The note lay on Edgar's escritoire like a coiled serpent, its message still legible despite the hours he had spent crumpling and smoothing and crumpling it again. "I know what you did." Five words, crudely formed, the ink a cheap violet that had bled slightly into the fibres of the paper. He had examined it under a magnifying glass, held it to the light, sniffed it for perfume or tobacco or any clue to its authorship. It yielded nothing. It was a voice without a face, an accusation without a source, and it had undone in a single night the composure he had so painstakingly constructed.
He did not sleep. He sat in the wing chair while the fire died to embers and the embers died to ash, and he turned the problem over and over like a stone in his mind. Who had written it? One of the men at the club, who had sensed his imposture and decided to toy with him? A servant, dismissed and resentful? Or someone else—someone who had seen something on that February night, a poacher perhaps, or a vagrant sleeping in the woods? The possibilities were endless and each was intolerable. He had planned for every contingency except this: the contingency of being watched.
At dawn, he rang for Grimes and gave instructions for the motor to be brought round. He would return to the Grange. The hotel, which had seemed a sanctuary, now felt like a trap; its corridors were too public, its staff too observant. At the Grange, at least, he could control who entered and who left. At the Grange, he could think.
The drive took three hours through countryside still clenched in the grip of winter. The hedgerows were black skeletons against a sky the colour of pewter, and the fields were ribbed with frozen furrows. Edgar sat in the back of the Daimler, a travelling rug across his knees, and watched the landscape slide past without seeing it. His mind was elsewhere—in the library of the Aurelia Club, where Wrexham had frowned at him across the table; in the empty street behind him, where footsteps had echoed and then vanished; in the cellar at the Grange, where the mortar was curing to the hardness of bone.
When the motor turned through the gates of Ashworth Grange, Edgar saw that a second vehicle was already parked in the drive. It was not a motorcar but a police wagon, black and square and unmistakable, with the gilded crest of the Chiltern Constabulary on its door. Two uniformed figures stood on the front steps, their breath pluming in the cold air. One was a thick-set constable with a red face and the patient, immovable stance of a man who had spent twenty years standing on doorsteps. The other was a young sergeant, narrow-shouldered and sharp-faced, holding a leather satchel against his chest like a shield.
Edgar felt his stomach drop and then steady. This was another performance, he told himself. Nothing more. He stepped from the motor with the unhurried dignity of a man who had nothing to hide. "Good morning," he said, and his voice was steady. "I am Lord Ashworth. What is the nature of this visit?"
The sergeant stepped forward. He had the pale, indoor complexion of a clerk and the cautious manner of a man who understood that the aristocracy must be handled with care. "Begging your lordship's pardon for the disturbance," he said. "We have received a report of a domestic disturbance at this address. Shouts heard, possibly a cry for help. We are obliged to investigate."
"A domestic disturbance?" Edgar allowed a note of frosty incredulity to enter his voice. "Sergeant, I live alone. My staff consists of three persons, all of whom have been in my employ for less than a fortnight. I have been in London these past four days. I can assure you there has been no disturbance."
The sergeant's expression did not alter. "Nevertheless, my lord, the report was made in good faith. We must conduct a search of the premises. It is a matter of procedure."
"And who made this report?"
"Anonymous, my lord. A telephone call to the station at Cheddington, early this morning. The caller gave this address and described sounds of a violent altercation."
Anonymous. The word reverberated in Edgar's skull. Another anonymous message, this time delivered not to his door but to the police. Someone was not merely watching him; someone was tightening a noose. "You have a warrant, I presume?"
The sergeant hesitated. It was the briefest of pauses, but Edgar caught it. "We do not, my lord. In cases of reported disturbance, where there is concern for the safety of persons within, the law permits entry without a warrant. It is a matter of immediate necessity."
Edgar had studied enough law in his weeks of preparation to know that this was true, or at least true enough to be unarguable. He could refuse, but refusal would only deepen suspicion. He could comply, but compliance meant allowing the police into a house whose cellar held a secret. For a long moment, the two impulses warred within him, and then the actor's instinct won. The best concealment was always in plain sight.
"Very well," he said. "Grimes, show the constables to the kitchen and see that they are given tea. Sergeant, you may accompany me. I will show you through the house myself."
The interior of the Grange was cool and dim, the curtains still drawn against the morning. Edgar led the sergeant through the ground-floor rooms with the measured courtesy of a host conducting a tour. The drawing room, with its shrouded furniture and cold hearth. The dining room, where a single vase of dried flowers stood on a table that had not been used for a meal in years. The library, which the sergeant examined with particular attention, his eyes lingering on the desk, the papers, the half-empty decanter. Edgar watched him catalogue each detail and felt a grudging respect. The man was not stupid. He was looking for something, though he did not yet know what it was.
"Your lordship lives alone, you say?" The sergeant paused before the portrait of a woman that hung above the fireplace. It was a full-length study in oils, executed perhaps twenty years earlier: a young woman in a green gown, her hair dressed high, her expression one of intelligent amusement. Edgar had studied that portrait during his first reconnaissance of the house and had learned from the shipping office records that it depicted Elinor, Lady Ashworth. He had not yet decided whether to leave it hanging or consign it to the attic.
"I am a widower," he said. "My wife died in the influenza epidemic of 1919."
The sergeant nodded, his face professionally sympathetic. "I am sorry to hear it, my lord. A terrible time. My own mother was taken in the same year." He turned from the portrait. "And the cellar? Is there a cellar?"
Edgar felt the question like a blade slipped between his ribs. "A small wine cellar. It has been locked since the previous staff left. I have not had occasion to open it."
"Then we shall open it together, my lord."
They descended a narrow staircase into the chill darkness below. The sergeant carried an electric torch, its beam swinging across stone walls beaded with moisture. The air smelled of damp and minerals and something else—something fainter, sweeter, that Edgar prayed the sergeant would not identify. They passed racks of wine bottles furred with dust, and Edgar made a show of fumbling with the ring of keys he had taken from the butler's pantry. His hands were steady, but his mind was racing. The vault was hidden behind a stack of packing cases. The mortar was fresh. If the sergeant examined the wall closely, if he thought to tap the bricks, if he noticed the faint discolouration where the new mortar met the old—
"Here we are," Edgar said, unlocking a wrought-iron gate that led to the deepest part of the cellar. "As I said, it has not been touched."
The sergeant swept his torch across the space. The beam illuminated the packing cases, the empty bottle racks, the flagstone floor with its pattern of damp. It passed over the section of wall behind which the vault lay, and Edgar held his breath. But the light moved on, and the sergeant made a small, noncommittal sound in his throat. "Seems in order," he said. "I apologise again for the intrusion, my lord. These anonymous reports are the bane of my profession. Most turn out to be mischief, but we cannot afford to ignore them."
"You were quite right to investigate," Edgar said, and the words tasted like copper on his tongue. "One must do one's duty."
They ascended from the cellar into the grey light of the hallway. The constables had finished their tea and were standing by the front door, their expressions blank with the particular blankness of men who had found nothing and were not surprised. The sergeant collected his satchel and made a final, formal apology. Edgar accepted it with a graciousness that felt, even to him, like a parody of itself.
"One more thing, my lord," the sergeant said, turning at the threshold. "The anonymous caller—the one who reported the disturbance—also mentioned a name. I wonder if it means anything to you." He consulted his notebook. "A Mr. Edmund Vane. Do you know such a person?"
The name struck Edgar like a physical blow. Edmund Vane. His own name, his discarded name, the name he had burned and drowned and erased from the world. He felt the blood drain from his face and hoped the dim light of the hallway concealed it. "I do not," he said. "The name is unfamiliar."
"Nor I," said the sergeant. "We made inquiries, but no one of that name appears on any register in the county. A phantom, it seems. Yet the caller was most insistent." He closed his notebook and tucked it into his satchel. "Good day, my lord. We shall not trouble you again."
The police wagon crunched down the gravel drive and disappeared through the gates. Edgar stood in the doorway until the sound of its engine had faded into the winter silence. Then he walked slowly back to the library and poured himself a brandy with a hand that had begun, at last, to shake.
The implications unfurled in his mind like a poisonous flower. Someone knew his old name. Someone had telephoned the police and used that name, connecting the anonymous report of a disturbance to the man who had once been Edgar Vane. But the caller had not told the police everything. They had not said, "Edgar Vane murdered Lord Ashworth and assumed his identity." They had merely dropped the name like a stone into still water, watching the ripples spread. This was not an accusation. This was a game.
He sat in the wing chair and stared at the portrait of Elinor Ashworth. She looked back at him with her intelligent, amused eyes, and he had the unnerving sense that she was waiting for him to speak. "What would you have me do?" he murmured, and the words were strange in the silence. He was talking to a painting. He was talking to a dead woman. He was losing his grip on the boundary between the performance and the performer, and he did not know how to reclaim it.
The afternoon wore on. Edgar cancelled his appointments, pleading a return of the old trouble that Finchley had mentioned—the sleeplessness, the neuralgia, the general malaise that had plagued Ashworth in his final years. It was a convenient excuse, and it had the added virtue of being true. He did not sleep. He could not eat. He sat in the library while the light failed and the shadows gathered, and he turned the problem over and over in his mind.
Someone knew. That was the central, irreducible fact. Someone knew what he had done, or at least suspected enough to torment him. But that someone had not gone to the police with the full truth. Why? Because they lacked proof? Because they wanted something from him—money, perhaps, or power? Or because they were enjoying his fear, drawing it out as a cat draws out the death throes of a mouse?
He thought of Finchley, with his probing eyes and his too-casual questions. He thought of Wrexham, frowning across the dinner table. He thought of the dismissed servants, who might have returned to the house and discovered something amiss. He thought of the poacher, the vagrant, the unknown watcher in the woods. The possibilities were infinite, and each was a doorway into darkness.
As dusk fell, he made a decision. He would not wait for the next move in this game. He would make a move of his own. He sat down at the escritoire and composed a letter to Finchley, accepting an invitation that had not been extended—a suggestion that they meet privately, away from the club, to discuss a matter of some delicacy. If Finchley was the hunter, Edgar would bring him close enough to see the whites of his eyes. If Finchley was innocent, he might yet prove a useful ally. Either way, Edgar could no longer afford to wait in ignorance.
He sealed the letter and rang for Grimes. "See that this is delivered by hand tonight," he said. "And Grimes—the police visit this morning. I trust it will not be a subject of conversation among the staff."
"Of course not, my lord." Grimes took the letter and withdrew, his face as unreadable as ever.
When the door closed, Edgar returned to the window and looked out across the darkening parkland. Somewhere out there, in the gathering night, his enemy was waiting. Somewhere out there, a voice on a telephone had spoken his discarded name. And somewhere beneath his feet, in the cold and the silence and the absolute dark, the mortar was setting hard around a secret that would not stay buried.
The house creaked around him, settling into the cold. The portrait of Elinor watched from above the fireplace. And Edgar Vane, who had once been no one and was now pretending to be someone, felt the first cold tendrils of a fear that would not be reasoned away. The performance was not over. It had only just begun. And the audience, he suspected, was larger than he had ever imagined.
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