Somewhat to my surprise, Shizuru did not take Dashiell to her client or call the family together to expose him. She didn't even start to question him about his motives for playing ghost. Instead, she had me bring him through the secret passage to Colonel Warburton's study. This time, she didn't even bother knocking, but walked right in.
"Colonel," she announced, "I'd like you to meet your ghost."
I ushered Dashiell into the room and shut the door behind us. Warburton stared with wide-open eyes at his brother-in-law.
"Hello, Bennet," Dashiell said, a faint smile playing about his lips.
"You! Then--?"
"No, Colonel, it wasn't a ghost, even if you were afraid it ought to be one."
"But...but..."
"Why?" Shizuru finished for him again. "I thought it might be best to discuss that ourselves and in private before bringing the others into it."
Warburton nodded.
"Yes, yes, of course. Thank you, Miss Viola. You and your associate can go now."
"Ara, but Colonel, I would be remiss in my duty to my client if I did not stay to establish the entire truth," Shizuru said with wide-eyed innocence. Warburton blanched and Dashiell chuckled harshly.
"Yes, Bennet, let them stay. I certainly trust the sound judgment of someone who could see through my little trick."
Dashiell reached around to his back and started to unhook the green dress. As we'd seen before, it was strictly a costume piece; beneath it he had on his trousers and shirtsleeves, having only had to remove his jacket—and what I now realized was a false beard—when he prepared. He folded the dress over the back of a chair, then went to the sideboard and poured himself two fingers of Scotch, neat.
"It's not an unusual story on the face of it, really. I'm sure Miss Viola can hazard a guess." He took a stiff drink.
Shizuru shook her head.
"I try not to guess. Logical speculation is one thing, but guessing is a shocking habit and in very poor form for one in my profession. And there was no reason to guess when I knew I could simply catch you and have you tell us."
"You knew that I was the one playing ghost?"
"When I hear of a female apparition haunting a house, and then I meet a man with a false beard, there is a strong chance of a correlation, which was confirmed when I found a well-used bottle of spirit gum among the 'ghost's' make-up supplies. Spirit gum is used by actors to attach various false properties, but we knew that the 'ghost' didn't appear at close range where such a thing would be necessary. Therefore, the make-up did not apply to the ghost act but to the actor's day-to-day life."
Dashiell regarded her curiously.
"You recognized that my beard was false? I had thought that I'd applied it most carefully. Certainly, none of the family had ever noticed."
Shizuru shook her head.
"It wasn't how you were wearing it, and you did an excellent job matching the color to your natural hair. The problem was the absence of gray. Almost invariably, facial hair will be among the first to show gray, and I could not but help notice that a man with notably graying hair had no gray in his beard. I therefore examined you closely and recognized the telltale signs of make-up."
"I see."
I should have seen it myself, I thought. I'd taken note of Dashiell's appearance, but just set aside the hair color as a quirk of nature without drawing any conclusions from it.
"You know, I thought that you were supposed to be answering Shizuru's questions, not the other way around," I said.
"True, Miss Kuga. Shall we be seated? We may want to be comfortable." Shizuru took the invitation, and Dashiell followed suit. As usual, I didn't seem to count in anybody's "gentlemen do not sit while a woman is standing" analysis which in this case suited me fine. I leaned up against the doorjamb, folding my arms across my chest.
"Well, Mr. Dashiell?" Shizuru prompted.
He lifted his glass to his lips and took a sip. Dashiell's eyes flickered to Warburton, who was sitting stock-still as if frozen in terror, and for an instant a faint, cruel smile played about his fleshy lips.
"I shall say it plainly: Bennet Warburton murdered my wife."
Warburton sagged back in his chair. The thunderbolt had struck, and the anticipation, the tension, had drained out of him. To me, his reaction said a lot. He'd been expecting what Dashiell had announced. Which implied that it was probably true—or at least that he knew Dashiell believed it. No wonder he'd tried to get us to leave.
"I believed...everyone believed...that she'd died in a fall from our bedroom window. It's a casement window, so it was believable, nothing more than a tragic accident. But the truth is that Warburton broke her neck with his own hands and then pushed her dead body out the window to make it seem as if the fall had been responsible.
"I'd have gone on believing the lie had it not been for Mrs. Warburton's death. The grief drove Bennet wild, nearly out of his mind. The night she died, it all came out of him in a frenzy: anger, terror, laments, all of it. He stood at her bedside and he told her corpse everything. You see, he'd come to love Elizabeth, even though he'd originally married her for money and status." He glanced at Warburton and smiled thinly, mockingly. "You didn't realize that I'd been coming up to check on you—or that when I heard some of what you were saying, I concealed myself in your bedroom and listened through the connecting door."
Warburton stared at him with eyes that seemed almost stricken, his gaze silently pleading with his brother-in-law.
"Will you tell them why you killed her, Bennet, or shall I do it?"
The Colonel clutched at the edge of the desk, fingers gripping tightly enough that they slowly turned while, like a drowning man clinging to support. His big head moved back and forth slowly, pleading with his accuser to remain silent. Dashiell, though, would not be swayed.
"She was in love with him, you see."
"His own sister?" I exclaimed, incredulous.
"Yes," Dashiell said softly, all the supercilious cruelty he'd been directing at Warburton draining away as he spoke. "It began in their terms. He was three years older, handsome, dashing, all the things a woman looks for in a prince. I don't know what it was that drove him, but he took advantage of her, seduced her—"
"She was the one who seduced me!" Warburton found his voice. "It was like she was possessed! That was why I joined a regiment to be posted in India, to get away from the vixen!"
"It was a silly schoolgirl's admiration like a thousand girls have every year, but you, you fanned it into something else, something to slake your perverse and disgusting lusts!"
"It wasn't like that, I tell you! The woman was a witch, a--"
"You knew about it already, didn't you?" Shizuru cut the Colonel off, though it was Dashiell she addressed her question to.
"Yes, I did," he said. "Catherine confessed it all to me before we married. She did not want to deceive me into taking what she referred to as an 'impure' bride."
"But you married her anyway."
Dashiell spread his hands helplessly.
"I was in love. What was I to do? Lie to myself and say I was not? And I believe that she loved me as well, regardless of the compulsion he had infected her with. At least, we were happy together for over a dozen years. And what love is free of all troubles?"
Shizuru's expression was gentle, even sorrowful as she regarded him. I didn't know what to think, for my own part. I didn't have brothers or sisters, and if I'd had, I couldn't imagine myself desiring one sexually. The idea made my skin crawl. And while I had to be impressed at the strength of a love that could see past that I couldn't really understand it, not in my gut. It'd be one thing if it had been rape, where the victim wasn't at fault, but to lay naked with someone, put his hands on her when she'd willingly...I remembered again the portrait of the two siblings in the dining room and my gorge rose at the thought of what lay behind those fond smiles.
"I understand," Shizuru told him. "If you truly love a person, then you accept them for who they are, not just the aspects that you like."
"It would have all been well," he said, "had Bennet not come home from India. I...I had hoped that time would have dulled the feelings between them, but I could see the spark there."
"It was like a drug," Warburton sobbed, "like the craving of an opium addict for his next pipe! The first night I slept under my own roof she crawled into my bed! The first night! She was a witch, I tell you, who'd put a spell on me!"
"The affair, if you can call it something so mundane as that, continued all summer and into the fall, until at last came her death. Catherine never talked to me about it, of course, never admitted what was happening, but I could see how it tormented her. I...I'd always suspected that she had taken her own life in order to be free of it all, the strain of the deceit and her terrible passions."
He swung his head toward Warburton, and the tenderness and sorrow he'd shown while talking of his wife were replaced by a searing hatred.
"But that was before I learned what this fiend had done. Since he was unable to resist the temptation, he destroyed its object."
Dashiell took a deep breath.
"I thought at first that his grief might finish him. He was crushed by Elizabeth's death and I considered that to be only poetic justice. But in the end his soul was too small and petty to let emotion for another bring him down, and I determined to have justice."
"So you played ghost."
"It took me some time to think of it, not just the idea but also the way in which I would carry it out, and to assemble the necessary materials without raising questions. But I was ready at last, and begun my work on the very day that Catherine died. She would be the instrument of her own vengeance."
"Vengeance!" Colonel Warburton howled. "You call it vengeance? She was a succubus who trapped me in her web! Twenty years on a foreign continent could not break her spell, so I took the only way out that I could. I had to be free!"
"Free of what you yourself created!" Dashiell snapped, literally trembling with rage. With effort, though, he seemed to master himself. "I'd hoped to make you feel the weight of your own guilt, but it's over now. At least by the time this is done, your filthy secret will be out, and everyone will know you for the monster that you are."
"What--? What are you--?"
"Colonel Warburton, you've confessed to murder in front of three witnesses, two of them completely independent of the matter," Shizuru told him plainly. "Surely you cannot expect this to pass by?"
Warburton stared at her, then back to Dashiell in stupefied horror.
"You...you can't be serious! It's you who's been haunting me, driving me out of my mind!" He pointed at his brother-in-law, his finger trembling.
"I've done nothing illegal," Dashiell snapped back, "while you...It's not the justice that I wanted, but it will suffice."
"But this will mean that it will all come out, the entire story. What will happen to Laurel then?"
"Can you believe it? After all this, he wants us to think he cares for anything but his own neck!" Dashiell barked.
"Do you, Colonel?" Shizuru asked, rising to her feet. "Do you really want to spare Laurel the reputation of being the daughter of an incestuous murderer?" Her voice was softer now, almost kind, but there was still steel beneath the velvet that made us all realize that the question was a completely serious matter, not meant rhetorically or mockingly or as a threat.
"No...no, for God's sake! She's innocent of all this! Isn't there a way to spare her?"
"After what you've done, you want us to let you go for her sake?" I exclaimed incredulously. I couldn't believe his gall. Warburton didn't even look at me, though; his eyes stayed on Shizuru as if transfixed.
"Please," he urged. "Please, promise me that you'll say nothing of this to her."
Shizuru regarded him silently for a long moment, then at last nodded.
"I shall not, and Natsuki also."
Something like relief came into Colonel Warburton's features.
"Thank you," he said. In the next instant, he reached for the heavy military revolver which still lay on the desk, his fingers curling around the walnut butt. I snatched at one of my own guns, but Shizuru's hand fell on my forearm and she shook her head. Since Warburton made no move to raise or even aim the pistol, I let Shizuru guide me. Dashiell rose to his feet.
"Come, Natsuki, let us go," Shizuru said, and first Dashiell than she withdrew from the study, with me bringing up the end due to my refusal to take my eyes off him should he mean to try to eliminate the witnesses to his confession. But that wasn't it, and we swung the heavy door shut behind us.
A moment later, we heard a shot.
"What will you tell Laurel?" Dashiell asked. "She is your client."
"The truth," Shizuru said.
"What? But you promised--?" I said, catching up only now to the point of that exchange.
"I will tell Miss Warburton that her father was haunted by the past, which deluded him into mistaking ordinary, natural phenomena for the presence of a ghost, and that in the end he could no longer bear it."
Dashiell nodded.
"It will be hard for her."
Shizuru looked at him.
"She loves her father, and love inevitably means that we will suffer at times."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
We did not spend the night at the Grange, even though it was nearly two by the time we were finished with explanations. Miss Warburton protested for hospitality's sake, but I could tell that our continuing presence was a painful reminder to her, and she didn't protest as strongly as otherwise she might have. The horse and trap were fetched, and a letter written to the keeper of the King's Arms in the village, who might otherwise not appreciate two strangers knocking him up at such an ungodly hour.
Apparently, the patronage of the Warburtons went a long way in Aldington, for the beefy, round-faced landlord's eyes lit up and his face took on a merry smile like an illustration of Father Christmas upon reading the letter, and he not only offered no complaints about the hour but even agreed to Shizuru's request for a pot of tea without a moment's hesitation.
"I can't believe you're drinking tea at three in the morning," I said, sitting on my bed as I levered my boots off.
"But Natsuki, I haven't had a cup since I left London!" she protested with a little pout.
"You won't be able to sleep a wink."
"Natsuki is always saying that I do not sleep anyway."
"Good point." I got the second boot off and wiggled my toes. My feet ached a little on top of everything else, and I had a fair amount of walking to do tomorrow—or later today, I should have said.
"Shizuru..."
"Yes, Natsuki?"
"Can you explain something to me?"
She nodded.
"I believe so."
"All right. I understand about the false beard. But you said that your suspicions were confirmed by what we found later on. You knew, not just believed, that it was Dashiell playing ghost."
She nodded again.
"And Natsuki would like to know how?"
"Natsuki probably won't be able to sleep without knowing how," I said bluntly.
"Well, we can't have that. Let me see: I began by being suspicious of Dashiell due to what looked like a false beard, but that was not proof. It might have been that he was one of the rare exceptions to the general rule for facial hair graying, or that for some reason he used hair-dye, or even that he might have some other reason for the beard unrelated to the case."
"I follow that."
She sipped tea, holding the cup just below her lips to savor the aroma for a moment before drinking.
"We learned that the secret passage which the false ghost employed was not in general use. Do you recall the dust and cobwebs? If it was common knowledge, treated as just another corridor in the house, it would have been swept routinely. But, as was clear this generation of Warburtons made no use of it, had perhaps even forgotten it, and Dashiell was the estate manager. Keys, house plans, and the like would fall within his purview. He had already displayed his knowledge of the house's history when he told us about the fountain, and it was also suspicious that he did not go on to mention the passageway when discussing the folly, since it was a far more interesting point. But then again, I hadn't asked, and he was not in a mood to cooperate in any case."
She sipped tea again.
"The items we found in the hidden room, though, provided the final confirmation. The identity of the ghost as Catherine Dashiell suggested that the widower would have the strongest motive. The spirit gum, as you already know, confirmed my suspicion about a fake beard, and the dress eliminated Dr. Brayle outright from suspicion."
"It did? How?"
"Its size. While a costume dress might well fit badly if not expected to pass close scrutiny, it at least had to be long enough that six inches of trousered legs didn't show below the hem. Dr. Brayle was too tall to wear it properly."
I nodded. I wished now that I'd taken a closer look at the dress; I'd have noticed that myself if I had. But I hadn't looked, which I supposed was part of why she was the consulting detective. In a few short hours she'd investigated, found evidence, revealed the culprit, and exposed a murder.
"It almost seems too easy," I reflected, amazed at how quickly things had gone.
Shizuru's answer to what hadn't even been a question came as a distinct surprise.
"I had wondered if Natsuki had noticed that."
"Yeah, it's almost like—wait, what?"
She set her empty teacup down; it made a soft clink in the saucer.
"The case was too easy to solve. The evidence was not nearly well-concealed enough. And even after I was brought in, Dashiell did not make even rudimentary changes to his plan."
"So what are you saying? It can't be a frame; we caught him in the act. Was he deliberately protecting someone else?"
Shizuru shook her head.
"No, I don't think so. There is no evidence of that, and his manner at the end seemed completely genuine. It is a clever thought, though, Natsuki."
"Just a wrong one," I muttered. "So what do you mean?"
She poured herself another cup of tea, the lateness of the hour apparently not concerning her at all.
"Put yourself in Dashiell's place for a moment, Natsuki. You have overheard your brother-in-law confess to murdering your wife, his sister, to free himself from their passionate affair so he'd be free to marry well."
I nodded.
"What would happen if you came forward and accused him?"
"I suppose that it'd be his word against mine."
"Correct. The crime was over twenty years ago and there were no witnesses, and at this late date the victim's body would provide no physical evidence in the current state of medical science. Furthermore, your story accuses Colonel Warburton of an incestuous affair, a shocking and forbidden act. If guilt does not lead him to confess, it is you who would be deemed mad for making up such a story. I'm sure that 'delusional' would be the kindest description applied to you."
"I see your point."
"Now, consider again. Rather than accuse the Colonel, you plan and carry out an elaborate and Gothic scheme of revenge, meant to torment the killer with his guilty knowledge. You are caught in the act, and you explain your behavior."
It began to dawn on me what she was getting at.
"You're saying that Dashiell would be believed, because of what he was doing?"
Shizuru smiled at me.
"Exactly. Who, the logic would go, would go to such lengths without some powerful, genuine reason for doing so? The mere fact that he was carrying out his revenge implies that he had something to be revenged for." She sipped tea again. "Did Natsuki ever doubt Dashiell's story of incest and murder?"
"No, I didn't...Wait, Shizuru, you're not implying that he was making it up?"
"No, of course not. Colonel Warburton confessed, don't you recall?"
"Oh, yes." I sighed with relief. The whole business had been horrid enough without adding in the possibility that Warburton's suicide had been undeserved. "Sorry; I was distracted by the implication."
She nodded.
"Kannin na; I was unclear. But my point stands—by being caught playing ghost, the burden of proof shifts from the accuser to the accused in the minds of everyone else. Warburton would have been ruined, the scandal run through the neighborhood like wildfire. Even his daughter would have believed it. His life would have been over for all practical purposes, even if he didn't take the final step that he did in reality."
I yawned.
"I must be getting tired, Shizuru. I follow everything that you're saying, but I don't really understand what you're trying to imply."
"My intuitive conclusion: Dashiell's playing ghost in a fairly obvious way, using a secret passage that was unused but not necessarily unknown. I'm sure that Colonel Warburton himself, for example, knew that there actually was a secret passage in the house. There was Dashiell's willingness to face gunfire, although I doubt that a terrified man, his aim further dulled by alcohol, would have much luck hitting a target thirty yards or so away in the nighttime. There was the fact that he took no precautions to thwart the two of us." She shook her head. "No, all along, I've had the feeling that whomever was haunting the Colonel would have been glad to be caught in the act. And after all, it was Dashiell being exposed that led Warburton to confess to the murder, and so be forced to choose between a bullet or the hangman's rope. Thanks to me, Dashiell achieved his vengeance quite nicely. To paraphrase Edgar Allan Poe, he's managed to make the Colonel know why vengeance has come for him, see his enemy dead, and get off scot-free himself. Indeed, I wouldn't be surprised if Dashiell dropped a hint or two in Miss Warburton's ear about hiring a detective in the first place."
"Doesn't it bother you, to be used like that?"
Shizuru sipped her tea. When she spoke, her gaze was intent, the scarlet of her eyes catching glints from the fire.
"Gregory Dashiell loved his wife. It didn't matter to him that she'd carried on an affair that would revolt and disgust most people, or that she couldn't stay away from it even years later. When he found that she had been betrayed and murdered, he didn't hesitate, but went to great lengths to make sure that justice would be done, without making himself into another victim by, say, simply shooting the Colonel. No, in this case, Natsuki, my sympathies are entirely with Dashiell."
I shrugged.
"Maybe you're right." She had a point, and yet...I ought to be agreeing with her, I thought. Speaking favorably of a man's revenge against a murderer.
Could that be it? Did it actually bother me that she approved? Did I think she was supposed to argue against it?
It didn't make any sense, and I was so tired anyway.
"Shizuru, tomorrow I'll have to take care of my own affair."
She nodded.
"I understand. Does Natsuki think she will be long?"
"It shouldn't take more than a day, so I should be back in London the day after tomorrow."
"I see." She recognized the dismissal for what it was, and did not offer to join me as I'd done for her trip to Warburton Grange. "May I wish you good luck on your errand?"
I smiled back at her, grateful for her well-wishes and grateful, too, that she knew where to draw the line between us. "Yeah, I'd...I'd like that."
"Very well; I hope that Natsuki is fortunate in her own forbidden love."
"It's nothing like that!" I exclaimed.
Shizuru's teasing grin grew wider.
"But Natsuki did call it an 'affair.'"
"Idiot! Not that kind!"
My face was flaming as I threw myself down on the bed to the sound of Shizuru's laughter, but at least for that night, my sleep was free of ghosts.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
A/N: For the curious, Shizuru is referring to "The Cask of Amontillado."