I am told that Christopher Marken, there with Cecil Cabershaw at the lake house shooting, was long dead. Dead for two days, I’ve heard. Drowned and dead before I fired the shots that killed him. I’m told that my shots (there were three bullets missing from my Webley, but I stand by my earlier testimony that I fired four rounds) were not the cause of Christopher Marken’s death. The reports say he drowned. I cannot account for whatever results Marken’s autopsy have brought forth. I can only say that they are a mistake. Some vials must have been mistakenly tagged. Perhaps tampered with. The samples must have been compromised. I tell you that Marken screamed when I shot him, and I can tell you that he lunged for me, that he had me by my collar, that he whispered words to me as he died, that his hands began dripping a foul wetness down the front of my uniform and that his eyes were screaming. He was screaming. I tell you he was screaming.
You must believe me.
* * *
I feel better now.
My visits with Mr. Ulton have helped. He agrees with me that there is no reason to feel weak merely because I’m seeing a psychiatrist like him. We have decided, after some discussion, that my shooting report should involve the whole of the incident. That it should not be a simple statement of, “Marken had an axe and I shot him.” It is best that I begin with the first disappearance, that I speak of the first bodies, of the shooting itself and, of course, of the lake where I was found. Lake Henpin.
Cecil Cabershaw was the first to go missing and I, of course, was assigned to the case. Cecil has lived for some time, alone, more or less, in the abbey. It is not much of an abbey, I’d say. Arrogant to call it as such, but it has been known by the name for some three or four centuries, now. The villagers wouldn’t know what else to call it. They’re simple, as a rule. I do not mean to fault them for that.
Cecil lives in the main house. That sprawling ancient mess. Not as old as the tower building, of course, but it still reaches back some few hundreds of years. It’s been anyone’s guess why the tower and the house, being part of the same estate, were built so far apart. Half a mile at the least. The tower is near the lake. My father always wondered why a defense tower would be so far removed from the main house and the main road. He wondered why it was so close to the lake. I could tell him, now. I’ve solved the mystery. I am pleased that my father is no longer with us. He would not want this knowledge.
Cecil spent the greater part of his life caring for his elder sister, Maple, doing so since the days of her near-drowning at Lake Henpin. This was some fifteen years ago. She’d been a bright child, but she’d slipped beneath the waves one afternoon, foundered by a cramp is the general belief, though she hasn’t spoken a word since that day. By chance my father and mother were on the lake as part of a boating party, like the ones you see in Impressionist paintings, my father said. He was fond of art. He was fond of calling the Cabershaw house an abbey. The cancer took him on my twenty-sixth birthday, but that’s nothing to this story. Nothing at all.
My father saved her. He was the very one who pulled Maple from the waters. She was limp. Like a rag, he was fond of saying. She’d been down for some time before my father found her. He hauled her up into his boat and he tried to get air back in her lungs, blowing at her mouth and massaging her lungs, pushing at her ribs, literally rocking the boat, as it were, so that the other boats (there were three in the party) came close in order to steady my father’s boat, so that it would not be spilled.
Maple gasped back to life. Heaving air. Father said she wasn’t the only one who gasped. It was like watching the dead come back to life. They’d all given up hope. They’d all thought the water had taken her life and spat back her body. It wasn’t far from the truth, I suppose, because she’s been silent ever since and holds a strange fascination with water. When her parents committed suicide (Albert and Dorline drank cyanide some few months after the lake incident, and then slid into the warm waters of their bathtub, to be found by their maid) Cecil was all that Maple had left. She is beautiful, in a wasted way. Haunting, I’d say. Almost as if her beauty was frozen away in time, caught in some trap with her words. She needs constant care. Cecil gave his life to her. For nearly fifteen years. Then, he went missing. There were signs of a struggle. The bathroom, the same room where Cecil had lost his parents, was smashed up a bit, as if men had been wrestling, tossing each other about. Maple was found sitting quietly in her own room. There was a bowl of oats on her lap. Half eaten. She would not give it up. She still kept the bowl, even when she was moved to the psychiatric ward of the hospital in Wath-upon-Dearne. She said nothing, of course, about any attacks or her missing brother.
The villagers widely regarded Cecil’s disappearance as a simple case of a young man (he was thirty, but that’s young enough) deciding that his life must be lived, and his sister must therefore be abandoned. There were few who blamed him. Few who wondered at the signs of the scuffle in the bathroom. Perhaps he had been in a rage, mad at himself over his upcoming flight? It was a plausible theory, but it is not the work of a policeman to devise interesting theories and move on. We must have our proof.
There were several tracks outside the bathroom. A toothbrush. A razor and a strop. These footprints, though, were largely upon a bed of Copper Beech tree leaves, making it impossible to determine their outlines or origins. My theory was that there was more than one set. I still hold this to be true.
The footprints led to the woods. I lost them several times. I had the dog with me. The one Captain Levetts had trained. Steggs was his name. An Irish Setter. Named after an army friend of the captain’s, I believe. The dog was eager for the run, at the first, but as the woods closed in the hound was less in love with the game. He was shivering, and there was a wetness to him, as if he’d been romping through the morning dew. The woods were humid. The dog was unnerved. Oh, he was still barking and such, but he was looking to me in question. I urged him on. Several times. He kept on past the clearing where the festivals are held. He circled. He whined. We carried on past the tower and its recent renovations, but Steggs did not find it to be of any interest. We moved through the woods. There were more tracks, now. I wish someone else would have seen them. I am sure of them. The late September heat had been about, but the footprints were wet. I can remember thinking that perhaps young Cecil had been in his bath. That his kidnappers had taken him straight from his daily preparations.
The dog and I emerged from the woods at the edge of Lake Henpin on the opposite side from the old docks, across from the boarded up lake house that had been built when the lake was considered a tourist attraction, in the days before the stuffy bastards from Basil College ran their experiments but could not tell us why all the fish in the lake have perished.
Steggs was no longer barking. He was, in fact, hiding behind me, and he was glad of it when I eventually determined that there was nothing to be seen. Had Cecil’s kidnappers taken a boat across the waters? If so, I could find no hint of a mooring or any place where a boat had been slid into the waters. I could find nothing at all, and the dog’s unease was wearing on my mood. When Steggs ran off, I followed after him willingly enough. I wanted nothing of the lake.
The Miller girl went missing only three days after.
* * *
Christopher Marken had been raised in these parts, if you’ll remember. I was actually with him in school. Up to Third Year, I mean. We learned our numbers together, but little else, for we did not mingle. He was standoffish, and to be honest I was a bit of a bully in those days. Marken (we called him Markie) was picked up after school by his father, having been deposited by his governess in the morning. He was good at his books, which none of the rest of us cared for. He left almost before we were out of our short pants. He was little remembered, his absence less mourned.