Foyle was still deep in thought as he left Miss Pierce's office. Mary Bishop was passing through the hall and he stopped her.
"I don't suppose you've seen my driver, have you?" he asked. "Miss Stewart? Young woman, fair hair, MTC uniform?"
"Oh, yes, sir," she said, with a little bob. "She and Miss Marcus were going downstairs."
"Downstairs?"
She pointed to a door toward the rear the hall. "Down there, sir. There's classrooms down there."
Foyle raised an eyebrow. "The one Mr Brink used?"
"And Miss Marcus, sir, yes," she said.
Foyle thanked her. The door opened to reveal a narrow set of stone stairs, and he made his way down them to discover what had obviously originally been a wine cellar. The cellar had been converted at a relatively recent date, judging from the rawness of the wood where new panels closed gaps in the thick stone walls. Bare bulbs gave a sickly light.
He paused, and called: "Sam? Miss Marcus?"
"Down here, sir!" Sam's voice came back in a hearty shout. "Left and left again!"
He followed her directions and saw her standing with Jen - Jean - by one of the doors. "I couldn't find anything," she said. "So I thought I'd have a look and see if there were any clues left in Mr Brink's classroom. Miss Marcus was letting me in."
Jean Marcus held up a bunch of keys. "They are all kept locked," she said. "Not that it keeps some of Mr Carey's more enterprising students out but one does try to show willing at least."
Foyle walked down the corridor to join them. "Valuables stored inside?"
"Not really," Jean said. "But Miss Pierce does try to minimise the number of places students might go to evade her ever-so eagle eye." She unlocked the door, and stepped back. "Voila, as they say in La France." Her French pronunciation was execrable, Foyle noted, marked with all the errors of one who'd learnt the language in a schoolroom and never used it to converse with a native speaker. Of course. Jeanne Valois may speak fluent French but Jean Marcus doesn't. He wondered if she taught her language classes as Jeanne or Jen.
"Merci," Sam said, her accent only slightly better. She turned the handle.
As she pushed open the door Foyle heard a sound he'd hoped to never hear again in his life; one that had ambushed him from the depths of his imagination in quiet moments for years after the war and which still had the power to make his blood run cold: the gentle ting of a pin coming out of a Mills Bomb.
"Down!" He flung himself forward. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Jen as a blur of movement, and then he had tackled Sam and carried her clear of the door, both of them tumbling to the floor.
The thick walls of the old wine cellar focused the blast through the door, which blew out in a cloud of splinters and dust. Foyle felt something sting his calf and the breath of deadly heat passed over him.
Then stillness.
He realised he was lying across Sam's legs and torso. Looking up, he saw an arm at an impossible angle, a bent body, a jumble of body parts he could make no sense of except blank horror, and then, blinking, realised he saw no blood. He was looking at Jen who, too, had fallen across Sam, curled protectively, one arm wrapped around her own head and the other sheltering Sam.
"Sam!" He could barely hear his own voice over the ringing in his ears.
"Here, sir," she said breathlessly.
"You alright?"
"Bit squashed," she said diffidently.
Foyle sat up. He could feel a warm stickiness in one shoe and forced himself to look down, dreading the sight of white bone and ruined flesh - but there was nothing more than a rip in his trousers and a finger-sized splinter of wood embedded in his calf, sending a thick trickle of blood running down to his sock.
Jen, too, sat up. Blood ran down her face from a gash on her forehead, bisecting the scar beneath her eye, marking her cheek with a cross of pale pink and sharp red. Her eyes were dazed. "Hurt?" she asked.
Foyle shook his head and Sam looked down at herself and gave an experimental pat to arms and legs. "No. All present and correct!"
Jen looked at Foyle, glanced at his leg and back to his face, and raised an eyebrow, then winced and put her hand to her forehead.
"Sir!" Sam said, following Jen's gaze. "You're injured!"
"It's a scratch," Foyle said, and as Sam started to scramble up, "Stay still, Sam." They had fallen hard. In the urgency of realising what that small distinct sound was and what it meant he had had no time to be cautious of her condition, but now a new fear touched him. As she ignored him, he said more sharply: "Stay still."
"But your leg!" she protested.
"Had worse shaving," Foyle assured her. He took out his handkerchief and, tugging out the splinter, pressed the cloth against the wound.
"Then I do suggest you sharpen your razor," Jen said dryly. She got to her hands and knees and then slowly to her feet, steadying herself against the wall, and peered cautiously through the ruined door.
"Was that a bomb?" Sam asked.
"Grenade, I think." Jen said.
"Wired to the door-frame?" Foyle asked, and Jen nodded. "When was the last time anyone was down here?"
"Five days ago," Jen said slowly. "Or six."
"Who has the key?"
"Me," Jen said. "No doubt Miss Pierce."
"Did Mr Brink have one?"
"Of course he -" Jen said. "Yes. He did."
So perhaps his killer has one too, now, Foyle thought.
Running footsteps heralded the arrival of two of Hill House's MPs, closely followed by Major Stafford. His comment at the sight of the shattered door was succinct and Anglo-Saxon and he barked an order to fetch a medic in a tone that sent one of the soldiers running at a pace that would have made him a very creditable candidate for the '44 Olympics. Provided of course the war is over by then.
"Bad?" he asked Foyle, and when Foyle shook his head, turned to Jen, taking her face between his hands gently but without tenderness. "Look up - look left - that hurt?"
"No," she said, following his directions. "I didn't go out."
"You'll be alright, girl," he said, releasing her. "Might have a new scar."
She laughed, too brightly, and said lightly: "And I was such a beauty before!"
"Bloody lucky," Stafford said. "All of you, bloody lucky. This joker damn well meant to make sure of whoever opened that door."
Looking at the splintered door, Foyle had to agree. Anyone standing in front of it - anyone who'd stepped through that door on opening it, as whoever had set the ambush must have expected - would have taken the full force of the blast.
He could, however, have done without Stafford's next muttered remark about scraping people off walls.
From the look on her face, so could Sam. "How did you know, sir?" she asked him.
"I heard it," he said. "The pin. So did Miss Marcus."
"No," Jen said. "I didn't hear anything. But you shouted, and …" she shrugged.
"Golly, sir," Sam said soberly. "Plurry good luck you came looking for us."
She was worryingly pale. "Sure you're all right?" Foyle asked her. "No … pain, anything like that?"
Despite her denials, when the Hill House MO arrived, Foyle insisted that Sam, at least, go to the infirmary. And then, he thought as, still protesting her fitness to work, she was led away up the corridor, back to the vicarage and I'll be damned if she comes anywhere near this bloody place until I've put cuffs on their resident 'joker'.
Stafford inspected the room before he'd allow anyone else to enter, then declared it safe. "Nothing else," he said.
"No pressure plates on the floor?" Jen asked gaily. "How disappointing! One does so wish one's would-be murderers to go to a little effort!"
Foyle tested his weight on his injured leg and then limped through the door after Stafford. No windows, no other doors. Most of the chairs had been shattered by the blast, their remnants tumbled on the floor. On the wall, a poster in French warning of the health risks of eating cat smoldered. "You think you were meant to be the target, then?" he asked.
"Miss Pierce doesn't spend a lot of time down here," she pointed out. "No-one else has the key. Who else?"
The handle of the door had been driven into the wall by the blast. Twisted by heat as it was, Foyle could still make out a strand of wire melted into the handle, confirming that the booby-trap had been as simple as he'd thought: grenade on the door-frame, wire from the pin to the door handle. Opening the door would pull the pin free, and then …
The problem with such a trap, as Foyle had learnt for himself one desperate, bloody day in France decades before, was that while it could be, with care, set from the outside of a room, it could only be disarmed from the inside.
He wished Jen had said yesterday when he'd asked her the last time she'd used the room.
Because six days ago, Axel Brink was still alive. Still likely to come down those stairs, and set off that grenade by unlocking the door.
The door to which only he, and Miss Pierce, and Jean Marcus had a key.
Jean Marcus, who had moved with the reflexes of a combat veteran at his warning.
Or had been expecting it.
.
.
.
A/N: The Mills Bomb was the standard fragmentation grenade used by the British in World War One, variants of which were still in use in World War Two .
The 1940 and 1944 Olympics were both cancelled because of the war.
