He said, “I felt something in here last night… It was what I expected to feel up at the Hall… but something more… yes, something stronger…”

He started moving down the side of the table, running his fingers along its edge.

Sam went to prop her bill up against the telephone. She noticed the phone was unplugged. The reason for Madero’s presence was made clear by the sight of a laptop connected to the point. Her gaze drifted to the screen. There was an e-mail displayed plus the Download Complete box. She didn’t mean to read it, but even a brief accidental glance was enough to print words and images on her mind.

Hi! Just to say my tec wiz unearthed the old Molloy website. Nothing on it but a self-promoting CV plus a selection of articles he’d written, presumably the best – if so, God help us! But interestingly one of the pieces (which I attach) demonstrates that he’d actually been to Jolley Castle and dug into the archive there. Tim Lilleywhite’s been back on this morning. He’s 99% sure he’s trawled up all the Tyrwhitt stuff now and definitely nothing more on Simeon. Sorry, but this Simeon thing is really a bit of a red herring, isn’t it? The main thing is your recusancy research. Hope that’s going well. Try not to fall into any priest-holes!

Cheers

Max

As she turned away, she found herself thinking, with slightly malicious amusement, old Max isn’t going to be pleased when he hears how his Holiness has cocked things up!

She set off toward the door. Madero was now sitting at the bottom end of the table, his face still rapt. As she passed him his hand snaked out, seized her wrist and forced her hand between his legs.

“Feel this,” he said. “What do you think this is?”

She bunched her other fist preparatory to punching him in the throat, then realized he was pushing her fingers along the table’s under-edge.

About nine inches from the corner there was a groove about two inches long, ending in a deep hollow. When her no longer resisting hand was moved along, she found another one the same distance from the other corner.

“They mean something,” he said. “I feel it as strongly as I didn’t feel it at the Hall.”

“Feel what?” she demanded.

“There was this so-called priest-hole,” he said impatiently, as if expecting her to understand him without explanation. “But I got nothing there. Whereas here…”

So Max, the e-mailer, hadn’t been joking. He really was looking for priest-holes! Which, he might be surprised to discover, she knew a great deal about. Well, a little deal.

One of her teachers used to read her class books she’d enjoyed in her own English childhood. OK, they’d been a bit old-fashioned, but Sam had loved these tales of tomboy girls in remote manor houses and boarding schools who were forever stumbling on secret passages and hidden chambers. Priest-holes were ten a penny in the UK, it seemed to the young Sam, and the land must be so honeycombed with subterranean passages that it was a wonder it didn’t just crumble underfoot.

Madero, like a good failed priest, was looking upward in search of inspiration. Sam looked up in search of clues. Right above her were the cured hams dangling from the hooks beneath the crossbeam. She recalled her reaction when she first noticed the pulley system the previous day.

She said, “What’s a ham weigh? Ten kilos? Wouldn’t have thought you needed such a high-geared ratchet for that.”

Madero’s gaze came slowly back into focus.

“Maybe they had bigger hams back then,” he said.

“Maybe.”

She went to the spindle on the left-hand wall and examined it closely. After a moment she pulled out the brake chock and began to lower the ham.

“Come on!” she said impatiently, looking across at Madero.

He took her meaning instantly and went to the other wall. For a few moments the only sound was the clacking of the ratchets as the hams descended. Hers landed first and, as she started to unhook it, she glanced his way again but this time did not need to speak. Funny how well their thought processes seemed to slot in together when they got beyond their instinctive antagonism. Together they bent down to fit the free hooks into the grooves and hollows beneath the table, then returned to the winding gear and in unison began to turn the handles.

Even with the gearing cogs, it took a good effort to lift the solid table, but slowly the massive legs rose. The hams began to slide down the slope and Sam paused, but Madero kept winding, so she resumed, wincing as the hams crashed to the floor.

When the table reached an angle of about forty degrees, Madero commanded, “Enough,” which was just like a guy. You have the idea, he’s not happy till he’s taken over. Now he dropped to his knees to examine the granite slabs of the floor, in particular the two which bore the circular print left by five centuries of pressure from the table legs. They were both a couple of feet square.

“There is some movement here, I think,” said Madero excitedly.

“So what?” said Sam. “Even if it does lift out, unless all your priests were my build, you’d never get one of them through a hole that size.”

“But it must signify something,” he insisted.

“Maybe. Look, if these old monks were clever enough to devise that lifting gear, they’d probably have something a bit more complicated than a simple trap.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like a counterweight system. Yeah, that could be it. How about if these two small flags are counterweights and when the table legs are resting on them the trap entrance is completely locked. Let’s see…”

She looked around, and finally her gaze came to rest on the greenish rectangular slab with the carving on it.

“This looks a possible. What the hell does this stuff say?”

“It’s from the Bible. Matthew 7:7. Curiously, I quoted part of it as we walked along the road. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

“Knock, and it shall be opened,” she echoed. “OK, let’s try.”

She knelt down and gently tapped the end of the slab.

Nothing happened.

She tapped again, harder.

Still nothing.

He said with a patience worse than mockery, “I think unless there is somebody down there to answer, your knocking theory is a non-starter.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass,” she retorted. “If these guys were as bright as I think, they’d know to the last gram just how much pressure you needed to move the counterweights, and it wouldn’t be much, else what’s the point? You’d want something like this to be swift and smooth and pretty quiet. Know what I think?”

“Not yet,” he said.

“I think it’s got gunged up. Jeez, could be centuries since it’s been used.”

She stood up, reached one foot forward and drove it down on the slab.

Nothing moved.

She did it again.

“Think I felt something there,” she said.

“Sam, be careful,” said Madero.

It was the first time he’d used her given name but it didn’t feel like a step to intimacy, more like a parent admonishing a naughty child.

So her natural adult reaction was to act like one.

She fixed him with her slatey gaze and said, “Knock, knock; who’s there?”

Then, jumping as high as she could into the air, she came down with all her slight weight on the end of the slab.

It was enough. It was more than enough.

With a smooth swiftness which gave her no time at all to react, the slab pivoted away beneath her feet to reveal a black hole into which she vanished like an insect picked out of the air by the tongue of a lizard.