You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilisation from barbarism. I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Satan. -- John Buchan, The Power House
Yo-han awoke with a presentiment of disaster. He went down to breakfast feeling like he was on the way to his own funeral. Miss Patton was already in the dining room, reading over a contract and absently stirring her porridge. She said good morning without looking up.
Normally Yo-han needed at least five spoonfuls of sugar to be able to eat porridge. Today he finished the bowl without even noticing the taste. He went over the events of the last two nights from every possible angle. It was like trying to complete a jigsaw when half the pieces were from a different puzzle.
Abruptly he asked, "Miss Patton, is it normal for a valet to use his employer's personal name?"
Miss Patton stared at him as if he'd sprouted wings. "No, of course not."
"What if it happened?"
"The valet would be dismissed on the spot." Miss Patton looked at him with a mixture of curiosity and resignation. "What is this all about, Mr. Seo?"
He was about to answer when the doorbell rang. The butler passed the breakfast room door on his way to greet the visitor. They heard muffled voices. The front door closed. The butler reappeared in the doorway with a letter in hand.
"For Mr. Su," he said solemnly. Unlike Miss Patton he still hadn't grasped how to pronounce Yo-han's surname.
Neither had the letter-writer, obviously. Yo-han couldn't help smiling wryly when he saw it was addressed to "Mr. See". Every time he thought foreigners had run out of ways to mispronounce and misspell his name, he was proved wrong.
He opened the envelope and scanned the letter. His eyebrows shot up.
"Have you any plans for this evening, Miss Patton?"
She raised her eyebrows too. "Not particularly. Why?"
"We've both been invited to dine with the Viscount." He handed her the letter and waited to hear what she thought of it.
Miss Patton read parts of it aloud. "Lord Kilskeery invites you to dinner tonight... may bring a guest if you wish... Pay special attention to Lady Kilskeery... Good grief! What does it mean?"
Yo-han poured himself another cup of tea. "I suspect it means Mr. Lennox wants me to judge for myself if his wife is trying to murder him."
What a pity it was too early to have heard anything from the chemist. He would have given a great deal to have solid proof to present to Mr. Lennox.
Miss Patton frowned at the letter. "It doesn't mention me."
"No, but it says I can bring a guest. You are the obvious choice. You have faced a murder before, and you're a woman. Mrs. Lennox would be more likely to behave naturally in front of you. Anyway, the alternative would be to bring either your sister or Király. Neither would be much help in an investigation."
"You forget that I was fooled by a murderer," Miss Patton said quietly. Not bitterly, not even with much emotion. She almost seemed wistful.
For a minute they were both silent. Leopold Colman's presence was felt so strongly that he might as well have been sitting at the table.
"I'm sure Mrs. Lennox won't be so convincing," Yo-han said. "For one thing she's not an actress."
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Phil didn't know what she'd been expecting. She'd never visited a viscount's house before; her late and unlamented Aunt Rachael had been an inveterate social climber, but she had never taken her niece with her when she called on rich and important people. Phil had a vague idea, mainly taken from novels, that viscounts lived in palaces and wore fancy clothes all day and kept dozens of horses. Lennox House was quite a shock.
It was certainly big enough to be a palace — though it had actually been a school once — but there was a strangely bedraggled air about the whole place. The walls badly needed a good scrub. Phil's gardener would faint in horror if he saw the state of the lawn. The flowerbeds varied between well-tended and overgrown with weeds. Curtains were drawn in half of the windows.
A large and gaudy car was parked outside the front door. Phil eyed it disapprovingly. The owner had better be colour-blind, because there was no other excuse for painting a car in a shade of red normally reserved for overripe tomatoes. And was that velvet upholstery? There was some sort of decoration on the door. It was too dark to see what.
She gritted her teeth and prepared for an ordeal.
Mr. Seo eyed the car with as much dubiousness as she felt. "That must belong to the politician's son."
"He must be embezzling his father's funds to afford it," Phil grumbled.
They continued up to the door. A harried-looking footman awaited them. He stared at them as if he'd never seen them before and wouldn't be surprised if they ran off with the silverware.
"Are you Mr. and Mrs. Dalrymple?" he asked. He had an American accent and his tie was lopsided. He was also apparently blind, if he thought Seo Yo-han was likely to have a surname like Dalrymple.
Phil resisted the temptation to make a cutting reply. Mr. Seo helped by speaking before she had a chance.
"No, we're Mr. Seo and Miss Patton, here at Lord Kilskeery's invitation."
The footman — who looked no older than fifteen; Phil was beginning to think he wasn't really a footman but had been drafted at short notice — gawked at them. "Did you say Lord Kilskeery? You sure you don't mean Lady Kilskeery?"
"I mean Lord Kilskeery," Mr. Seo said, beginning to look annoyed.
Phil was in her best dress, the silk was not very warm, and the evening was chilly. She couldn't help shivering at an especially icy breeze. That finally reminded the footman of his duty. He showed them into the entrance hall. Phil was disappointed to discover it wasn't much warmer than standing on the doorstep.
It also wasn't very grand. There was a staircase, but it was made of wood instead of marble. Most of the hall was taken up with photographs. The few pictures on display were ugly splashes of incoherent colour. They looked as if someone had spilled paint on the canvas and called it a day.
"Wait here," the footman said, and disappeared through a doorway to the right.
Phil distinctly heard a woman say, "Who invited them?"
A minute later the footman reappeared. He ushered them through the doorway with a helpless expression.
Phil's first impression was that he'd made a mistake and sent them into a room that was about to be redecorated. The walls were white. The floorboards were whitewashed. The lampshade around the ceiling light was an ugly lump of metal. The rug looked motheaten. The furniture was grey. A duller room would be hard to imagine.
The only splashes of colour were the people. There were five of them. Phil loathed them from the minute she saw them. First there was a young woman with her hair cut in the latest fashion, wearing a shapeless mass of dark fabric and smoking a pipe. Beside her was a woman of about sixty, wearing the height of 1880s fashion. She reminded Phil of Rachael, which was an instant mark against her. There was a young man sprawled out across a settee and snoring loudly. His suit was splashed with alcohol; Phil could smell the stuff from here. There was a well-dressed man of about thirty who looked foreign and was also smoking, though he was smoking a pipe.
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Then there was the other woman. Presumably Lady Kilskeery herself, though Phil had never seen anyone less ladylike. She wore another of the shapeless dresses that had become fashionable lately[1]. Her hair was bobbed, and if it wasn't dyed then she was the only blonde Phil had ever seen with naturally dark roots.
Lady Kilskeery got up when Phil and Mr. Seo entered. She looked at them as if they were something the cat had dragged in.
"Good heavens," she said with a fake girlish giggle. Maybe she thought it made her charming. Phil could have told her it made her sound half-witted. She had an American accent with just a slight hint of England, and it grated on Phil's ears. "Whatever have we here? Since when does my daaaarling husband invite Chinamen and—" She looked at Phil as if she was some scientific curiosity "—country parson's wives?"
Phil had never come so close to boxing someone's ears.
The woman — Phil had stopped even trying to think of her as Lady anything — gave Mr. Seo an especially nasty, sneering look. "Do you think he speaks English?" she asked her friends with another fake giggle.
"I assure you I do," Mr. Seo said coldly. He managed some sort of smile, but his eyes were icy. "I have the advantage of you, Mrs. Lennox, for I saw you yesterday evening."
Her fake smile remained fixed in place, but her brows furrowed. "Yesterday evening?"
Mr. Seo nodded. With a smile even faker than hers he said, "That balcony upstairs is quite useless. I'm surprised you haven't boarded it up."
His words were meaningless to Phil. Mrs. Lennox, on the other hand, lost all her colour and practically collapsed into her chair. Her friends looked bemused. The two of them who were awake enough to pay attention to what was happening, that was, because the young woman stared vacantly into space and the young man was still snoring.
Phil did some quick deductions. She came up with a series of possibilities. Adultery was the most likely. The probability of Mrs. Lennox trying to murder her husband immediately increased.
The door opened. Phil looked over her shoulder.
From Mr. Seo's description she had known Lord Kilskeery was thin. She wasn't prepared for just how gaunt he looked. His face was so thin that it resembled a skull. His clothes were obviously expensive but too large for him.
This was more than losing weight during an illness. He looked like he was starving.
Mr. Seo's presence brought something to mind that she would otherwise not have remembered. Aunt Rachael died — was killed — on a ship named after Empress Elisabeth. Elisabeth had been obsessed with staying beautiful. She'd been so terrified of becoming fat that she'd starved herself until her waist was only nineteen inches[2].
Phil looked at Lord Kilskeery and was very worried.
For a minute he and Mr. Seo exchanged greetings, and Mr. Seo introduced Phil. Then Lord Kilskeery looked at his wife. He smiled very coldly.
"Mr. Seo is a detective," he said, and left it up to her to decide why he had invited a detective.
Judging by her shaken expression, she didn't like any of the possibilities.
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Dinnertime at Lennox House was the most depressing meal Phil had endured since Rachael was alive. Lord Kilskeery was seated at the head of the table with Phil on his right and Mr. Seo on his left. Phil was absolutely sure this was an insult somehow to Mrs. Lennox, who was seated at the other end of the table and hidden from her husband's line of sight by an enormous vase. Three of the other guests were seated firmly in the middle of the table, several seats away from both their hosts. The fourth, the foreign man who was apparently the owner of the gaudy car, sat on Mrs. Lennox's left. Those two spent the whole meal whispering to each other.
Lord Kilskeery made a rather stilted effort to talk to both Phil and Mr. Seo. Phil found herself explaining her occupation and how a woman of twenty-four had become the owner of a security company. That involved a brief mention of her aunt's death. She carefully avoided describing the circumstances.
"You were arrested for a crime you didn't commit?" Lord Kilskeery asked, sounding genuinely horrified.
Phil nodded. "It wasn't pleasant, but Mr. Seo caught the real murderer easily."
"I wouldn't say easily," Mr. Seo muttered. He frowned at his plate. Phil suddenly knew that he wasn't being modest. He really had wished it wasn't Leopold as much as she did.
The thought of Leo put a damper on an already uncomfortable situation. Phil's mind was filled with questions. Where was he now? What play was he acting in? Was he planning another murder?
At the back of her mind was the knowledge that he could be caught again at any time. He had been lucky in Australia. The next time he might find it harder to escape. What if he had already been arrested? What if he was sentenced to death?
The world with Leopold Colman in it but out of reach was bearable. The world without Leopold, with no chance of ever seeing him again, ever yelling at him for what he'd done, ever telling him everything she'd thought and dreamt over the last two years... That was unendurable.
Someone somewhere had a grudge against Ophelia Patton. There was no other explanation for the fact she'd fallen in love with the assassin who murdered her aunt.
Phil drank the rest of her glass. Lord Kilskeery drank apple juice, but he had provided alcohol for his guests. She was grateful to him for that.
While she was distracted he and Mr. Seo had started discussing photography. Phil listened without understanding a word. She knew how to work an ordinary box or folding camera, but photography had never interested her much. What in the world were pinhole cameras and banquet cameras?
She lost interest and began to look idly around the room. That was how she noticed two interesting things.
First: Mrs. Lennox was listening intently to the photography conversation. She clearly wasn't another enthusiast, because her face was a mask of horror. Phil wondered why.
Second: a stranger stood in the doorway. He was concealed from the people at the bottom of the table by the shadow cast by a bust of Julius Caesar, but was clearly visible to the people at the top. Lord Kilskeery wasn't looking in his direction and Mr. Seo would have had to look over his shoulder, but Phil was looking almost directly at him.
He appeared to be foreign, possibly from the same place as the politician's son. (Wherever that was; no one had introduced him to Phil, and she didn't care enough to ask.) From his clothes he might have been either a servant or another guest. He didn't behave like either. He stared intently at Lord Kilskeery with a strange look on his face. Phil couldn't identify it. But she felt as if she was face to face with grief and suffering too intense to comprehend. As she stared at the stranger she felt tears well up in her eyes.
Bewildered, she dashed them away. Her movement caught the stranger's attention. He looked at her. His eyes were dark brown, so dark they seemed almost black. For a minute they studied each other. Then he looked once more at Lord Kilskeery, turned, and disappeared into the hall. Neither of the men beside Phil had noticed his presence.
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When the ladies retired to the drawing room Phil was prepared for an ordeal. It wasn't the ordeal she expected. The middle-aged woman and the constantly-smoking young woman found a newspaper and began to argue over racehorses. Mrs. Lennox took advantage of their distraction to turn to Phil.
"Miss Patton, isn't it?" she said with a wide smile. It didn't hide the fear in her eyes. A more complete reversal from her attitude earlier could hardly be imagined. "What a charming dress! You must tell me where you bought it."
She sat down on the settee and practically pulled Phil down beside her. Phil looked at her coolly and waited for her to say what this was really about. She didn't have to wait long.
"Is that Mr. Soo your fiancé?" Mrs. Lennox asked. "Such matches would never happen in America, of course — we American women have more pride — but I suppose everything is allowed over here."
Her first words bowled Phil over. Her next ones brought back Phil's desire to box her ears. It was a minute before she collected herself enough to speak.
"No, Mr. Seo is just a friend," Phil said, and mentally kicked herself when this made Mrs. Lennox give her a knowing smile. Out of desperation she said, "I'm engaged to someone else."
This wasn't strictly true — she had approximately as much chance of marrying Leopold as of flying to the moon — but it wasn't quite a lie. Last year, when she had realised the real nature of her tangled feelings towards him, she had decided she would never marry anyone but Leo.
Mrs. Lennox simply smiled even more knowingly. Phil was disgusted to realise that to this woman, little things like engagements and even wedding vows didn't matter.
"Has he always been interested in photography?" Mrs. Lennox asked next.
Phil wondered if she was dealing with a lunatic. "For as long as I've known him, yes. Why?"
With one of her fake giggles Mrs. Lennox said, "We both know what I mean. How much will he ask to keep those photos hidden?"
Phil did some very quick deductions of her own. Fact: Mr. Seo had seen something incriminating last night. Fact: Mrs. Lennox believed he had taken pictures. Fact: she believed he was going to blackmail her.
The situation was so absurd that she couldn't help laughing.
Mrs. Lennox misinterpreted her reaction. "He's already given them to Lennox?" She ground her teeth and said a few words that were better-suited to a barroom than a drawing room. "Let me be perfectly honest, dear: my husband is a disgusting... Well. I'm too delicate to say the word. But he is still a viscount, and I'm not going to let him divorce me. If he tries to ruin me I can ruin him. But if he has photos? That's a different story."
Phil made a note to ask Mr. Seo if there was any truth in the vague accusation. Lord Kilskeery had struck her as nothing but a very ill man. After five minutes with his wife she thought she knew the cause of his illness.
"You're completely wrong," she said. "Mr. Seo has no photographs of you and he isn't a blackmailer. Your husband hired him..." because he thinks you're poisoning him "...to solve a mystery."
Mrs. Lennox finally wiped the smile off her face. "Really?" She seemed to have suddenly had a realisation. "I never thought Lennox was such a fool. Paying for it when Eames is begging to do it for free?"
Phil didn't have to understand this to know it was extremely offensive.