They crossed a rugged bridge to the meadow, the flock of sheep scattering before them as thunder rumbled in the distance. Following a passage through the monastery’s confused tumble of fallen stones and ruined walls, they came out in the central cloister. Hero had brought the satchel with Emma’s sketchbook, and she opened it now to the final drawing.
“Emma must have been standing about here when she drew this,” she said, positioning herself in the cloister by comparing the ruins of the chapter house to Emma’s sketch. Then she lowered the sketchbook, her face pinched as if with pain.
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t understand why Flanagan and Lowe felt they needed to kill her. I mean, if they found her here sketching, why not simply go away and arrange for Flanagan to pass the message from Paris to Bonaparte another time?”
“I suspect they didn’t realize she was here until she’d already seen or overheard something that betrayed what they were about. That’s why they killed her.”
“But surely they would have looked around when they first arrived, to make certain they were alone?”
“I’ve no doubt they did. Which tells us that by the time they arrived, Emma was no longer here in the cloisters.”
Hero turned in a slow circle, her gaze scanning the broken walls and weed-choked walks around them. “So where was she?”
He found himself staring at what was left of the refectory, the lacey sandstone tracery of its outer row of soaring, pointed-arch windows showing pale against the increasingly storm-darkened sky. Running nearly the entire length of the cloister’s south walk, the monk’s stately dining hall had been built above an undercroft, both to provide storage for foodstuffs and as a deliberate echo of the cenaculum, the upper room in Jerusalem where the Last Supper was said to have taken place. The grand portal that once marked the entrance to the refectory’s main stairs had long ago collapsed. But a second, narrower set of steps, its barrel vault still intact, led down to the chamber below.
Hero looked from Sebastian to the undercroft’s entrance and whispered, “Oh, my Lord.”
A growing wind buffeted their faces and flattened the lank grass as they crossed the cloister. The ancient stone steps were crumbling with age and littered with debris, and she was about to descend when he put out a hand, stopping her.
“Look,” he said.
Two distinct sets of men’s footprints showed in the dust of the centuries: one smaller, the other noticeably longer. The men had passed up and down the steps several times, nearly obliterating a third set of prints left by a woman’s half boots.
Dainty footprints that went down but did not come back up.
“She died down there, didn’t she?” said Hero, her voice hushed.
“I’m afraid so.”
They picked their way down the ancient stairs in silence, his stomach hollowing out with the implications of what they had found. He imagined Emma finishing her sketch of the chapter house and then turning, sketchbook still in hand, to notice the steps to the undercroft. Intrigued, she must have ventured down the steep steps, surely as awed as they were when the beauty of the ancient, vast chamber opened up before her, its sturdy stone vaulting and central row of stout Norman piers perfectly preserved, its outside range of round-headed windows echoing the Perpendicular windows of the refectory above.
Had she been planning to make a sketch of the undercroft? he wondered. Was that why she lingered? Or did she hear Flanagan’s and Lowe’s voices and decide to remain out of sight, lest she discomfit them by her unexpected appearance?
If so, it was a decision she surely came to regret.
“I wonder how they knew she was here,” said Hero.
“She may have accidently made some sound. Or Lowe could have decided to search down here and came upon her by chance.”
“And so he killed her,” said Hero, her words echoing eerily in the cavernous space. “He pinned her down against the rough flagstone floor and quietly smothered her.”
“Yes.”
A single lady’s glove lay beside one of the undercroft’s central octagonal piers, and Sebastian bent to pick it up.
He had no way of knowing for certain, but he suspected Flanagan had been horrified when he discovered what Lowe had done. They would have had to leave Emma’s body here, in the undercroft, until nightfall, using the remaining hours of daylight to trick Alice Gibbs into helping them obscure the time and place of Emma’s death. Then, under cover of darkness, they would have returned to shift the body to the water meadows, carefully staging the scene to look like a suicide.