“You were here last night, were you?”
“I was, my lord. Only, as I told Mr. Leigh-Jones, it is the practice of Mrs. Campbell and I to retire to our rooms by eight o’clock. The first we knew anything was amiss was when the constables came pounding on our door in the attic.”
“So you didn’t hear the shot?”
“No, my lord. My hearing’s not what it used to be-nor Mrs. Campbell’s.”
Sebastian let his gaze drift, again, around the old hall, assessing the distance from the front door to the staircase and the passage beyond. If Yates had been standing on the stoop as he claimed when he heard the shot, and then rushed inside to find Eisler dead, would the killer have had time to escape the parlor and run down the shadowy passage-or up the stairs-without being seen?
Sebastian doubted it.
He said, “Is there a door that leads from this floor to the rear yard?”
“There is, yes. At the end of the passage there.”
“May I see it?”
The butler gave another of his creaky bows. “If you will follow me, my lord?”
Moving with doddering slowness, he led the way down a narrow corridor made even narrower by more furniture lined up on either side. Sebastian counted four doors opening off the passage, plus a set of steep, narrow steps leading down to what he assumed was the basement kitchen. The entire house reeked of decay and stale cooking grease mingled with the smell of an old man’s unwashed clothes and some other, indefinable odor to which Sebastian could not put a name.
“I’ve heard of you, you know,” said the butler, drawing back a heavy iron bolt on the door at the end of the passage. It was an old door, Sebastian noted, shrunken and warped by age, so that it did not fit its frame. “In fact, I’ve followed your career with a certain morbid fascination. And I must say, it’s interesting you should ask about this door.”
“Oh? Why’s that?”
“After the constables left last night, I naturally checked to make certain that all the windows and doors were secure.”
“And?”
“This door was open.”
“You mean, the bolt was drawn?”
“More than that, my lord. The door itself was standing quite ajar. It’s possible, of course, that the constables threw it open in their search for the suspect-he ran off, you know, as soon as Mr. Perlman came and discovered him standing over the body. But I did find it peculiar. I mean, I myself heard Mr. Perlman say the blackguard ran out the front door. So why would they bother? And if it was the constables who opened the door, then why didn’t they close it? Shockingly bad form, if you ask me.” Campbell dragged open the door and bowed as a chorus of birdsong filled the air. “After you, my lord.”
Sebastian stepped onto a terrace of uneven slates strewn with dead leaves and broken branches and crowded with row after row of birdcages. In the largest cage near the door, half a dozen black crows flapped their wings in frustration. Other cages held everything from sparrows and doves to a white owl and one very disgruntled-looking, long-haired black cat with a long bushy tail and glinting green eyes.
“Mr. Eisler was fond of birds?” said Sebastian, going to stand before the cat’s cage. The cat blinked and stared back at him in sulky discontent.
Campbell cleared his throat. “I don’t know as I’d say he was exactly fond of them, my lord. But he was always buying them.”
Sebastian glanced over at the wooden-faced butler. “And doing what with them?”
The butler stared out over the overgrown ruin of a garden, toward a crumbling brick wall and the collapsed roof of what might once have been a stable. “That I couldn’t say, my lord.”
Sebastian studied the aged retainer’s carefully composed features, then turned back toward the house. “Do you know if Mr. Eisler was expecting any visitors last night?”
Campbell waited until they were back inside and the door was carefully relocked before saying, “Mr. Eisler frequently had visitors.”
“Oh? Anyone in particular you remember?”
“I’m afraid my memory isn’t what it used to be, my lord.”
“Like your hearing.”
Campbell slid the bolt home with quavering fingers. “Just so, my lord.”
Sebastian let his gaze drift around the cluttered space. Many of the paintings, he now realized, were priceless; he spotted a Van Eyck, a Fouquet, and, half-hidden behind the open door to the kitchen stairs, a massive Tintoretto. “The only staircase to the first floor is the one in the hall?”
“Yes, my lord.” Frowning, the butler leaned toward him, a suddenly arrested expression sharpening his features as he peered up into Sebastian’s face.
“What is it?” Sebastian asked.
“Have you by chance been here before, my lord?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“You’re quite certain you didn’t come one day last week, to see Mr. Eisler?”
“Quite certain.”
The butler pursed his lips, his brow furrowing as he subjected Sebastian to a narrow-eyed study. “Yes, you’re right, of course. Now that I think about it, I believe the gentleman in question was slightly darker and perhaps a few years older-and not exactly a gentleman, if you get my drift, my lord? But for all that, there’s no denying the individual in question looked enough like you to be your own brother. . If you don’t mind my saying so, my lord?”
Chapter 9
Sebastian was aware of a strange sensation, like a rush of burning liquid that coursed through his veins, tingling his fingertips and dulling all external sound. As if from a long way off, he heard the old man say, “You don’t by chance have a brother, do you, my lord?”
“A brother?” Somehow, Sebastian managed to keep his voice calm and even. “Not living, no.” At least, not to my knowledge, he thought, although he didn’t say it. He turned deliberately toward the darkened parlor beside them. “You say Mr. Eisler was found in here?”
“He was, my lord.” Campbell went to open the faded drapes at the front windows, filling the room with dust and a dim light half-obscured by thick wavy glass coated with the grime of ages. “Sprawled on his back just there. Quite ruined the rug, I’m afraid.”
The chamber was long and narrow and crowded like the rest of the house with a discordant jumble of furniture and art. Sebastian recognized a Rembrandt self-portrait and a Madonna by Fra Filippo Lippi. The carpet on the floor looked like a priceless seventeenth-century silk Isfahan, its far edge disfigured by a large dark stain no one had yet made any effort to clean.
Hunkering down beside it, he breathed in a cloying mixture of dust and blood and a faint but unmistakable whiff of stale burnt powder. Mr. Eisler’s wound had obviously bled profusely. Yet there were no splatters of blood on the nearby wall or on any of the furniture. Sebastian looked up. “How, precisely, was the body oriented?”
The butler came to stand beside him. “He was on his back, as I said, my lord.”
“Yes, but was he facing toward the door? Or away from it?”
“Well, his head was just here”-the old man moved with ponderous slowness, his thin arms waving as if to sketch the position of the body in the air-“with his feet there, nearer the door. So I suppose he must have been turned in that direction when he was shot-wouldn’t you say, my lord?”
“Probably,” said Sebastian, although he’d seen enough men shot in the war to know the force with which a bullet could spin a man around and send him staggering.
He pushed to his feet, his gaze drifting over the strange, shadowy chamber. With its collection of furniture, statues, porcelains, and paintings, the place more closely resembled a storeroom or auction house than a home. “Are all the rooms like this?” Sebastian asked. “Full of furniture and piles of art, I mean.”
“Most of them, yes. Mr. Eisler was something of a collector, you know. I’m afraid Mrs. Campbell gave up trying to fight the dust quite some time ago. People were always. . giving him things.”