‘What are you saying?’ A bead of sweat ran down Reverend James’ brow. His face was red.
‘If you want to stop incriminating yourself, you’d better stop with these sermons.’
‘Shut up, Rafe,’ said Alison, standing. ‘How dare you say that about the Reverend?’
Danny stood too. ‘Yes, Rafe, this is not app-appr-appropriate.’
‘Fine.’ Reverend James slammed the Bible shut and sat down, pulling his chair closer to the fire, his back to us. The sermon was over.
Suzanne stood too. ‘Rafe and I will prepare supper,’ she said. Emily looked up in surprise.
‘We’ll all help,’ said Linda, also rising.
‘No, you stay there,’ said Suzanne. ‘We’ll be okay.’
‘Well, what’s it to be?’
‘Lasagne,’ she said, pulling a baking tray covered in tinfoil from the fridge.
‘Courtesy of Signor Alfieri, the concierge. I know all these meals are ready-made. Don’t try to pretend you prepared them from scratch.’
She turned the oven on to fan force, and the noise gave her the cover to speak to me. I knew that was the real reason she had brought me into the kitchen.
‘Rafe, I need to ask your advice. Something has happened and–’
Too late. Linda and Alison entered the kitchen. ‘Reverend James said we should come and help you,’ said Alison. She looked smug.
‘Excuse us, we’re doing fine without you.’ Suzanne indicated the oven. ‘All done, see?’
But Linda and Alison would not leave. Linda took out lettuce and tomatoes from the fridge and began making a salad; Alison cut a French loaf down the middle and basted it with garlic paste from a jar she found in the cupboard. We were being policed.
We ate supper in silence. Emily watched Suzanne, and Suzanne watched me in distress that her efforts to communicate something to me had been thwarted. What did she want to say? I signalled to her that we could talk soon. But Reverend James had made sure there was no way this could happen. He stared at me, at her; he knew something was up. He also scrutinised Emily’s every move. He was looking for signs of guilt. He was looking to see whether she had spilled the beans about him, I was sure.
After supper, Suzanne looked at me and yawned. ‘It’s late. I’m going to bed.’
Linda declared that she and Alison would chaperone Suzanne and Emily for toilet breaks and to prepare for the night ahead. It was a deliberate ploy to keep me away from them.
‘Let’s go then,’ Alison said, and she and Linda stood. ‘We’ll make up beds in the same room.’
‘Linda’s room,’ said the Reverend. ‘And the boys will all sleep in my room.’
Emily shrugged her shoulders and nodded her agreement. With a look of resignation, Suzanne did the same.
Danny pushed back his chair. ‘Gentlemen, let’s s-sort out the rooms, move beds.’
As I left the table, I slid a butter knife up my sleeve. You never knew when you’d have to defend yourself.
Emily managed to push against me for a last word before we parted. We stared out at the snow-glowing night. ‘I don’t trust any of them,’ she said. ‘Not anyone.’
‘Not even me?’
‘What was going on in the kitchen there?’
‘Detective work.’
She looked sceptical. ‘Sure.’
I touched her cheek. ‘Just watch Suzanne, okay? Something is up.’
She winked. ‘Don’t worry, Rafe, I’m onto it. I’ll be all over her like a rash. But you’d better be onto the Reverend too.’
I laughed. ‘Like a cheap suit.’
It was not pleasant sleeping with James and Danny. The thought that one of these men could be the murderer made it even more disconcerting. How safe was it to sleep in the same room? Whose idea was this anyway? The murderer’s? And similarly, Emily could be sharing a room with a female serial killer.
Unless she was the female serial killer.
The rule – I had gleaned this from reading too many bad mystery novels – was that the murderer was always the one you least suspected. Not the obvious one.
Unless the obvious one was the one you least suspected.
The most suspicious: Reverend James.
The least suspicious: Emily.
Or Danny. His stammering bewilderment could be a ruse, hiding a dark lust for destruction.
Or myself.
I once saw a movie, Hide and Seek, where the investigator found, to his surprise, that he himself was the murderer.
But in the real world, the most obvious suspect was Reverend James Miller. Who else could have engineered this whole nightmare so perfectly, and made the deaths neatly correspond to his little Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. And Linda could be his accomplice. Or Alison. Or all of them. But again, it felt more likely that he had worked with an invisible hand here – the concierge, the castle owner – to pick us off one by one. There have been cases of cult leaders massacring their own flocks.
And so I lay awake, wired, vigilant. Feigned sleep. Watched Reverend James in the next bed. How had I found myself in this situation? Just like the old retreats at school when we were so terrified of not conforming, so eager to please, to get approval that we went along with this man’s crazy ideas, burning our rock albums and ‘secular’ books, foregoing movies and TV as ‘of the devil’. Aware that demons were always on our backs trying to get us to stumble and fall, tempting us with sexual desires, God watching our every move, frowning at our sins, wanting submission and obedience and worship. And behind it all was Reverend James, grooming us to be his sheep. It made me sick. I watched this man, his bald head full of secrets. I turned over in my mind Emily’s revelations: Glen and Linda, James and Emily, and whoever else. This man’s fanaticism may have been turned into an insatiable need for revenge and obliteration of all immorality.
Only when he was snoring deeply and Danny lying like a sack of stones on his mattress on the floor did I relax and begin to drift off to sleep myself.
But at around midnight, a creak of a floorboard brought me back to full consciousness. Out of the crinkled slits of my eyes, I watched a shadow rise out of the next bed. I reached my hand down the side of the mattress and felt for the butter knife, gripped its cold handle.
The shadow shuffled towards the door.
Danny.
Going to the toilet, I guessed. In the icy night, with that cold stone floor, he had wrapped his blanket around him and shuffled like a zombie in the dark. Turned the key in the lock slowly and carefully pulled open the door. Disappeared into the corridor.
I had to follow.
Reverend James was fast asleep, snoring lightly. I crept out of bed. My teeth were chattering. My bare feet stung with cold. I pulled the duvet from my bed and pulled it tightly around me, then put on my sneakers. I followed Danny into the corridor, hiding in the shadows.
No, he was not going to the toilet. Danny walked to the end of the corridor leading to the women’s wing and paused by a window. The glow from snow on the ground gave me enough light to see his silhouette. He clutched a note in his hand, holding it tight as if it was guiding him. Then he walked down the corridor and hesitated outside the room where the women were sleeping. He touched the door handle, deliberating. My heart pounded. If he made any attempt to go in, I would tackle him and bring him to the ground. I clutched the knife and readied myself for attack. But no, he did not enter. He moved on, shuffling in his blanket like the ghost of a monk. I breathed out.
Danny turned and headed for the library. He pushed open the door and entered the darkness. I waited outside and listened.
Gotcha.
Danny had been the quiet one, the one least suspected. This was uncharacteristic behaviour for a follower, a sheep. Was Danny setting up a murder? Or going to commit one? And then I smelt the perfume.
Suzanne’s perfume.
The thoughts spiralled in my head. He had lured her in here to murder her. She had tricked him into meeting her here so she could kill him. They were in l
eague and were plotting to murder someone else.
I had been lured to my death. Or maybe this was nothing to do with murder. A tryst, a meeting of secret lovers.
But they knew how dangerous it would be to prowl this castle at night.
I peeked into the room.
There was no trace of Danny. The heavy shelves of books stood silently. The white gleam through the windows made a zebra pattern across the shelves on the floor. Danny was not in the room. But a cold wind blew and I saw a door ajar at the other end. I pressed myself against the wall and sidled towards it. I had not seen this door before, but I quickly discovered that it was another entrance to the torture museum.
We had left the window open in this room to keep Stephen’s body cold. The torture museum was out of bounds, and we had locked it. But whoever could open and lock doors electronically had made sure this one was open. Now here was Danny going into a secret entrance in the dead of night. I saw only shapes cast in by the luminous snow outside the tall window. There was the guillotine. There was Stephen’s body. Stephen’s head. And I recognised other shapes too – the iron maiden standing there like a beast with mouth open, eight mannequins hanging from the ceiling, the brazen bull.
Danny could be hiding behind any of these objects, waiting for me. So I kept to the shadows, held the knife out. I expected some horrible thing – a spike through the neck, or two metal sprung doors to press me into a flesh sandwich. I experienced all the animal instincts of prey, the hackles rising, the beating heart, the blood draining from my extremities. We’re animals, I thought. Predators and prey. And this was going to be survival of the fittest. My body was prepared for fight. Or flight. But not for silence, darkness and perfume.
No Danny anywhere.
Bewildered, I stood still as stone and listened. Heard nothing but the pounding of my own heart.
I returned to the library and scanned that room again in case I had missed something. But there was nothing.
I prowled the corridor, trying to sense by instinct, intuition. The perfume was turning my stomach. I tiptoed to the room where the women were sleeping. Listened outside for a moment and then turned the handle slowly. The door was locked. That was good.
Along the passage, the other women’s rooms were empty.
Finally, I returned to the men’s wing and entered our room. Reverend James was still asleep, in exactly the same position I had left him, on his back, snoring. Danny’s bed too was occupied. Danny had pulled the blanket he had been wrapped in over his entire body and was asleep. I stood by the man’s bed, knife at the ready, listening.
6
Six geese a-laying
I must have fallen asleep shortly afterwards, because it was dawn when I awoke, the knife slack in my hand.
And now Reverend James was gone. I knew that he rose early to pray every morning, but we were not supposed to be out of one another’s sight.
At least Danny was still asleep in his bed.
In the rosy light, I spied a note on Danny’s bedside table. I reached for it. Danny did not move. I unfolded it, squinted at it. Handwritten in pencil, in soft loopy writing, it said:
Danny, be there, please. Library midnight. I have to speak to you. Life or death.
The note reeked of perfume. I was sick with nausea as I placed it back on the table. Suzanne was playing a game here, but what?
‘Danny!’ I whispered.
No response.
I threw back the bedclothes, reached over to shake him awake. But he was not there. The pillows and blanket had been rolled into a ball.
‘Shit.’
I ran to the door and pounded along the corridor, then leaped down the stairs and into the living room. ‘Reverend James!’
Reverend James was on his knees, bowed in prayer, facing the window. On the floor in front of him sat his open Bible and the Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. Nothing unusual. Reverend James had done this every day of his life for as long as I had known him, and had exhorted his flock to have their own ‘Quiet Time’ every morning at dawn, to pray to God and let Him speak to them through His Word. ‘How long have you been here?’ was my first question.
Reverend James opened his eyes. ‘Rafe, you don’t disturb someone’s Quiet Time with God. You know that.’
I restrained a violent urge to lash out at him. ‘Where’s Danny?’
He breathed out in annoyance. ‘I left him asleep. And you too. Both of you snoring away.’
‘He’s not in our bedroom.’
He did not react. ‘Maybe he’s having a Quiet Time somewhere. As we all should be doing.’
I shook my head. ‘His blanket was plumped up to look like he was in it, but he’s gone.’
Reverend James closed his Bible. ‘Maybe he’s in the loo.’
‘I’m going to find him.’ I strode into the dining area and stood by the breakfast table. Stopped dead. ‘Look!’
Five plastic golden rings lay on Danny’s placemat, arranged in the Olympic design. I knew what that meant.
‘Five golden rings,’ said Reverend James. He picked one up, examined it, weighed it with a shaking hand. ‘The fifth day of Christmas.’
I scrutinised his reaction. He acted unsurprised, unemotional, as if he knew exactly what this meant. I hid the dread I felt in my own stomach. ‘Danny?’ I crouched down to examine something on the floor, ‘Look.’ Under Danny’s chair, in the semi-darkness, lay a Bible, or what was left of a Bible. Pages had been ripped out and lay scattered all over the floor.
Reverend James bent down and picked up the vandalised tome. His fingers trembled. ‘The first five books of the Bible. Ripped out.’
He gathered the torn pages, peered at them. It was too dark to read, but he seemed to know exactly what pages they were. ‘The five golden rings. That’s what these are. The Pentateuch. The books of the law.’
I stared directly at Reverend James. ‘Who would even know what the five golden rings mean, except you?’
Reverend James blinked at me and dropped the pages. ‘It means that none of us are safe. It means–’ He turned and ran for the door.
I ran after him. ‘Wait!’
He climbed the stairs and bounded along the corridor, and I followed in hot pursuit. Ignoring me, he stopped outside the women’s bedroom and pounded on the door. ‘Are you okay in there? Linda? Ali?’
A sleepy Suzanne in pink marshmallow dressing gown, gossamer hair like a spider web all over her face, opened the door. ‘Reverend James.’
She barred the door, the ghost of an ironic smile on her face. ‘Sorry, Reverend, Rafe, you can’t come in here. We’re still in a state of… undress.’
I smelt that perfume on her and it made me want to retch. ‘Danny’s missing,’ I said.
I looked unblinking into her eyes to ensure I could see beyond the façade. The first reaction is always the honest one. Her eyes flooded with terror. Affirmation of some fear, but not surprise. ‘But Danny was with you.’
Emily pushed past Suzanne, wrapping her dressing gown around her. ‘Danny’s missing?’
I peered past her into the dark bedroom. ‘Has anyone seen him?’
‘He’s certainly not in here,’ said Emily.
Linda and Alison crowded the door too.
Emily pointed down the corridor. ‘Maybe he’s in the bathroom.’
‘I’ll check the men’s bathroom and bedrooms.’
But Danny was nowhere to be seen.
‘Let’s check the women’s bathroom,’ Suzanne said. ‘Together.’
I led the way, banged open the door, inspected the toilet stalls, the storage closet. Emily pointed to a row of bottles on the shelf. Shampoo, conditioner and a small rose-coloured bottle with a stopper. ‘Suzanne’s perfume,’ she mouthed. I picked up the bottle, sniffed it and winced.
‘Excuse me!’ I turned to see Suzanne frowning at me. ‘That’s mine.’ I had no time to think of an excuse for why I was sniffing her perfume. She looked panicked.
‘Danny!’ Reverend James’ trembling vo
ice multiplied in the echoing corridors. Stone-cold walls bounced the voice back. He beckoned us all out of the bathroom. ‘We have to go room to room. But all together.’
‘Knowing Danny, he’s praying somewhere,’ said Alison. ‘He always has a Quiet Time when he wakes up.’ But she said this without conviction.
‘I hope so.’
‘Where are we going, Rafe?’ asked Emily.
I led them into the library and past the rows of shelves. Perhaps I had missed something in the dark last night. Perhaps Danny was still here. But the room was empty. I tried the door handle at the end of the room. It was locked. ‘We have to get in here.’
Reverend James frowned. ‘Where does that door lead?’
‘The torture museum.’
‘No, the door to the museum is on the other side of the corridor.’
‘Just trust me.’ I took out the bunch of keys I had filched from Stephen’s corpse and tried one key after another. No luck. What chance did I have against a remote electronic locking mechanism? ‘We’ll have to go around to the torture museum door.’
Reverend James’ eyes were wide. ‘You think he’s in there. He couldn’t get in. I have the key.’
‘Doors open electronically in this castle,’ I said. I rattled the door again. ‘He came through here. Anyway, we’ve got to go around the other side.’
Reverend James led us around to the entrance through the corridor and unlocked the door. I pushed past him into the room.
‘I don’t think this is a good idea,’ he said. ‘The ladies should stay behind. After all–’
‘I’m not staying on my own outside,’ said Linda.
The first thing I smelt was the faint trace of perfume. Ice-cold air blew in through the open window. Nothing else was amiss. But instinct had pulled me here, and a sense of dread.
‘You sure he came in here?’ asked Emily.
Twelve Days Page 12