5. The Unmasking

The fifth anonymous note arrived not on paper but as a telegram, delivered by a boy on a bicycle who pedalled away into the mist before Grimes could question him. Edgar read it standing in the draughty hallway, the front door still open to the damp February air. Three words this time, in the telegraph clerk's neat block capitals: "TONIGHT. THE CELLAR." He folded the telegram carefully, as though precision in small actions could impose order on the chaos of his thoughts, and walked into the library. The fire had not yet been lit. The portrait of Elinor Ashworth watched him from above the cold hearth, and for a terrible moment he imagined she was smiling.

He had been summoned. The watcher, the caller, the author of the violet-inked notes had tired of the game and was demanding a confrontation. Edgar felt something that surprised him: not terror, or not only terror, but a thread of bleak relief. The waiting was over. The performance was nearing its end. Whatever waited in the cellar, he would meet it with the only weapons he possessed—his voice, his face, his craft. He had spent a lifetime pretending to be other people. Perhaps he could pretend to be brave.

The day passed in a suspended haze. He dismissed Grimes and the household staff at noon, telling them that a gas leak had been reported and the house must be empty until the engineers arrived. The lie came easily; lies had become his native tongue. He spent the afternoon alone, moving through the rooms of Ashworth Grange as though seeing them for the first time. The drawing room with its shrouded furniture, like a ballroom of ghosts. The dining room where no one had dined. The library where a dead woman watched from her gilded frame. Each room was a stage set, dressed for a play that had never opened. He had stolen this life, and the life had stolen him in return. He could no longer remember, with any clarity, what it had felt like to be Edgar Vane. The actor had dissolved into the role. The role had become the man. And the man was about to walk into the wings and discover whether the audience would applaud or call for the curtain to fall.

At dusk, he took a lantern from the pantry and descended the narrow cellar stairs. The air grew cold and damp, heavy with the mineral scent of old stone. The beam of the lantern swung across the wine racks, the packing cases, the wall of fresh mortar that he had laid with his own hands. He had not returned to this place since the night of the murder. He had told himself it was prudence; the truth was cowardice. He did not want to see the wall. He did not want to remember what lay behind it.

But now he stood before it, and he saw that something had changed. The packing cases had been moved. The empty bottle racks had been shifted aside. And in the centre of the wall, where the mortar had been smooth and unbroken, there was a hole. It was small—no larger than a fist—but it was enough. Someone had been digging.

"Good evening, my lord."

Edgar spun round, the lantern swinging wildly. A figure stood at the foot of the cellar stairs, silhouetted against the faint light from above. It was not Finchley. It was not Pelham. It was Grimes.

The butler stepped forward into the lantern's glow, and Edgar saw that his face was not the face he had worn in service. It was harder, older, the deference stripped away like a mask removed. In his hand he held a revolver, small and neat and pointed at Edgar's chest. "I trust your lordship will forgive the melodrama," Grimes said. "The cellar, the darkness, the anonymous notes. I have a weakness for the theatrical. I come by it honestly."

Edgar's voice, when it came, was hoarse. "Who are you?"

"That is the question, isn't it? Who is anyone?" Grimes descended the last few steps and leaned against the iron gate, the revolver still steady. "I am not Grimes, of course. Grimes is a fiction, a character I created for the purposes of this engagement. My real name is William Cathcart. Does that mean anything to you?"

It meant nothing. Edgar shook his head.

"No, I thought not. Why would it? You are not Julian Ashworth. You never were."

The words hung in the cold air. Edgar considered denial, but denial would be absurd. They were standing before a wall with a hole in it, a wall that concealed a body, and the man with the revolver was not asking a question. "No," he said. "I am not."

"I know. I have known from the beginning." Cathcart—the man who had been Grimes—settled himself onto a packing case, crossing one leg over the other with a casualness that was more menacing than any threat. "You see, I have been looking for Julian Ashworth for a very long time. I have been looking for him because he murdered my sister."

The lantern flame guttered. Edgar steadied it with an effort. "Your sister?"

"Her name was Margaret Cathcart. She was a governess in the Ashworth household, many years ago. Before Elinor. Before the shipping fortune. Julian Ashworth was young then, and charming, and utterly without conscience. He seduced her, promised her marriage, and when she told him she was with child, he dismissed her with a letter and a banknote. She died in a workhouse infirmary two years later. The child died with her." Cathcart's voice was level, almost conversational, but the revolver never wavered. "I was ten years old when she left home. I spent the next thirty years trying to find the man who destroyed her. I traced him to this house. I insinuated myself into his employ. And when I arrived, I discovered that the man who called himself Lord Ashworth was not Julian Ashworth at all."

Edgar's mind was racing, piecing together the fragments. "The anonymous calls. The notes. The police."

"All me. I wanted to see how you would react. I wanted to understand what kind of man you were before I decided what to do with you." Cathcart studied him with an expression that was almost clinical. "You are a curious specimen, Mr. Vane. You murdered a man in cold blood and assumed his identity with remarkable skill. By any rational measure, you are a monster. And yet the man you murdered was also a monster. A different sort of monster, but a monster nonetheless. That presents me with a philosophical difficulty."

"Does it."

"It does. You see, I came here to kill Julian Ashworth. I had planned it for years—the method, the disposal, the escape. I was going to give him a chance to confess, and then I was going to execute him. But you have deprived me of that satisfaction. The man I hated is already dead. Killed by a stranger for reasons that had nothing to do with my sister, nothing to do with justice, nothing to do with anything but greed." Cathcart's voice hardened. "Do you know what that feels like, Mr. Vane? To have your revenge stolen by a man who didn't even know he was stealing it?"

Edgar said nothing. There was nothing to say.

"I have been watching you for weeks," Cathcart continued. "I have watched you manage the shipping firm with unexpected competence. I have watched you navigate the social world of the aristocracy with admirable skill. I have watched you sit in the library night after night, drinking Ashworth's brandy and staring at his wife's portrait with something that looked almost like grief. You are not the man I came to kill. But you are a man who has killed. And I find myself uncertain what to do with you."

The silence stretched between them. Somewhere above, the wind moaned in the chimneys. Edgar looked at the hole in the wall and thought of the body behind it, the body of a man who had seduced and abandoned a governess, who had let her die in a workhouse, who had gone on to build a fortune and marry a woman in a green hat and become a recluse in a house full of ghosts. He had not known any of this. He had killed a stranger for his money, and the stranger had turned out to be a villain. It did not justify what he had done. Nothing justified what he had done. But it changed the shape of it, somehow. It made the hollow space inside him feel fractionally less hollow.

"What do you want?" Edgar asked.

"I want to understand," Cathcart said. "Why did you do it? Not the money—I know about the money. But what made you capable of it? What makes a man decide that another man's life is worth less than his own comfort?"

Edgar considered the question. It deserved an honest answer. "I was tired," he said. "Tired of being no one. Tired of hunger and cold and the contempt of people who had never had to be hungry or cold. I told myself it was a performance, the greatest role I would ever play. I told myself I was an artist, and the art justified the means. But the truth is simpler and uglier." He met Cathcart's eyes. "I did it because I could. Because the opportunity presented itself, and I was too weak to refuse it. There was no grand motive. No passion. No ideology. Just the hollow, miserable desire not to be myself anymore."

Cathcart was silent for a long moment. Then he lowered the revolver. "That is the most honest thing anyone has said to me in thirty years," he said. "And it makes my decision both easier and harder."

"Your decision?"

"I am not going to kill you, Mr. Vane. I thought about it. I thought about it a great deal. But killing you would not bring my sister back, and it would not punish Julian Ashworth, who is beyond punishment. It would only add another body to the wall." He stood up and tucked the revolver into his coat. "But I am not going to let you go free, either. You are a murderer, and the world deserves to know what you have done."

Edgar felt the cold seep into his bones. "You are going to the police."

"I am going to do nothing. You are going to do it yourself." Cathcart reached into his pocket and withdrew a folded sheet of paper. "This is a confession. I have written it for you, in your voice—or rather, in the voice of the man I have observed these past weeks. It describes the murder of Julian Ashworth in full detail. It also describes the crimes of Julian Ashworth against my sister, which your confession will bring to light. You will sign it, and you will deliver it to the Chiltern Constabulary tomorrow morning. If you do not, I will deliver my own testimony, and I will ensure that the consequences are far less merciful."

Edgar took the paper with a hand that trembled. He read it slowly, the lantern light wavering across the cramped handwriting. It was meticulously detailed—the chloroform, the sash cord, the wine vault, the mortar. It was also, in some strange way, compassionate. It did not excuse what he had done, but it explained it. It made him human, even in his monstrosity.

"And if I refuse?" he asked.

"Then I will shoot you where you stand and bury you beside Ashworth. The world will assume you fled, and no one will look for you." Cathcart smiled, and the smile was not unkind. "But you will not refuse. I have watched you, remember. I have seen you staring at the portrait. I have seen you flinch at the name Elinor. I have seen you sit alone in the dark, grappling with something that looks very much like a conscience. You are not Julian Ashworth. You are capable of remorse. And remorse, Mr. Vane, is a luxury that demands to be paid for."

Edgar looked at the confession, at the hole in the wall, at the man who had been Grimes. Somewhere in the house above, a clock struck midnight. The sound echoed down the stone stairs and faded into the dark. He thought of the stage, of the moment when the curtain falls and the house lights rise and the audience files out into the night. A performance must end. It was the nature of performances to end.

"Very well," he said. "I will sign."

Cathcart produced a fountain pen from his coat. Edgar took it and, using a packing case as a desk, signed the confession with the looping J and the sharp terminal stroke that he had practised two thousand times on cheap foolscap. The signature was perfect. It was the last perfect thing he would ever do.

"Thank you," Cathcart said, and the word was oddly gentle. "I will leave you now. The house is empty. You have until morning."

He turned and climbed the cellar stairs without looking back. Edgar heard his footsteps cross the hallway above, heard the front door open and close, heard the crunch of gravel recede into the distance. Then there was only silence, and the dark, and the cold, and the wall with the hole in it, and the body behind the wall, and the confession in his hand.

He did not sleep that night. He sat in the library, in the wing chair by the cold hearth, and watched the portrait of Elinor Ashworth while the hours crawled towards dawn. He thought about the life he had stolen, and the life he had lost, and the strange symmetry that had brought him to this moment. He had murdered a murderer. He had assumed the identity of a man who was, in his own way, as hollow as Edgar himself. The perfect performance had been built on a foundation of emptiness, and the emptiness had swallowed them both.

At first light, he rose and walked to the window. The mist had lifted, and the parkland stretched away in shades of grey and silver. Somewhere beyond the bare chestnuts, a blackbird was singing. He watched the sun rise over the Chilterns, and he felt something that might have been peace, or might have been despair, or might have been the simple, human recognition that all things must end.

He had Grimes's confession—no, Cathcart's confession—folded in his pocket. He had a motorcar in the drive. He had a choice. He could drive to the constabulary at Cheddington and deliver the document, or he could drive to Dover and take a steamer to the Continent, or he could walk into the woods and simply keep walking until the cold or the hunger or the sheer indifference of the world took him. The choice was his. For the first time since he had become Julian Ashworth, the choice was truly his.

He turned from the window and looked at the portrait one last time. Elinor Ashworth gazed back at him with her amused, knowing eyes, and he understood at last what she had been trying to tell him. The performance was never the point. The technique was never the point. The point was what you did when the curtain fell and the audience went home and you were left alone with yourself. The point was whether you could bear to be who you were.

He did not know the answer. But he walked out of the library, and out of the house, and into the cold grey morning, and the blackbird was still singing, and the world was still turning, and somewhere in the distance a church bell was tolling the hour. He stood on the gravel drive and looked at the sky, and then he made his choice.

The Daimler's engine turned over on the first try. Edgar Vane—who was no longer Lord Ashworth, who was no longer anyone, who had been a failure and a murderer and, perhaps, a man who had learned something about himself in the hollow heart of a stolen life—put the motor into gear and drove towards whatever waited down the road. The gates of Ashworth Grange swung shut behind him. The house settled back into silence. And in the cellar, behind the wall with the hole in it, the mortar continued to cure, and the darkness continued to deepen, and the secret that had been buried there was buried no longer.