INSIDIOUS ASSASSINS

by Jack Ketchum

  The gentlemen and senior male servants, meanwhile, clustered at the pond’s edge as the younger footmen, gardener and groom’s lad waded into the shallows. Their shoes sank deep into soft, spongy black muck, eliciting grimaces and squishy, squelching sounds. A green layer of algae some inches below the surface that, by day, gave the pond a most picturesque opacity, adhered to their pant-legs in a scummy manner the laundresses would no doubt find difficult to contend with.

  “Does anyone recognize him?”

  “Not from here, I don’t.”

  “Not from this angle, either. Hardly a chap’s best.”

  “Isn’t one of the staff, is it?”

  “Certainly not, m’lord.”

  “By the look of his clothes, I’d say he’s no gentleman.”

  “That’s a cert. From the village, do you reckon?”

  “Must be, or traveling through.”

  A long pole-hook was fetched from the gardener’s shed. It took some fiddling, and one unfortunate clonk to the drifting man’s head, but finally they snagged his waterlogged clothing and haul him within reach. The footmen took hold of limp arms and legs and carried the body ashore.

  “You might want to stay back,” Lord Fitz-Hughes said to the women. By his expression, he wished he himself could do the same. By his expression, he also wished he could sit down, and perhaps finish that stiff slug of brandy.

  His advice was, for the most part, hardly necessary. Only Rebecca, Sir Geoffrey’s stepdaughter, had inclination enough toward the morbid and ghoulish to attempt a closer look.

  The servants set the man down on the grass and rolled him over. His hands flopped out pallid and wet by his sides. His head lolled. Pond-water trickled from his gaping mouth. A lily frond lay pasted across his cheek.

  Gasps, small shrieks of horror, and little outcries greeted this glimpse of his slack, blue-gray face in the moonlight. Lady Fitz-Hughes swooned again and two other ladies followed suit. Eyes were averted, mouths daintily covered, pearls clutched. Some of the men shared grim looks. Others had to turn away. Old Bennings, the butler, tottered and pressed a palsied hand to his chest. Lord Stafford’s valet was sick all down his shirtfront.

  He was, most decidedly and most definitely, dead.

  He was also, most decidedly and most definitely, a complete stranger.

  Sleep would be a rare and much-belated business that night, if in fact it arrived at all. For any of them besides the children, that was. They, at least, succumbed to a reasonable bedtime ... if perhaps generously helped along by cups of hot chocolate laced with a tincture of something from a brown bottle the governess kept in a locked cupboard for just such occasions.

  Well, perhaps not just such occasions. It wasn’t every day, after all, that anything so noteworthy as a death took place at Woadcastle. The last one had been, oh, ages ago, the preceding autumn, that regrettable hunting accident with the poor Earl of Falloway. It had very much put a damper on the whole month. Of course, there had also been the matter of the actress a few years previously, the one young George found so fascinating, but her suicide had put quite the tragic end to their star-crossed love affair. Everything worked out for the best eventually, with George going on to a far more suitable engagement, though they all agreed it had been a most shocking breach of hospitality by the actress. The stains would not come out of the porcelain; the entire bathtub had to be replaced.

  These topics were uppermost on the minds of the Fitz-Hugheses and their houseguests, not to mention the servants. The temptation among the adults to seek a similar insomnia remedy as had wafted the children away to dreamland was not inconsiderable, but none of them wanted to be the first to make such a medicinal request. They contented themselves for the time being, therefore, with brandy, whiskey, and other spirits.

  Besides, the doctor had been summoned from the village, and the police were on their way, and nobody wanted to miss any further developments.

  “This isn’t going to turn into another of those garish murder-mystery affairs, is it?” inquired Great-Aunt Gertrude, comfortably ensconced in a chair with Leopold curled on her lap. The cat’s pale-sapphire eyes glimmered under drowsy half-lids.

  “What, you mean with some inspector nosing about?” said William Stafford, Lord Stafford’s brother. He threw back his third or fourth drink at a gulp, insulting to such a fine vintage of scotch whisky.

  “Oh, I do hope not,” fretted Lady Fitz-Hughes. “All that asking of impertinent questions—”

  At that, several more of them chimed worriedly in.

  “Not to mention making accusations and sinister assumptions about motives!”

  “Insisting no one’s permitted to leave the estate, and so on?”

  “Digging for secrets and scandals—”

  “So uncouth. Not to mention inconvenient.”

  “A man has died!” cried Louisa, Henry’s wife of a few months, silencing the rest. “Doesn’t that matter rather more than our inconvenience?”

  “Well, my dear, it’s far too late for him to be troubled by it,” Gertrude said. “Why should the rest of us be put out?”

  “We don’t know it’s murder!” Lady Fitz-Hughes wrung her many-ringed hands. “We don’t even know who the man is yet, let alone how he died. Let’s resolve that before we go leaping to any melodramatic conclusions!”

  “Melodramatic?” echoed her husband. “Oh, I say.”

  Their eldest son, Roddy, chuckled. “Besides, if this were one of those murder-mystery affairs Auntie mentioned, shouldn’t it be Father as the victim?”

  “To be sure,” said Roger, Roddy’s younger brother by only a matter of minutes. He grinned a wicked grin at the blustering reaction of Lord Fitz-Hughes. “He would have had to bring us all here to discuss changing his will, and then be found dead—”

  “Several times over,” said Roddy. “Shot, stabbed, cracked on the head, and poisoned.”

  “Then pushed down the grand stairs for good measure.”

  Just like that, they were off to the races, exchanging rapid-fire remarks as their wives—they’d married sisters, of course, Lord Stafford’s cousins—heaved identical sighs of chagrin.

  “With the will then gone missing, and none of us knowing what it had said.”

  “Everyone a suspect—”

  “You having learned you’d been disinherited and furious about it—”

  “Because he blamed me for something you’d done, disguising yourself, easy enough as my twin—”

  “With some long-hidden bastard popping out of the woodwork.”

  “I’ve half a mind to disinherit you both on the spot,” Lord Fitz-Hughes declared.

  “Capital!” Edmund tugged on his jacket lapels. “That’s me next in line, then!”

  “Rubbish it is,” said Elizabeth, who was Roddy’s wife. “I won’t see my son passed over for the likes of you.”

  “What’s wrong with Edmund?” Caroline favored him with a smile. “I find him quite charming.”

  Edmund preened. Rebecca muttered what might have been, “You would,” but in so low a tone only those nearest to her heard.

  Elizabeth glared icicles at Caroline. “Oh, of course you do, now that he stands to inherit and reduce my children to paupers!”

  “What about mine?” added Adelaide, Elizabeth’s sister. “How will Roger and I find good husbands for our girls? They’ll need a fortune to back their prospects more than ever, with their father disgraced and a suspect in his own father’s murder!”

  “Need I remind you all,” grumbled Lord Fitz-Hughes, refilling his drink, “that I am not, in fact, dead?”

  “Weather’s all wrong for it, anyway, of course ...” Roddy went on, glancing out the window.

  “Absolutely,” said Roger. “Should be the proverbial dark and stormy night.”

  “Indeed. We’d lose the electric at a crucial moment.”

  “You see?” Lord Stafford shook his head. “Told you it was a mistake to rely too much on these modern williwags.”

  �
��That’s when the next shot would ring out,” said Roddy.

  “Another murder, the killer eliminating someone who’d gotten too close to solving the crime.”

  “At that rate, half the household could be dead by dawn.”

  “More, if dinner had been poisoned.”

  “Or the brandy.” Roddy raised his in a toast.

  Great-Aunt Gertrude, who had been watching the interplay with the avid attention of a spectator at a tennis match, spoke up. “I thought, in those dime-novel situations, it was always the butler that did it.”

  “The butler?”

  “Good God, old Bennings?”

  “Given how he shakes, the safest place to stand would be wherever he was aiming—”

  “Would you all stop!” Lady Fitz-Hughes, in her extremity of emotion, went so far as to make a throw-pillow live up to its name, hurling the small embroidered cushion across the drawing room.

  “Careful!” Roger caught it. “This might be the murder weapon itself!”

  “He was suffocated as well?” asked Roddy.

  The others, however, had the decency to be more duly chastened. A moment of polite silence passed, one for which idle chatter seemed discouraged. The awareness gradually returned to them that, murder-mystery fancies aside, a man was dead. A stranger, yes. Not a gentleman of quality—not a gentleman at all, judging by his attire. Not one of the household or visiting servants. Not one of the villagers that anyone could recognize, or a local tenant farmer. He was no one, really.

  No one in particular, no one important, no one of consequence.

  But still and all, a person. Some parents’ son, possibly someone’s brother, some woman’s husband, some child’s father.

  “Perhaps it was an accident,” Sir Geoffrey suggested, breaking that long moment of silence. “Perhaps the wind blew his hat into the pond, and he was trying to retrieve it, when he had a cramp.”

  “Perhaps a swan struck him,” Henry said.

  Edmund nodded. “They can do real damage, you know. Strength of their wings and all. They don’t look it, of course. They look so regal, gliding about the way they do, but I wouldn’t cross one.”

  “Met a bloke once whose arm was snapped in three places by a swan.” Major Eldridge, Caroline’s uncle, puffed on his pipe. No one had the heart to dispatch him to the smoking room at the end of the hall, him being a war hero and all, requiring a cane just to move about. “Vicious brutes, swans.”

  Louisa touched her fingertips to her brow. “I can’t bear to think one of our swans might be a murderer!”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake!” exclaimed Lady Stafford. “Listen to yourselves! How ridiculous you sound!”

  “Or he might have done it himself, drowned himself,” Edmund said. “Suicide, don’t you know.”

  “In our pond?” said Lady Fitz-Hughes. “What kind of man would do that?”

  “Well, but, Mother, I’m only saying, a man so deranged as to be suicidal wouldn’t necessarily be bound by concerns of whose pond he chose. Not in the right mind, hey-what? Taken leave of the wit and wisdom.”

  “Nonsense. There is still such a thing as common decency.”

  “You do remember the actress—”

  “Yes, but she was American.”

  “The moon’s full,” Rebecca said, nodding toward the white orb visible in the dark star-sprinkled firmament through the drawing-room window. “Suppose a werewolf got him?”

  “A what?”

  “A werewolf?”

  “Are you daft?”

  “Gracious!” Gertrude pursed her lips, stroking Leopold’s back. “It’s like living in the penny dreadfuls.”

  “Besides,” said the Major, “if it was a werewolf, he’d be right torn up, wouldn’t he? Throat laid open, gutted, eaten on—”

  “Major!” several voices pleaded at once.

  “No, the Major’s onto it, he is,” said Edmund. “Any sort of wild animal had done this—”

  “Barring a swan,” Louisa said.

  Henry rounded on his young bride. “Would you forget the damnable swan!”

  “Fine, fine, only you brought it up in the first place, the idea of murderous swans!”

  “Not murderous, only ...” He broke off. “Are we having our first fight?”

  “Oh! Yes, I rather think we are!”

  “Our first fight! Oh, darling!”

  “Darling!”

  They clasped hands and gazed at one another with lovestruck adoration.

  “As I was saying,” Edmund continued, raising his voice and giving an exaggerated roll of the eyes, “we’d be knee-deep in entrails, blood from hell to Christmas.”

  “Edmund Chamberlain Hubert Fitz-Hughes!”

  “Sorry, Mother. Ladies. Sorry.” Stammering and blushing, he rubbed the nape of his neck.

  It was hard to say which proved the more comical in the next instant—the cliché of the doorbell, or Edmund’s pantomime of relief at the cliché of the doorbell.

  Shortly thereafter, Bennings—who, to be fair, was on the far side of ancient; none of those present, even Gertrude, could recall the butler as a young man—tottered in with his usual unctuous discretion. “M’lords,” he said. “M’ladies. Doctor Lenk has finished examining the, ah, deceased.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, man!” said Lord Fitz-Hughes. “Don’t bandy about ... who is he? How did he come to be floating in our pond?”

  “I believe the doctor would be better able to—”

  “Yes, yes, show him in!” Lady Fitz-Hughes dabbed at her brow. “I honestly don’t know how much more strain I can be expected to endure for one night.”

  Bennings, again with unctuous discretion, cleared his throat. “The police have also arrived, m’lady.”

  “Oh, God!”

  “So it is murder!”

  “What do they say?”

  “Are they going to shoot the swans?”

  “Here, now, that’s hardly sporting.”

  “I agree. If anyone’s going to shoot those honking, black-banded blackguards, it should be done properly.”

  “Show in the doctor, Mr. Bennings,” Lord Fitz-Hughes said. “And the police captain, when they’ve done ... whatever it is they do.”

  The butler performed what, in earlier years, would have been an unctuously discreet inclination of the head. As it was, however, with time and palsy doing their work, it proved more of an impression of a nearsighted pigeon attempting to peck for seed. He stepped back into the hall and, moments later, ushered in the village doctor.

  Doctor Lenk looked as if he’d been roused from a deep slumber, and no doubt had been. He blinked around the well-lighted drawing room at the well-dressed gentlemen in their dinner jackets and the well-dressed ladies in their evening gowns and jewels. If Bennings was the nearsighted pigeon of this nursery fable, Lenk was an owl, unceremoniously thrust into the midst of a gathering of songbirds.

  He flinched from the barrage of questions peppering him like birdshot from all corners, clutched his sensible black doctor’s bag to his stout frame, and wet his dry lips with a nervous little pink tongue.

  “Was it the swans?” Louisa’s clear voice rang in an opportune lull. She and Henry had mended their differences and sat side by side on a velvet settee, his right knee pressed to her left and her gloved hands clasped in his.

  At this, Doctor Lenk blinked again, goggled, and said, “Beg pardon, mum?”

  “Never mind that,” Sir Geoffrey said from the mantle. “What can you tell us? What’s going on?”

  “Yes, please do, by all means, make your report,” urged Gertrude. “It’s far past Leopold’s bedtime.” On her lap, as if to second her remark, the Persian yawned to expose sharp, pearl-white teeth.

  “Blimey, Auntie,” Roddy said. “You could send him up. It isn’t as if the police will want to question the cat.”

  “Send him up? Alone?” She gave her great-nephew an affronted look.

  “Alone, nothing,” said Roger. “Ring for ... what’s-his-name. Bloo
dy cat’s got his own valet, might as well earn his keep.”

  “I’ll have you know that Clarence very much earns his keep,” Gertrude informed him. “He takes excellent care of my Leopold.”

  Rebecca leaned toward Edmund. “Her cat has a valet?”

  “Oh, yes. Damned animal lives better than most anyone else in the house. I wouldn’t mind sleeping half the day on silk pillows, eating from crystal dishes, and someone to brush my hair on demand.”

  “That is how you live, you ungrateful gadabout,” his father said.

  “What about tummy-rubs, then? He has tummy-rubs at his beck and call, hey-what?”

  Caroline tittered. “Well, then, Eddie, maybe you should get married.”

  “Would it trouble everyone unduly,” began Lady Fitz-Hughes, with one of those sorts of tight smiles that would send sailors scurrying to batten down all hatches, “to let the doctor have his say?”

  When he did, however, it turned out to be far less than enlightening. All that Lenk could tell them with certainty was that the man was dead, which obviously anyone with even a fraction of brain would have known. He showed no evident injuries or signs of violence or a struggle. For anything else, they would have to wait on a more thorough medical investigation.

  “That’s it?” Lord Fitz-Hughes said. “That’s all you can tell us?”

  “I’m not sure what else I could tell you.”

  “Who he is, for starters!”

  “Doctor,” interrupted a crisp baritone from the doorway. “Why don’t you leave that ... to me.”

  All eyes in the drawing room, even the pale-sapphire ones of Leopold the cat, turned to behold a tall man in a dark coat, returning their startled looks with a narrow, sharp, and flinty gaze.

  The local constable, their village peacekeeper, lingered in the hallway, deferentially behind this striking new arrival. To carry on with the earlier descriptive bird motif, Constable Potter was more of the waddling gander, if ganders were possessed of muttonchops and made excessive use of moustache wax.

  As for the striking new arrival, with his chiseled profile, sharp gaze, and erect carriage? An eagle, a peregrine falcon, a hunting-hawk.

  “Isn’t that Inspector Braithley of Scotland Yard?” whispered Caroline.