WHEN THEY GOT BACK TO THE LIBRARY THE EVENING WAS winding down. The fire in the hearth burned low. The baron had retired to his quarters. The Irish lady, Emma Wallace, was playing chess against Colonel Green, who was losing. Edith Hoffman was missing, as was Ernesto Salazar. Mr Jacobs, the banker, was quietly reading a book.
The silent butler appeared with two glasses on a silver tray. Edna St James took one. She nodded to the other.
‘Drink it,’ she said. ‘It helps.’
Edgar drank. His head swam.
‘It has been a long day,’ he said.
‘It will be better tomorrow,’ Edna said. ‘They do a good breakfast here.’
Edgar tried to smile. It felt brittle.
‘I think I will retire now,’ he said.
‘I think I will too,’ Edna said. ‘Goodnight, Mr Waverley.’
‘Goodnight, Mrs St James.’
She nodded. She touched his arm lightly.
‘It gets better,’ she said. ‘We humans, we have an immense capacity to heal.’
It sounded like a cheap line from one of her cheap novels. Edgar shook his head and left.
He went up the stairs to his room. Too tired to bathe, he washed his face in the sink, rinsed the taste of puke from his mouth. He felt feverish. All he wanted was to sleep, but his mind was full of swirling, unconnected images: the shadowy form of a woman, the mother he didn’t know; his adoptive father dying by his own hand; Roddy, naked in the moonlight, smoking a fag by the window after the last time they made love; the bloodied, brutalised face of the brute, Earl Cody.
Edgar fell on the bed. He was asleep in moments.
*
When he woke up it was dark. His head hurt indomitably. Something had woken him. He stirred uneasily. What was it?
A faint sound he’d heard, filtering into unsettled dreams.
A scream.
That was it. A scream.
He listened. All was quiet. No. Someone moving out there, fast and muffled, steps up the stairs. The stairs creaked. Nothing in the corridor. Then a door closing with a soft hush.
Then it was silent. It was the dark before dawn. He wanted nothing more than to go back to sleep.
Instead he stood up. He wobbled, then found purchase.
It was definitely a scream, he thought.
He listened but there was nothing. No one else had woken up or, if they had, they went back to sleep.
Foxes, maybe. Foxes made a lot of noise.
But the feet in the corridor, the door shutting?
It wasn’t his business.
Go back to bed, Edgar.
What kind of a person goes back to sleep? he asked.
A sensible one, his ghost-self answered.
A coward, Edgar answered himself. To move in this world you have to stand for something.
Fool’s errand, boy, his ghost-self said. But knock yourself out.
Thanks. I think I will.
He went to the door. He stepped into the corridor. He padded along, his bare feet making no sound. Did the person he heard take off their shoes?
He went down the stairs. The stairs creaked.
No light. He went cautiously. Heard nothing.
No servants, too early even for them to wake up to prepare the house. The house felt cold. Feebes Manor, this pile of architectural kitsch, this pious monument to avarice. He went down the stairs, holding on to the banister. A corridor below, doors leading to rooms. He needed a candle, a light. Something. He staggered in the dark.
There. The library. He recognised roughly where he was. The door was open. The blinds were drawn. The fire had died in the fireplace, only embers still glowed. He tried to see in their light. His foot hit something heavy and soft. He stumbled, lost his balance and fell.
He cried out when he hit the object. He fell on it with a soft whoomp, his fall arrested by… Arrested by…
His mind shied from what it was, what he knew it had to be.
A soft human body, slick with something Edgar knew just then, with certainty, was blood.
He scrabbled to get away from it, every inch of him screaming at him to flee. His ghost-self laughed at him.
Didn’t I tell you? Nothing good comes from screams in the night.
Screw you, Edgar answered himself. The corpse moved under him, huge arms, a big belly, swaying like the sea. He fell from it and onto the floor, crawled on hands and knees to get away. Something hard and sharp hit him then. He bit back a curse, felt for it, found a long handle. He stood up, picking up the object, breathing heavily.
The overhead electric light came on abruptly.
A young servant girl stood facing him. Edgar looked down, saw the corpse of Earl Cody, his brutal face brutalised and bloodied, just like in Edgar’s dreams.
He looked at his own hands.
Saw he was holding a gold shovel.
Then the maid screamed.
*
‘I came in to prepare the fire, and he was… he was…’ The girl swallowed back sobs. ‘I saw the body on the floor and Mr Waver… Mr Waverley was standing right above him, covered in blood, holding the… the…’
‘The shovel,’ Colonel Green said.
‘The shovel, yes. It always hangs on the wall, it belonged to the old Mr Feebes, they always show it off to guests, they call it the—’
‘The golden shit shovel,’ Colonel Green said. ‘Yes, we all heard that story more than once.’
‘I didn’t do it,’ Edgar said. He was sitting in an armchair. ‘I didn’t do it!’ He stared at their faces. ‘May I have a cup of coffee?’ he said. ‘And some aspirin? My head is killing me.’
At that the servant girl began to cry again and Edgar immediately regretted his choice of words. Baron Feebes, who stood glowering by the window, nodded to the butler.
‘We could all do with some breakfast,’ he said.
No one seemed unduly upset that Earl Cody was dead. No one but the maid, at least. And she was just scared, she wasn’t sorry. Edgar looked at the assembled guests one by one. They looked sleepy, harassed, confused. But none of them was sorry for the loss.
‘A nice croissant,’ Edna St James said. ‘With raspberry jam. I find it does wonders for one’s energy in the morning.’
‘I could murder a fried breakfast, myself,’ Emma Wallace said. ‘This is all very upsetting, you understand.’
‘You must have seen bodies before,’ Edna said. ‘During the Civil War and so on.’
‘Ah, well, the fight for independence,’ Emma Wallace said. ‘Well, one does see things, of course.’
‘Or helps them happen?’ Edna said.
Emma Wallace smiled, for just a moment, then shook her head.
‘It was so long ago,’ she said.
‘Yet you will have the north,’ Edna said.
‘Edna, let’s not do this now,’ Emma Wallace said. She looked at Edgar. He realised it was the first time she had paid any attention to him.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘You must have had a terrible shock. Get this man his aspirin!’
‘It was only a shock if he didn’t do it,’ Colonel Green said. ‘If you ask me, he looks guilty as hell.’
‘I’ve already told you, I found him like this!’ Edgar said. ‘I heard a noise, I came downstairs, and I stumbled over the damn body!’
‘There’s no need for strong language, I’m sure, Mr Waverley,’ Mr Jacobs, the banker, said.
Ernesto Salazar, who was pacing restlessly up and down the room, smoking a cigar, stopped and waved the cigar at them.
‘None of us are safe here, man!’ he said.
‘How so?’ Colonel Green said.
‘If this madman killed Cody, who knows who else is on his… his assassination list? Good god, it could have been me right there!’
‘Why?’ Emma Wallace said. ‘Whatever did you do, Ernesto?’
She turned a smile on him. There was nothing sweet in it.
‘You know what I mean, Emma!’ he said.
‘I am sure that I don’t.’
‘I will have coffee also,’ Edith Hoffman said. She was sitting apart from the others, her face pale. ‘An aspirin, too. I’m afraid I find this whole affair distressing.’
‘Poor girl,’ Colonel Green said, sounding sincere. ‘Well, an Englishman has a right to be considered innocent until proven otherwise. And I myself agree with Mrs Wallace, a good breakfast will do us all a world of good.’
Edgar stared at them, trying to think. He knew he hadn’t killed Cody. Hadn’t, as much as last night he’d wanted to. So one of the others in the room had to be the killer. He thought in horror of what this could mean for him. It could kill any hope he had for a decent career. Or worse. Imprisonment? Hanging? He had to prove his innocence!
‘I will call my man,’ Baron Feebes said, evidently reaching a decision. ‘I have a man for this kind of thing.’
He spoke of this the way others would of the man who took out the rubbish.
‘Let us adjourn to the dining room,’ the baron said.
‘What of the body?’ Edna St James said.
‘Well, it will still be there when we’ve finished, won’t it!’ the baron snapped.
‘Of course,’ Edna said. She seemed cowed. ‘I wasn’t thinking.’
‘It really is a terrible inconvenience,’ the baron said. ‘A very useful man, this Cody. One should always strive to make oneself useful.’
With this eulogy concluded he turned and left. The others followed. Edgar gave Edith Hoffman a pleading look. She looked back in what seemed like pity, then shrugged.
‘We had better… adjourn,’ she said.
Edgar almost smiled.
*
They all sat around the same dining table as before. The servants served coffee and tea and fresh juice. The oranges were from Seville. Eggs and bacon and devilled kidneys, sausages and mackerel and black pudding. Edna St James nibbled on a croissant. Edgar drank coffee and tried to think. He couldn’t shake the dead man’s face from his mind.
The man had only moments before been alive. Earl Cody, a drunk and a bully, had threatened him so casually – that was what had really hurt. He did it only because he could. And yet the vitality of the man was unmissable, and Edgar wondered what had made him what he was: who were his parents, what was his childhood like, how did he grow up to be the man he became? For once he was a newborn babe, the first soul in all of creation to emerge from the womb. Then, in a snap of the fingers, a mangled corpse on the floor. No thoughts, no dreams, no fear. What did he fear, this Earl Cody? Everybody was afraid of something.
‘You look pensive, Mr Waverley,’ Edna St James said.
Edgar shook away the maudlin thoughts. He said, ‘I was just reflecting how this is not quite like it is in the books.’
‘My books?’ She looked at him in some amusement.
‘For instance,’ he said. ‘Yes. I mean, the awfulness of it, the violent taking of a life. It is like…’ He tried to think. ‘In the books it always makes sense, it’s a puzzle to solve. But when you see it…’
‘Death is distasteful,’ Edna said.
‘Exactly.’
‘Which is precisely why we skim over it,’ Edna said. ‘It is tragic that a man should die but it is delightful if it is merely to provide a mystery. In real life murder is seldom complicated. It is done for love, or hate, jealousy or greed, and if a woman is to be murdered it is almost always by the husband. This is not the material of which book advances are made, Mr Waverley. My colleagues and I at the Detection Club – I think I mentioned it to you last night? – we feel a strong moral sense. We are as outraged, if not more so, at senseless murder than your average man on the street ever is. But our job is to entertain first, to make death seem almost palatable, like a game of draughts by the fireplace. I’ve seen death before. It’s never pretty.’
‘I saw so many die, side by side,’ Edith Hoffman said. Her voice was hollow. ‘The Nazis are murdering my people back home, and no one lifts a finger.’
‘I saw the corpses of my countrymen and women lying in the gutter,’ Emma Wallace said, ‘murdered by British soldiers, their blood soaking into the dirt.’
‘People die!’ Colonel Green said. ‘No one dies a natural death, Mr Waverley. Something or other always kills you in the end. You don’t like it? Tough break, I say. You think like a boy, but you must be a man. You must know death. Don’t you agree, Ernesto?’
‘Eh?’ The Peruvian looked startled. ‘I don’t read those kind of novels,’ he said. ‘I find them silly. What were you discussing again?’
‘Boor,’ Edna said, but she said it quietly.
Edgar looked at them all again. Trying to discern, the way a Poirot or a Holmes might, which one of them was guilty. He had the sense then that they were all murderers, that they had all taken a life before, and done it casually. Edna in her fiction only, perhaps. But he was not so sure about the others.
It made him afraid. Yet he realised that a part of him liked the feeling; it kept him sharp. He attacked his breakfast, so far untouched, with a new hunger. The eggs just right and the yolk so yellow, and the sausages made of Baron Feebes’s own pigs. They were delicious.
He said, ‘Where were you all when the murder took place?’
‘We don’t know when the murder took place,’ Edna said.
‘Who was last in the library last night?’ Edgar said.
‘I was reading a book,’ Mr Jacobs said. He spoke so little that Edgar was vaguely surprised to hear him just then. ‘One of Mrs St James’s, in fact, Memento Mori. Rather good, I thought. When I had finished and bid goodnight only Mrs Wallace and Colonel Green were still there, locked in a mighty battle across the chessboard.’
‘We finished our last game shortly after,’ Emma Wallace said. ‘I won. Then went to bed.’
‘As did I,’ Colonel Green said, looking sheepish. ‘Separately, I mean, of course.’
Emma Wallace smiled a small smile. Edith Hoffman muttered, ‘I could hear them through the wall. My room is adjacent to the colonel’s. They were… quite loud.’
The colonel blushed. Emma Wallace’s smile grew wider.
‘I was in bed,’ Edith Hoffman said. ‘Throughout the night.’
‘As was I,’ Edna St James said.
‘As was I!’ Ernesto Salazar declared. ‘I retired early, thinking we would be grouse shooting this morning.’ He looked annoyed.
‘So everyone was asleep,’ Edgar said.
‘What else would we be doing, man?’ Ernesto said. ‘You are the one with blood on your hands!’
‘I didn’t kill him!’
‘So you keep saying.’
‘Perhaps no one killed him,’ Mr Jacobs suggested. They all looked at him in surprise.
‘The shovel could have fallen off the wall,’ he said. ‘Hitting Mr Cody as he stood underneath it. It is heavy, it hit him on the head and he fell, smashing his face further against the floor…’ He looked wistful.
‘It would certainly make life simpler,’ Emma said.
‘Absurd!’ Colonel Green said. ‘Waverley is clearly a murderer! No offence, sir,’ he said to Edgar.
‘I didn’t know him well enough to kill him,’ Edgar said. At that, the others exchanged amused glances.
‘Oh, I think you did,’ Emma Wallace said. ‘It doesn’t take long, with old Earl, you know.’
‘Before you want to kill him,’ the quiet Mr Jacobs said.
‘Did the world a favour,’ Ernesto Salazar muttered.
‘Enough!’ It was the baron, his hand slamming against the table. Glasses rattled. ‘He was my man, my property! And no one breaks my things without my say-so. Do not think his death changes our arrangements.’
They all looked down then.
‘Of course, Baron,’ Ernesto Salazar said, as eager to please as a frightened puppy. ‘One did not mean to suggest—’
‘Do not play amateur detectives,’ Baron Feebes said. ‘I have a man for this kind of thing. He will be here shortly. As for you, Mr Waverley…’ He turned a baleful glare on Edgar. ‘I am a generous host,’ he said, ‘but you will find me a fearsome avenger should this be your handiwork. Am I clear?’
‘Very much so,’ Edgar said.
‘Good. Porridge?’
‘I am quite full, but thank you.’
‘I love porridge,’ the baron said.
‘Perhaps a little, then,’ Edgar said.
‘Good man.’
Porridge duly arrived.
Edgar duly ate.