THE DEAD MAN STILL LAY, UNDISTURBED, ON THE library floor. He looked worse now, the face waxy, the blood drying and the smell growing as bad as a Victorian sewer someone had forgotten to brick over. Whatever sins he had upon his conscience, whatever dreadful deeds he had committed when alive – and who knew just how long the list went? Edgar wondered – they troubled him no more. The dead bear no more responsibility in the world of the living, he thought. It is those who remain who must deal with their shit.
Edgar stared at the corpse of Earl Cody. Willing it to speak, willing it to tell him what happened. No, not tell him – tell them. His hands shook when he thought of what could happen. It would ruin everything. It didn’t bear thinking about.
Who murdered you, Mr Cody? he said, speaking to the dead. The dead don’t answer, as a rule. Edgar’s first thought – when he could think rationally again, after finding the corpse – had been that someone was trying to frame him (to use the parlance of the sort of novels Mrs St James wrote). He had examined that thought over breakfast, however – turned it over and over again in his mind – and he had to conclude, however reluctantly, that it did not hold up. He had been sound asleep in his bed when the murder happened. It was the noise that woke him up, and that mysterious sound of a door being shut – proof enough that one of his fellow guests was behind it.
But no one had expected him to go and investigate. No one could predict he would have had a bad sleep, or felt the need to go down, or that he would have stumbled over the corpse, or got hold of the murder weapon…
Anyone could have responded to Cody’s scream. It just happened to be Edgar.
Which left, what? The others, all six of them. He discounted the baron. He had the strong feeling that if Baron Feebes wanted someone gone, they would be gone, and not making a mess on the man’s own library floor. Whoever did this, in fact, did not merely strike at Earl Cody – they struck at the House of Feebes itself. For if Earl was the baron’s instrument, and the six guests all suborned to his will in some way, then murdering the baron’s own man in his own home was tantamount to a declaration of war.
One of them was still not entangled enough, not so fully under the thumb of Feebes as to submit meekly. One of them killed Cody in revenge.
But what if there was more than one? He felt his thoughts spinning out of control. What if two or even more of them had worked in tandem?
But no – he had heard only one set of footprints, only one door shutting. Only one of the six killed Cody.
Who, then?
Take your pick.
‘You seem deep in thought, dear boy,’ he heard a voice. Looked up to see Edna St James, smiling benevolently, smoking a thin cigarette that smelled of cloves. ‘Wonderful stuff,’ she said, ‘Colonel Green has them shipped from Malaya. I can read your face, Mr Waverley. You are trying to work out a puzzle.’
He smiled at that, feeling self-conscious.
‘Am I that transparent?’ he said.
‘No. Just young. And,’ she said, ‘in quite the predicament. I have been thinking much as you have been, of course. Trying to fit together the pieces of the puzzle. I do not believe you did it. You have kind eyes.’
‘I doubt that would hold up in court,’ Edgar said.
‘Court?’ she laughed openly. ‘None of this will end up in court, Mr Waverley. None of this will ever be public. Too many reputations are at stake. But justice… can still be served. How about if you and I team up? Try to solve this little mystery together? Unless, of course, you think I did it.’
Edgar rose to his feet. He had been sitting there staring at the corpse for too long. The golden shovel, used nearly a century ago by some poor soul to dig up precious excrement half the world away, still lay where he dropped it. Nothing in the room had been disturbed.
‘You could have,’ he said.
‘I was fast asleep, Mr Waverley,’ Edna said. ‘As you should have been.’
‘Did you hear him?’ Edgar said. ‘Did you hear anything?’
‘No. I am a sound sleeper. So what do you say?’
‘The baron told us not to play amateur detectives.’
She looked at him in amusement.
‘Do you always do what you are told?’ she said.
‘I thought he had sway over you,’ Edgar said.
Edna St James considered.
‘The baron has power,’ she said. ‘Influence. It is not a, how do the Americans say it, a one-way street. We feed off his power more than he does off us. It is nothing more than a mutually beneficial arrangement.’
She sounded like she was trying to convince herself.
‘Why does he need you at all?’ Edgar said, curious. At this she didn’t smile.
‘I am famous,’ she said. ‘Influential. In my own way. I move amongst commoners and royalty, read by station porters as I am by sheikhs. I am welcomed in places many wouldn’t be.’
‘I apologise,’ Edgar said.
‘You spoke out of ignorance, so I will accept it,’ she said. ‘But you would be wise not to underestimate me, or the others.’
‘All right,’ he said, accepting it. ‘Then tell me about the others. What are their uses?’
She smiled again. She stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and steepled her fingers (a little theatrically, Edgar thought) as she considered.
‘There’s Colonel Green,’ she said. ‘Retired military man. The Butcher of Amritsar, they still call him.’
‘That was him?’ Edgar said, appalled. He had heard of the Jallianwala Bagh massacre. Indian protesters were herded into a square with only one way out and, once penned in, the British soldiers opened fire. The dead numbered in the hundreds. ‘He gave the order?’
‘And never lost a wink of sleep over it, the way he tells it,’ Edna said. ‘The Feebeses used their influence to exonerate him, and now he’s theirs. Not that Britain could have admitted wrongdoing in the matter, but anyway. Colonel Green would have done for Earl quite happily, I think, though perhaps with less mess.’
‘He was blackmailed, too?’
‘That I don’t know,’ Edna said. ‘Colonel Green is the baron’s man, but perhaps… I do know he loathed Cody all the same.’
‘There’s Mr Jacobs, then,’ Edgar said.
Edna shrugged.
‘A banker,’ she said.
‘Bankers don’t make good murder suspects?’
‘They make great murder suspects,’ Edna said. ‘I had a banker as the killer in The Deadly Cost of Murder a few years back.’
‘I haven’t read that one yet.’
She shrugged again. ‘Oops,’ she said.
‘What did Cody have on him?’
‘I don’t know what dirt Cody dug about anyone here,’ Edna said. ‘That’s their business.’
Edgar rubbed the bridge of his nose. He felt a headache coming. He said, ‘Any of them could have done it, then.’
‘Sure. Including me, or you.’
‘What about the Austrian girl? Edith?’
‘She’s a communist,’ Edna said. ‘You should stay away from her. She’s trouble.’
‘You don’t like communists?’
‘I don’t like the girl.’
It was Edgar’s turn to shrug. They were just passing time, and with every moment that went by his future shrank. He said, ‘The Irishwoman.’
‘Emma Wallace. Yes. She runs guns for the IRA.’
‘Really?’ He looked up, curious. ‘What is she doing here, then?’
‘There’s money in guns, Mr Waverley.’ She looked at him in what was half amusement and half pity. He resented the look. Like he was a child. Naive.
‘The baron?’ he said.
‘Money has no nationality, Mr Waverley. It has no loyalty, no flag. It is the thing whole in itself.’
‘All right,’ he said. He tried to think who was left.
‘Ernesto Salazar,’ he said.
‘Ah,’ Edna said. ‘That handsome son of a bitch. Yes. Now, he makes a good suspect.’
‘You think he did it?’
‘I think if he crawled any further up the baron’s backside he would give our gracious host a hernia,’ Edna said. ‘Is he capable of murder? As sure as eggs is eggs, as the fellow says, Mr Waverley. Yes. My money would be on him… He is a nasty piece of work, that one.’
‘This is all just speculation,’ Edgar said. ‘We need a way of figuring this out. Perhaps we can construct a timeline of the events. Who was the last person to see Mr Cody alive?’
‘I believe that was you,’ Edna said. ‘I saw you both talking by the maze. You then said, “I’ll kill him” – with a swear word I won’t repeat.’
‘You heard.’
‘I did.’
‘It sounds damning,’ Edgar said.
‘It does.’
‘But I did not kill him! I never saw him again!’
‘Let’s take a walk,’ Edna said. ‘Retrace our steps, as it were. Perhaps we’ll find something. A clue.’
‘I am beginning to suspect clues only happen in novels,’ Edgar said.
‘You wouldn’t be wrong, Mr Waverley,’ Edna said. ‘In real life the murderer often walks away free, unless he happens to be found standing over the corpse while holding the murder weapon.’
She wasn’t smiling now.
He said, ‘You think I did it. You actually think I did.’
‘I think it’s possible,’ Edna said. ‘In life the simple explanation is often the right one.’
‘But you’re still going along with my attempt to prove otherwise?’
She stood up.
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘If nothing else, I am grateful to whoever did it. I hated him too, Mr Waverley. I often dreamed of doing the deed myself. Come, let us partake of the outdoors for a while. Who knows what clues we may find and, if nothing else, at least we can enjoy the sunshine.’
Edgar followed her along the corridor and to the outside. It seemed to him a week since he had first arrived here, but it had not even been twenty-four hours. In that time he had had his illusions about his lineage and family shattered; his innermost secret exposed and contemptuously exploited; his shoes ruined by his own vomit, and then the final indignity, stumbling over a corpse. There was dried blood on his hands he could not scrub off. He felt more alone than he had ever felt in his life. And the only thing that sustained him now, he realised with some surprise, was the hatred Cody had kindled in him and blown into a full, roaring flame.
It was not even Cody he hated, but the whole goddamned edifice that had made an Earl Cody necessary. This parasitic world of wealth and privilege that he could never have, this edifice of Feebes in which the current baron was merely the latest in a line of… of… leeches… His thoughts wandered. Something about leeches. The good thing about leeches was that you could squish them, sooner or later. And all that blood they’d sucked would come right back out again… His fingers were bunched uselessly into fists. He made himself relax. It was sunny outside and the air smelled fresh when he got further away from the manor. Ernesto Salazar and Edith Hoffman were both on the veranda, smoking, he with a cigar and her with a thin rolled up cigarette. Ernesto scowled. Edith gave Edgar a quizzical look, then turned away and continued blowing smoke in silence. Co-conspirators, perhaps. Or maybe they had just had sex. Or they were just waiting out the time.
In the daylight, the maze looked less impressive. It was just a hedge, trimmed to within an inch of its life by some hidden gardeners, every green leaf accounted for and in its place. In the daylight, Edgar could see the tree where he threw up, and some footsteps in the soft earth, deep and heavy, that could have been Cody’s.
‘What are we looking for?’ he said.
‘Maybe nothing,’ Edna said. ‘Maybe something. You were both talking, then he walked away. This way.’ She pointed.
‘Yes,’ Edgar said, remembering how the American seemed to just melt into the darkness. In the daylight his passage was more noticeable. Footsteps, then thick ash on the ground near an elm, where he must have stood and smoked for a while. They followed it further, around the maze – ‘There!’ Edgar said.
He pointed to the cigar stub on the ground, next to a fountain in which naked marble nymphs frolicked with water running down their bosoms. Edna bent down, scooped up the cigar and smelled it.
‘So?’ Edgar said.
Edna nodded very seriously.
‘It’s a cigar,’ she said.
Then she cracked up. Her laughter sent a blackbird flying up in alarm, and Edgar, surprised by the unfamiliar feeling, felt the laughter bubbling out of him, escaping at last in a series of bellows. He laughed until his sides hurt.
‘It’s a… a cigar!’ he said.
Gradually it faded. When it did he felt sad.
‘What do we know?’ he said.
‘Not much. When he left you he came here. He smoked on the way. He dropped his cigar.’
‘Was he alone?’
‘I am not sure,’ Edna said. She pointed to the ground. Footprints, possibly. Too faint, Edgar thought, to know for sure who they belonged to. And even if you could – then what? Anyone could have come here, at any time. But still—
‘Who was not in the library when we got back last night?’ he said.
‘Edith and Ernesto,’ Edna said promptly. ‘But Cody was not murdered last night, Edgar. Whoever he met here didn’t kill him. Or, well, they might have, but only much later, and not here.’
‘Oh, it’s impossible!’ Edgar said.
Edna shrugged.
‘We’re just passing time,’ she said.
‘Where do the footprints lead?’ Edgar said. But he already knew, even as Edna said, ‘Into the maze.’
‘Of course.’
She smiled.
‘Shall we?’
‘And get lost?’ he said.
‘If you do, cry out,’ she said, still smiling, ‘I’ll come to your rescue.’