“A house where history isn’t content to stay in the past,” said Catherine. “Where people can just vanish into thin air, and no one knows how or why.” She turned suddenly, to stare accusingly at Arthur. “Why weren’t you more upset, when I told you Wendy was dead? She was your friend too.”

  “I barely remember the woman,” said Arthur. “She might have thought we were close once, but we really weren’t.”

  “And yet she came all the way from London, just so she could be supportive in your hour of need,” said Marion.

  “Don’t start that again,” Arthur said tiredly. “I promise you; she means nothing to me now.” He turned his attention back to Catherine. “I don’t think you should expect to see Wendy’s ghost any time soon.”

  “Why not?” said Catherine. “Lucas came back.”

  “That was just a bad dream,” Marion said impatiently.

  “This house is full of bad dreams,” said Catherine. “And some of them walk the Hall at night, desperate to be heard.”

  I decided I’d heard enough, and gave Penny the nod. We slammed the door open and strode into the dining hall. Everyone turned around in their seats to look at us.

  “Please!” I said cheerfully. “No need for anyone to stand up!”

  It didn’t look like the thought had crossed any of their minds. I gestured for Penny to take up a position at the end of the table, so she could block any attempt to reach the door, and then I took my time strolling down the length of the room, so I could give everyone my best I know something you don’t smile. They stared back at me, saying nothing. I came to a halt at the head of the table and drew myself up, but before so I could launch into my big speech Marion cut in.

  “Have you found Wendy yet?”

  “Yes,” I said. “We found her body. Wendy has been murdered.”

  I deliberately kept it blunt so I could study their reactions. Catherine just nodded, as though I’d merely confirmed her worst suspicions. Ellen shrank back in her chair, as though she’d been hit. Arthur stared at me. And Marion looked even angrier.

  “Another suspicious death at the Hall? Oh, that’s all we need! How are we ever going to get this business off the ground if the guests keep on dying?”

  “Probably not the best approach to be adopting just now, dear,” Arthur murmured.

  “To hell with that!” said Marion. “I’ll speak how I like in my own house.”

  “Your house?” said Catherine. “Glenbury Hall was here centuries before you showed up, and it will still be here long after you’re gone.”

  “Hold your tongue!” said Marion, infuriated enough to lash out at anyone. “We brought you in to help us, but you haven’t contributed anything useful that I can see. I will not lose the Hall; not after everything we’ve put into it!”

  Ellen sat up straight in her chair, as shock gave way to anger. “Two people have died in this house...and all you can think about is what that might mean for bookings?”

  “Not now, dear,” said Marion.

  “Yes, now!” said Ellen, her voice rising dangerously. “Since when is running a business more important than people?”

  Marion made an effort to be polite, since she was in the presence of outsiders. “What happened to Mr. Carr and Ms. Goldsmith is unfortunate, and very sad, but they were just visitors. Family comes first.”

  “Poor Wendy,” Arthur said quietly. “She came so far to help me, to a place she’d always dreamed of visiting, and the Hall killed her.”

  “No,” I said, and everyone’s gaze snapped back to me. “It wasn’t Glenbury Hall that killed Wendy. She was murdered by someone in the Hall.”

  A heavy silence fell across the table, as everyone stared at me. Marion was the first to recover.

  “Are you saying she was killed by one of us?”

  “There’s no one else in the Hall,” I said.

  “You know who did it?” said Arthur. “You have proof?”

  “Mostly theory,” I said. “But with a certain amount of evidence to back it up.”

  They all looked quickly around the table, searching each other’s faces for signs of guilt, and then turned reluctantly back to face me.

  “Who was it?” said Catherine. “Who killed Wendy?”

  “Have you worked out what happened to Mr. Carr, as well?” said Ellen.

  “Yes,” I said. “It’s all connected.”

  “Do you know where Carr is?” said Arthur.

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea,” I said. “But let’s start at the beginning, so I can walk you through what’s really been going on at Glenbury Hall.”

  I took a moment, to rehearse my arguments. It was a complicated story, and I didn’t want to leave anything out.

  “It’s taken me this long to get to the bottom of what’s been happening,” I said, “because the killer has been tap-dancing like crazy to distract me from realising there was only one person it could have been. It was you, Arthur. All along you’ve been saying you should never have come back to Glenbury Hall. To the house that poisoned your life. You did everything you could to escape from your abusive parents, and the weight of the Hall’s history, but when your life in the City crashed and burned you had no choice but to return home. Even though you knew what being here would do to you.”

  Marion, Ellen, and Catherine stared at Arthur blankly. He looked calmly back at me, saying nothing, defying me to prove anything.

  “All right,” I said. “We’ll do it the hard way, step by step.”

  As always, Marion jumped in to protect her husband. “You can’t seriously believe that Arthur would kill anybody? It just isn’t him!”

  I didn’t make the mistake of arguing with her. I just met her gaze steadily, until she looked away and settled angrily back in her chair. I took my time looking round the table. Ellen was looking to her father for reassurance, but he had his gaze fixed on me. Catherine had shrunk into herself when I announced that Wendy had been murdered, but now I was threatening the only member of the family she really cared about, she found new resources and sat up straight.

  “It couldn’t have been Arthur!” she said sharply. “I’ve known him since he was a child. He’s not capable of anything like that. Tell them, Arthur.”

  He was still looking at me steadily, apparently entirely unconcerned by my accusation.

  “What makes you think I’m the killer?”

  Marion couldn’t keep from cutting in again. “Have you forgotten that Arthur was at the reception desk when Carr disappeared?”

  “No he wasn’t,” I said. “That’s just what he wanted us to believe.”

  Marion turned on Arthur to order him to explain himself, but he wouldn’t even look at her. Marion seemed suddenly lost, unsure what to say in the face of Arthur’s refusal to defend himself. She looked around the table for help, but Ellen and Catherine were just as thrown as she was. In the end, all of them just sat there and looked to me to explain things.

  “From the very beginning,” I said, “it’s been like dealing with a stage magician who keeps fooling you into looking the wrong way, so you won’t see him setting up the trick. Arthur told us that Lucas Carr turned up at reception, signed in, and then went up the stairs on his own. Only to mysteriously vanish before he could reach his room. Lucas must have disappeared, because he never came back down the stairs, which Arthur was watching all the time. But there were no witnesses to support any of this. All we had was Arthur’s word as to what happened.

  “So; let me walk you through it. Step by step. Lucas definitely did arrive at reception. We have his signature in the book, which I sent to my people to verify. But this is what I believe happened next...

  “Arthur escorted Lucas up the stairs, on the pretext of helping him with his heavy suitcases. He already told us how Lucas all but collapsed, carrying those very heavy cases into reception. But once the two of them were inside Lucas’ room, Arthur waited till Lucas turned his back on him; and then broke the man’s neck with a rabbit punch. Which is why there was no spilled blood, or signs of violence, in his room. Wendy told us they were taught how to do that in London, at the self-defence classes their company ordered them to take.”

  “But Arthur was never any good at those!” said Marion, unable to contain herself.

  “That’s what he told us,” I said. “But as in so many things, he wasn’t being entirely truthful. Either way, when it mattered, the technique came back to him. Arthur then searched the suitcases until he found Lucas’ presentation paper, and the documentation he’d brought to back it up. And then he destroyed them because of the threat they presented to him, and his family. I’m guessing he burned them; there are any number of open fireplaces in the Hall, where no one would notice a few ashes.

  “Arthur was then faced with the problem of what to do with Lucas’ body. He could have dumped it in one of the Hall’s many secret rooms....We’ll get to those in a moment....But once the Historical Society turned up, it was always possible they might know about the secret doors and sliding panels, so he had to dispose of the body somewhere he could be sure it would never be found. The one place at Glenbury Hall that has always been famous for accepting bodies in a way that guaranteed they would never be recovered. The old well, in the grounds. But he couldn’t just carry Lucas’ body down the stairs because there was always a chance Marion or Ellen might appear and see him.

  “So Arthur opened the room’s window, and threw the body out. I found recent scuff marks, on the windowsill. Arthur then closed the window, left the room, and locked the door behind him with his spare pass key. I always knew there had to be another. No hotel management would have just the one made, in case they lost it. So...Arthur hurried down the stairs, carefully bringing the small suitcase back down with him, so he could leave it by the reception desk and Marion would have a reason to go upstairs and check on Lucas. Pretty fast thinking for someone who hadn’t planned to commit murder when he got up that morning.

  “Next, Arthur went out the front door, and there was Lucas’ body lying on the grass. The body made a shallow depression in the earth, where it hit. One of the first things I noticed, when I checked the grounds, was a small area of flattened grass and compressed earth right in front of the Hall. Later on, when Arthur tried to kill Penny and me by dropping a gargoyle on us, the heavy stone figure all but buried itself in the ground, and that made me think about things falling, and what affects the impacts would have. Probably still running on adrenaline, Arthur picked up the body, carried it over to the well, and dropped it in. That deep, dark place, that no one has ever got to the bottom of.”

  I stopped and looked at Arthur, to give him a chance to confirm what I’d been saying. He sat perfectly still in his chair, staring calmly back at me. Marion jumped in again.

  “This is all nonsense! How could Arthur have managed all of this without being seen?”

  “He knew you were busy working at the back of the house,” I said. “And that Ellen was busy listening to her music. The only real risk he was taking was that some other members of the Historical Society might have turned up. But fortunately, Lucas had arrived a lot earlier than expected. I’m not sure what you did with the suitcases, Arthur. They had to vanish as well, to back up the strange nature of Lucas’ disappearance. I’m assuming you just dumped them in one of the hidden rooms, till you could dispose of them properly later.”

  “There are no hidden rooms in Glenbury Hall!” Marion said furiously. “No secret doors, and no sliding panels. We looked!”

  “They’re not easy to find,” I said, “but they do exist.” I nodded to Arthur. “After the gargoyle threw itself off the roof at Penny and me, I decided we needed to go up there and took a look around. You tried to put us off by making the only way up there sound too dangerous to try, but you had no idea what we were capable of.”

  “Neither did I,” said Penny.

  I looked at her politely. “Did you want to add something?”

  “No, no, you carry on,” said Penny. “I’m fascinated.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, and turned back to face the others.

  “Once we were on the roof, it didn’t take us long to find a trapdoor that gave access to an old priest’s hole on the top floor. That led us to another secret room, and what we found inside proved that Arthur was responsible for everything that’s happened in the Hall.”

  “What did you find?” said Catherine.

  “The answer to more than one mystery,” I said. “Starting with: why did Arthur want to kill Lucas? A man he’d never even met before? It all comes down to the disappearance of Lord Ravensbrook.” I produced the letter from my jacket and unfolded it to show them the handwritten statement. “Penny and I found this on Lord Ravensbrook’s stuffed and preserved body, in one of the Hall’s secret rooms. It’s a confession, written by Alexander Glenbury, head of the family when Ravensbrook came to call. And, the lord’s illegitimate son. Alexander says he killed his father because he was paid to do it by agents of King James and because his father refused to acknowledge him.”

  Marion was starting to look like a fighter who’d taken too many hits to the head, but she was still ready to fight her corner.

  “What has this solution to a centuries-old mystery got to do with what’s happening now?” she said stubbornly.

  “The past is always with you, in Glenbury Hall,” I said. “The details in this confession make it clear why Lucas had to die. For purely personal reasons; nothing at all to do with the security aspects of his work. When Lucas arrived at reception, he found himself face to face with the Ravensbrook display, and he couldn’t help boasting to Arthur about the important paper he was going to present to the Society. I’m pretty sure it was based on an early draft of Alexander’s confession. The text in this letter is far too smooth, with no contradictions or crossed out lines. Which suggests there had to be an earlier version. This was to be Alexander’s confession to history, so it was important he get it right.

  “Lucas told Arthur what he was going to be saying, and the splash he was sure it would make when he revealed its contents to the Historical Society. And, later, to the world. He had no way of knowing this was something Arthur could never allow. Because once this knowledge became public, it would change how everybody looked at Glenbury Hall. No longer the scene of a famous mystery, and a place of ghosts and wonders...but merely the setting for a squalid little murder.

  “Arthur had nothing left but the Hall, and his new business, so Arthur killed Lucas to silence him. The world had taken so much away from Arthur...he couldn’t bear to lose what little he had left.

  “Now, as Penny commented when we first arrived, old manor houses like this always turn out to be riddled with secret passageways. And this house had more reasons than most. At The Smugglers Retreat, the barman told us this whole area used to be smuggling country. And the Glenburys were famously determined to always have the best of everything at a time when the only way to be sure of that was to have your own supply. What better way to ensure that, than to fund the local smugglers and allow them to hide their nocturnal business behind the Glenburys’ evil reputation? No one would come anywhere near the Hall, because the locals believed the Glenburys were monsters. The smugglers would be allowed to hide their illegal goods in the Hall’s increasing number of secret rooms until they could be moved out and distributed across the country, as long as the Glenburys got their cut.

  “And yet Arthur went out of his way to insist that there weren’t any hidden rooms in the Hall; that he’d spent his whole childhood searching for them, without success. He even invited us to tap on the walls, and listen for ourselves. But Penny and I have since discovered that the hidden rooms were specially constructed so no one would hear anything. On top of that, I’m convinced there are any number of secret passageways, connecting most of the rooms in the Hall. Arthur has been using them to move around the Hall unseen, manufacturing all kinds of ghostly manifestations to distract us from the truth.

  “He was the figure I saw crawling on all fours. As long as he kept his head down, and stuck to the shadows, no one was going to recognise him. But he gave himself away when he used a secret passage to emerge from the bathroom, because he didn’t flush the toilet before he came out. Which he would have needed to do if that was why he’d gone in there.”

  Catherine turned her head to fix Arthur with an accusing stare.

  “Is this true, Arthur? Did you kill Lucas, and my friend Wendy?”

  Arthur met her gaze briefly, but still wouldn’t say anything.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why did Wendy come to Glenbury Hall, if it wasn’t to support Arthur in his hour of need? I believe she was the one who discovered that a first draft of Alexander’s letter still existed. She told Lucas, and he used his resources to track it down. And of course he would have brought it with him, as evidence to back up the paper he was going to present to the Society. Wendy came here to look for that first draft, to make sure the truth about Lord Ravensbrook’s murder would still come out.

  “Arthur decided he had to kill Wendy, because she kept saying that she knew what was really going on and that she was determined to get to the truth of what was happening, whatever it took. He couldn’t risk that. And he was beginning to realise that not everyone was buying into the supernatural atmosphere he’d worked so hard to create. He must have believed a second mysterious disappearance would help to convert any doubters.

  “He was at the reception desk when Wendy came hurrying through the lobby, following Catherine. Arthur saw his chance, and intercepted her. He probably told her he had happened across Alexander’s first draft of the letter, but he needed to check it against the historical texts and documents Wendy had in her suitcase.

  “She had no reason to see him as a threat, so it never occurred to her that it might not be a good idea to turn her back on him. But the moment they were inside her room, he broke her neck with the same rabbit punch he’d used on Lucas.

  “He dumped her body in the corridor, and left her door key in her room, lying in plain sight. He then locked the door with his pass key, and hid Wendy’s body in the same secret room as Lord Ravensbrook. He could always drop her in the well later. Penny and I found her there, and when I saw her neck had been broken, I knew what must have happened to her and Lucas Carr.”