We are getting to the end of this arc soon, and then there'll be the Campania Arc where we'll see Papa Undertaker again!

Lucky Number Thirteen

~O~

One of us in this very room is in fact the murderer

-Agatha Christie, And Then There Were None-

~O~

The key wasn't found in Sebastian's bedroom, so Arthur suggested they check the bedrooms and luggage bags of the guests. This had to be done by gender to avoid embarrassment and maintain decorum so they were split into two groups and headed off.

Irene had the most luggage out of the four of them. She'd come as though she'd planned to spend a week in a lavish country house, with boxes of wide-brimmed hats pinned with feathers, and dresses strewn with glitter and silk. Charlotte and Ran-Mao knelt on the floor, less interested in the search and more interested in the colourful menagerie.

Mey-Rin, ever dutiful maid that she was, peered between the clothes hung up in Irene's closet. Something caught her eye and Irene gasped coquettishly.

"Oh my!" She blushed, "I can't believe I left that out."

It was a photograph of Irene and Grimsby, both dressed primly and smiling genuinely at the camera. "I hadn't heard that you two were in a relationship so yesterday was quite a surprise," Mey-Rin commented as she adjusted her glasses to examine the picture better.

Irene chuckled, embarrassment tinting her cheeks a lovely shade of pink. "I'm sorry to have surprised you then. I'm twelve years older than Grimsby so it's a little mortifying to tell people."

Charlotte's head snapped around so fast had she been a normal human she would have instantly dislocated her spine. "You're WHAT?" She dropped the shoe she'd been examining and rushed over to Irene, eying the woman up and down. "You don't look nearly that old! What kind of skin treatment are you using?"

The older woman – now revealed to be even older than she appeared – preened happily at the indirect compliment. "Thank you, but it's a secret!"

Charlotte batted her lashes dramatically, playing up her pretty face. It was a near irrefutable fact of life that pretty people were drawn to other pretty people, especially when that beautiful person looked like them and both existed within the confines of Victorian era England social mores, where money and good looks held much sway.

Besides as much as Charlotte didn't actually need anti-aging treatments, establishing rapport with other people always meant that they were more inclined to help you later on.

She tapped her pink bottom lip with a gloved finger. "A secret?" She echoed. "That sounds mysterious! You won't even give me a hint?"

True to expectations, Irene giggled and ushered her closer. Charlotte huddled up to her like they were two schoolgirls trading secrets. "Well," she stretched out the word.

Charlotte listened as she divulged the secret to her youthful appearance, gasping and making interested noises when appropriate even though the information was far more benign and banal than she thought it would be. Honestly it didn't even involve bathing in the blood of younger girls.

"I brought along a bottle of it with me since I drink it every morning and evening," Irene confessed at the end. "It does wonders for the skin! Oh but you don't need it," she smiled kindly at Charlotte, "why you can't be more than twenty-five!"

"You're right! I'm nineteen," Charlotte lied chirpily and then she turned around and burst out laughing. "Ran-Mao what are you doing?"

Irene screeched, running over to the other girl who had a pair of clean white bloomers on her head. "No, stop it! You can't wear that on your head!"

Charlotte cackled at the sight, glancing at Mey-Rin to see if she was watching. The redhead was staring with dumbfounded eyes at something in her hands and trembling minutely. The object she was holding didn't look particularly shocking; it was just a small stopped bottle filled halfway with a dark red liquid.

Apparently this new fear was enough for the redhead to overcome her previous dread of the blonde; she didn't even flinch when Charlotte glided over to her in that disconcerting way she did. "Ms. Charlotte, I found this in Ms. Irene's bag! Do you think it's…!" Mey-Rin glanced at Irene nervously and then hunched closer to Charlotte. "Do you think it's, you know…"

Tamping down the urge to laugh in the face of the other woman's fear, Charlotte studied the bottle and its contents. This was probably the anti-aging tonic Irene had told her about, distilled and mixed with other ingredients until it looked very much like watery blood. Charlotte opened her mouth to tell her exactly what it was, and then the thought of Mey-Rin and the other servants panicking because they thought they had a vampire in their midst proved to be too funny to pass up.

"Yes," she said with a completely straight face. "It is definitely blood. It must be! She looks so young! The only possible explanation for it is that she's a vampire."

"You really think so?" Mey-Rin's eyes bulged behind her glasses. Then she noticed what was going on behind them and squeaked. "Ah, Miss. Ran-Mao please don't stretch Ms. Irene's clothes like that!" She put the bottle back into the suitcase she'd fished it from and ran to help.

Charlotte snickered softly, watching the scene wondering how the boys were getting on. "I think we've gone through all of Ms. Irene's things," she walked over to Ran-Mao and plucked the underwear off her head, replacing it with one of Irene's hats instead which at least made the two women less mortified. "Let's check Ran-Mao's things next, and then mine and Mey-Rin's."

oOo

By the end of the search the guests were no closer to discovering an answer and they all returned to the main room a little more demoralized than before.

"In the end we didn't find anything useful. The key wasn't there after all," Arthur slumped in his seat, staring pensively at the table.

"Sebastian must have hidden the key somewhere else," Ciel said.

"Or the culprit threw it out the window," Lau suggested. "It's so small, you'd never find it in this storm. It might have been washed away or buried under the mud for all we know."

Even if we found it it's not as though it would tell us who the killer was, Charlotte thought but didn't say because if everyone was going to go chasing after red herrings it wasn't going to be any of her business. Especially if they planned to do it in this rain like the servants were.

Bard turned to scowl at her, an unlit cigarette between his teeth. "Are you coming or what?"

Charlotte arched an eyebrow at them and pointedly fluffed her soft, well-combed and styled hair. "What, in this rain? You must be mad," she replied loftily. The angry, almost contemptuous glare he aimed her way was brushed off like it was a dead leaf that had landed on her shoulder and

Ciel opened his mouth like he wanted to call them back. Then he huffed and leaned back in his chair, his fingers linked together to form a perch for his chin. He glanced at the blonde girl and scowled. God she was annoying, he thought although he was beginning to realise that most of her irksome qualities came from the fact that she was very similar to him.

It was in the way those blue eyes tracked every person's movement, running over them like they were characters in a mildly interesting book or play and she an outside observer utterly unbound and unbeholden to their laws. Charlotte stood by, cataloguing personalities and personal quirks with a smile on her face and Ciel was almost certain that if she chose to she could become a very difficult foe or at least an annoyingly persistent hindrance.

Until then he was stuck with her. He was definitely going to mend that loophole in Sebastian's contract. "You're not going to help them?" He asked aloud.

Charlotte stopped checking her locks for dry strands. "It would ruin my hair," she chirped.

"Your hair is the least important of our problems," Woodley grunted. "Honestly this is a waste of time."

"I agree," Grimsby conceded, albeit very reluctantly. He got to his feet and started to leave the room before Woodley snarled at him and asked where he thought he was going. "I was just going to grab some things for work. I do have a deadline for my script, and we are stuck for the time being."

Arthur straightened up in his seat. "Please wait a minute. We don't know the killer's identity yet so until we have more information and to avoid more casualties it might be safer if we all moved as a group."

Lau took a puff of his pipe which no one had noticed him light. He exhaled a puff of fragrantly spicy smoke and smirked. "True. If the killer is one of us, moving as a group would certainly be best."

"What do you mean by that?" Charles frowned at the Chinese man who only smiled cryptically. "If they're not amongst us then where would they be?"

Irene gasped. "Do you mean…they could be hiding outside?"

"Even if they were, they couldn't enter a locked room or wander about in a storm without leaving some sign of their presence," Ciel pointed out.

"But what if there was a fourteenth person," Lau's smirk widened, smoke curling from his nose and lips like the breaths of a dragon, "who could make the impossible possible?"

Woodley scoffed. "Ridiculous," he barked though he didn't sound totally sure. "Someone like that could never exist!"

"'Never'?" Lau repeated, amused. "In this world there's never such a thing as 'never'. If there was a mysterious fourteenth member hiding in this manor, creeping through the grounds and waiting patiently to pick us off one by one…" he chuckled darkly, "why they might already be at our door…"

Irene looked like she was about to burst into tears or faint, again. Woodley looked shaken but he still scowled and folded his arms across his chest, diamonds glinting in the light. "And I'm telling you, such an outlandish theory could never be real!"

And that was the moment the servants threw the door open, dragging a bound and cuffed, black-clad lump between them. "Young master, we've captured someone suspicious! Come on, get in here!"

This new person was a man; tall and slim. Elderly, with sharp wine-red eyes, a square jaw and thin lips turned down in what looked like a natural frown. His hair was the colour of rich black ink, and it had been slicked back off his face with enough pomade and product to make it appear shell-like and shiny.

Whoever he was, he didn't look nervous or angry about being tied up by a bunch of unfamiliar people, and simply eyed everyone with mild interest.

Charlotte wanted to laugh so hard that she choked on her giggles and had to turn to face the window to swallow her snorts.

"Wha-? He was real?!" Grey yelled and Charlotte almost lost it at the incredulous tone of his voice. "Where on earth was he hiding?!"

Lau pulled the pipe from between his lips and smiled. "I didn't think that the 14th guest would show up this soon. Even I am a little surprised," he rose to his feet and walked over to the man. The whole room took a breath as he placed a hand on the newcomer's broad shoulder, and then his mysterious and knowing expression disappeared like smoke and he grinned a clueless grin. "So, who're you again?"

Ciel resisted the urge to slap his forehead. The man smiled back, a slow and knowing curve of the lips that made you feel like he was in on some cosmic joke and you weren't invited to know. "My name?"

To everyone's surprise other than Charlotte who had just managed to get herself under control, Ciel got up and nodded cordially to the man. "It's been a while, Reverend Jeremy."

Lau cocked his head and looked curiously at Ciel. "Earl, is this old guy a friend of yours?"

"Old?" The man muttered under his breath, affronted.

"Y-Yeah," Ciel replied, stumbling over his surprise before he caught himself and made a brief introduction. "This man is Father Jeremy Rathbone. He's a popular advisor to the local church and somewhat of a famous person in certain circles."

"What the hell? Like I'd trust a suspicious-looking guy like him!" Woodley accused not without good reason which was a first. "Like we said before, the only one who could have committed the murders is the 14th person without an alibi! No matter how you look at it, it has to be this guy!"

Jeremy's turned his sharp smile on Woodley. "Actually, your reasoning is utter nonsense, Mr. Woodley."

The man started and took a step backwards, unnerved by the expression on his face. "How did you know my name?!"

"Looking at your rings, it's quite obvious," Jeremy replied easily. He leaned closer and Woodley leaned back instinctively. "Furthermore the only place you'd be able to mine a large diamond like that would be South Africa. In addition to that the only way you'd be able to get the special round, brilliant cut this diamond has is with the latest polishing machinery developed by the Woodley Company. Considering the calibre of guests invited to the Earl's home, it's very likely that you are Mr. Woodley. Am I wrong?"

Woodley scowled and retreated, muttering curses under his breath.

Arthur stepped forward. "How did you get here? More than that, how long have you been here? And for what reason did you even come?"

"Sheesh, nothing but questions," Jeremy scoffed. He turned to Bard. "Would you mind opening my bag?"

Bard unclipped the portmanteau briefcase and opened it to reveal the snowy owl Charlotte had released the night before. It was lying on its back with its eyes shut.

"I-Is it dead?" Mey-Rin feared.

"No," Jeremy replied dismissively. "But it was resisting so I gave it a mild sedative. It should wake up in a few minutes. There is a letter attached to its claw. Please look at it."

Ciel unrolled the tiny piece of paper that sure enough had been inside the letter canister tied to the owl's left leg. "What does it say?" Lau asked.

The Earl's eyes scanned the paper briefly, and twitched minutely as if he wanted to scowl. "It seems that he foresaw his death and sent a letter to Jeremy while he could," he crushed the paper and shoved it into his pocket.

"But you can't prove that he isn't the killer with just a piece of paper!" Grimsby argued. "If he came from outside he could very well have committed last night's murders!"

"Actually," Jeremy interjected. "I have a simple solution to your lack of confidence. If one of you would be so kind as to check my coat pocket…"

Finny was the closest to him and he stuck a hand into Rathbone's coat pocket. From the damp and lined inside he produced a small, wrinkled bit of paper.

"It's a…ticket?" The young boy frowned at the printed words, smeared a little by the rain. "It's a ticket for a play that happened yesterday. It's for the evening show of March 12th. The place and program are um...the la...the la-"

"The Lady of the Lake at the Lyceum theatre," Jeremy supplied smugly.

"Yes, I recall that there was a performance of The Lady of the Lake last night," Irene confirmed. "There's another performance tonight as well."

Jeremy nodded. "Indeed, I went to the Lyceum theatre in London last night to watch the play which ended after 10 p.m. Even if I took a hansom cab and threw the driver a sovereign, it would still take over two hours to get here. Of course there are countless other ways of getting here, but there is only one truth."

"Essentially you are claiming that you could not have been involved in the killings because you were in London last night, am I right?" Arthur said. "That is the truth?"

The reverend nodded. "As expected of a master novelist," he commented. "Thank you for speeding up the conversation."

"How did you-?"

"You can find out a lot about people's jobs and the like from examining their looks and habits you know," Jeremy grinned, and then he straightened up and eyed the ropes binding him with disdain. "Well, now that your doubts have been assuaged, would you mind getting these ropes off me? It seems that the air around this mansion is heavy with the smell of a crime that will rid me of my boredom."