Trouble in the Town Hall by Jeanne M. Dams

Author:Jeanne M. Dams [Jeanne M. Dams]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
Published: 2012-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

10

“MIND WHERE YOU step, dearie,” said Mrs. Finch. “There ain’t no real floor up ’ere, just them boards laid across the beams. One slip and you’d go straight through.”

We were in the biggest of the attics, the central one with the gable windows. There was quite enough light on that sun-drenched day to show me the perils of my footing. The light showed, too, just how serious the Town Hall’s condition was. Huge oak roof timbers were riddled with beetle damage; the dust we kicked up as we picked our cautious way across the floor was more than half sawdust left behind by the busy destroyers. Cobwebs hung everywhere in great, dirty festoons, and the smell of dry rot was overpowering.

“Mind your ’ead!”

The warning came too late. Watching the floor, I’d ignored what was above me, and fetched up against a hammer beam—this one still sound and extremely solid. I yelped and put up one hand to steady myself, the other, cautiously, to examine the damage to my temple—and then stood staring, openmouthed.

In the wall facing me, a door was slowly creaking open.

“It’s that there beam,” said Mrs. Finch stolidly. “You pushes on it to make the door open. Most people,” she added, “uses their ’ands.”

“I’ll remember that next time,” I said just as dryly. “It’s a good thing I was wearing this silly thing, or I’d be laid out on the floor.” I picked up the thick felt hat, brushed it off ineffectually, and, balancing on the unsteady floorboards, walked into the secret room.

It was a vast disappointment. There was nothing much there, just a small room with one dusty gable window and no door except the one by which we’d entered.

“Do they know what it was used for?” I asked my guide. I doubted it had been a priest’s hole or anything so romantic.

“Papers,” she said briefly. “Important dockyments, as they didn’t want to get lost. They cleared ’em out an’ took ’em to that new buildin’ when they moved, though wot they wants with papers ’undreds of years old, as is crumblin’ to bits besides, is more than wot I can tell you.”

I took one more look around. Shelves lined the walls, empty except for thick dust and, in one corner, a forgotten piece of paper. I picked it up gingerly and shook off some of the fuzz; it seemed, so far as I could make out the faded, spidery handwriting, to be a tax roll of some kind for 1737, of interest possibly to historians but not to me.

Well, of such disappointments are the lives of superannuated girl detectives made. There was nothing in this room except decay. I tucked the paper into my purse to give to somebody who might want it and went back into the main attic, carefully avoiding the hammer beam. Mrs. Finch manipulated the beam to close the door, and we plodded back down the stairs in silence.

Perhaps, I thought dismally, the Pettifers of this world were right and this building needed a new purpose, a new life before it moldered to ruin.

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