The First Night – Murder in the Study

"A locked door is only a promise that someone has made to himself. It has never yet stopped a murderer."

Out on the cliff the blizzard had reached the very summit of its fury. Gales rose off the ocean at a height no ship had ever known and flung themselves against the marble flanks of the manor, and the great house answered them with long, horrible, drawn-out howls that ran through every chimney and every cavity of its walls. They had hardly reached the head of the stairs when a sharp, crisp click sounded from the central control panel at the end of the corridor, and the boiler in the cellar that fed the lamps and the warm copper pipes gave a dry, sputtering rattle, groaned, and fell silent. The flames in the long row of crystal chandeliers sank to blue threads and went out together, and a dense, bone-chilling darkness closed down over the house and swallowed it whole.

"The power is gone," Roderick said, very quietly. A small hooded lantern clicked open in his left hand, and its pale yellow beam cut a narrow lane through the icy mist of their breath, while the revolver stayed ready in his right.

Thump... Thump... Thump...

The pounding went on below them without a pause, each blow landing on the oak with a dull, hurried, desperate violence, as though whatever was at the other side of the door were flinging its whole weight on the grain. Thalessa did not hesitate. She went down the spiral marble staircase at the Inspector's side, the hem of her ash-gray coat sweeping the black velvet of the carpet, her ebony chest held tight against her ribs. The stair seemed to go down for a long way. At the foot of it they turned along the passage that led to the west wing, where the Duke kept his study, and the lantern light swung ahead of them over walls hung with dim ancestral faces that seemed, in the moving glare, to twist their mouths and watch them pass.

When they reached the door the rest of the household had already gathered in front of it. Lady Aurelia cowered against the corner of the wall with both hands clamped over her ears and her knees knocking together in a rapid, tremulous rhythm. Doctor Malthus stood as upright as a stake, his face ruthlessly composed in the shaking light, though a bead of cold sweat ran from his temple to the corner of his jaw. The housekeeper, Vespera, stood a little apart from the others with her candle and her pale unseeing face turned toward the sound, quite still, like a woman listening to music. And Duke Alastair was battering the mahogany panel with both fists, bawling in a cracked, wild voice:

"Ragnar! Open this door! Ragnar, what in God's name are you doing in there?"

"What has happened?" Roderick raised the revolver and swept the beam straight into the Duke's face, and the voice that came with it was the voice of the Crown.

"He locked himself in!" Alastair swung round, gaunt and shaking, his hands twitching uncontrollably in the light. "He went in the moment he left the dining hall, complaining of a heat in his chest, and the door's been bolted from inside ever since. A little while ago the lights failed, and then this—this hammering began, from inside the room—and the door, the door is bolted shut!"

Thalessa went to the oak and laid her gloved palm flat on it. Through the wood, faint and regular as a pulse, she could feel the vibration of the blows, and she let it go on under her hand for a long moment while she listened with her whole skin. Then her brows drew together, because the scientist in her had caught an irregularity that the others, in their terror, had missed. The rhythm was perfect. There was no stumbling in it, no hesitation, no gasping variation of effort. It had the cold exactness of a metronome. It was not the sound of a human being fighting for breath at the end of its strength.

"Stand back!" Roderick thrust the Duke aside and bent over the solid brass lock. "The bolt is thrown from within. No key will turn it."

He thrust a hand inside his coat and drew out a short, heavy breaching axe of blued steel, a specialist tool of the Investigative Corps, and brought it back over his shoulder and drove it into the timber at the level of the latch.

CRASH!

Splinters of ancient oak burst across the passage. Three blows he struck, the metallic clangor rolling deafeningly through the silent corridors, and then he put his shoulder against the splintered wood and heaved, and the door gave way all at once and slammed against the inner wall with a report like a cannon.

A gust of air rushed out of the study.

It struck them in the face, a thick, suffocating, heavy stench in which two things lay entwined: the intensely bitter, sickly sweet perfume of wisteria, and under it the flat metallic putrefaction of fresh blood. Lady Aurelia gave one shrill scream and crumpled onto the flagstones with her face in her hands.

Roderick lifted the lantern, and the beam sliced the darkness of the room, and showed them what lay inside.

It was a sight seared into the mind of everyone who saw it, the final brutal accuracy of a flawless crime. The obese merchant, Ragnar Sterling, sat slumped in a high-backed leather armchair at his mahogany desk with his head thrown back and his eyes rolled upward and dilated to their utmost limit, frozen in the primal terror that had been the last thing he knew. His whole face and neck had gone a violent purple, contorted like wet clay in the grip of a fist. Thick threads of deep crimson blood had crept from his nostrils, from the corners of his eyes and out of his ears, and had run down onto the emerald-green desk-cloth and dried there in black runnels.

But the most monstrous thing was in his arms. Ragnar Sterling had died with both arms stretched out before him. His right hand was pinned flat to the desktop by a long iron nail. His left was bound with wire to the cord of a pulley, which ran up and across to an antique brass pendulum that swung to and fro in the dark, and it was the slow, ceaseless, rocking motion of that pendulum that jerked the dead man's slack left hand again and again against the inner face of the door, to make the sound that had called them all here: thump... thump... thump.

A machine for knocking on a door, made out of a corpse.

"Do not go in!" Thalessa's voice rang out, ice-cold and so authoritative that it stopped the Duke where he stood, one foot already lifted. She stepped over the threshold with her chest in her arms and her gray eyes moving over every surface with the settled composure of a forensic scientist at her work.

All the arched windows of the study were shut. The iron latches were rusted solid, and a fine skin of snow had drifted against the glass on the outside and lay undisturbed. The sole doorway had just been broken in by Roderick himself, and the heavy bolt on its inner face was still shot home in its socket. Above the desk, in the ceiling, a round copper grille let in the faint exhalation of the heating pipes, and a thread of that sweet cloying fragrance came down through it and hung in the air above the dead man's head. She marked it and passed on.

It was a perfect locked room. No one could have left it after the deed.

She went to the corpse, drew on a fresh pair of leather gloves, and with two fingers lifted the chin. The pupils were widened to their maximum. The jaw muscles were locked in a hard spasm, and the mucous membrane of the mouth was swollen and wet with hemorrhage. Upon the dried black glaze of his lips, exactly as on the lips of Thorne Valerius three days earlier, someone had laid face-up one fresh purple petal of wisteria, and upon its soft surface, in thick black India ink, as sharp as a graver's cut, a second letter had been written: S.

She drew her jade strip from her pocket and touched it lightly to the dark stain at the corner of the mouth. The jade turned at once a sinister purple-black.

"A concentrated toxin," she said evenly, turning to the group at the doorway. "An extract of wild wisteria root, combined with a salt of mercury. Swallowed, or taken through the mucous membrane, it paralyses the muscles of breathing and bursts the small vessels from within, and the man suffocates, fully conscious, in a matter of minutes."

"But how?" the Duke cried, clutching at his hair, his bloodshot eyes on the edge of breaking. "How could he be murdered with the door locked? We were in the passage! Nobody went in, and nobody came out!"

Roderick came to her side. He leveled the lantern at the little saucer and cup of chamomile tea that stood at the corner of the desk, a pale film dulling its surface now that the warmth had left it, and bent over it with his magnifying lens.

"He was poisoned before he ever bolted himself in," he said, in the low, cold voice of a man laying out a theorem. "The killer put the stuff in his tea, or in his food, hours earlier, and it needed time to work. Sterling began to feel unwell, retired to the study, and shot the bolt for his own protection. He did not understand that his sentence had already been written in his blood."

"And the murderer reckoned the moment of onset to a hair." Thalessa took the petal between finger and thumb and lifted it to the lantern. "He did not forget one detail. He rigged this contrivance so that the knocking would bring us all to see his work, as an actor draws the audience's eyes to the stage."

From the doorway Doctor Malthus Malakor spoke in his flat dry whisper, and a faint, frigid smirk lay on his thin lips. "T on Valerius. Now S on Sterling. T... S. Is it possible that the murderer is spelling a name?"

A fresh wave of terror passed through the little crowd as through a field of grain.

"St. Jude!" Lady Aurelia lifted a face the color of a corpse's, and her voice was broken by sobs. "It's the ship! T and S, the letters of Saint Jude! It means to kill us one after another! None of the five of us will leave this cliff alive!"

Thalessa did not echo her. She went down on one knee beside the mahogany desk and narrowed her eyes, because she had caught sight of a curious detail beneath the frame. Lying under the sole of the dead man's boot was a small, hastily torn scrap of parchment, its corner stained black with one drop of fresh blood from his hand. She lifted it with her forceps and tilted it to the light.

Written across it in a tremulous, frantic scrawl, in Ragnar's own hand, set down in the last minutes before he died in convulsions, was one line:

It was no storm... We ate...