An Unsuitable Heir Read online

  Mark wasn’t expecting that from anyone. He’d walked into funeral parlours that were more hail-fellow-well-met than this house. “All right. Will you tell me what’s been happening?”

  They did, all three of them. Greta took the lead, and Mark noted the intent way Tim watched her. Pen retold the incident of the falling stone and the night attack, sounding a little defiant. “It happened,” he insisted, though nobody in this room was arguing, almost as if he was reiterating it to himself, and Mark felt an unpleasant prickle up his spine.

  “All right,” he said. “First thing is to get through tonight without any bugger trying it on. Tomorrow, I’d like a look round the house. Are there, you know, secret passages?”

  “Not as such, no,” Tim said. “But there was a lot of building over the years, and there are some odd corners—”

  “Any odd corners that lead into Pen’s bedroom?”

  “No, I’m quite sure of that.”

  “Right. I’d like to have a look, though.” A look at Pen’s bedroom. I bet you would. He carefully didn’t meet Pen’s or Greta’s eyes. “How about those, what do you call ’em, priest holes?”

  “We’re not Catholics,” Tim said. “But we sided with the King in the Civil War, so there are some rather unobtrusive doors. Are you suggesting something?”

  “I’m thinking aloud,” Mark said. “If you’re convinced the attacker wasn’t Phineas or any of the servants, it must have been someone else. Say he came from outside. The Fogman, or someone in his pay. How would he—or she—have got in?”

  Greta gave a frustrated gesture. “There are no new staff; Tim says most people have been here for years. There’s one entrance to the house, and it was locked and barred last night.”

  Mark frowned. “What if this joker can swim?”

  “You can’t get into the house from the moat,” Tim said. “Clem and I never did and we spent summers trying. The windows are well above water level, and there are no easy handholds or footholds. The moat was intended to keep people out.”

  “So the only way for this character to be in the house last night was if he got in before the door was locked. Either he visited yesterday and didn’t leave, or he was in here already. Right?”

  “I’m glad you’re here,” Greta said. “Clear thinking. We need that.”

  “Is the door open during the day? Or is there always a footman?”

  “It’s unlocked and not constantly attended; we ring for the footman when we want him,” Tim said.

  “Doesn’t sound very secure for a place with all this portable property.”

  Tim shrugged. “It’s a manor house, not a fortress, and we’re in acres of our own land. If you’re wondering about passing tramps stealing the silverware—this isn’t London. We don’t think like that.”

  “You may need to start,” Mark said. “So someone could walk in unseen?”

  “It would be possible for someone to come in,” Tim agreed, “but I don’t think one could guarantee doing so unseen. The footman doesn’t sit in the hall waiting, but there are usually people around.”

  “It’s a big place and there aren’t that many staff,” Greta said. “You can wander around for twenty minutes and not see anybody. But I don’t see how you’d make certain of it.”

  “What about with the connivance of someone in the house?”

  “That would undoubtedly make things easier,” Tim agreed.

  “But Pen was attacked in the middle of the night,” Greta said. “If someone came in during the day he’d have to hide somewhere. It would be bad enough finding an unused room, let alone a secret one—all the rooms anywhere near the hall are used—and then you’d have to find Pen’s bedroom in the dark. I don’t see how it would be possible for a stranger. I’m still getting lost and it’s been more than a week.”

  “So we’re talking about someone who already knew the house, or had a lot of help from someone who does, and got in before the doors were locked last night,” Mark said. “That narrows it down.”

  “Yes, but…,” Pen said. “What about the visiting?”

  “The which?”

  “There was visiting on New Year’s Day. Open house for the neighbours, which apparently means everyone in a fifteen-mile radius. All sorts of people coming in to give New Year’s greetings.”

  “Like who? I mean, anyone unfamiliar?” He looked to Tim, who shrugged.

  “I’ve no idea. I was out visiting myself. The men go out and the women stay at home to receive.”

  “Don’t ask me, I was in hiding,” Greta said.

  “So who did these people greet?”

  “Nobody,” Tim said. “Well, some of them would have come to Desmond, but most would simply come into the drawing room, take a drink, and leave a card. I dare say it would have been possible for one of them to slip away into the house without being noticed.”

  “But it was two days ago,” Greta said. “We can’t have had someone lurking in the house for two days. Can we?”

  “Can’t we?” Pen asked. “I keep expecting to open a door and find some wizened old great-aunt. This is a huge house. There are corridors running next to one another. You hear footsteps from people you can’t see.”

  “You make it sound like a haunted mansion,” Greta said. “It’s a lovely house.”

  “I wish we were dealing with ghosts,” Mark said. “Something you should know. I’ve been talking to Inspector Ellis about the murder investigations, and, uh, they found another body.”

  “What? Who?”

  “He was Justin Lazarus’s assistant, before,” Mark said. “His name was Frankie. They found him floating in the river a day or so after you came here. He’d been there a few days. And he’d had a couple of teeth pulled out before someone crushed his throat.”

  “My God,” Tim said.

  “I’d guess the Fogman, the killer, found him at Justin’s place and decided to ask him some questions. Justin says he wouldn’t have known much, and what he did know he’d have given up for the asking; he wasn’t one to stay loyal. He reckons if the Fogman tortured Frankie anyway, it was because he likes torturing people.” Mark paused, then finished reluctantly, “He was seventeen.”

  “God.” Pen looked sick.

  “Yeah.” Mark met his eyes for the first time. “I meant it about the danger. And Justin’s got two girls in his household; it’s pure luck the Fogman didn’t run into them. Nathaniel’s lodged them both with a lady friend of his while Justin’s away, in case.”

  Greta’s lips were tight. “Three murders at this man’s hands. What are the police doing?”

  “A lot, for little good,” Mark said. “Ellis has had no luck so far finding this son of a…person, and he’s pretty narked about it.”

  “He’s not the only one,” Greta said. Her hands were tightly fisted together on the table. Tim put his own hand over them, a comforting gesture, and she looked round at him with a fraction of a smile.

  “Surely Lazarus is safe now, though?” Pen said. “Since you sent the murderer after me instead of him, I mean.”

  Greta winced visibly. Mark hoped his own flinch was better concealed. “He’s up in Norfolk with Mr. Hapgood right now, has been a few days,” he said, deciding to answer the question and ignore the rider. “Along with Phineas’s man Conyers. I got the impression from Clem that he’s a tough customer, so I wanted Justin keeping an eye out for your interests.”

  “So nobody can cheat me by proving that I’m not the earl,” Pen said. “So I won’t have any way out of this. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

  “Yes, so that nobody cheats you,” Mark said. “Being done out of your rights won’t save you, any more than it saved your mother. You’ll always be a threat.”

  Pen’s jaw set. Greta said, hastily, “I don’t suppose you know how Mr. Hapgood’s getting on or when he’ll be back?”

  “Justin wrote from Wycombe or wherever Emmeline—your mother’s family were. He said Hapgood’s leaving no stone unturned, and making sure he consults Cony
ers all the way, so there’s no room for doubt by the time he’s done.”

  “And I have to wait here for them,” Pen snapped. “Marvellous. I’m so glad this is being done for me by people who know best.”

  Greta rose. “Do you know, I think I need to stretch my legs. I’m going to walk around the Gallery. Come and tell me about the pictures, Tim.”

  Tim rose with alacrity and followed Greta out, flashing Mark an apologetic smile and leaving him alone with Pen.

  “Well,” he said. “Should we talk?”

  “We could,” Pen said. “Of course there’s three doors to this room and anyone could be behind any of them. Does that sound like persecution mania? Because I’ve started to feel as though I have it. That happens when half the people around you tell you that you invented a murder attempt, and the other half claim they believe you but say it’s impossible anyway.”

  His voice rang with tension. Mark wanted to pull him close, just hold him. “I believe you, and I don’t see why it’s impossible,” he said instead. “We know this bugger’s good at covering his tracks. Is there somewhere we can talk with a bit of privacy?”

  “I suppose my bedroom,” Pen said. “Because it has a connecting room, with no other doors, and a bolt on the door.” He didn’t say and for no other reason, but Mark took that message loud and clear. He followed in silence as Pen led the way round corners, through a diagonal passage, down half a flight of stairs, and into a corridor. Pen opened a dark wooden door and made an ironically courteous you-first gesture. Mark went in, and Pen followed, shooting the bolt on the door behind him.

  There was a fire burning, and a lamp lit, heavy drapes drawn over the windows. Mark, feeling a bit absurd, went to check behind them, letting in a blast of cold air; he bent to squint under the bed, checked the large wardrobe, then went round the small connected room, which had a truckle bed, a washstand and basin, and not much else. Pen watched with his arms folded and his face sardonic.

  “Finished?”

  “Think so.”

  “It’s a bit of a shame you didn’t consider my well-being quite so carefully in the first place.”

  “I did,” Mark said. “I truly did, Pen. I am dead sure, if you’d been going to and from the Cirque in the dark on your own, you’d have had a knife in the ribs by now. Maybe I’m wrong and he wouldn’t have found you and this would all have gone away but I don’t reckon so, seeing as the bastard has got in this house. I thought you’d be safe here and I was wrong, but at least you’re still upright, so I’m not bloody sorry for what I did. I lied to you, and I went against your wishes, and I know how much you didn’t want this, but I saw Erasmus’s corpse, and Justin’s boy—seventeen—lying dead, and what had been done to him. If you and Greta are still breathing, then we can fix the rest later. Not—” He gestured vaguely at himself and Pen. “I don’t mean that. But your life, because you’ll still have it. And I don’t care about anything else.”

  “You’re not even going to apologise?”

  “Of course I’m apologising. I spent three days obfuscated because I couldn’t look myself in the face. I still don’t think there was anything else I could have done. You wouldn’t go away, this wouldn’t go away, the murderer wouldn’t fucking go away, and I ran out of time because there was more lives than yours at stake.”

  “Your friend Justin,” Pen said bitterly.

  “Yeah. Justin, who had a gun in his face because of all this. He’s got as much right to live as you do. And we weren’t jumping at shadows, were we?” Mark had stood with Justin in the mortuary, looking down at the river-bloated corpse; he’d seen his new partner’s face. “That boy, Frankie—”

  “I know,” Pen said. “I’m sorry. I know. If—if I’d done something differently, would he be alive?”

  Mark exhaled. He wanted to say no, but he wasn’t sure it was true. “It looks like he was killed while Justin and Nat were in the country, waiting for me to say I’d found you. He’d been in the river for at least a week, the police doctor thought, though what with the cold it’s hard to tell.” Pen shuddered. “So, perhaps, if I’d found you and told the world right away you were Lord Moreton, the killer wouldn’t have bothered with Frankie. Maybe he’d have come right after you. Maybe he’d have given up, though it doesn’t look like it. I don’t know, Pen, but it’s on me, not you. I’m the one who kept quiet.”

  Pen started to put his hand out, a quick motion as quickly checked. “It’s not your fault. It’s the Fogman’s fault.”

  “I don’t think you can unpick whose fault it is,” Mark said. “Erasmus, the Fogman, your father, and from what I understand, he did what he did because of what his father did, which was fathering Clem, and I don’t reckon anyone can be sorry he was born except maybe the woman he was got on. It’s a bloody great mess, that’s all.”

  “ ‘Visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children’s children, unto the third and to the fourth generation,’ ” Pen said. “ ‘The fathers have eaten a sour grape, and the children’s teeth are set on edge.’ ”

  Mark snorted. “Sounds about right. We’ve all made a damn great tangle of this, me as much as anyone, and I’m sorry. You’ve had to bear too many of the consequences.”

  “Yes,” Pen said. “Only, if my father had been true to Mother, I’d have been born here and grown up here, and it would have been unspeakable. It was unspeakable growing up with Erasmus too, but if Mother had gone somewhere people were kind, Greta and I would never have run away. Erasmus was going to force Greta to marry him. We ran because of that, not because of me. And then we found the circus, and the trapeze. I could fly, I could wear what I wanted, I was me for the first time in my life, and it felt like I’d had my legs in iron braces and I hadn’t even known until someone took them off. How could I have had that as an earl’s heir?”

  “You’d have found a different way.”

  “Not like music hall,” Pen said. “Not when I didn’t have to hide or sneak, and dressing as I wanted wasn’t an eccentricity to tolerate, it was what I was supposed to do.”

  Pen’s bed was a four-poster, of course. Mark leaned back against one of the carved posts. “Yeah. I see.”

  “You didn’t know what to do,” Pen said. “I do understand that. And I didn’t really believe you about the danger, is the truth. It all seemed unreal, and if I’d listened better then maybe we could have done something else. So it’s not all your fault and I shouldn’t blame you. But—”

  “Is it that bad here?”

  “It’s unbearable.” A dramatic word, but Pen said it in a terrifyingly matter-of-fact tone. “I can’t bear it.”

  “But when you’re earl—”

  “No. Never. Maybe if I’d been bred to this and never known anything different, but I wasn’t and I do and I can’t, Mark.” His eyes were wide with a suppressed panic Mark could hear shadowed in his voice. “It’s all wrong. I’m having dizzy spells again, all the time. I—” He held out his hands demonstratively, as if there were something wrong with them, then yanked them away. “I don’t feel like me. And when they cut my hair—”

  “No bastard’s cutting your hair,” Mark said, with a pulse of pure rage.

  “Oh, don’t be absurd,” Pen said. “Of course they will. Or, rather, they’ll all explain why it’s necessary until I agree, because I don’t want to be a freakish eccentric. I never did. I just wanted to be myself.”

  “You’re still you. No matter what you wear.”

  “But that’s not true,” Pen said. “It matters what I wear and how I look. And it does change—Look, am I a trapeze artist?”

  “What? Yes, of course.”

  “And if I don’t ever get on a trapeze again, if I throw away my costumes, will I still be a trapeze artist? In ten years’ time, when I’ve stopped for so long I wouldn’t dare step off a platform again? If you don’t do what you are—”

  “But trapeze artist is a job,” Mark said. “You’d still be you if you broke your legs. You’re al
ways still you.”

  “Are you the man you would be if you’d been born with two arms?” Pen asked. “Don’t you think that changed anything about you—how you were treated, how people saw you, how you reacted to them? Or if you’d been born with two arms and lost one aged twenty, say. Would you be the same as you are now?”

  Mark opened his mouth and shut it again, thinking of taunts, curiosity, jokes, kindly offers of help with simple tasks, people who saw a cripple for kicking. A lot of fights, mostly won. His mother’s impatience, his own anger, the stubborn need to push back against a world that looked at him and saw an incapable. “Yeah. All right, fair enough.”

  “It’s not the same,” Pen said. “I can’t explain this properly, I know that, but I’m trying to make you see, it does matter how I dress, because that’s how I make everything fit, and that changes everything. If I have to dress as a man for the rest of my life, and jam my mind into a body that doesn’t fit properly, either I’ll go mad or…”

  “Or what?”

  “Or my mind will start fitting,” Pen said softly. “Because you can’t not be yourself all the time. I’ll have to make myself into somebody else who can do that, and then who will I be?”

  “Jesus.” Mark didn’t intend to move, he’d never intended to touch or approach or anything, but the fear in Pen’s voice could not be borne. He stepped forward, arm out, and Pen walked into its embrace as though Mark had never irretrievably fucked up his life at all.

  He felt so right there. He buried his face in Mark’s shoulder, and Mark buried his face in Pen’s hair, and they held one another, gripping close, breathing hard, like there was a way to stand against it all if only they stood together.

  After not long enough, Pen lifted his head, but he didn’t move away. “Mark…”

  “Wait.” Mark reached up for the back of Pen’s head, and felt for the clip that held his hair confined, snapping it open and tossing it onto the bed. He ran his hand through the thick hair, pushing the heavy locks free. “Uh. Look, I got you something. It was for Christmas, but, well. Here.”