Belcourt Manor gave every indication of being both a murder and a mystery. which might or might not be connected. A horror has come to Belcourt Manor … It wasn’t like the Colonel to be so dramatic. Why couldn’t he just say what he meant? Did he expect his letter to fall into enemy hands? Did he expect his father to open it, and hadn’t wanted him upset? What could be so horrific that the Colonel didn’t even want to hint at it?
Questions without answers. Best to stick to the situation at hand. Work it through. Who killed the Colonel, and why? And why kill him in such an extreme manner? So far, it seemed I was faced with two main possibilities. One; the Colonel was killed by the horror. Whoever or whatever that might turn out to be. Or two; he was killed by whoever sent the death threats to Walter. I sat up a little straighter as a third possibility suggested itself. That this was the result of something out of the past. The Colonel’s past. The trailing end of some old investigation; something missed or overlooked at the time.
The one thing the Colonel had feared the most: that his family might be punished for the life he’d led.
The Colonel and I had worked a number of cases together. Usually, I was left to run my assignments alone. I preferred it that way. If only because it meant there would be fewer questions to answer afterwards. But sometimes the Colonel would just turn up. Not to take charge, and not because he didn’t trust me to do things properly, but because he was interested. Like the Case of the Trans-Siberian Underground Railway. I had no trouble remembering that one.
It started with people going missing, and then turning up again hundreds of miles away from where they should have been. I followed the clues, and the Colonel followed me, and we ended up going underground, into the deep dark places of the Earth. I could still remember running through endless caverns, miles and miles beneath the surface of a country that doesn’t even exist any more. Following the long silver railway lines as they stretched away into the darkness, only illuminated by the phosphorescent glow of a blue moss growing in thick mats on the curving walls. Some said, if you ate or smoked the blue moss it would blow the doors of perception in your mind clean off their hinges. I wasn’t tempted.
I just kept running, following the tracks and the trail of blood left by the horrible laughing thing ahead of me. The Colonel stuck close at my side, just about managing to keep up. I could hear his lungs labouring as he struggled. I couldn’t afford to slow down, for fear the Damned Thing would get away. And then, there was what was coming after us … Every now and again, the Colonel would turn and fire his machine pistol back down the tracks to slow our pursuers down. I never did learn the name of the local agent they’d already killed, drowning out his screams with their awful piping laughter.
The Colonel emptied his machine pistol and hurried after me, fumbling in his pockets for another magazine. And then he made a tutting sound, and shrugged easily, as he realized he’d run out of ammunition. He didn’t say anything, just ran along beside me, trusting me to catch the villain and find us a way out.
And then, there was the Appalling Affair of Roger Styles.
Just a small fishing village, tucked away in some forgotten part of the Cornish coastline, where the locals still took their boats out every day, whatever the weather. The Colonel told me to book into the village’s one and only hotel, and inquire about the fishing. I did sort of hope it might be my long-delayed vacation time. I should have known better.
The moment I started my innocent inquiries, the hotel owner couldn’t wait to bend my ear over all the troubles the village had been having. Fishing boats going out, and never coming back. Nothing left for Search and Rescue to find; not even bits of wreckage or a body floating in the water. Fishermen told of seeing things, shining white, down in the very depths of the sea. Things big as churches or cathedrals, or bigger still. Some of the fishermen were afraid to go out, and it takes a lot to scare a Cornish fisherman. And then there was Roger Styles. The man who was not a man, and never wanted to be.
The Colonel set himself up as bait. Sitting there on the old wooden bench, on top of the cliff, looking out to sea for hours on end, with only an improving book for company. Sitting there till the sun went down; waiting for Styles to come and get him. To shut him up, because of all the things the Colonel had been saying so loudly in the local tavern. I was there too; hidden and waiting. The Colonel sat at his ease, the bait in his own trap, trusting me to do whatever might be necessary. To take Styles down and save the Colonel’s life.
And, of course, there was the last case we worked together, in deepest, darkest Peru. In that horrible hidden city on the Plateau of Leng. A cruel place and a cruel people; if you could even call them people. The roots of their family tree didn’t lie in the earth, but in the stars. The buildings in that city were older than human civilization; huge and blocky, actually unnerving to look at for too long. Their aesthetics hadn’t been meant for human eyes. Everything seemed to lean at some unnatural angle, and their proportions didn’t add up to any whole my mind could accept.
There were windows that showed shifting views of other places, some of them beyond human comprehension. The Colonel vomited every time he looked into a window, so he stopped looking. I couldn’t bring myself to stop, because every now and again I thought I glimpsed something … familiar.
I remembered the Colonel kneeling in an open square, concentrating on the terrible thing he’d brought with him. I stood guard, while he programmed the nuclear device and set the timer. We weren’t taking any chances with the awful people of Leng.
I remembered them all. Old cases, old faces; moments from a past filled with thrilling incidents. I could have sworn we hadn’t left a single loose thread anywhere.
I felt suddenly tired and old. With the Colonel gone, there was a tremendous gap in my life. Every time I remembered I’d never speak to him again, it was like someone kicked me in the gut. I hadn’t realized how attached I’d become to the man, down the years. All the things we’d seen, and all the things we’d experienced, that we could never talk about to anyone else. I never told him my secret, but sometimes I thought he knew. He never brought it up, and I never volunteered. Probably each of us thought we were protecting the other. The Colonel had given my human life a sense of purpose, of direction. He made me believe that the work I was doing mattered. That I mattered.
What was I going to do now?
I made myself concentrate on the situation. If the killer really was one of the people here at Belcourt Manor, what motive could they have for killing the Colonel? Some things had become clear, even in the short time I’d been here. Khan and Melanie were either having an affair, or about to start one. Suppose Khan wanted Walter dead, so he could marry Melanie and take control of the company that apparently meant so much to him … Yes. I could see Khan doing that. He’d worked for Black Heir. You learned to do the cold, hard, necessary thing if you wanted to get on at Black Heir. It wasn’t a place for a man with a conscience.
And then there was Melanie herself. Did she want Walter dead, for her own reasons? Could she be playing Lady Macbeth to Khan, urging him on to remove the only obstacle in their way? If the Colonel had overheard something, noticed something he wasn’t meant to, tried to protect his father … Yes. I could see that happening.
Next, Diana. Who had already told me how much she missed living at the Manor and all that went with it. What would she do to get her old life back? Did she perhaps plot to kill Melanie, so she could remarry Walter? The girl I remembered from Paris would never have been capable of doing anything so cold-hearted, let alone kill her own son, but Paris was a long time ago. People change.