Page 2 of All of Us Murderers

This was a bad dream. In fact, yes, of course it was a dream.

Zeb didn’t have a cousin Jessamine, and Gideon could not possibly be here calling him sir, therefore he was dozing in the motor-car and would wake up at any minute.

Zeb prodded at that thought for a second in a hopeful sort of way. No waking occurred.

“Thank you,” he said, because some sort of reply was needed. “When you say ‘last’…”

“Get in.”

Zeb grabbed his bags and got in, finding himself in a huge hall. Gideon shut the door with the kind of deliberate care that was more pointed than a slam. “Alfred will show you to your room. Take the luggage, please, Alfred.”

A footman approached, with a truculent look reminiscent of the chauffeur. He hoisted the suitcases. Gideon added, “The rest of your family will be gathered in the drawing room, which is there, down the—”

“My family?” Zeb said. “You mean Wynn, yes?”

“And Mr. Bram Wyckham—”

“Bram?” Zeb yelped. “Bram is in this house? Right now? At the same time as me?”

“Mr. Bram Wyckham, Mrs. Wyckham, and Mr. Hawley Wyckham.”

“Sweet baby Jesus!”

Gideon inclined his head. The gaslight was by no means excessively bright, and the positioning of the lamps cast dramatic shadows. His eyes and cheeks were hollower than they used to be, Zeb thought. He looked drawn, older, almost cadaverous.

And he’d said Bram was here, so this wasn’t a dream. It was quite clearly a nightmare. “Tell me you’re not serious,” Zeb said.

Gideon gave him an expressionless look. Zeb wished he could detect sympathy in it. “Please follow Alfred, Mr. Zebedee. Mr. Wynn prefers punctuality at meals.”

***

Zeb’s allotted room was on the first floor of the west wing, towards the back of the house. It was reasonably sized, with a canopied bed, leaded windows, a heavily-framed oil painting of a man that Zeb didn’t want to look at, and a Tudorish sort of air it was three centuries away from deserving.

Zeb didn’t care about historical accuracy at this moment. He was more concerned with getting dressed, and also whether he could fashion a makeshift rope from bedsheets and escape.

Bram was bad enough. Elise made everything worse. Bram, Elise, and Hawley…well, if Cousin Wynn had planned this as a delightful family reunion, he had a shock coming.

And, worse than all that put together, Gideon. How could Gideon be here, working as Wynn’s secretary? How was Zeb supposed to spend a fortnight with Gideon calling him Mr. Zebedee and looking at him with such cold dislike?

Obviously Gideon still hated him. That was more of a blow than Zeb might have expected.

He had woken up for a year knowing that Gideon hated him, of course, that he’d ruined the best thing in his life out of his own damn fool stupidity, but he’d known it from a distance: their paths hadn’t crossed since they’d parted.

Now he was faced with Gideon hating him in person, and it hurt as much as it ever had.

Gideon ought not hate him. It was quite reasonable he did, in the circumstances, but he ought not.

In a better-ordered world, his light eyes would have warmed as they used to, and his lips would have twitched in the little smile that utterly changed his serious face, and the stiffness of his shoulders would have relaxed, and Zeb would have run up the stairs and caught his hands…

That should have happened. And he shouldn’t have that drawn, unhappy look, as though he hadn’t laughed in a year; as though all the old stiff reserve had come back and calcified him. As though Zeb had ruined, not just what they’d had, but Gideon himself.

He sat on the bed, head in hands. He didn’t want to have hurt Gideon; he also very much didn’t want to spend a fortnight having the fact he had done so rubbed into his own face.

Perhaps that was cowardly and he deserved the punishment, except he couldn’t imagine Gideon enjoying the next fortnight either.

Why the devil was he here? How was he here?

Distantly, Zeb heard a gong. It didn’t register for a moment, then he realised with a jolt he was supposed to be downstairs.

At least he’d got everything done but his tie. He went to do that, and winced at what the mirror showed him.

He’d meant to get his dinner things cleaned and pressed for this visit, but there had been all the kerfuffle with work, and various tasks had come up that he couldn’t even remember now but which had seemed more urgent at the time, and the fact was, he hadn’t got round to it.

The neglect showed. His dinner jacket was decidedly grubby and creased after a few excessive nights a couple of years ago, followed by an unspecified period stuffed into the bottom of his wardrobe; the disgraceful state of his black trousers suggested very accurately that he’d spent some time kneeling in them; and his white waistcoat lacked snowy spotlessness in the same way that London’s streets lacked a patina of gold.

In fact, he looked an utter scruff. He usually did, in part because of his shambolic inability to get things cleaned and pressed, rather more because he simply didn’t care.

His father had frequently expressed that cleanliness was next to godliness, and, as with many things, Zeb wasn’t inclined to follow in his footsteps.

Left to himself, he would live in old tweed, older shoes, and a general state of baggy comfort.

If only people would leave him to himself.

But he had wanted to sort out his dinner things for this visit, and at this moment, the failure felt crushing.

He batted ineffectually at the unruly curls he might have smoothed with pomade if he’d had any. He’d intended to buy some when he got his hair cut, which he also hadn’t got round to. Bram was going to love this.

Zeb got the tie dealt with in the speckled mirror while, to one side, the portrait contemplated him with a sneer. “You can sod off,” Zeb told it, and wondered whether it would be rude to take it down and turn its face to the wall.

Stop dallying. Get on.

Zeb took a deep breath, and headed out of the room to find himself in a long, empty corridor.

The dim gaslight revealed it was papered in dark red with an aggressively repetitive decoration of swerving, bloated lines, and hung with dark paintings of grim old men and empty moors.

At least they distracted the eye from the wallpaper. Doors stretched off in both directions.

It would be very easy to have no idea where to go at this point, and end up helplessly baffled and miserably late for dinner. It was what he’d usually do, in fact, which was why Zeb had made himself consciously note the way to his room. Now, if he could just remember what that was.

He checked his bedroom door to be sure he could identify it on his return (three from the end, and opposite a painting of a man in a Georgian wig who looked like his father but with syphilis), and headed off with reasonable confidence that he had to take the first right turn and then a left.

He did so, but decided after about ten feet he’d been wrong: he didn’t recognise this corridor at all.

Hell’s bells. He doubled back, took the next right in an exploratory way, and decided that was wrong too.

He turned back to retrace his steps, trying to quash the rising fear that he’d got turned around somehow, came round a corner, and almost walked into Gideon.

“Oh,” Zeb said.

Gideon’s jaw was set. “May I show you the way downstairs?”

“Gideon—”

“Mr. Grey,” Gideon said, low and savage. “Remember that. You’re not losing me another job.”

Zeb’s stomach tensed so hard it hurt. “What are you doing here?”

“I assumed you’d get lost. Clearly, I was right.”

He stalked off on that. Zeb hurried to catch up. Gideon had longer legs and a fast pace; Zeb was one of nature’s amblers.

“I meant, why are you here?” he demanded as they stormed along the dark corridor. “Here with my cousin? How did you get this job?”

“Not off my references from Cubitt’s; I can assure you of that.”

He sped up, leaving Zeb entirely behind, and led the way to a door that opened on to the landing at the top of the main hall.

Zeb had been too distracted to pay attention when he had entered the house.

He now saw it was impressively sized, with a very high ceiling, a couple of huge windows, and a neck-breaker of a stone staircase leading down to the flagstoned floor.

It was distinctly cold. He hurried after Gideon, but couldn’t quite catch him before they reached the drawing room, and his assembled family.

Everyone turned to look at him as he tumbled in at Gideon’s heels. There was a silence. Finally Bram said, through tight lips, “Zebedee. You’re late.”

“Charmed to see you too,” Zeb retorted.

He regretted it as soon as the words were out.

He always did, but his determination to be the bigger man and rise above his brother’s sneers never survived contact with the blighter.

He swung away before it got worse, giving his sister-in-law the obligatory bow.

“Good evening, Elise. Ah—” He glanced between the two men he didn’t know.

The shorter of them stepped forward, smiling, and shook Zeb’s hand warmly. “Zebedee. How delightful to meet you after so long. I am your Cousin Wynn.”

Wynn was cheerful, plump, and entirely bald but for a fringe of grey hair. He blinked in a friendly way through owlish spectacles. Zeb knew him to be in the region of fifty; he looked older.

“It’s lovely to be here,” he lied. “Very good to meet you, Wynn. Well, to meet you again, I suppose, since we have met, but I was rather young then—”

Bram muttered something not quite under his breath, in which Zeb made out the word ‘wittering’. He stopped talking.

Wynn was smiling, though. “Yes, it has been twenty years or more, hasn’t it? We must not let so long go by again. Thank you for coming, Zebedee.”

“Zeb, please. I go by Zeb.”

“Really? What an ungainly shortening of an elegant name. Still, that’s young men for you, eh, Dash? Do you know Colonel Dash?”

He indicated the other unknown man, who looked to be in his mid-forties, with a ramrod-straight back and a heavy moustache. He and Zeb shook hands as Wynn said, “Wyckham Dash, our second cousin. Dash, this is Zebedee. Zeb.”

Dash gave a confident smile. “Pleased to meet you. Call me Dash. Too many Wyckhams in here.”

That was inarguable. Zeb crossed his fingers as unobtrusively as possible, turned to the final member of the company, and said, “Good evening, Hawley.”

“Zeb, dear boy,” Hawley drawled. He was much the best-looking of the younger generation, with dramatically swept back dark blond hair and striking green eyes, and sported a goatee that suited him tiresomely well.

He wore an emerald velvet jacket in lieu of the conventional black (or, in Zeb’s case, blackish) evening dress the other men sported; it made him look like the artist he was.

He held a glass of sherry, presumably because Cousin Wynn didn’t stock absinthe.

Hawley was assessing Zeb in his turn. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? Now, when was it I last saw you?”

He knew very well where: a very specific sort of gentleman’s club. Hawley had been there because he liked to be acquainted with London’s scenes of vice; Zeb had been there because he was a member. It was a little tease, a little taunt, a little flick of the cat’s claw.

“The Café Royal, I think. You were with a party,” Zeb said. That was actually the last time but one he’d seen the fellow, and it had been brief, what with Hawley’s party getting themselves thrown out for drunken and disorderly behaviour.

“The Café Royal?” Elise repeated in her clear, bell-like voice. “Goodness, Hawley. How strangely predictable of you. So very bourgeois.”

“It can hardly be strangely predictable, dear Elise,” Hawley returned, with a wolfish smile. “You muddle your metaphors.”

“That wasn’t a metaphor,” Zeb said, and got glares from everyone involved: Hawley for the correction, Bram for inserting himself in a conversation with his wife, Elise for existing, probably. She’d never been pleased about that.

Wynn beamed around them. “How marvellous it is to have the whole family together like this. I don’t know if it has happened before.”

Zeb was fairly sure it had not, since the spectrum of Wyckham family relationships ran from indifference to loathing. He said, “It’s very kind of you to host us all.”

“Be so good as to speak on your own behalf,” Bram said. “I don’t require you to offer gratitude for me. Wynn is, as always, a most thoughtful host.”

“Do pour yourself a sherry, Zebedee,” Wynn said.

“If you care to smoke after dinner, there are cigarettes in the boxes around the house: please do help yourself, but I ask that my guests do not smoke in here or the dining room. I have a quite irrational aversion to the smell. I will just send to see if Jessamine will join us. Do please enjoy catching up with each other.”

Zeb was fairly sure they’d already managed all the courteous interaction of which a group of Wyckhams was likely to be capable.

He went to look at the paintings on the walls as a pretext for not talking to anyone, slipping his hand into his pocket as he did so, and realised he’d forgotten to transfer the rosary from his other jacket. Blast.

There were several rather good pictures, including a Turner seascape and two portraits of a woman in her thirties, one of which had the sensuality of John Singer Sargent’s best work.

In fact, Zeb realised as he examined them, it was a Sargent, and the other one was John Everett Millais.

That must have cost a few bob to commission, and he wondered who the woman was.

Wynn had never married, so far as he knew, but Lackaday House’s previous owner, his father, had died around 1880—

“For goodness’ sake, must you?” Bram snapped in his ear.

Zeb jumped, startled. “What?”

“Fiddling and fidgeting. It is intolerable.”

Zeb had no idea what he was talking about for a second, and then realised he’d picked up a box of matches from the table in front of him and had been playing with it, pushing the drawer in and out.

He hadn’t noticed himself doing it; he never did.

“Sorry,” he said automatically, and then could have kicked himself.

He had no need to apologise to Bram, for anything, ever.

At the door, Wynn clapped his hands. “Well! We are all here except Jessamine, and we will not wait for her. Let us go through.”