Night Three: The Voice on the Gravel

On the third day nobody went anywhere alone, and the House seemed to approve of it.

Wren spent the morning with the keyring in her fist, walking the second degree end to end while Simon Pell walked a pace behind her, because his mother had told him to and because, Wren suspected, he would have done it anyway. Simon was the kind of man who stood near doors. "Mum sleeps in the afternoons," he said, when Wren asked. "Since Dad. If I'm not in the chair when she wakes up she thinks I've gone the way of Mr. Dunne. So I'll stay with you till three and then I'll go and sit in the chair."

"Does she really think that?"

"She's seventy-one and she watched a man get carried into a cold room last night. She thinks it." He glanced at the painting at the end of the Gallery. "Does that look like Mrs. Varga to you?"

"Everyone asks me that."

"What do you say?"

"I say it's the keys."

Simon considered the warden for a long moment. "It isn't the keys," he said.

The Gallery lamp was the problem. It stood on a bracket beside the painting, an old oil lamp with a brass base, and it was the only light in the long room after dark. Mrs. Varga had said, flatly, over breakfast, that the lamp must be burning when the warden was covered at eleven, because the Warden did not cover the painting in the dark and never had. Wren had gone up at nine to fill it and found the wick trimmed and the reservoir full and the box of matches on the bracket empty. Not a match in it. Not a match in the kitchen either, nor in the drawing room, nor in the Caretaker's room where she had seen a full box the night she arrived.

"Someone's taken them," Simon said.

"Or something."

"Does it take things?"

"I don't know what it does," Wren said. "I know what it leaves."

They asked every guest. Nora Finch had a lighter once and had lost it in an airport. Callum Finch did not smoke and said so as though it were a moral position. Nora Fitch, from the window seat, said that she had given up matches when she gave up the classroom. Agatha Pell said the House had been taking small things since the first night, a thimble, a hairpin, Mireille's shawl, and that nobody had listened to her, and Simon said, "Mum."

It was Mireille Dunne who solved it. She had been sitting in the hall all morning on the chair beneath the slate, where her husband had died, with her hands in her lap and Howard's brass lighter between them. When Wren explained, she turned it over once and held it out.

"Take it," she said. "Howard would want the lamp lit. He hated a dark room more than anything. That's why he went out to the hall, I think. Not the shawl. He couldn't bear to lie in the dark listening." Her fingers unclosed. "You need a flame for the lamp and there isn't another flame in the House. So the Caretaker should have it. Bring it back when there are matches again."

Wren took it. It was warm from Mireille's hands and heavier than a lighter should be. She carried it up to the Gallery with Simon behind her and struck it, and it caught on the second try, and the lamp came up yellow and steady beside the painted woman's folded hands. That was done, then. One small thing, done. She stood a moment and let herself have it.

Dr. Roux had spent the afternoon with a scraping of the residue on a glass slide, under the travelling microscope he kept in his bag. He reported to the drawing room at five with the wariness of a man presenting evidence to a jury that has already decided.

"It is organic," he said. "It is not skin, hair, fat or any secretion I can name. It is very nearly inert. If you asked me what the Pale Lodger's residue is, I would say it is the Pale Lodger's residue, and that I am a trustee of this House and a physician and I have never been so little use in my life."

"Is it from the Cellar?" Callum asked. "The fourth degree? Is that where it lives?"

"Mrs. Varga says it lodges between the Cellar and the Attic," said Nora Fitch. "That is the whole House, Mr. Finch. It lives in the whole House."

"The Warden said that," Dr. Roux agreed. "And the Warden has been here thirty-one years, and I have sat on the Trust for twelve and visited for a weekend every autumn, and she has never once told me anything she did not want me to know." He looked at the stairs. "Edmund Hale's rooms were in the third degree. The Attic. I asked to see them in 1998. I was refused. I have been refused every year since."

"By whom?"

"By the Warden," said Dr. Roux, "who is Mrs. Varga, and not me, and I would be grateful if you stopped asking."

Mrs. Varga covered the warden at eleven, by the light of the lamp Wren had lit with a dead man's lighter. At a quarter to midnight Wren counted. Agatha and Simon. Nora Finch and Callum. Nora Fitch. Dr. Roux. Mireille Dunne, alone in the hall chair. "Seven," she said, and made seven marks under the two rows of eight, and the third row was shorter and looked it.

The Hour of Silence came in on the stroke of one.

At half past, Wren heard Howard Dunne.

He was outside. That was the first thing and the worst thing. The voice came from the gravel beyond the front door, from the fog where the taxi had refused to go, and it was Howard's voice exactly, warm and a little put out, the voice of a man who has gone to fetch something and been locked out by mistake. "Mireille? It's me. I found it. I've got your shawl, love, it was in the car all along. Open the door."

Rule Six. If you hear a guest who is not in the House, do not reply.

Along the corridor Wren heard a chair scrape. Mireille's chair. She heard Mireille's feet on the boards, three steps toward the door, and then stop, and then Mireille's breath, very loud, held.

"Mireille. Please. It's cold."

Wren pressed her forehead to her own door and did not open it and did not speak and thought, as hard as she had ever thought anything: he is in the cold room off the kitchen. You put your hand on his chest. He is not out there.

The breath along the corridor let itself out slowly. The feet went back to the chair. The voice outside asked twice more, and the second time it used Mireille's name in a way that Wren would later be unable to describe except by saying that it was wrong in the vowels, and then it stopped.

At two the clock struck and the doors opened. Mireille Dunne was sitting under the slate with the chalk in her hand, staring at the seven marks, and when Wren came to her she said, quite steadily, "I nearly answered him. I nearly made it eight."

"You didn't."

"No. But I understand now why the Rule is written down." She gave Wren the chalk. "It wasn't him. I know that. I knew it when it said my name. Howard never said my name like that in twenty years. He is dead and he is in the cold room and that was something that has learned him."

Nora Finch came out last, grey under her freckles, and found Nora Fitch in the kitchen doorway, and the two Noras stood together in the lamplight without speaking, which Wren thought was the first time she had seen them agree on anything.

"Who painted it," Nora Finch said at last, to nobody. "The warden. There's no name on the plate and no signature on the canvas, I looked. Who paints a picture of the person who runs the House and leaves their own name off it?"

Nobody answered. Above them, in the second degree, the lamp burned on beside the covered painting, and the Caretaker's keyring in Wren's pocket was still eleven keys, and the long silver one for the Attic was still cold.