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

were outsiders as far as the servants were concerned; they belonged ‘out the doors’.
    So who had the night watchman seen? More than seventy years after the event, the trail is not quite cold. While the chief witness has long since died, among the descendants of those working at the castle on 27 April 1940, the memory of what happened that night lives on.
    It was Philip Stubbley who saw the woman in the passage. He was one of three watchmen on duty on the night of the break-in. Security had been stepped up to protect the government records; the men were armed with revolvers and machines tracked their progress through the castle.
    ‘The watchmen clocked into tachometer-type machines at various points on their round,’ George Waudby remembered. ‘They went everywhere. Up into the towers, out on to the roof, then they’d come down through all the different floors and levels. There were hundreds of rooms to go through, but they didn’t miss a single one. It took them a full hour to go round. Then they’d start again. I don’t know how many times they went round, but there were three of them circulating throughout the night.’
    It was a few minutes past three o’clock when Philip Stubbley turned the corner into the passage outside the Duke’s rooms. Bill Hotchin, the boiler stoker, started work at dawn that morning. He told his daughter, Dorothy, what Stubbley saw: ‘As he came round the corner into the passage a man ran past him. Or he thought it was a man. Philip shouted at him and
she
turned round. She was wearing men’s clothes. All in black she was. I remember my father saying heought to have got out his pistol and challenged her – the night watchmen were trained to fire below the knee, you know. But he didn’t. He panicked and ran back to find the other watchmen. And of course, she got away. But she had been in the Duke’s rooms.’
    Stubbley – as Dorothy was later to discover from other servants at the castle – had every reason not to shoot. He had recognized the woman: ‘He said it was “the woman from Eastwell”. That’s what they called her. She lived in the manor house in Eastwell village, just across the Vale. She was the Duke’s mistress. Apparently, he used to see a lot of her. They said he’d left her a letter or some money, and that’s what she’d come to collect.’
    The moment’s delay – when Stubbley went in search of the other watchmen – gave the woman the vital seconds she needed. Dashing across the Guard Room, past the stands of pikes and muskets, she escaped through the great oak doors at the entrance to the castle and vanished into the night.
    While the servants claimed to know who the woman was,
exactly
what she was doing in the Duke’s rooms and what – if anything – she took away with her are among the many questions that hover over the strange events that occurred at Belvoir Castle in the week of his death.
    With the passing of time, even her alleged identity becomes mere hearsay. But an important detail relating to the means by which she first attempted to enter the castle suggests there is some truth in the servants’ second-hand recollection of events.
    Of the many windows overlooking the gun-carriage terrace, the one leading into the room where the Duke died was the most secure. On the inside, a concertina-style iron grille operated in a similar manner to the doors of an old-fashioned lift: it could be pulled across and locked. So why then, when the woman arrived at the castle, did she make straight for this window? Why break the glass and force the catch when the internal grille surely rendered it impregnable? There is just one possible explanation: when she smashed the pane of glass and used the brace to force the catch on the window, she had anticipated that the grille would not be locked.
    Someone, she presumed, had left it open for her.
    The servants suspected the Duke.
    According to George Waudby, the window was a route of entry that she had used many