“Well, he said it was unlocked,” Rune reminded us.
The door was, but our chains weren’t. The good news was that the keys to the padlocks were most likely in the tiny chamber outside. And the bad news? There had to be at least two hundred keys hanging neatly on hooks on the wall. Were we expected to try all of them? Because that would take an hour on its own.
Alaric picked the nearest key off the board. “They don’t have any codes on them.”
“Are either of you girls wearing bobby pins?” Ravi asked. “Shame they’re not regular handcuffs, or we’d be out of them by now.”
Really? How?
Rune elbowed him. “No cheating. Is that other door locked?”
Alaric tried it. “Yup. There has to be some kind of clue…”
“But there isn’t,” I said. Why had I ever suggested this? “Just a hundred keys and a freaking light switch.”
Suddenly, Alaric smiled. “Turn the lights off.”
“Huh?”
“Just do it.”
Rune hit the switch, and what do you know? Five of the keys glowed, four green and one pink. Alaric snatched them off their hooks, and then Rune turned the lights back on and held up the lock securing her to Ravi. A quiet click, and she was free.
“Good thinking,” I said to Alaric.
“I remembered Emmy’s tattoo. She has a skull on her arm that only shows up under black light.”
A secret tattoo? How clever. That’s what I should have done. Instead, when my family had sold Polo out from underneath me, I’d got his name tattooed across my heart in black ink. Piers had gone bananas. He’d even got a therapist to come to the house while I still had my bad leg propped up on the sofa, but thankfully, the woman had reassured me that my expression of grief was perfectly normal.
Alaric freed my hands, then rubbed a thumb over my wrist. “Okay?”
“We should open the door.”
Turned out the mad scientist wasn’t a bad housekeeper. His living room was quite tidy, albeit filled with a strange selection of objects. Including a mechanical parrot that greeted us with a squawk.
“Pieces of eight,” it screeched. “Pieces of eight.”
“Is there anything gold in here?” Alaric asked. “That could be a clue. Let’s take one side of the room each—say what you see.”
What I didn’t see was a door. How were we meant to get out?
“I’ve got a fireplace with a mirror over it and a painting either side. One’s a weird abstract thing, and the other’s a poor copy of the Mona Lisa.”
Alaric studied the bookshelf on an adjacent wall. “The guy has bizarre taste in reading material. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and a Russian dictionary just in case he forgets any of the words. Science books, algebra, a zoology manual, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Someone must’ve put that here as a joke, surely?”
“Or an instruction manual,” Ravi muttered. “I’ve got six pairs of shoes next to the desk, parrot food in one of the drawers, a pair of glasses, a notepad, and a bunch of pens.”
“Anything on the notepad?”
“Not unless it’s written in invisible ink. The shoes have numbers on the bottoms—twenty-three, fourteen, fifty-seven, and so on, all two digits—but I have no idea what they mean.”
Rune held up a box. “There’s a jigsaw. Is that what the parrot meant? Pieces?”
“That’s a good possibility. How many pieces?”
She already had the lid off the box. “Not many. Twenty?”
“Good. You do the jigsaw with Bethany, and we’ll carry on looking.”
“The parrot has an empty dish,” Ravi pointed out. “What if we’re meant to feed it?”
I joined Rune at the desk, pushing any discomfort over the weirdness of the whole affair to the back of my mind. I hadn’t spent much time around kids, especially teenagers, and I didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot with her. That could make working for her father somewhat awkward.
“It’s a picture of this room,” she told me. “Here’s the parrot and the Mona Lisa. Can you see any more corners?”
If she was feeling any of the same uneasiness, it didn’t show. Then again, she was probably used to her father’s assistants coming and going. Emphasis on the going. I didn’t want to leave like the others, but since I had no desire to jump into bed with a smooth-talking playboy, I considered myself one step ahead of my predecessors.
Gradually, the jigsaw took shape, and we both realised at the same time that there was one big difference between the picture and the actual room. A moment later, the two of us leapt for the rug.
“There’s a trapdoor under here!” Rune said, breathless.
A trapdoor with five dials, each engraved with the numbers one through nine. A combination lock, except we didn’t know the combination.
“Good going,” Alaric said as he poured birdseed into the parrot’s dish.
“Two-six,” it shrieked. “Two-six.”
Ravi knelt and turned the second dial to the number six. “Guess this is how we get out. Somewhere in here, there are four more combinations. One’s on the shoes, but we need to narrow it down.”
“Wait, wait,” Rune said. “There’s a piece of the jigsaw left over. A brown boot, left foot.”
That gave us four-nine. Three numbers left to go, and now that I knew what we were looking for, I had a good idea where to find one of the codes.
“Where are those glasses?”
Alaric passed them over, and I slipped them on. Sure enough, the abstract picture changed under the tinted lenses, revealing two definite digits. I’d had a book of puzzles like that when I was a child, even had a go at creating them myself.
“Three-one.”
Two to go. But we’d tried everything obvious. What about the books? I pulled a copy of War and Peace off the shelf, checking for any hidden compartments or perhaps a scribbled note. Nothing.
Then Alaric breathed on the mirror, and two ghostly numbers appeared. One-seven. My jaw dropped.
“How did you know to do that?”
He gave me a wink. “Just a trick that us businessmen use occasionally.”
Businessmen my ass.
“There’s only one number left,” Rune said, a little breathless.
But Ravi shook his head. “No need to look for it. We have four definite digits, which means there are only ten possible options for the remaining dial. All we have to do is cycle through them, and…voila.” The lock clicked, and he heaved the trapdoor open, revealing a black hole. Spooky, but we’d come this far, and I wasn’t about to chicken out. “Who wants to go first?”
Alaric stood at the edge, peering into the gloom. “There’s a ladder. I’ll go down first, then help the girls.”
Teenage me, the tomboy my mother hated so much, would have insisted on going it alone, but as I’d got older, I’d been schooled into accepting assistance gracefully. Rune already had her manners, and she stood to the side with Ravi, who nodded for me to go next.
Good thing I’d worn trousers.
Alaric disappeared into the darkness, but it didn’t stay dark for long.
“Ah, fu—” He obviously realised Rune was in earshot. “Fiddlesticks. There must’ve been a pressure sensor.”