Death at Hollowmere Hall

The only road to Hollowmere Hall crossed the river by an old stone bridge, and at ten minutes to six on Saturday evening, the river took it.

Tamsin Reeve saw it happen. She was standing on the front steps of the Hall in her good coat, watching the last of the weekend’s guests arrive, when a roar came up the valley like a train in a tunnel. A brown wall of water poured down the moor, struck the bridge, and for one second the whole arch seemed to hold. Then it folded in the middle, quite gently, and was gone.

“Well,” said her gran, beside her. “That’s us settled in, then.”

“Gran! The bridge.”

“I saw it, dear.” Ada Reeve, seventy-four years old, retired magistrate, owner of a green tweed hat and a face that gave away nothing at all, adjusted her handbag on her arm. “Mobile signal?”

Tamsin checked. “No bars.”

“Landline?”

“Mr Fenwick said it was down this morning.”

“Hm,” said Gran, and looked at the valley with the expression of a woman who had sat through four hundred trials and knew the sound of a door closing. “Then we’d better enjoy the weekend, hadn’t we?”

It was meant to be a good one. The Hollowmere Codebreakers’ Weekend was the most famous puzzle contest for young people in the country, and Tamsin had qualified for it by solving a thirty-eight-line cipher in eleven minutes flat. There were twelve finalists, aged thirteen to sixteen. They had come from all over, with chaperones, to a great grey Gothic manor on the moors, belonging to the great Dr Leopold Marsh, who had written nine books on ciphers and designed every puzzle in the contest himself.

The Hall was every bit as grand as the website had promised. It had towers. It had a library two storeys high. It had a great black staircase and a hundred portraits of Marsh’s ancestors, all of whom seemed to disapprove of Tamsin personally. Over the front door, a bronze plaque said HOLLOWMERE: EST. 1791.

Dr Marsh met them in the hall. He was a small, restless man with white hair like a dandelion clock and a bow tie patterned with tiny question marks. He shook Tamsin’s hand with both of his and said, “Ah! The cipher girl! I’m told you’re dangerous.” And then he laughed, a high rapid laugh, and bustled away to meet the next guest.

She liked him at once.

At dinner that night, in the long dining room under a chandelier of glass icicles, she counted the adults and wrote them in the little notebook she always carried. It was a habit. Her gran called it “collecting,” as if people were stamps.

There was Ms Juno Hargreave, Dr Marsh’s secretary, a thin, anxious woman with ink on her fingers who never sat down. There was Professor Basil Quill, a large red-faced man, another cryptographer, who ate his soup as though it had personally offended him. There was Mrs Dorothea Pym, the housekeeper, round and brisk, who served the fish with a clatter and never once smiled. There was Rafe Marsh, the doctor’s nephew, twenty-four, handsome and bored, who kept checking his phone though it plainly had no signal. And there was Ms Celeste Doran, a glossy woman in a silver dress who was, Tamsin gathered, Dr Marsh’s publisher, and who laughed at everything he said slightly too loudly.

Halfway through the fish, Ms Hargreave apologised to the table. The conservatory, she said, would have to stay shut for the evening: the glass roof leaked in a storm and the orchids hated it. She locked the door every night at eight, and the key hung on its hook in the pantry. “Drowned orchids,” said Rafe Marsh, to nobody, “the great tragedy of our age,” and Celeste Doran laughed much too loudly.

“Tomorrow’s the final,” said Dr Marsh, tapping his glass for quiet. “Noon, in the library. One last puzzle, devised by me. But tonight, my dears, you may enjoy yourselves. Games in the drawing room from nine. And I shall be in my study, finishing the great riddle.”

He looked round the table, bright-eyed, and added:

“I have an announcement to make tomorrow. A very important one. Several of you will be surprised.”

Tamsin saw Professor Quill put down his spoon. She saw Juno Hargreave drop her gaze. She saw Celeste Doran’s smile flicker, like a candle in a draught, and then steady.

She wrote it all down.

The drawing room was warm and gold, with a fire the size of a small car. The twelve finalists sprawled over the sofas, and the adults sat round the edges, and by half past nine they were deep in a noisy game of charades, with Professor Quill hopping about the hearth rug pretending to be a kangaroo.

Tamsin loved it. She was good at it too, which surprised her. Beside her sat Kofi Mensah, fourteen, round-faced and watchful, the only other competitor who had actually finished the qualifying cipher faster than she had. They had become friends over the fish.

“The storm’s dropping,” murmured Kofi, listening to the windows.

“It’s been dropping for an hour.”

“Good. I hate thunder.” He grinned. “I bet Dr Marsh is going to make the final unbearably hard.”

“I hope so.”

“Liar. You hope you win.”

“I hope we both get to the end,” said Tamsin, “and then I win.”

Dr Marsh had left the dinner table at nine, with a cup of cocoa, a mouthful of cheese and a bundle of papers under his arm. Before he went, he’d paused beside Tamsin and Kofi, who had won the afternoon’s mini-round together.

“Here,” he’d said, giving them a folded slip. “A last small riddle, for the two of you only. Solve it and bring me the answer in the study by half past ten. There’s a prize for the first team to do it. A very good prize.”

The riddle said: I see in the dark, but I am never awake. I watch the whole room, and I never take a break. What am I?

Tamsin and Kofi had solved it in about four minutes, in the corner of the drawing room, and written the answer carefully on a card. They were both rather proud.

At a quarter to ten, Ms Hargreave handed out score sheets and announced a change of game. At ten to ten, Rafe Marsh stood up, stretched, and said he was going to the side porch for a cigarette. At five to ten, Celeste Doran squinted at the fire, said she couldn’t see a thing without her glasses, and left to look for them. At the same moment Mrs Pym came in, collected the empty tea tray with a sniff and carried it away to the kitchen.

The hall clock struck ten.

It was a deep slow bell, and it filled the whole house. Tamsin counted without meaning to: one, two, three, four, five, six. And on the sixth, from somewhere beyond the drawing room door, she heard another sound, a heavy, muffled thump, like a sack dropped on a floor.

“Thunder,” said Kofi, wincing.

“I think so,” said Tamsin.

Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

She turned back to the game. Out of habit, she noted the time in her head. She didn’t know why. It was just a thing she did.

By a quarter past, Rafe had come back damp and smelling of smoke, and Mrs Pym returned with a tray of cocoa, and Celeste Doran wafted in, glasses on her nose, saying brightly that she’d found them in the conservatory. At twenty past, Tamsin looked at the card in her pocket and nudged Kofi.

“It’s nearly time,” she said. “Let’s go and win.”

The study was at the end of the east corridor, behind a heavy oak door with a brass knob shaped like a lion.

They knocked. Nobody answered. Kofi knocked again, louder, and the door, which had not been fully closed, swung inward with a soft groan.

“Dr Marsh?” said Tamsin. “We’ve got the answer—“

She stopped.

It was a large panelled room, lined with books. There was a desk with a green lamp, an old typewriter, a brass telescope on a stand. The window beside the desk stood wide open, and the curtains were blowing in sheets, and rain was spattering onto the carpet. The lamp was still on. The fire had burned right down.

Dr Marsh lay on the rug in front of the hearth, on his side, quite still.

“Oh,” said Kofi, in a tiny voice. “Oh, no.”

She went to him. She knew before she touched him. His eyes were open and fixed, and his white hair was stained dark at the back, and there was something very wrong about the angle of his neck. On the rug beside him, half under his arm, lay a bronze owl about the size of a man’s fist. Its wings were folded. One of its feet was dark and wet.

“Don’t touch it,” said Tamsin. Her voice came out odd and thin. “Don’t touch anything.”

“I’m not going to.”

“Go and get Gran. Not anyone else. Just Gran.”

Kofi ran.

Tamsin stood alone with the body and the rain. She made herself breathe. Then she did what she always did when something overwhelmed her: she looked. She looked at everything, one thing at a time, and committed it to memory.

The window. Open. The sill is wet. The curtains are soaked at the bottom. There are no footprints on the carpet. There’s mud on the sill, a smear, as though someone has come in that way. The fire has gone out. The lamp’s on. The typewriter has a sheet of paper in it; I can see the words from here.

The clock.

It was a small gilt carriage clock on the mantelpiece, over the dead hearth. Its glass front was cracked across. Its hands stood at a quarter to ten, at 9:47, and it wasn’t ticking.

So it happened at 9:47. She felt the thought land in her head with a click. Somebody hit him at 9:47, and the clock was struck in the fall, and stopped.

She frowned. Something was wrong with that. She couldn’t say what.

Then her gran was in the doorway, with Kofi behind her, white as milk, and Gran took one look at the room, put a hand on the doorframe, and said very quietly, “Oh, Leopold.”

“Nobody leaves the house,” said Gran.

She said it at the top of the stairs, in the great hall, to a crowd of frightened faces. She had put on her magistrate’s voice. It was not loud; it did not need to be. Tamsin had heard her use it twice before, once on a burglar, and once on a very large dog.

“Dr Marsh is dead. Someone has killed him. The bridge is down and the telephones are out. There is no way to fetch the police until morning, and I’m not prepared to wait until morning to start finding out what happened.” She looked round the room. “I am going to ask every adult in this house to stay in the drawing room, together, and not to touch anything. My granddaughter will take notes. She’s very good at it.”

“Is this a joke?” said Rafe Marsh. He had gone grey. “Is this part of the game?”

“No, dear,” said Gran. “It isn’t.”

“My uncle can’t be—he was perfectly—“

“Sit down, Mr Marsh.”

He sat. Behind them, somebody cried out in a high, shaking voice. Tamsin was watching Rafe’s face and did not turn round to see whose it was, but she wrote down every word of it in her notebook, as she wrote down everything, and thought no more about it.

It was the strangest night of Tamsin’s life. The adults were shepherded into the drawing room, and the children, white-faced and silent, were sent up to the nursery wing with Mrs Pym’s second-eldest niece as a minder. Gran locked the study. She put the key in her handbag. Then she and Tamsin sat down together in the library, under a ceiling that was lost in shadow, and Gran took out her own notebook, a small red one with a pencil in the spine.

“Tell me what you saw,” she said. “Everything. In order.”

Tamsin did. It took twenty minutes. When she described the window, her gran raised one eyebrow. When she described the clock, she lowered it. When she got to the owl, she held up her hand.

“Wait. The owl was on the rug? Beside him?”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell anyone it was an owl?”

“Only you.”

“Did Kofi?”

Tamsin considered. “He ran out before he’d seen it properly. He said ‘Dr Marsh is hurt.’ I told him not to say anything else.”

“Good.” Her gran’s eyes gleamed. “Good girl. That might matter.” She tapped the notebook with her pencil. “The clock says nine forty-seven. What was everyone doing at nine forty-seven?”

“The charades. Everybody was in the drawing room.”

“Everybody?”

Tamsin thought. She shut her eyes and ran the scene back like a film. “Professor Quill was doing the kangaroo. Ms Hargreave was handing out score sheets. Rafe was on the sofa. Mrs Pym was—oh. She was pouring tea. And Celeste Doran was by the fire, laughing at Quill.”

“All five?”

“Yes.”

“Then it can’t have been 9:47, can it?” said Gran, gently.

The thought that had nagged her in the study came loose and floated up.

“The clock’s wrong,” said Tamsin. “It’s a fake. It was meant to say 9:47 so that we’d think—“ She stopped. “But the glass. The glass was cracked, but there wasn’t any broken glass on the carpet. It was just a crack. If a clock gets knocked off a mantelpiece, it breaks, doesn’t it? This one was still on the mantelpiece.”

“Someone cracked it and stopped it on purpose.”

“To make it look as though he died at nine forty-seven.”

“When every single person in the house can prove where they were.” Gran closed the red notebook. “So when did he really die, Tamsin?”

Tamsin looked at her.

The thump. During the chime.

“At ten,” she said. “At ten o’clock exactly. I heard it. I thought it was thunder. But the thunder had stopped an hour before, I remember the windows going quiet. It was a body.”

“And at ten o’clock,” said her gran, “which of our guests was missing from the room?”

They took the list in order, on a clean page.

At ten o’clock, in the drawing room, there had been twelve teenagers, two chaperones (including Gran), the dead man’s secretary, and a professor who was hopping about like a kangaroo. All of them could account for one another. They were out of it.

That left three people who had walked out of the drawing room in the ten minutes before the clock struck ten. Rafe Marsh. Mrs Pym. Celeste Doran. Each had left. Each had come back. Each had been alone, for fifteen or twenty minutes, and none of them had been seen.

Gran went to talk to them one by one. Tamsin sat in the corner of the drawing room with her notebook and the face of a very young person who isn’t to be noticed.

Rafe went first. He sat on the edge of the sofa, picking at his thumbnail, and said he’d stepped out to the side porch for a smoke, because he hadn’t wanted the children coughing. He’d been there for twenty minutes. No, he’d seen nobody. Yes, he could prove it.

“How?”

“There’ll be butts on the step. I smoke slowly.” He gave a bitter smile. “Also, my uncle cut me off last week. I’m in some trouble, Mrs Reeve. Money, you know. I’d have been a terrible person to be alone with a dead man, and I know it. I’m telling you because someone else will.”

“Where did you stand?”

“Under the eaves. It was pouring.”

Gran thanked him. When he’d gone, she turned to Tamsin and murmured: “Go and look at the porch.”

It took Tamsin four minutes. She came back with her coat shining wet, and she sat down and opened her notebook.

“There are three cigarette ends on the step. All under the eaves, all still dry. They’re the same brand. There’s a fourth in the puddle by the rail. That one’s been trodden on.”

“So he was out there.”

“For a good while, yes. But there’s more.” She frowned. “There’s a window in the kitchen, and it looks straight onto the porch. You can see the whole step from the sink.”

“Mrs Pym,” said her gran, softly.

Mrs Dorothea Pym was next. She came in with her arms folded, and her mouth a firm straight line. Yes, she had gone to the kitchen with the tea tray at five to ten. Yes, she’d washed up. Yes, she’d made the cocoa. No, she hadn’t left the sink.

“Did you see anyone?” said Gran.

“Mr Rafe. On the porch, with his cigarette. I saw the end of it glowing.” Mrs Pym sniffed. “Standing there like a dripping heron. I thought, that boy’ll catch his death.” Her face changed. “God forgive me. I didn’t mean—“

“I know, Mrs Pym.”

“Dr Marsh was kind to me.” Her voice cracked. “Twenty-two years I’ve been in this house. Do you think I’d lift a finger—“

“I don’t think so at all,” said Gran. “Thank you.”

When she’d gone, Tamsin looked up from her page. “Rafe says he was on the porch. Mrs Pym says she saw him from the sink. And she was at the sink the whole time, because he’d have seen if she’d gone.”

“Each,” said Gran, “has made the other an alibi. Whether they intended to or not.” She tapped her chin. “Which leaves us with—“

“Celeste Doran.”

Celeste Doran came into the library last, shutting the door behind her with a soft click. She was still elegant, in the silver dress, but her face had a stiffness about it, like a mask that had been put on slightly crooked.

“This is so dreadful,” she said. “I just can’t believe it. Leopold. And in his own study.”

“Please sit,” said Gran.

She sat, and crossed her ankles, and pressed a tissue to her eye. “He was the dearest man. I’ve been his publisher for eleven years. We’d just been discussing his new contract, in fact. We were so close to signing.”

“At dinner he said he had an announcement.”

“Yes, well.” A flicker. “Authors say these things.”

“You left the drawing room at five to ten.”

“My glasses. I couldn’t see the charades. I went to find them.”

“And where did you find them?”

“In the conservatory. On the wicker chair. I must have left them when I was admiring the orchids.” She smiled, a bright, brittle smile. “It took me ages, the conservatory is so enormous.”

“I’m sure it is,” said Gran. “Did you go anywhere else?”

“No.”

“Not the east corridor?”

“Good heavens. I wouldn’t know where it was. I’ve barely set foot out of the guest wing all weekend.” A small laugh. “I’m dreadful with directions, Mrs Reeve. I got lost on my way to the bathroom.”

“And you never saw Dr Marsh’s study.”

“Never.” She said it firmly. “Not once. I’ve never so much as set eyes on that room.”

“What a pity,” said Gran. “It has such a beautiful fireplace.”

“Hasn’t it?” said Celeste. “I’ve seen the photographs.”

She smiled again. The air in the library seemed to tighten. And in the corner, with her pencil frozen over her notebook, Tamsin felt her pulse begin to knock against her ribs.

When Celeste had gone, Gran sat for a long moment without speaking.

“She said she’d never set eyes on it,” said Tamsin, in a whisper. “She was so sure. But Gran, the owl—“

“Wait,” said Gran.

“She didn’t know where the study was! She said so. She said she’d never been in it!”

“That’s what she said.”

“Then how—“ Tamsin broke off. She stared at the page in front of her, at the words she’d written three hours ago, in the great hall, while the adults were crowding round the foot of the stairs.

When Gran had made her announcement, Celeste Doran had cried out to the whole company, loudly, in a voice that shook.

”Dead? Poor Leopold. Killed with that dreadful bronze owl of his?”

“Gran,” said Tamsin slowly. “Nobody said it was an owl.”

“No,” said Gran. “Nobody did.”

“It isn’t enough,” said Gran, an hour later.

They were standing in the east corridor, outside the locked study. She had a torch in one hand. In the other she held Tamsin’s notebook, open at the page with three names and three lines.

“She might have heard it from someone. The cook might have mentioned it. A child on the stairs. We’d need to prove she’s lying about where she was at ten o’clock.”

“The conservatory.”

“If she wasn’t in it.”

“She said it was enormous,” said Tamsin, frowning. “And she said she found the glasses on a wicker chair.” She turned over a page. “But Ms Hargreave told us at dinner that the conservatory was shut for the storm. She said the glass roof leaks and the door’s kept locked from eight o’clock. She made a joke about it. The whole table heard.”

“Who has the key?”

“Ms Hargreave. She hangs it on a hook in the pantry.”

They found Juno Hargreave in the pantry, red-eyed, folding napkins that were already folded. She looked up at them with terrified eyes. When Gran asked about the key, she stared blankly for a moment. Then she went to the hook by the door, and took it down and held it out on her palm.

It was an old brass key on a loop of green string. A strip of masking tape on the handle read CONSERVATORY.

“I locked up at eight,” said Juno. “Like I always do. In storms the roof drips on the orchids. I haven’t taken it down since.”

“Has anyone else?”

“Not that I know.” She flushed. “I—it’s always on that hook. Nobody ever—“ She stopped. “Mrs Reeve, it’s cold. The tape’s cold. It’s been hanging in the draught all evening. And the string’s damp.”

“Damp?” said Gran.

“From the rain.” Juno turned the key over, and the colour drained from her face. “No. Wait. It’s dry on the inside. Dry where it hangs against the wall. Which means it’s been taken down, and used, and put back.”

“Recently?”

“In the last hour, or it would have dried.”

Gran nodded slowly. She looked at Tamsin.

“There’s more,” said Tamsin. “In the study. I didn’t see it at the time. The window was open. And there was mud on the sill, remember, as though someone had climbed in. But I looked this evening, with the torch, from the garden. The flowerbed under the window is smooth. Not a mark. It’s been raining for six hours. Anyone who climbed through that window from outside would have left a dent as big as a bucket.”

“Then it was set up from the inside.”

“The mud was brought. Smeared on the sill by hand. And the window opened to make us think someone had come from the garden.” She swallowed. “She even set the clock. To make it seem he’d died while the whole house was together.”

“Because nobody could have done it at 9:47.”

“So nobody could have done it. Therefore: an outsider.” Tamsin’s voice was shaking now with fury. “She wanted us to believe in a stranger who doesn’t exist.”

Gran put a hand briefly on her shoulder.

“Come along, dear,” she said. “I think it’s time we had a conversation.”

There is nothing that stills a room like the slow collection of eleven people in one place and the knowledge that one of them has done something dreadful.

They gathered in the drawing room at midnight. The fire had burned low. The rain had dwindled to a whisper against the glass. Rafe Marsh sat with his head in his hands, Professor Quill stood with his back to the mantelpiece, and Mrs Pym, in a corner, held a handkerchief to her face. Juno Hargreave perched on the edge of an armchair. And Celeste Doran, silver and composed, sat alone on the sofa with her ankles crossed and her hands folded in her lap.

Gran stood in the middle of the carpet. Tamsin stood beside her. It was the first time in her life she had been asked to speak to a room full of grown-ups, and her mouth was dry.

“Tamsin has something to say,” said Gran, “and I’d like you to hear her out.”

She told them.

She said it simply, one piece at a time, the way she’d been taught to do a cipher: the clock, the glass, the thunder that wasn’t. The three who had walked out of the room. The cigarette ends on the step, and the kitchen window that watched them. The key on its damp green string, and the smooth flowerbed, and the mud that had been put on the sill.

Nobody moved.

“So the only person who left the drawing room alone,” said Tamsin, “and who hasn’t got anyone to say where she was at ten o’clock, is Ms Doran.”

“That’s absurd,” said Celeste.

“You said you found your glasses in the conservatory.”

“Yes.”

“The conservatory was locked. The key was on a hook in the pantry, and somebody took it down and put it back tonight, after the rain started.”

“Anyone could have—“

“You said you’d never been in the study,” said Tamsin. “You said you’d never even set eyes on it.”

“That’s true.”

“Then how did you know it was an owl?”

Silence fell like a dropped plate.

It was Professor Quill who spoke, in a hoarse, astonished voice. “What owl?”

“The bronze owl,” said Tamsin, “on Dr Marsh’s mantelpiece. The one that killed him. Nobody told anyone what the weapon was. Not me. Not Kofi. Not my gran. We said Dr Marsh was dead. We said he’d been struck. We didn’t say with what.” She took a breath. “And at the top of the stairs, an hour later, you said it. You said, poor Leopold, killed with that dreadful bronze owl of his. You said of his. As if you knew where it lived.”

Celeste Doran’s face did not change.

For three long seconds, nothing in it moved at all. Then something did, like the faintest crack across glass.

“I must have heard it from someone.”

“From whom?”

“I don’t—Rafe, perhaps—“

“I never said anything,” said Rafe, sitting bolt upright.

“Mrs Pym—“

“I haven’t said a word to anyone,” said the housekeeper stoutly, “since I got here.”

“Then it was the secretary—“

“I’ve told no one,” said Juno.

Celeste stood up. Her hands, Tamsin noticed, were trembling now, very slightly, in the folds of her dress. She had a small, wild, quite beautiful look in her eyes, like a bird in a room.

“He was going to ruin me,” she said.

It was a very quiet confession. It came out in a single breath, and when it was done, nobody in the room said anything for a very long time.

Dr Marsh’s announcement had never been about the contest. It had been about money. For years, Celeste’s publishing house had been quietly underpaying his royalties, shaving a little off here, hiding a little there, a few thousand pounds at a time. It had added up. It had added up to nearly a hundred thousand. He’d found out in September, from an accountant. He hadn’t confronted her. He had waited, and gathered the evidence, and planned to read it out loud at the Sunday finale, in front of a hall full of people, as a last great puzzle.

“He told me this evening,” said Celeste. “In the corridor, before dinner. He was smiling. He said he’d given me a day’s grace, out of friendship. He said I ought to prepare a speech.” Her mouth twisted. “He enjoyed it. He actually enjoyed it.”

“So you went to the study.”

“I went at five to ten, to ask him to wait. Only to ask. I took the conservatory key, because the conservatory has a back stair that runs up to the east corridor. Nobody ever uses it. I thought nobody would see.” She stared at her hands. “He laughed at me. He said I’d had eleven years of his money and I could surely afford one weekend of embarrassment. And he turned round to put another log on the fire.”

Tamsin felt sick.

“I didn’t plan it. I swear to you. I picked up the first thing.” Her voice cracked. “And then he was on the floor, and I thought, I can’t be here. I thought, there’s a way out of this. I remembered what he always said about alibis. That everyone’s in the drawing room at a quarter to ten.”

“So you stopped the clock.”

“And opened the window. And smeared the mud.” A bleak laugh. “I thought I was so clever. It took me four minutes.”

“And you came back for your ‘glasses.’”

“They were in my handbag the whole time,” said Celeste Doran, and sat down again, very slowly, and covered her face.

Rafe Marsh was standing at the door. He had gone white to the lips, and he did not move. Professor Quill crossed the room and stood behind her chair without a word, a big man with an enormous, gentle bewilderment on his face. In the corner, Mrs Pym had begun to cry, silently, into her apron.

Gran walked across to the window and drew back the curtain. The rain had stopped. Over the black hump of the moor, a thread of grey light was coming up, thin as a pencil line.

“The bridge crew will be here by eight,” she said. “I expect the police soon after.”

She turned and looked at Tamsin.

“You did that,” said Gran, quietly. “Not me. I’d like you to remember it.”

Tamsin did not sleep.

She sat in the nursery-wing window seat at four in the morning, wrapped in a blanket, watching the sky go from black to charcoal to the colour of a dove. Beside her, Kofi sat in silence with his knees pulled up. They had found each other without speaking.

“Do you think he knew?” said Kofi at last. “Dr Marsh. That he was in danger?”

“I think he thought it was a puzzle.”

“That’s awful.”

“I think that’s what he’d have liked to be told,” said Tamsin, and her voice wobbled, “that it was at least a very good one.”

Kofi laughed, a wet, surprised sort of laugh. Then he put his head on her shoulder, and she leaned into him, and the two of them sat in the grey light until a bird began to sing somewhere in the ivy.

At seven she remembered the card.

It was still in her coat pocket, a little crumpled, the one with the answer to the last small riddle: I see in the dark, but I am never awake. I watch the whole room, and I never take a break. They’d solved it in four minutes. They’d been so proud.

She took it out and looked at it. In her own round hand, in blue pen, were four letters.

OWL.

She had thought it was only a clever little riddle, a puzzle for two children on a stormy night. And now, in the cold light, she saw that it had been something else too. Dr Marsh had known exactly what sat on his mantelpiece, and what he’d meant them to find. A bronze owl that saw in the dark, and watched the whole room, and never looked away.

It was the only witness there ever was.

She folded the card very carefully and put it back in her pocket. And downstairs, with a long, low rumble that shook the windows, the first of the rescue lorries came grinding up the valley road.