Free Grave Doubts by John Moss Page B

suppose there was a third party involved. Someone contrived what purported to be an ancient crime, but it seems it was not. And you want my opinion about what, precisely?”
    There was a touch of the carnivalesque in the air. Pope was relishing his role as forensic antiquarian, Rachel was giddy from sleep deprivation, Miranda was distracted by lingering sensuality that refused to coalesce around particular memories or desire. And Morgan was happy. He had been drawn out of winter lethargy by a macabre spectacle so wondrously devised, where the anonymous victims were dramatis personae and the mysteries of death itself were on theatrical display.
    The transition to serious work was abrupt. Alexander took out a Swiss Army knife and pried off a small slab of plaster from the edge of the hidden closet. He set the plaster on the floor and gently crushed it under the ball of his foot, then leaned down with surprising grace for such a tall and angular man and retrieved a few remnants of dust-dry powder and strands of fibre. He turned to the wall cupboard that was leaning against a pile of splintered lath, squatted down, and examined it closely. He smiled appreciatively, turned it over, and scrutinized the back, fingering the bolts that had been embedded in a stringer running between the studs of the original door frame. He drew a penlight out of his hip pocket and entered the closet, disappearing in the sudden darkness as he moved under the eaves. He emerged and walked over to the laundry chute, stuck his hand in with the flashlight, then squeezed his head through the restricted opening and looked down, then up. He extricated himself, rose to his full height, and smiled beatifically.
    “Someone has done remarkably fine work,” he pronounced. “There’s a paradox, though. Everything has been meticulously contrived to seem in keeping with the age of the house. The plaster is a good imitation, slaked lime with horsehair binding, aged well, and layered with paint and paper. A lot of thought went into this project. The only woodwork that shows — the baseboard across the bottom where the door had been — is authentic. I assume the culprit took it from one of the other rooms. The filler, the paint, and the blending are spot on. But the inside of the closet has been sealed with a contemporary potion — Polyfilla, I expect.
    “The lath over the sealed door and the chute must have been lifted from another room as well, even another house. It’s all hand-split swamp cedar, but tacked on with old nails that have recently been cleaned. The chute, of course, was a ratheringenious dumbwaiter to bring wood upstairs for the fire. This house predates cast-iron stoves, which were evidently a later accoutrement. There is a fireplace here, hidden inside the gable-end wall. A stovepipe was later forced through into the chimney. Another goes up through the roof in the hall, above the dumbwaiter shaft. The chute was lined for laundry quite recently, possibly between the wars, and blocked off at floor level only in the last fortnight or so.
    “It is an admirable counterfeit, all of this, but there is an intriguing anomaly, and that, Miranda — if I may call you Miranda — is the poetry you wanted. This fraud paradoxically insists on being exposed — something hidden, a concealment, that yearns for revelation. This makes it a work of art. The whole project is designed for our appreciation, incomplete until it has been exposed.
    “The key is the hanging cabinet: it was bolted in place, it is valuable. A salvager would be counted on to retrieve it. It would refuse to yield. The wall had to give way. The bodies were exposed not amidst rubble but in pristine condition — exactly, I imagine, as the killer intended. And there we are!”
    Alexander Pope looked pleased with himself.
    Morgan was excited by his articulate economy with words. The man was worthy of his namesake. Miranda was thinking, there is nothing poetic about murder, except in classical