The Prisoner in the Castle

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  Anna swayed in her damask-covered chair. Her cigarette continued to burn, the column of ash glowing heavier and heavier, until it dropped to the carpeted floor. “Oh!” she yelped, startled.

  Leo made a dismissive gesture. “Leave it. Rome is burning, my dear. A few more ashes here and there won’t make a difference.” Anna settled back, but crushed out the glowing cigarette on her plate. It made an ugly black stain on the antique china.

  “What?” The sound Murdo made was halfway between a snort and a laugh. “My mother would rather die than sleep with Killoch or the likes of him.”

  “And yet,” Quentin persisted, “she did.” He gulped more wine.

  “Quentin,” Teddy warned. “These are serious accusations—”

  Murdo yanked free from McNaughton’s grip. “I don’t believe it!”

  Quentin glared at Teddy. “I know it’s serious. Deadly serious.” Before Maggie could stop him, Quentin pulled something from his pocket. It was a yellowed and curling photograph. In it Fiona McNaughton’s eyes were black holes of terror and defeat.

  “Mr. Asquith!” Maggie exclaimed, horrified. “No!”

  Unrepentant, he looked to her. “I’m sorry, Miss Hope—but I’m not about to die just to spare anyone’s delicacy.” He held up the photo for everyone else to see.

  “Jesus Christ,” breathed Leo as the rest stared in mute shock. A vein began to throb in Angus McNaughton’s forehead. But the big caretaker didn’t move.

  “That’s—that’s Mrs. McNaughton?” Anna stammered. “Let me see.” Quentin handed her the photograph, and she gazed at it in horror, struggling to find a connection between the respectable housekeeper she knew and the bound and terrified young woman in the picture.

  “Stop it!” Murdo cried, seeing her expression. “Give that to me!” He grabbed the photo and squinted at it. Before Quentin could stop him, he touched the picture to one of the candles’ flames, watching with tears in his eyes as it disintegrated into ash.

  “You can destroy the photo, but you can’t dismiss the truth,” Quentin pressed. “Your mother slept with him, conceived you, bore you, raised you as McNaughton’s son. Look in the mirror, my friend. You’re the murderous old bastard’s spitting image.”

  They stared. It was true: Murdo was slim and dark, with the same aquiline nose as Killoch’s in his portrait. “Why didn’t I see the resemblance before?” Teddy muttered.

  Leo crushed out his cigarette in his uneaten sandwich. “Sweet Christ.”

  “My God,” Anna whispered, looking up to Murdo. Even Ramsey’s eyes widened.

  “Your father was a killer and now you’re ours. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree,” Quentin concluded. “Except now we found you out—and you won’t be able to kill anyone else.”

  “Why would I kill anyone?” Murdo repeated, staggering. “I’m not a…killer!”

  “You’re a hunter, we know.” Quentin shrugged. “It runs in the blood. Your father did it—committed murders en masse. And now, apparently, it’s your turn. Well, we’ve found you out, you sick little bastard! You’re not going to get away with it!”

  “No,” Murdo whispered hoarsely. Then, “No!” He ran from the room. McNaughton whirled and followed him.

  Leo poured more wine, then held up the glass to examine the dark red in the candlelight. “I have supped full with horrors.” He looked to Anna. “Maybe Murdo is your ghost?”

  Anna’s eyes were glassy. She didn’t seem to hear him at all.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” Maggie said to Quentin.

  “With all due respect, Miss Hope, I’m not about to die on this godforsaken island just because you’re afraid to hurt young Murdo’s feelings.”

  “I’m thinking of Mrs. McNaughton’s as well,” Maggie countered. “And the dates and that photograph don’t prove anything. You’re just causing people unnecessary pain.”

  “You knew, Miss Hope?” Anna frowned at her.

  “We found the pictures and an appointment book in the library this afternoon,” Maggie admitted. “But even if Murdo is Marcus Killoch’s son, it doesn’t mean he himself has killed anyone.”

  “Poor young man.” Teddy wiped his lips with a napkin. “His whole world’s been turned upside down.”

  Quentin’s head snapped up. He stared Maggie straight in the eye. “If not Murdo, then who is doing this?” He stared at them all, one by one—Teddy, Ramsey, Anna, Leo, Sayid, and then Maggie. “One of you?”

  “No,” Anna protested. “I can’t believe one of us is a murderer. There must be someone else in the castle. Not Murdo. Someone else, hiding. Or out there on the island. There has to be.” She had gone so pale, Maggie feared she might faint.

  “If there’s anyone else on the island, they’re doing a good job of getting in here without anybody seeing,” Teddy remarked, reaching for his pipe.

  “There’s no one else here,” Leo insisted. “Don’t you understand? It might be Murdo and it might not. And if not, it must be one of us.” He finished his wine and poured more. “I daresay the scene down in the kitchen tonight won’t be pretty.” He drained his glass again. “And I doubt there will be pudding. However, I do have a little something that might help…”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a cloisonné pillbox. When he opened it, Maggie could see it was filled with white powder.

  Sayid tilted his head. “Cocaine?”

  “It was Helene’s,” admitted Leo. “But she’s not needing it now, is she?”

  “I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Sayid countered. “It’s dangerous to start, then mixing it with wine?”

  “Well, then, it’s a good thing I’m not asking for your permission, now, isn’t it, Doctor?” Leo rose, frowning, then turned back to pick up the wine bottle by the neck. “I say we move this party into the billiards room and forget our troubles for a while. What do you say?”

  “Should Miss Hope and I come, too?” asked Anna. “Aren’t the ladies and gentlemen supposed to separate after dinner?”

  “Separate and die,” Leo said bluntly. “Life is short, after all.” He raised the wine bottle high into the air. “Carpe vinum!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  The rumbling of thunder was masked by the sentimental strains of Charles Harrison’s “I’ll Be with You in Apple Blossom Time” playing on the gramophone in the billiards room. Maggie looked around; she hadn’t spent much time in this room, as it was considered the men’s territory. It was, improbably, even uglier than the rest of the castle, the furniture covered in fur pelts, the mounted heads, horns, and antlers of both American and African animals staring down from the walls. Kenyan carved wooden poles to commemorate the dead, ivory figurines in what looked to be the shapes of phalluses, and a golden Ethiopian crown adorned the walls and tables, while Masai shields and spears framed the gigantic fireplace.

  The last time she’d been in the room was when she’d gone to Captain Evans’s dead body…She closed her eyes, as if that would get rid of the memory, but she only saw his face more clearly.

  “Maggie, have a drink!” she heard Quentin say, as he pressed a brandy snifter into her hand. “We can call you Maggie now, can’t we?” he asked, indicating the stuffed fox, its beady eyes glinting in the candlelight. The air was filled with a desperate hilarity.

  “Of course…” She tried out his first name. “Quentin.”

  “And Reynard.”

  “Yes, and…Reynard.”

  The room was wood-paneled, with a gold and green leopard-print wallpaper above the wainscoting. The floor was covered with an immense red Persian rug. There was a dais in the center, and on that was the green-baize-covered billiards table. An enormous bar lined one wall. Maggie noted the vents behind the paneling to remove cigar and cigarette smoke, while clean air was pumped in from underneath the pool table. Still, the room retained the stink of stale tob
acco. She felt sick.

  Quentin changed the record, and male voices sang in three-part harmony:

  I found a rose, in the devil’s garden,

  Wandering alone, little lonesome rose,

  For her the sun is never shining,

  For her the clouds have no silver lining…

  “This song”—he told the other prisoners, leaning back on a brocade wing chair, swigging from his bottle of port—“came out before the year of the murders. Might have been the last thing those poor souls ever heard.”

  “My, you’re feeling ghoulish,” Leo retorted. He took a scoop of cocaine under the nail of his pinkie and snorted like a pig searching for truffles.

  He offered the pillbox to Quentin, who declined. “I prefer port, old thing. Any port in a storm, yes?” No one laughed.

  “At least it’s not ‘Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,’ ” Maggie remarked, putting a hand to her head. She was feeling the tightening behind her eyes that always led to a headache. “I’ll never be able to listen to that song again.” She sat in a daze, paralyzed by shock. The high ceiling caused the voices and music to reverberate in a ghostly echo, and for a moment she felt as if she were on a sinking ship. Really, the first-class salon of the Titanic must have looked similar after hitting the iceberg—the mahogany paneling, the thick carpets, the brocade-covered chairs—the desperate gaiety. She closed her eyes and rubbed at her temples, unable to escape the image of icy seawater lapping at the feet of the great ship’s passengers as they sang out a final brave chorus of “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  “May I have another cigarette?” Anna asked Leo.

  “Of course,” he responded, taking a pack from his jacket pocket and handing it to her. She shook one out and leaned over to light it from a candle in a twisting ormolu candelabra, her blouse falling away from her collarbones, revealing a lacy slip. Leo stared.

  “Cigarette, Maggie?” Anna asked, offering the pack. Maggie noted the use of her Christian name but didn’t correct the younger woman.

  “No, thank you.” Maggie watched as Anna leaned back, crossing her legs, the edge of her stocking and garter belt clearly visible. Leo appeared mesmerized.

  Quentin wandered the outskirts of the room, drawn to a long sofa topped with a zebra hide. He pulled the skin over himself, peeping through the cut-out eyeholes.

  “Oh, wait!” Leo scrambled to his feet. “Let me play the lion!”

  He returned with the lion-skin rug from the floor of the great room thrown over him and growled. “I will roar that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar that I will make the duke say ‘Let him roar again, let him roar again!’ ”

  The lion chased the zebra around the room, almost knocking over the lit candles. Maggie ran to get them out of their way. The last thing we need is a fire.

  “I feel we’re on safari, watching the beasts hunt on the Serengeti,” Teddy remarked.

  “War certainly does make strange bedfellows,” Maggie said to him in disbelief, as she watched the pelt-covered men attack and feint, jumping over furniture, the revelation about Murdo seemingly forgotten. Anna clapped her hands, laughing. Ramsey sat next to her, eyeing her shyly. “And this is the first time I’ve seen Ramsey interact with any of us besides you.”

  Teddy watched, looking displeased. Is he jealous Ramsey’s coming out of his shell, making new friends? But why? He tore his eyes away from the group. “Miss Hope,” he said in a low voice, “would you come with me?”

  Maggie nodded, and together they walked past the billiards table to the shadows at the far end of the room, Teddy leaning on his bear-topped walking stick. “Things are not going well here,” he said.

  “Rather an understatement.”

  “With the possible exception of Dr. Khan, I feel as though this is a squirrelly lot. I don’t trust any of them.”

  “Not even Mr. Novak?”

  “I feel great affection for the boy, but he obviously suffers from shell shock. I saw it with veterans returning from the Great War—their minds were turned somehow. Twisted,” Teddy replied. “I don’t know how stable Ramsey is, really, when it comes down to it. What I suggest, Miss Hope, is that, as two of the more stable personalities of the group, you and I go even further than friendship—and make an alliance.”

  “An alliance? What kind of an alliance?”

  “We have come to be friends, you and I. And, I think by sticking together, we’ll get through this mess. What do you think?”

  Is Teddy frightened, too? Of course he’s older, less spry, and therefore more vulnerable. “Of course, Mr. Crane,” Maggie said, feeling a rush of protectiveness toward the older man, one of the few prisoners she could talk to. “We shall stick together, you and I—never fear.”

  “Thank you, Miss Hope.” She thought she might have seen his eyes shine with tears, but perhaps it was a trick of the light.

  Sayid made his way over to them. “It’s a good sign,” he said as he watched Anna try to talk to Ramsey while Quentin in the zebra skin dodged Leo the lion. “Maybe the only good thing to have happened these past few days.” He cleared his throat. “Please call me Sayid, by the way, since it seems we’re using first names now.”

  “And I’m Maggie.”

  They smiled at each other. His eyes are so trustworthy, she decided. He couldn’t possibly be him—could he? Maggie shook off her doubts. She was being foolish. He was a doctor. He had taken the Hippocratic oath. He was no killer, he couldn’t be. The impossible stress of their situation was making her paranoid.

  Quentin and Leo left off chasing and passed a bottle of whiskey between them, still wrapped in their animal skins.

  The record had reached the end, and Teddy went over to change it. “Here’s another one from before the murders—Marion Harris’s ‘I’m a Jazz Vampire.’ ”

  Take a tip, take a tip, take a tip from me

  For I am all the evil music has.

  I stood by the ocean, no one around,

  Shook my shoulders and the sun went down…

  To her astonishment, Sayid offered his hand. “Would you care to dance, Maggie?”

  “Why, thank you, Sayid—I would.”

  They started a one-step at the edge of the room. Soon Leo dropped the lion pelt and he and Quentin pushed furniture out of the way and began dancing, too—unsteady, port and brandy sloshing in their glasses, spilling over and staining the rug. Quentin kept the zebra skin on. Ramsey rose and offered his hand to Anna. Looking surprised, she accepted, and they began a tentative dance.

  When the record ended, all the dancers but Quentin sank back into chairs and the sofa, out of breath. “Helene would have loved this,” Leo remarked, gazing at the flickering candles as he changed the record to something more upbeat. “The dancing, the drinking, the decadence…”

  “To Helene!” Quentin called from under the pelt, holding up a brown bottle of port. “Tell us,” he asked Leo. “Were you fucking her?”

  Teddy glared. “Mr. Asquith! May I remind you there are ladies present? Mind your language, if you please!”

  “I assumed you were—you know,” Anna slurred to Leo. “With Helene. Which was why I was always so annoyed with you two. Because I wanted to”—she giggled—“you-know Ian.” Leo threw back his head and roared. She glared at him. “Why are you laughing?”

  “What a mess we’ve all made.” Leo chuckled, tilting back a bottle of rare cognac.

  Quentin, still covered in the zebra skin, was dancing the Charleston in an alarmingly vigorous fashion. Anna stumbled over to Maggie and giggled. She whispered, “Do you think he’d be good or bad in bed?”

  Maggie watched for a moment, then dismissed the idea. “I don’t want to know.”

  “The inmates are running the asylum,” Sayid murmured.

  The music changed again, louder and faster. A loose win
dowpane rattled in time to the beat. Sayid unbuttoned his jacket. “One thing this tragic mess has done is put my own life into perspective.”

  “How’s that?” asked Maggie. They were sitting so close, she realized if she moved her leg just the slightest bit it would touch his.

  “I’ve realized I don’t like my life back home very much, when it comes down to it. I don’t want to marry some girl I don’t even know, one my parents have chosen for me. It’s not what I want. And life is too short to waste.”

  “Now’s probably not the time to make a decision like that,” Maggie offered. “Why don’t you wait until you get off the island? Then decide. This isn’t the time to do anything rash—”

  “This is the only time.” Sayid watched as Anna pulled Ramsey out of his chair and onto the makeshift dance floor. Ramsey held her like a captured wild bird. Sayid’s eyes turned to Maggie’s, intense and warm. “I can’t live my life pleasing other people.”

  “This isn’t real,” Maggie protested gently, even as her heart beat faster. “You know it’s not. It’s fear and adrenaline…”

  “I don’t care…” He tucked a stray curl of her hair back. “You are a dazzling woman, Maggie Hope. Getting to know you has been the only good thing to come from this nightmare.” He bent and whispered, “Don’t go back to your room tonight. Come to mine instead.” Maggie swallowed.

  “Good night, all,” the doctor declared, rising. “I’m going to bed.”

  * * *

  —

  A long bar of light seeped from beneath Sayid’s door, shining in the dark corridor. Maggie hesitated, trying to make a decision. Finally, she knocked. “It’s me. Maggie.”

  The bolt snapped and the door swung open. Sayid had taken off his jacket and tie, and a fire glowed behind the grate.

  “Well, aren’t you going to invite me in?” she tried to joke. “There’s an insane killer out there somewhere.”