by Alex Pavesi
‘His clothes are dry, though it’s been raining for the last two days. He died recently.’
Charles frowned. ‘This morning, you mean?’
‘Possibly.’
The door of the house banged shut behind them. The wind was picking up now, blowing a fine spray of water across the island; thousands of tiny droplets, like little fish. Charles approached the silent, snow-white house with his gun held out and stood for a moment as a soft grey outline in front of its sharp black door, then the door blew open once again and he stepped inside.
‘Hello? Is anybody there? I have a gun. Please, make yourself known.’
The house returned a silence as unpleasant as a bowl of cold soup.
Sarah followed him into the main hall. It was an awkwardly shaped room that reached up to the top of the house, with black and white tiles on the floor. A low bench, for changing shoes, was placed to the right of the door, but there was no other furniture. Opposite that was a wooden staircase that led to an upper storey. An unopened can of beans sat on the bottom step.
A series of muddy paw prints covered the floor; something had entered through the opened door and walked in circles over the tiles.
Charles and Sarah looked around the room, their footsteps echoing. All of the doors were closed, except for a small, misshapen one huddled under the staircase, slanted at the top and with a simple magnetic latch instead of a lock. The magnet had proved too weak for the wind and now the door swung back and forth rhythmically, as if the house was breathing. From beyond it came a sound like the scurrying of rats.
Charles walked up to the door and nudged the barrel of his pistol through the gap, then worked it open with his left foot. The dim, windowless room inside was lined with display cases. A miniature museum. They were full of clocks. Clocks of different colours, different ages, some with elaborate mechanisms and some simple. Many of them were still ticking. And laid out on the floor beneath them, neatly and respectfully – the head covered – was a human figure. A woman, judging by the clothes.
Sarah knelt and removed the veil. A young-looking middle-aged woman, her face grey but her hair still colourful. She was wearing a red cardigan over a white shirt, which was spotted with blood towards the top. Her face had a slight, sad frown and wide, frightened eyes; two extravagant green earrings rested against her cheeks. Sarah remembered her walking past the garden two days before, the red cardigan in particular. She’d been walking with an older man; they’d found something they disagreed on and were engaged in a passionate dispute.
The woman’s body was slightly too long for the room so she’d been placed at a diagonal with her head propped up in one corner. Sarah felt around her throat, touched the dried blood at the corners of her lips and forced open her mouth.
Charles was keeping a watch on the hall behind them, occasionally turning to look around the room. ‘These clocks all show different times, Sarah. Do you think there is some kind of code?’
‘I think the clocks are just decoration.’
He gave a doubtful grunt. ‘Well, then. What killed her?’
‘I can’t quite tell. Something internal. She seems to have swallowed something.’
He choked down a touch of vomit and put the back of his hand to his lips, leaving his fingers dangling absurdly from his face like some kind of tentacled sea creature. ‘Come,’ said Sarah, moving past him.
‘Must we find all ten of them dead?’
‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Though nine is more likely.’
A quick intake of breath. ‘And the tenth?’
‘Escaped, probably. Either that or hiding.’
The two largest doors leading off from the entrance hall opened onto a grand dining room with a high ceiling, its corners lost in cobwebs. The windows along one side reached three quarters of the way up to the roof, giving a magnificent view of the frothing, furious sea. Once inside, they closed the doors and Charles made a crude barricade with a serving table and a chair.
The room itself was a mess. The table had been set for a large meal, used once and never cleared. The diners hadn’t even reached dessert; plates of half-eaten savoury food dotted the length of the table, the remnants of sauces dried into dusty and cracked crescent shapes, like sores from a particularly unpleasant disease. Charles counted them. Eight places. That would be the entire group, minus the two servants. Eight chairs were set back from the table: some neatly and some in disarray. Two had fallen over.
‘An argument erupted at dinner,’ said Charles, scraping at a spot of blood, or possibly sauce, on the tablecloth.
‘Something must have happened to the servants,’ said Sarah, ‘to prevent this mess from being cleared.’ Thrown over the cliff, she thought.
She was examining a knife and fork. One of the tines of the fork was missing, with a neat hole in its place. She put it down and lifted up a plate. A square of white cardboard was hidden underneath it.
There was a short, printed message on one side. Sarah read it out loud: ‘Mrs Annabel Richards, a teacher, is accused of taking sexual gratification from the torture of young children.’ Charles winced at the choice of words. There was nothing printed on the reverse.
‘I think that’s her in the room with the clocks,’ said Sarah.
‘How can you know?’
‘Children, that’s how. When they passed me two days ago, she and another man were discussing the education of children. He was a doctor, I gathered, and she sounded like a teacher.’
‘Look, here’s another one.’ Charles lifted a handbag from the table; beneath it were a bloodstained napkin and a clean white card. He read the message printed on it. ‘Andrew Parker, a lawyer, is accused of killing his family.’ He held the card up to the light; there were no other clues. ‘Could that be the man outside, caught in the snare?’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps.’
While Charles stood hypnotized by the brutality of the situation, staring at the single card in his hand, Sarah found two more of them on the floor beneath the table. The first read: ‘Richard Branch, socialist, is accused of hounding an old man to his death.’ The other: ‘Thomas Townsend, alcoholic, is accused of murdering his wife.’
‘They make no sense,’ said Charles, with a sigh. ‘The mystery only deepens.’
Sarah shook her head. ‘These cards explain everything. These people were brought here to be judged.’
‘But why would they come, if they were to be judged?’
‘I assume they were tricked into it. By someone with a corrupted sense of justice. Or someone with a need for revenge.’
Charles grunted. ‘This was meant to be a kind of courtroom then?’
He stared in astonishment at the very thought of it; Sarah patted his shoulder. ‘Something like that, Charles. And it seems that four of them at least were sentenced to death.’
At the far end of the room another two doors led to a decadent lounge, which ran along the side of the house at a right angle to the dining room. The windows here had deep red curtains, like thick smears of blood. All of the furniture either looked out through them, over the waves towards the coast, or pointed at a fireplace in the centre of the opposite wall. Blood-red upholstery was everywhere, like spilled wine.
The centre of the room was covered in ash; a feathery semicircle of grey smudges spread out from the fireplace and covered the tabletops and cushions. Sarah followed the trail of burnt debris inwards. She found animal hairs and charred splinters of wood scattered across the floorboards, pieces of coal and several small fragments of white card.
One of the accusations must have been thrown on the fire.
‘Look at this,’ she said, taking a log from the basket beside the fireplace and holding it out towards Charles. A small opening had been drilled in one end and filled with a gritty black powder.
He touched it, then held his forefinger to his nose. ‘Gunpowder. I would know the smell anywhere.’
‘A nasty trick to play on someone. It would burn normally for a few minutes and then
explode.’ Sarah ran her hand across the chair nearest the fireplace and felt a mass of wooden shards poking out of the cloth, only vaguely visible against the dark fabric. ‘There’s no blood here, it seems that nobody fell for it.’
‘It’s lucky the whole house didn’t burn down.’
‘This tells us the violence wasn’t necessarily targeted. Anybody could have been killed by this, which means they were all brought here to die.’
‘Then who was their accuser?’
She considered the question. ‘Let’s keep looking.’
A smaller door took Sarah back into the entrance hall. She waited there for Charles while he looked out of the lounge windows, trying to spot their own house. When he was done she opened the door to the next room.
‘Careful,’ he cried out.
She stepped inside. It was a study, but one almost empty of furniture. There was a desk and a glass-panelled bookcase; inexplicably, both were covered with a thick black soot. She ran her finger over the desk, leaving a line in the black sludge.
At one side of the bookcase was a small window, and underneath that were two more dead bodies. They were laid out like market produce, stacked sloppily in a shallow pile. They were both women, one of them young and one old. Sarah remembered them clearly; she’d been weeding the foxgloves as they’d walked past the house, two days earlier. An affluent lady and her travelling companion, that much was clear. The older one had been bossy, a bully even; it was obvious from the sheepish way the younger one would respond to everything with single, conciliatory words, and the way the older one would keep talking regardless, her speech never once deflected by a lack of interest.
Charles shuffled into the room behind her. ‘It smells of smoke in here.’ He left the door open and hovered on the threshold; his manner had become that of a child who has spent too long in an art gallery.
The two bodies were both saturated with smoke. The young woman’s hair was grey with it and the old woman’s almost black. Charles stepped past Sarah and opened the window, revelling in the clean sea breeze. He looked down at the bodies and tutted.
‘I make that six,’ he said. ‘And the killer still unaccounted for. I think we’ve seen enough of this place, we should leave.’
‘There is more to find.’
‘It’s not safe here.’
Sarah didn’t respond; she was examining a small hole in the wall on one side of the room. Its presence there was unexplained. A few tins of food, a bible, a bottle of pills and a pitcher of blackened water were concealed under the desk, but there was very little else in the room. She gave the two dead women a cursory examination but their pockets were empty. They’d both been carrying bags when she’d seen them before, but they’d presumably been lost in the panic somewhere.
She walked towards the door. ‘It might have been these two that burned the accusations against them.’
‘That could well be.’ Charles stopped her. ‘Sarah, I know you like to show resolve, but are you really all right with all this horror and danger? Maybe we should rest a minute before we move on?’
She sensed the pleading embarrassment at the back of his words. ‘Charles, darling, I’m perfectly fine.’ And with a hand on his shoulder she ushered him out of the room.
As they left she ran her other hand down the inside of the door jamb, which the soot had not reached. ‘Interesting,’ she said to herself.
The next room along was a small library. There was nothing notable inside except for a large desk, made from a combination of wood and metal. An incongruous iron shelf emerged from the wall above it, at head height, and seemed to be linked to the desk somehow. Sarah studied it carefully while Charles stood in the doorway.
The house was not excessively large and, aside from a closet, which was seemingly untouched, the rest of the rooms on the ground floor were all dedicated to the preparation of food. The black and white tiles from the main hall continued into this part of the house, where it was noticeably colder and their footsteps were noticeably louder. Charles led the way, his gun pointed before him and his other arm held protectively in front of his wife, while she walked patiently behind. Together they searched the kitchens and the few small storerooms, but found nothing. No more bodies and nobody left alive, just chaos and mess.
It was clear that there’d come a time, during the convulsions the household had suffered, when the occupants had decided that it was appropriate to stockpile weapons and supplies, and the kitchens had been raided for both. The canned goods had all vanished, except where they’d fallen from desperately cradled armloads and rolled into corners or been kicked across the tiles. A tin of pears in syrup lay on a mat by the back door next to a tin of corned beef and a pair of Wellington boots. Knives had tumbled from their hooks and pans had been taken as containers for water.
In a small pantry the floor was swampy with spilled flour and smashed pots of honey. Footsteps of frozen meat were defrosting along the length of the corridors, with teeth marks where they’d been chewed at the edges. Those meagre supplies they had seen under the desk in the smoke-stained room, and whatever they might find upstairs, had come at the cost of all this mess. In many ways it was a more horrifying testament to the ordeal undergone here than the bodies themselves.
‘At some point civility broke down,’ said Sarah. ‘And they must have taken to their rooms with supplies. It confirms what I’ve been thinking.’
‘And what’s that, my darling?’
‘The accuser was one of the ten guests. If it was someone else, the guests would have united against them. But instead they turned on each other. So the killer must have kept their identity secret.’
‘While he killed the other nine, one by one? So you think one of the accusations was a fake?’
‘Either a fake, or a confession.’
Charles swallowed uncomfortably. ‘Then there may be three more bodies to find. And where do you think the killer went once they’d finished?’
He held his breath while waiting for her answer.
‘Maybe they took the boat and left. Or maybe they’re still here.’
The upper floor of the house was less imposing. The staircase twisted around to reach a landing with a large window and from there two corridors stretched in opposite directions to the two ends of the house.
Every room on this floor was either a bedroom or a bathroom. The bedrooms varied wildly in size and opulence, and some had bathrooms of their own. ‘If there’s anyone left alive,’ said Charles, ‘they’re probably in one of these rooms.’
He insisted that Sarah open the first door with her fingertips, standing flat against the wall beside it, while he stood in the doorway and gripped his gun with both hands. She indulged him, finding the method faintly comical; the door swung back anticlimactically to reveal the quarters of the two servants.
Inside were twin beds, the sheets a drab grey. The rest of the furniture was minimal. It was close to the head of the stairs and had presumably been chosen so they could come and go early in the morning without disturbing anyone. Both beds were made and the curtains were drawn; except for an opened bible, the Stubbses had left no trace of their occupancy.
Opposite that was another simple room, with a single brown bed. The window above it was smashed. It was the window they’d seen through the telescope, though it was clear now that a lot of the glass had been removed by hand.
‘Perhaps there was a fight,’ said Charles.
Sarah looked in the drawers of a small desk; they were empty. Beside that was a wastepaper bin, containing a thick green candle. ‘Or someone made themselves an escape route.’
There were two more bedrooms along that side of the house: one exceedingly large, with its own bathroom and balcony, the other more modest and without any appendages. Both contained beds that had been slept in, though only one of them had been made, and both had dressing tables covered with a host of female accoutrements.
‘The quarters of the two women downstairs,’ Sarah remarked. ‘Can you guess w
hich is which?’
Charles grunted, half in amusement and half disapproval. ‘They are equal in the eyes of god now.’
The last room along that corridor was unremarkable, with a toilet, sink and shower. The shower curtain was torn down and the floor was covered with water, but there were no other signs of damage.
They turned back and crossed the landing to the other corridor. Five doors looked out at them from alternating sides of the hallway, all closed.
The first opened into a bathroom, with a tasteless olive-toned carpet. A cabinet above the sink had been searched through in a hurry but there was nothing else of interest.
The next door was locked. Charles banged on it for several minutes with the base of his gun, but there was no answer. He searched for a key but found nothing.
‘This seems ominous,’ he said.
‘There are three doors left,’ said Sarah. ‘And three bodies missing. We’ll have to return to this one later.’
The next door along was also locked. The one after that opened into a slim, light room with a single bed placed along the wall. On the bed lay a woman, dressed in her day clothes. She was still wearing her shoes. She seemed to be asleep, but they both knew she wasn’t. The few other things in the room were a desk beside the bed and a book of Russian short stories left there at an angle that implied it had recently been read. Her travelling bag was at the foot of the bed, but nothing was unpacked. A handful of other books were lined up on a shelf above the desk, a notable gap where one had been removed.
‘I remember her,’ said Sarah, thinking back to the bright blue eye-shadow this woman had been wearing two days before. ‘She walked past me with a handsome young man. He was very quiet and she was doing most of the talking. She was giving her opinions on the countryside.’
Charles nodded. ‘It’s very sad, she’s only about your age. But I can’t say I’m surprised.’