Gretel and the Case of the Missing Frog Prints by P. J. Brackston Page B

vanished beneath the body of the hotel. There was no light, and what daylight fell through the gap showed a low-ceilinged, dripping tunnel. As tunnels went, it was as unappealing and grim as any Gretel had seen. As that thought made itself known to her, however, she also acknowledged that this was an Important Discovery, and one that any detective worth her salt would follow up. Those prints had been taken from the Grand somehow, and this could very well be one possible how. Where exactly it led, and what was waiting at the other end of it, there was only one way to find out. With a deep breath that pressed her ribs against her corset, Gretel stepped into the darkness.

SIX
    T hree paces in, before she had even had time to muster up a nerve-steadying whistle, the door behind Gretel swung shut with a thud that sent a shudder reverberating down the tunnel and through her very bones. She stood still for a moment, quelling panic, and allowing her eyes to adjust to the light. Or the lack of it. She told herself that the ladies of the night who used this passageway did so apparently without fear. It must lead somewhere worth going, and it must not contain any of the terrifying things that were currently sprinting through her mind and wriggling up and down her spine. A cold sweat seeped from beneath her arms into the silk of her dress.
    â€œJust darkness,” she told herself, her voice echoing bleakly into the nothingness ahead of her. “Just a lack of light. Nothing would linger here. I am merely walking from A to B. Couldn’t be simpler.” As pep talks went it wasn’t her best, but it did stir sufficient courage from somewhere deep within her to enable her to put one cautious foot in front of the other. The tunnel was, at the start, wide enough to pass along easily enough, the rough stones beneath her feet reasonably firm and dry, and the ceiling provided sufficient head height to accommodate an elaborate hairdo, possibly with ostrich plumes, if not a towering wig. At the start. After twenty yards or so, however, it began to narrow, and the roof to lower. By the time Gretel had been walking for two minutes her hair had been knocked flat on her head and her sleeves were brushing against the damp walls.
    Resolving to significantly increase her fees for the case, and cursing the meanness of the construction, but refusing to give in to the churning fear in her stomach, Gretel pressed on. Soon she was having to squeeze. She was just entertaining the thought that she would shortly be stuck fast, when she spied a tiny glimmer of light. Abandoning her role as host to the notion of becoming jammed—rudely hurrying it out through her mental front door without so much as a glass of schnapps—she pushed on. Soon she could see that the light was falling through a tiny window at the end of the tunnel.
    â€œA window in a door!” she announced to herself and all the scuttling things that scurried about her feet. She crept up to the gap in the stone and peered through.
    Given that Gretel was on the trail of two trollops, she ought not to have been surprised by the sight that greeted her, but it was difficult to remain impassive to the scene of riotous debauchery that met her blinking eyes. There was a sumptuous room, abundantly draped in velvet swags and bows in myriadshades of crimson and pink, with long, low sofas and love-seats aplenty, on which sprawled men and women in various states of déshabillé . Much laughter filled the room, prompted, it appeared, to no small extent by the liberal quantities of wine that were being pressed upon the patrons by a girl dressed as a serving wench, in as much as she wore a mop cap, a lacy apron, a willing smile, and nothing more. Gretel recognized the two women she had seen gain entry to the den via the tunnel. She noticed an older woman who appeared to be the bawd in charge. She was a hard-faced creature, skinny as a garden rake and every bit as spiky. She appeared