Airs and Graces by Roz Southey

latch. I cautiously pushed at the door. It swung, creaking. We hesitated; Hugh said, ‘If it is a thief, he won’t still be there surely.’
    Cautiously, I ventured in. The house was pitch-black; I groped on the shelf by the door, hoping the candles and tinder box would still be there. They were; I lit a candle and held it high.
    The shop had been ransacked, the furniture turned over and smashed, pictures thrown on to the floor in showers of glass, wallpaper samples torn up and scattered. We stood, staring at the mess. ‘The key’s in the lock on the inside,’ Hugh said.
    I turned on my heels, fighting the ache in my head. At least the bodies had not suffered – they had been removed after the inquest. ‘The thief must have come in, locked the door behind him; with the shutters closed, no one outside could have seen him. When he’d finished, he simply unlocked the door and walked off, leaving the key.’
    I put the key in my pocket, relieved to have it in my possession again so quickly. We avoided the debris and climbed the stairs to the drawing room above. That too had been turned over; cushions had been ripped and the stuffing thrown out, ornaments swept from tables.
    ‘Looking for valuables,’ Hugh said.
    ‘Then why leave the candlesticks?’ I pointed to the mantelshelf.
    It was the same tale upstairs, in the bedrooms. The stained bedding had been torn off the beds and the mattresses slashed, feathers lying in little drifts about the floor. Gaudy ribbons, almost the only sad remains of Sarah Gregson, were trampled and dirty on the floor. Upstairs in the attic, the little girl’s bed had been overturned; beyond the partition, Alice Gregson’s trunk had been emptied, and the contents scattered over the floor: the stylish dresses, dancing pumps, cobweb-thin lace, handkerchiefs, nightgowns  . . .
    I frowned at the tangle of clothes. ‘He was obviously looking for something but I’m damned if I know what.’ I glanced at Hugh; he shrugged. I sighed, scrubbed at my eyes. ‘We’d better be thorough and look in the cellar. I haven’t been down there at all – there didn’t seem any point last time I was here.’
    We went back down the stairs to the shop, found a door that led to a narrow stair built into the structure of the bridge. Unsurprisingly, the cellar below smelt damp; I held the candle higher in an effort to see into the dark corners. Hugh took a branch of candles from a table in the middle of the room and lit them from mine; the room brightened.
    It was a moderately-sized room, full of boxes, and furniture in various states of repair. The boxes had been disturbed, although not, in most cases, completely turned out; it looked as if the thief had merely glanced in and lost interest when he found china tea-sets and painted shepherdesses. On the table stood a moneybox, with the lid thrown back, empty except for a scrap of paper. A receipt: Rec’d £112 11s 6d of William Threlkeld . The signature was Gregson’s. Threlkeld: that name was familiar too. But my head was throbbing ever more fiercely, and I was beginning to long for sleep with a rare passion.
    Something caught my attention – a gap on a shelf. ‘This is presumably where the box was kept.’ The shelf was dusty and the place where the box had stood was obvious, a rectangular clean spot. With another identical space next to it.
    ‘There were two boxes,’ I said.
    Hugh inspected the shelf. ‘Maybe our thief took the other one just now. There was probably more money in it.’
    I shook my head and winced. ‘The watchman at the inquest said he’d searched the entire house and there was no money left anywhere. This must have been taken at the time of the killings, or before.’
    ‘Maybe Gregson moved the box himself.’
    ‘That would be a coincidence, and I don’t much like coincidences.’ I looked at the empty box on the table. ‘Alice could have emptied one box into the other, leaving the empty one behind.’
    ‘That sounds more