The Hand on the Wall(63)

Leo had been in the house all day; he had never left the property. On impulse, when the car was halfway down the drive, Leo said, “You know, if you don’t mind stopping, I feel a bit unwell. I think I may have to go back to bed for the afternoon, if that’s all right. The walk back up will help, I think.” He got out of the car and returned to the house.

One very good thing about Albert’s house was that if you didn’t want to be seen, you did not have to be. The size alone made this possible, but the various little passages and nooks made it simple. He watched George Marsh send the security guards to the four winds, he watched Montgomery cleaning things away while he listened to the radio. George Marsh had meandered around all day, slept a bit, and generally done nothing at all until nightfall, when he made his curious journey into the garden. Leo didn’t dare follow him down into the dome, but he watched him come back up covered in dirt, go to his car, and retrieve a bundle. The bundle did not come back up again. So when George Marsh went inside the house, Leo went down under the dome to see what had been put there.

Now he was aboveground again, queasy, and in shock. The shock made everything mild, almost reasonable. He had just watched George Marsh bury Alice’s body. Leo had seen dead bodies before; in his art-student days he did medical illustrations for money. He had seen human parts in basins and pans and attended autopsies. After the war, he had been unfortunate enough to be present at two suicides. This, however, was something entirely different and new and numbing. It made no sense, and it demanded to be understood.

Which was why Leo was standing on the patio, shivering and wet under a sliver of a moon, planning his next move. What did you do when you were in a remote location with someone you suspected of murder? There were security men about, but they were far. Montgomery was in the house, but he was asleep and not physically robust enough to take on someone like Marsh.

The sensible thing would be to slip inside Albert’s office now and call the police. A hundred men would descend on the house within the hour. He could tuck himself away until then.

That was the obvious course of action. Call the police. Do it now. Stay out of sight and wait.

But Leonard Holmes Nair was not a man known for doing the obvious and sensible thing. He was not foolhardy, but he often took the other path, the one less traveled. Whatever was going on with George Marsh—there was a story there, a story he might never know if the police raided the house and took him away. This story that was clearly fairly complicated, because if George had killed Alice, why had he brought her back? Questions would linger for the rest of his life, and that was a prospect that troubled Leo quite a bit.

Then again, confronting a man who was used to physical fighting and was probably a bit on the nervous side also didn’t seem like a good option.

So what was it to be?

Leo looked to the moon to help, but it simply hung in the sky and told him nothing. The cold was penetrating his clothes. At least the smell was starting to leave his nose. He would never feel the same way about the scent of fresh earth again. He had gone to the underworld and returned, changed.

He opened the door to Albert’s office and switched on a small, green-shaded light at the desk by the door. He was fairly certain that Albert kept a revolver in the desk. He tried all the drawers but found them locked. He searched the top of the desk for a key, rummaging through papers, telegraph slips, pen and pencil containers, looked under the phone. He did the same to Mackenzie’s much neater desk on the opposite side of the room. He spent a fruitless hour delicately ransacking the room before pausing to lean against the cold fireplace. The French clock ticked away the midnight hours.

The clock. This chunk of green marble, fabled to have been among Marie Antoinette’s possessions. Leo picked it up. It was a heavy piece, weighing twenty pounds or more. He lifted it over to one of the reading chairs and set it down, flipping it on its head. He felt around for the catch that Albert had shown him those years before, that snowy day in Switzerland. His long fingers worked the base of the clock until he felt the small indentation, barely noticeable. He pressed on it and felt something give—the little drawer in the base. He flipped the clock upright and pulled it open, revealing a small collection of loose keys.

“Albert, you maniac,” Leo said, snatching them up. A few tries revealed which ones opened which drawers, and a bit more poking turned up a small but powerful-looking revolver and some ammunition. Leo had never loaded a gun before, but the general mechanics of the thing seemed clear enough.

Five minutes later, he was making his way out into the great open atrium of the house, his steps echoing against the marble and crystal and miles of polished wood, this cathedral of wealth and sadness. It seemed best not to sneak up on Marsh; one doesn’t want to creep up on a person who has just buried a body in a tunnel at midnight. Better to make it loud.

“Hello!” he called. “It’s me, Leo! George, are you up there?”

George appeared on the landing in seconds, dressed only in the bottom half of some pajamas.

“Leo?” he said. “What are you doing here? How long have you been there?”

His tone gave away nothing, but his question did.

“I came back,” Leo said again. “God, it’s dismal. Come have a drink.”

George hesitated a moment, gripping the rail, then said, “Of course, yeah. A drink.” He walked along the balcony rail, looking down as he approached the stairs. “Anyone else come back? I didn’t hear you.”