The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery Read Online Free PDF Page A

smashed ; then a metal brace used to force the catch. The attempt at entry failed: the metal grille on the inside of the window was locked.
    Had anyone been about at that hour, they would have described the intruder as male: he wore a long worsted jacket and his trousers were tucked into a pair of laced leather boots. Yet – as would become clear just moments later – ‘he’ was in fact a woman who had come disguised as a man.
    Turning, and creeping back out on to the terrace, she stopped and looked up to take in the full expanse of the castle’s façade.
    A few paces to the right of the room where the Duke had died, two lead drainpipes, positioned a foot apart, ran up to the roof. Seen from the terrace, it looked an awkward climb. After pausing for a moment, she crept back up to the window; then, dropping the rose bit and the brace on the gravel, she grasped both pipes firmly and, using the brackets as footholds, climbed fifteen feet to the first floor. It was a precarious stretch to the window on the left, but it waspossible to reach the stone ledge beneath it. The window was open and led into the nursery passage.
    Moments later, the night watchman ran into her in the passage outside the Duke’s rooms on the floor below.
    Whoever she was, she was not caught. After being discovered, she fled along the passage and escaped from the castle.
    The police arrived soon after dawn. When they interviewed the night watchman, he omitted to tell them that it was a woman, not a man, whom he had seen outside the Duke’s rooms.
    Missing this key piece of information, it was left to the police to try to make sense of the break-in.
    Immediately, the police suspected espionage. It was clear that this was no casual burglary. The Duke’s rooms had been specifically targeted. In the midst of war, all government establishments were on the alert for enemy agents. The police were aware that both a summary of the records stored at the castle, and a plan of the stacks, showing precisely where specific bundles of documents could be located, were kept in the rooms where the Duke had died.
    Police reports of their investigation into the incident have not survived. But a report written by John Gilkes, the caretaker appointed to look after the records, is now held at the National Archives.
    Midway through the morning, after inspecting the thousands of bundles of documents stacked along the passages and in rooms all over the castle, Gilkes communicated the facts – as he understood them – to the Keeper of the Records in London.
    His report is confusing, the detail sketchy: ‘ I thought I ought to let you know of recent doings here,’ he began. ‘During last night an attempt was made to force the window of the Duke’s room from the outside with a brace and a rose sinking bit. One pane of glass was broken, but the gates and bars outside were not forced. Also a man was spotted in the passage. He escaped having been seen by the watchmen. It is thought they got in through the window above the Duke’s rooms. When told at breakfast of the occurrence, I walked all round our stacks but couldn’t find even a slight alteration in the dust sheets, which I replaced in position on Friday last. Whatever they were after musthave been in the room where His Grace died. The police were here early and I cannot say if any clues were found, except the brace and bit. So it is rather a mystery. So far nothing has been noted as missing.’
    The break-in appeared motiveless: not a single document had been taken, nor a single item in the castle reported stolen.
    At breakfast that morning, the servants had purposely kept Gilkes in the dark. Like the police, he was not aware that the ‘man’ was a woman. ‘What went on up at the castle never went out the doors,’ Gladys Brittain, the wife of the Duke’s butler, remembered. ‘The castle – by that I mean the family – was the castle. It was nothing to do with anyone else.’ Gilkes, a cockney, and the police