Chapter 14 - Flight into the Winter Gale
The service corridor plunged down a steep flight of narrow wooden steps, bypassing the ground floor entirely and dumping us into the old coal cellars beneath the kitchen. The air was frigid, thick with the scent of damp earth and rust. Outside, the sirens continued their mechanical wailing, but here underground, the sound was muted into a low, rhythmic thrum.
I held Maisie’s small, mittened hand tightly in mine, guiding her past the rusted iron boilers that had been cold since the 1970s. The black ledger was jammed into the deep inner pocket of my wool coat, its hard corners pressing against my ribs like an iron shield.
"Watch your step, Maisie," I whispered, lifting her over a broken section of cast-iron drainage pipe. "Almost there."
At the end of the cellar wall was the old root hatch—a pair of angled wooden storm doors that opened into the overgrown rhododendron thicket at the manor's western boundary. The iron latch was frozen solid with rime. I set my jaw, braced my shoulder against the timber, and threw my entire weight against the wood.
With a sharp crack that sounded like a gunshot in the confined space, the ice shattered. Freezing air rushed in, carrying with it the needle-sharp sting of falling sleet.
I pushed Maisie up through the opening first, then hoisted myself into the knee-deep drifts. The blizzard had arrived in full fury. The wind screamed through the bare branches of the ancient oaks, whipping the snow into blinding, swirling sheets of white that completely erased the glow of the police cruisers parked five hundred yards away at the front portico.
We were invisible in the storm, but we were on foot, half a mile from the estate gates, with the temperature plunging rapidly below zero.
"Where is the car, Mommy?" Maisie asked, her teeth already chattering as the freezing wind tore through her woolen scarf.
"We can't use the car at the driveway," I said, shielding her small face with my coat. Rebecca would have an officer stationed at my sedan within minutes, ostensibly to preserve evidence, but really to ensure we couldn't leave the grounds. "We're going to the old boatkeeper’s cottage by the lake."
Grandfather Thomas had kept a vintage Land Rover in the cottage's carriage barn for fifty years, maintaining it with the obsessive regularity of a retired naval commander. Arthur had considered the vehicle an eyesore and had never bothered to inventory it.
We trudged through the drifts, the cold biting through our boots until my toes felt like dull stones. Every snap of a pine branch sounded like pursuit; every howl of the wind mimicked the harsh bark of a police radio. But Maisie never cried. She kept her chin tucked, matching my strides as best she could, her hand locked in mine with a fierce, desperate strength.
Ten minutes later, the dark silhouette of the boatkeeper’s cottage materialized through the whiteout. The carriage barn was padlocked, but I didn't need a key. Thomas Vance had hidden a spare key inside the hollowed brass cap of the outdoor thermometer fifty years ago.
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My fingers were so numb I could barely turn the brass cap, but it unscrewed with a gritty squeak. The key fell into my palm.
Moments later, the heavy barn doors swung open just wide enough for us to slip inside. There, beneath a heavy, dust-caked canvas tarp, sat the boxy, olive-drab shape of the 1984 Defender.
