Page 39 of All of Us Murderers

Twenty-One

Zeb walked back to the house at a painfully fast pace, breath steaming and ears straining, and almost sobbed with relief when he reached the building. As he approached the front, the door swung open and Gideon stood silhouetted in the doorway, as he had that first night, an aeon ago.

“Oh thank God,” Zeb said.

Gideon stalked out, grabbed his wrist, and dragged him down the steps, a little away from the house. “Where have you been?” he demanded, strangled.

“The crypt.”

“Why?”

“What’s wrong?”

“The motor is back,” Gideon said, with tenuous patience. “I was looking for you half an hour ago to suggest we wait by the gate, but I couldn’t find you, and now the motor is back and it won’t be going out again.”

“Of course it will,” Zeb said blankly. “The police and the doctor—”

“Haven’t come. Won’t.”

“What?”

“The chauffeur returned alone. I asked where the authorities were. He said he was very sorry, but he encountered a bad patch of mist and felt unsafe driving through it, so he came back. He was laughing at me when he said it. So now the gate is locked again, and I have no doubt that Wynn will announce it’s too dangerous to send the motor out until tomorrow.

We’re stuck, Zeb. We missed our chance.”

“Because of me,” Zeb said, with a cold feeling in his gut.

“Shit. Wynn got me out of the way, didn’t he?

Shit!” And if he hadn’t been sucked into that mock funeral procession, if he’d just refused to be involved with Wynn’s nonsense, if he had paid attention, they might have been outside the wall now.

His heart constricted with guilt. “Oh God. I’m so sorry. This is all my fault.”

“Why the blazes did you go off with him?” Gideon almost shouted. “You have to stop playing his games!”

“It was a particularly good game,” Zeb said numbly. “We just interred Elise—”

“What?”

“And I think Wynn intended to get me in the crypt with her body and slam the door.”

Gideon stared at him, mouth open, for a moment, and said again, as more of an acknowledgement than a question, “What.”

He was wearing his overcoat. “Come on,” Zeb said, tugging him down the path. “We need to speak in private and that means not in the damned house.”

They walked in silence, except for the percussive thud of self-reproach in Zeb’s brain. He’d been so easily distracted. He’d taken Wynn’s bait, and now Gideon was caught here with him, flies in a web. All Zeb’s fault. Ruining his life. Again.

He led the way into Wayland’s Smithy, the faux-prehistoric folly. Nobody would see them in there without actually sticking their head into the building, and nobody was likely to pass by. He had to duck his head low to enter; Gideon, several inches taller, bent double.

There was a sort of stone bench. Zeb sat on it, and Gideon joined him. It was extremely cold and felt damp.

“All right,” Gideon said. “Why are we here?”

“Wait. Listen. I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t. Really, Zeb. Wynn is very good at manipulating people, and I might have done the same in your shoes. We’re where we are; we have to concentrate on what we’re going to do. Rosary.”

“What?”

“Rosary. Start fidgeting and pay attention.”

Zeb blinked. Then he hauled the string of beads out of his pocket, flicking the smooth ovals through his fingers, letting a little of the pent-up tension in his body leak out through his hands.

“Can I go on? Right,” Gideon said. “Firstly, this is Wynn’s fault, every damned part of it. He won that round, so now we need to win the next. For that, I need you thinking, not mired in guilt or might-have-beens. So with that in mind, what did you want to say?”

Zeb took a deep breath. “I know what’s going on. Not why, but what.”

“In what sense?”

“It’s the books. I think Wynn is recreating the Walter Wyckham books.”

Gideon frowned. “You said the ghost was copied from that one, The Monastery.”

“And the writing on the walls. Then there’s Lady Ravendark.

She’s a character in Coldstone Abbey, the one I compared Elise to.

” When she was still alive. He shuddered.

“Lady Ravendark is a very lovely woman but an unfaithful wife. She eventually gets pushed down the stairs of her stately home by—” He stopped.

“By?”

“Her cuckolded husband,” Zeb said reluctantly. “But the point is, she gets pushed down the stairs, just like Elise. And the same book also has a truly horrible scene where a character finds herself trapped in a room that’s crawling with spiders.”

“Right,” Gideon said slowly. “That is a pattern, yes. Does it have sacrifices in a stone circle?”

“No. That’s in The Stone Circle.”

“Are you serious? There is a Walter Wyckham book with a sacrifice on the altar of the stone circle? By hooded monks?”

“Robed druids, but yes. It also has a scene where a character is locked in the family crypt with a recently murdered corpse. He’s left there overnight and goes raving mad. And just now Wynn asked me and Bram to put Elise in the crypt, and he nodded at me to go in first, and I remembered—I thought…”

He shuddered again, violently, as though he was chilled to the bone. Gideon put his arm round him, and Zeb leaned against him, feeling safe in the embrace even though he really wasn’t.

“I don’t know if he meant to lock one or both of us in,” he went on.

“Clara Lackaday has two brothers fighting over a fortune who are locked in a room, so maybe that was in his mind. And I don’t know, if he’d locked me in, if Bram would have objected or if he’s too addled by now.

The point is, it’s all Walter. Even the basic premise is Walter.

Clara Lackaday’s entire plot is her being trapped in a great house with a wall round the estate.

I literally thought about that when I arrived.

We’re in a cocktail of my grandfather’s books, and if I had to be caught in an authorial world, I would not have picked his! ”

“Makes one think longingly of Faraway Meadow,” Gideon agreed thinly. “What about Colonel Dash? Are there mysterious disappearances?”

“Several, most ending badly. And secret passages. And there’s also the sinister secretary.”

“Do I want to know?”

“He’s the villain of Coldstone Abbey, and father of Lady Ravendark’s baby, but it’s hinted he’s also sleeping with Lord Ravendark, inasmuch as you could hint it at the time.

In the end he gets put at the bottom of a well, standing with water up to his neck, and left there knowing he’ll drown once he falls asleep.

Which, of course, he does eventually, after lots of terrible hallucinations and slowly rotting away alive. It’s horrible.”

There was a nasty pause. Gideon said, “You don’t think—”

“I don’t know,” Zeb said. “I don’t know how much Wynn has planned or how mad he is.

Not that ‘mad’ is the word, really. I think he’s perfectly sane, just wrong.

If you told me he was possessed by Walter Wyckham’s ghost, I’d probably believe you.

” He thought of the portrait, his ancestor’s sly smile on that cherubic face.

“I just wanted to make sure you knew about the secretary and, uh, don’t go near any wells? ”

It was just a joke. A whistling-in-the-dark joke, but a joke nevertheless, so it was unfortunate that his voice cracked on the words.

“Zeb.” Gideon’s arms closed round him. “Zeb. Sweetheart. It’s all right.”

“It is not all right! It isn’t nearly all right and I keep thinking of that cursed scene—”

“I’d rather not dwell on that. What else happens in the books? What about this Lord Ravendark?”

“The sinister secretary drops a chandelier on him.”

“There’s a chandelier in the hall.”

“I’ll look up,” Zeb said, feeling rather sick. “Oh God.”

“At least we know what’s going on, and that will surely help.” Gideon kissed his hair. “We’re getting out of here. Both of us. I promise.”

“You can’t promise me that. It’s not in your power.”

Gideon paused. “No, perhaps I can’t. But I can promise that I won’t leave without you.”

“Well, don’t. What if you have to?”

“I will not leave without you,” Gideon said steadily. “That is a promise. Now stop recriminating: we need to work out what to do.”

“Not believe Wynn, for a start,” Zeb said. “I really thought he’d sent for the police, just like I’ve swallowed a great deal of lies since I got here.”

“We all have. I believed his lies about you.”

“But then you stopped. Whereas I—oh, hell. Gideon, I told Jessamine I was going to leave today. She was going to propose to me again and it was too awful and I said I was leaving, and the next thing, Wynn turned up with this plan for a funeral march for Elise and I felt obliged—”

“She’s working with Wynn,” Gideon said. “That’s been fairly obvious.”

“And she’s also not Jessamine. I mean, there is no Jessamine. Elise says the woman here is at least twenty-one and probably an actress.”

Gideon’s jaw dropped. “Good God. Really?”

“Elise said so, and she was right about Laura’s mother.”

“About—”

“Laura’s mother, the housemaid. She was locked up here. They kept her imprisoned for years rather than hand over her legacy. I found the room, her prison. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.”

“My God.”

“Wynn’s father did it, which might explain a lot about Wynn. Oh, and Elise also thinks—thought—Wynn and Laura had a Romeo and Juliet sort of affair and Wynn fathered her baby.”

“I don’t think the play would be the same if Juliet was Romeo’s aunt,” Gideon said in the very calm sort of way of someone trying not to lose his grip. “Although I suppose that explains all the paintings. Ugh.”

“Wynn clearly hated his father for getting rid of Laura. And, uh, he told me that his father drowned in the mire, alone. That it took hours for him to die, all the time crying for help that didn’t come.”

“If he died alone, how would Wynn know—”

“That’s what I was wondering.”