Oz was at the breakfast table when Henrietta came down, Dr. Whitmore's examination notes spread in front of him. Three pages in a tight clinical hand, the kind of writing that got smaller toward the bottom of each page as the writer ran out of patience with the subject.
She poured her coffee and sat.
He read to the end of the third page, turned back to the first, read something again, then folded all three and put them in his coat pocket. He picked up his cup.
"I want to walk the house," he said. "All of it. Before we speak to anyone."
"The east wing?"
"Not yet. Everything else first."
Eleanor came in with bread she had brought herself, which told Henrietta something about the current state of the household staff. She sat down and Oz asked her two questions while he ate: how many staff were currently in the house, and how many had left since the first death.
Eleanor said: currently seven, including Edmund. Before Fen died, fourteen.
Oz said: the ones who left. Did any of them say why.
Eleanor said: fear, mostly. Two gave no reason. One said she had heard things in the night and would not stay.
Oz nodded. He finished his coffee, stood, and said: "Start with the ground floor."
They walked the house for an hour.
Henrietta had worked enough cases to know what Oz was doing even when it looked like nothing. He walked each room the same way: in at the door, a turn around the perimeter, a pause in the centre. He opened cupboards and closed them. He tested floorboards with his heel. He looked at ceilings. In the long gallery he stopped at a window that faced the east wing and stood there for thirty seconds looking at the exterior wall before moving on.
In the kitchen he crouched next to the fireplace and looked at something in the mortar between the stones. He did not point it out. He stood and moved on.
In the linen corridor on the second floor, where Nell Graves had been found, he walked to the spot twenty feet from the east wing door and stood there for a moment. The corridor was plain: stone walls, a single window at the far end, linen presses along the right side. He looked at the left wall, which was the wall shared with the east wing. He put his hand flat against it.
He said nothing. He took his hand off the wall and continued down the corridor.
Henrietta looked at the wall where his hand had been. Stone, old, slightly damp the way interior walls went damp in autumn in old houses. She could not see anything particular about it.
She did not ask. She wrote down the location in her notebook, the corridor, the wall, the approximate spot, and moved on.
Edmund was in the estate office, a room off the back hallway full of household ledgers going back a century and a smell of cold air and old ink. He looked up when Oz came in without knocking and he did not look surprised, which was its own kind of answer.
Oz sat in the chair across the desk without being asked.
"Tell me what you were doing in the east wing corridor last night," he said.
Edmund put his pen down. He thought for a moment, and then he said: "Checking the door."
"Every night?"
"Every night since Fen died."
"Why."
Edmund looked at his hands. "Lady Victoria asked me to. Before she died." He said it the way people recited things they had memorised long ago. "She called me to her room three days before she died and gave me an instruction. She said: if anything begins happening in the house after I am gone, check the east wing door every night. Make sure the lock holds. Tell no one. Not even Eleanor."
Oz said: "You kept that for seven years."
"Yes."
"When the deaths started."
"I checked the door. Every night. The lock holds." Edmund looked up. "I followed her instruction because she was not a woman who gave them without reason. I did not know the reason. I still don't."
"What else did she tell you."
Edmund was quiet for a moment. Then he said: "She told me that the door must stay locked, and that the lock must be maintained, and that if it ever opens, nothing that comes through it should be let further into the house." He said it carefully, precisely, the way you said a thing that had been too long in your chest. "Those were her exact words. I have not forgotten them."
Oz looked at him across the desk.
"You maintain the scored marks on the door," he said.
"She showed me the pattern before she died. Left the tools in the maintenance cupboard." A pause. "I don't know what it does. I know it needs doing."
Oz stood. "You should have told Eleanor when the deaths started." He said it without heat. "You know that."
Edmund said nothing. He did not disagree.
"From tonight you tell me," Oz said. "If the lock changes. If the pattern changes. If anything in that corridor is different from how you left it."
Edmund nodded.
At the door, Oz paused. "The people who left. The fourteen who are now seven. Did any of them tell you specifically what they heard in the night?"
Edmund looked at the desk. "One of the kitchen maids. She said she heard someone walking in the east wing. Regular footsteps. Back and forth." He paused. "She said it had been going on for months. She thought it was Lady Victoria at first. Then she remembered Lady Victoria had been dead for three years."
Oz said: "Thank you, Edmund."
He went out.
Henrietta was in the library when he found her, working through a shelf of bound estate ledgers. She had found the gap in the records: 1639 to 1643, four years missing from a collection that was otherwise unbroken from 1598 to the present day. She had a note open beside her with the dates written and a question mark.
Oz told her what Edmund had said. He did it in the way she had come to appreciate: sequentially, without editorialising, every relevant thing and nothing else. She wrote it down.
Then Eleanor appeared in the doorway.
She was carrying a small book with a dark green cloth cover, no title on the spine. The cloth was worn at the corners in the way books got worn when they had been opened and closed many times over many years. She held it in both hands.
She looked at Henrietta. Not at Oz.
"My grandmother kept a diary," she said. "Every year of her adult life. In the last year she wrote about a man she had called to Rosemere. He had come to deal with something in the house." She still did not look at Oz. "She describes him. His eyes, specifically. The way he moved. The fact that he carried no visible weapon." A pause. "I believe it was you, Mr. Oz. I used her description to find you. That is who directed me to you."
Oz said: "What did he deal with."
"She does not say directly. She wrote around it." Eleanor's hands tightened slightly on the spine of the book. "I have read this diary many times and I have never been able to find the answer to that question in it."
Oz said: "May I read it."
Eleanor looked at him for the first time since she had come into the room. The look lasted three seconds and contained something Henrietta could not fully read, the same controlled layering she had seen in the doorway the night before. Then Eleanor looked at Henrietta.
"I would prefer you read it first," she said. "If you are willing."
Henrietta looked at the diary. She understood, without being told, why Eleanor was making this distinction. She was not sure she was glad of it. She said: "Yes."
She took the book. The cloth cover was warm from Eleanor's hands and the book was lighter than it looked.
Eleanor left. Oz looked at Henrietta for a moment, then he too went out, which meant he was going back to the east wing corridor to look at the wall again, or to look at something else she had not yet seen. She would ask him later.
She drew the curtain against the afternoon glare and sat in the library chair with the diary in her lap.
She opened it to the first page.
Victoria Veldacre's handwriting was small and precise and slightly forward-leaning, the hand of someone who wrote quickly and thought faster. The ink was brown with age.
The first entry she read was dated some thirty years ago, near the beginning of the final volume, and it said:
He does not carry a weapon that I can see, and yet the room arranges itself around him as though something in it knows better.
Henrietta sat very still.
Then she turned the page.