Death and the Maiden by Gladys Mitchell

it were, some ghostly possibilities.
    A squarish Tudor window looked on to the side entrance of the hotel, and a large open fireplace seemed to speak of logs, priest-holes and a chimney with a long and interesting history. A low window-seat concealed a box, and the room also contained a massive and gloomy cupboard.
    Mrs Bradley shut the window, locked the door, took off her skirt and shoes, and, putting her head up the wide aperture and shining her torch upon the blackened brickwork, soon discovered footholds in the chimney.
    She put the torch in the fender, but where she would not tread on it when she came down again, listened at the door, wedged an armchair against the cupboard, put her heaviest suitcase, fully packed, on the window-seat, and then climbed into the chimney.
    About halfway up she discovered, as she had expected, that there was easy access to the roof, for the chimney terminated squarely and had no pot.
    The roof here was flat, and facing her was another chimney, broad-breasted and nearly three feet thick. She walked over to it, or, rather, almost crawled, hoping that she would not be detected from the garden below. She was also in mortal fear of being spotted from somebody’s bedroom window. It was by this time almost dark, however– the chimney had been like the Pit – so she hoped to remain undetected.
    It took her ten minutes to find the concealed door on the outside surface of the second chimney. The doorway had been painted to look like the brickwork, and she had to explore the whole side of the chimney, as soon as she discovered which face was of iron, before she could swing the door open.
    She managed it at last. The door was on a pivot, and, as it swung, it showed a dark flight of very narrow steps. Mrs Bradley descended into the hotel and soon found herself in a small square room. There were six feet of headroom, and the floor space, roughly, was eight feet by seven. It remained to discover how to get from this elaborate priest’s hole into one of the bedrooms or on to the main staircase.
    She listened again, but could not hear a sound. She had closed the top door behind her and now, by carefully testing the walls, she discovered that a hidden spring gave admittance not to a bedroom or to the main staircase, but to that other priest’s hole, the present, prosaic linen-cupboard passage which she had pointed out to Connie soon after their arrival at the hotel. To construct a priest’s hole to conceal another priest’s hole seemed to Mrs Bradley an intelligent thought, and she wished she could have shared her discovery.
    However, as the ghost had taken to walking, it would be as well, Mrs Bradley thought, to keep to herself the means by which it could make its entrances. She would wait, she decided, upon the order of events before she took anyone into her confidence.
    She did not undress, but sat for some time at the window, gazing out and with ears alert for sounds. There were plenty of these to be heard. Conversation, laughter, and what seemed, at one point, rather like a quarrel between Crete and Edris Tidson, came floating up out of the garden. There was the hum of traffic from the High Street, not so very far away; and, half an hour later, raucous singing from men turned out of the public house at the top of the quiet street.
    Gradually all sound was hushed, but Mrs Bradley sat on in the quiet darkness. It was a warm night, and she had raised her window halfway up at the bottom as soon as she had entered the room. She knew when the lights in the public rooms went out, for they cast no more reflections on the lawn. She saw the lights in the glassed-in corridor which led to the annexe flick out one by one as a distant clock struck a quarter past eleven, and Thomas made his solemn nocturnal rounds – a Presbyterian elder sentencing the household to slumber.
    Mrs Bradley sat on. All was silent and dark. She strained her ears. At last came the sound that she was waiting