by an impassioned desire not to let her go. He’d forgotten completely how it felt to hold a woman like this.
At long last he let her go and held her at arm’s length, looking down into her brown eyes. ‘That’s quite a swing you’ve got,’ he said, smiling.
‘I owe it all to softball,’ she answered.
‘More like hardball, if you ask me.’
They separated and turned their attention to Fox. Kingston knelt down and checked his pulse.
‘He’s not dead, I hope—is he?’
Kingston found the question strangely poignant. Unconscious in front of him was a psychopath who’d clearly demonstrated that he was not above burying people alive, maiming or killing to get what he wanted and Jamie was concerned about his health. If it had been up to Kingston, he would have given Fox a couple more whacks.
‘No, don’t worry, he’ll make it.’
‘Then I hope he spends the rest of his life locked up,’ she said.
‘We were terrified when we head that shot, Jamie. What happened?’
‘I don’t know. I was outside the chapel when I realized that, even though I had a good lead on Fox, he could still shoot me in the open. He’d know I would head for the house. So I changed my mind. I figured that if I hid in the chapel, I stood a much better chance. Seeing the chapel empty, he would conclude that I’d run outside. And that’s exactly what he did. The problem was that sooner or later he would come back and it turned out to be sooner. I was wondering what I should do, when I heard the shot, too. A few seconds later, he stormed back into the chapel and went below.’
‘So, he fired the shot—what, in anger?’
‘That’s what I think. He was so furious that I’d got away.’
‘You took a big risk staying here—’
‘—but it paid off, didn’t it?’
Kingston nodded. ‘Certainly did.’
Jamie’s expression changed. She looked perturbed. ‘Where’s Roger?’
‘He’s still down in the catacombs somewhere. He probably heard everything that Fox and I said and, knowing we were on our way back down, he did the smart thing and made himself scarce.’
Kingston walked halfway down the steps and shouted, ‘Roger! You can come out, it’s all over.’
It was a minute or so before Roger made an appearance. His forehead looked a mess where the blood was starting to congeal. He’d been hiding in one of the rooms close to the steps, he said. Seeing Fox’s body and the candlestick he knew quickly what had happened. ‘How did you manage it?’ he asked Kingston.
‘Ask Jamie,’ he replied. ‘A home run, you might say.’
The police arrived quickly. First, a van and an incident-response car followed by an ambulance and then, five minutes later, a car with Detective Chief Inspector Chadwick and Sergeant Eldridge.
After seeing Fox lifted on a stretcher into the ambulance, the DCI and sergeant accompanied Jamie, Ferguson and Kingston back to the house. A police constable was instructed to retrieve the trunk and its contents and anything else left in the catacombs at the foot of the stairs and bring it all up to the house.
Chapter Twenty-six
In the dining room, Jamie sat at one end of the long dining table, Kingston at the other. Between them, on the shiny mahogany surface, was a hotchpotch of yellowing papers, envelopes, folders, documents and a couple of cigar boxes. On the floor close to Jamie stood the leather-handled trunk; next to it, strewn on the oriental carpet, the framed photographs.
The last policeman had left fifteen minutes earlier. Since then, Jamie and Kingston had been studying the photos and were only now starting to examine Ryder’s personal papers, correspondence and keepsakes. For the occasion, Jamie had opened a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne.
The photographs spanned many decades, the earliest—guessing from the style of the clothing and the military uniforms, which, it turned out, Kingston knew quite a lot about—dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Nearly all the pictures were sepia or black and white. When they first started to look at the photos, Jamie had remarked that she felt like a voyeur looking through a one-sided mirror into a family’s private life. Kingston had no such misgivings. He viewed them dispassionately, simply as historical documents, much as he imagined Roger Ferguson would when he got to see them. Roger had left soon after they’d got to the house, complaining of a nasty headache and nausea. Jamie had volunteered to take him to the hospital to have the wound properly dressed and to get an X-ray but he had insisted that he could manage on his own.