Page 16 of The Shadow Key

Linette Tresilian hesitates. ‘I just wish Dr Evans had not died in such a manner.’

Again, that tingling in his fingers. Something is missing here. Henry wants to ask more, to exercise that muscle which – until this moment – he thought he had left behind in London, but she is turning away, a pained expression on her face.

‘Please, let us not speak of it. He is gone and buried, surely that’s the end of it? Come,’ Linette Tresilian says, brusque, unbending. ‘Let me show you the house.’

She leads him through each room.

The first is the study, where a rattan examination couch lies on its side, its seat ripped. A small bookcase has been emptied of its contents. Sheets of paper litter the floor and pictures have been torn from the walls, a desk and chair upturned; one of its legs has snapped and lies at an angle, splinters pointing upward like little knives.

On the other side of the house is a sitting room, its furniture too upturned, which leads into what Henry must assume was a small but well-stocked library for the shelves are empty, the books they once housed scattered across the rug. At the back of the gatehouse in which Angharad and Aled are already at work are a small kitchen, larder and washroom. Upstairs houses two bedrooms and an unexpected quantity of feathers, their origins one must assume having come from the mattresses and pillows which have been so brutally shredded. Every single room has been left in disarray with much of the furniture either broken or damaged.

Having returned to the hallway Linette Tresilian excuses herself to speak with the servants and Henry waits, pushes his hands deep into his pockets.

Nothing has been spared; whoever did this ensured that Henry could not stay here, and it baffles him as to why. What possible reason is there? Who would cause such wilful damage?

I cannot deny I have my suspicions.

Henry sinks to his haunches, picks at a smashed vase marooned on the rug like flotsam.

Linette Tresilian knows who, though she will not confess to it. Why?

Thoughtful, he runs his hand across the back of his neck. Dr Evans could easily have died of heart failure. There have been many people who suffered sudden shocks to the heart having otherwise been perfectly healthy. It does happen. Perhaps, he muses, he is deliberately looking for a puzzle to solve. A chance to do what he could not in London …

A ray of sunshine glints through the splintered windowpane, sends a shard of light across the floor. Henry’s gaze follows the line of it without thinking; the beam ends just at the tapered leg of a satinwood cabinet, and his gaze sharpens.

Something gleams beneath.

He leans over, reaches his hand under the cabinet. Cannot find purchase. With a grunt Henry flattens himself to the floor, reaches once more, and his fingers brush against cool glass. It takes a moment to fish it out, and when he does he narrows his eyes.

A glass vial, no longer than his middle finger, no wider than two.

It is an unusual bottle. Fluted in shape, grey glass, gold Turk’s-head stopper. Unmarked. As a man of medicine, Dr Evans will have housed many apothecary bottles in his stores, but Henry has never seen one quite like this. In fact, it looks more like a perfume bottle of the sort he saw, once, on the dressing table of a Chancery madam he visited a few times fresh out of university. So, then. Why on earth would Dr Evans own such a thing?

Observation. Contemplation. Interrogation. These are methods that have always served him well when it comes to getting to the bottom of a question requiring an answer, whether that be in the form of a patient in need of a cure or a body concealing the cause of death.

An unexpected fatality. A vandalised gatehouse. Could the two be connected?

He curls his fingers around the vial, weighs the glass within his palm.

I might be wrong, Henry reminds himself. He was wrong before, was he not? But something here does not add up – his gut implicitly tells him so.

‘Dr Talbot?’

Henry rises, hides his hand behind his back.

‘I was wondering,’ Linette Tresilian says when she reaches him, and the imploring look on her face reassures Henry she did not see. ‘My mother will still be abed, but if you’re eager to begin your duties might you accompany me to see Tomas Morgan? I’ve been seeing him every day this week, but I’ve done what I can for him now. My services are nothing, I’m sure, to what yours will be.’

‘Of course,’ Henry says in a rush, eager to be gone.

He steps aside, allowing his hostess to leave first, and as she leads him from the ruined gatehouse, Henry surreptitiously slips the glass vial into his coat pocket.

CHAPTER SIX

Their walk back up to Plas Helyg is achieved in relative silence, more so because Linette keeps a brisk pace and there is no chance to speak easily at such a speed. Her pace is deliberate – she did not like Henry Talbot’s probing questions and what they implied, has no wish to give him the opportunity to ask more. Nor does she like the troubling thoughts now spiralling about her head like a waterwheel because of them.

I assume he performed a post-mortem?

Such a distasteful practice. To think of Dr Evans laid out on a bloody slab, butchered … Linette sets her teeth, continues up the dirt path, the new doctor at her heels.

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