‘Mr Quinlivan? Ms Walsh?’ Butler-man asked. ‘Thank goodness you’re here! I am Smythe, purser of the Queen Anne ocean liner. A pair of diamond earrings has disappeared from the stateroom of Lady Glenrother. Suspicion has fallen on young Mabel here, Lady Glenrother’s personal maid.’
At this point Mabel curtsied.
Unsure of the etiquette, I half curtsied back.
‘I know Mabel to be an honest soul,’ Smythe said. ‘She is entirely innocent. But if you do not locate the missing jewels, Mabel will be sent for trial and found guilty.’
‘You’re my only hope,’ Mabel said. ‘Do you accept your mission?’
‘I accept,’ Quin said.
Then they were all looking at me.
Oh God. I didn’t do well with that sort of pressure. ‘Okay, I accept too.’ Jesus, could we not just have gone for ice-cream? Ice-cream dates had become an actual thing and I was so there.
Smythe relieved us of our coats and phones, then declared, ‘You have one hour to find the jewels and save Mabel. The clock starts ticking … now!’ Next thing, we’d been ushered through a doorway and the lock had clicked behind us.
We were in a small, dim room, perhaps an old-timey office. A jacket and official-looking cap hung from a dusty coat-rack. A still-smoking tortoiseshell pipe lay abandoned on a heavy wooden desk, over which a bare yellow bulb was suspended.
In a corner, a heap of vintage leather suitcases and trunks were piled high. On one wall, a noticeboard showed the times of the tides and a sepia photograph of a military man with a luxuriant moustache glared down at us. Another wall was almost entirely covered with leather-bound ledgers.
It was surprisingly un-shit.
‘So we’re looking for keys, switches, weird stuff in paintings, anything.’ Quin was already pulling at the locked drawers in the desk.
‘Like this?’ I held up a heavy brass key.
‘Where d’you get that?’
‘I put my hand into the jacket pocket.’ I indicated the coat-rack.
‘Wow.’ His grey eyes glittered.
Sweeping my gaze around the small room, I homed in on a tray in a corner, bearing a teapot and two china containers. I just knew something was hidden in there. The first container was full of tea leaves, I gave it a good shake, rearranging the leaves and sure enough, a small laminated card saying ‘67’ appeared.
I held it up to Quin.
‘Jesus, you’re a natural!’
I could actually see his respect for me expanding.
‘Hold onto it,’ he said. ‘But first we should try opening this desk with your key.’
The desk had nine drawers, all of them locked. On my fourth attempt, one of them opened – to reveal a trove of six more keys. ‘Jesus! I guess now we try all of them in every lock?’
We split the task, three keys each. Our bodies close, we fumbled our way through but nothing worked until – of course – the last key opened the last drawer, which slid open to reveal a leather-bound ledger. We flicked through it at speed, trying to discern a clue, but all the pages were empty.
‘It must mean something,’ I said.
‘Not always, there are lots of red herrings.’
Focusing hard, I scanned the wall of ledgers.
Quin started, ‘What about that card –’
But, way ahead of him, I’d spotted a teeny gap between two ledgers. There was no need to check that the numbers on either side of the space were 66 and 68; I was certain they were. In slid the ledger – then came a loud click, followed by a whirring noise. ‘Quin! What’s going on?’
Astonishingly, the wall of ledgers was splitting open from floor to ceiling. ‘There’s another room.’
Quin sounded pleased. ‘Behind this one.’
Feeling as if I were dreaming, I slipped into the new space: a huge, high-ceilinged art deco bedroom, a marvel of Lalique glass, smoked mirrors and pale parquet flooring. Along one wall were large portholes, through which you could see an actual ocean. I could hear it too, the wash and slap of the waves and the screeching of seabirds.
Some sort of audio-visual miracle, it was thrillingly convincing.
‘Mind. Blown,’ I said. ‘Oh my God, Quin, I absolutely love this.’
‘You do, do you?’ He slanted some approval my way. ‘But think of poor Mabel. Start looking.’
‘Yeah, but.’ I pointed at the headboard on the bed, a dramatic fan of overlapping slices of mirror. ‘Like, it’s class. And the light fixture!’ A giant supernova in chrome and opaque white glass stretched in a frozen explosion above our heads.