Not a Creature Was Stirring

by Jane Haddam

  You’re getting itchy, Gregor told himself. Then he thought he ought to feel guilty, but didn’t. For one thing, he was much too curious. For another, he was getting angry. If he had been the chief of police in this town and walked in to find the place in this unsecured state, he would have had somebody’s head.

  Because there was nobody’s head he could have, he left the driver standing at the foot of the terrace and climbed the steps toward the front door. The driver was babbling, going on and on about how poor Mrs. Hannaford must have died of her illness, but Gregor paid no attention. It just proved what Gregor had thought in the car—that the man was singularly unintelligent. If this had been a natural death, there wouldn’t have been a whole pile of patrol cars and a medical examiner’s van cluttering up the drive.

  He stepped into the foyer and looked around. There were doors to his right and directly in front of him, but they were both closed. The doors to his left were open. He peered down the long hall they opened on and found the first sign of activity: a young patrolman standing in the middle of the carpet at the far end, looking green.

  “I’m not going back in there,” the patrolman was saying to someone out of sight. “That thing makes me dizzy.”

  Gregor sighed. “That thing” was probably the corpse. Why did they let these people join police forces when they couldn’t stand the sight of an ordinary corpse? Gregor had no doubt this was just an ordinary corpse. If something really strange had been going on here, there would not only have been a patrolman at the door, the entire journalist population of the Philadelphia ADI would have been out there, too.

  Fortunately, he had learned a few things besides the etiquette of jurisdiction in the Bureau. He was a middle-aged man beginning to run to fat, not Clint Eastwood, but he could make people think he was the president of the United States if he wanted to.

  Gregor squared his shoulders, straightened his spine, and sailed toward the green young man. His strategem must have worked. The green young man came immediately to attention.

  “Sir?”

  “Gregor Demarkian,” Gregor said.

  The green young man nodded sagely, as if he’d been hearing the name all his life. Gregor almost felt sorry for him. The boy was scared to death, thinking with fear instead of his brain—and here Gregor was, about to get him in a great deal of trouble.

  Another young man came out of a room on the right, not scared this time but sullen and belligerent. He reacted to Gregor’s stiff-backed presence like a dog to a mailman. He didn’t question Gregor’s authority. He assumed it and hated it on sight.

  “Oh, Christ,” he said. “Another one.”

  “This is Mr. Gregor Demarkian,” the first patrolman said diffidently.

  “I don’t care who he is,” the second one said. “Christ, but I’m tired. Tired to death.”

  “You’re not the one that’s dead,” the first one said.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Gregor edged past the two of them, to the door of the room the second young man had come out of. The desertedness of this place was beginning to make him a little nervous. It wasn’t right.

  He stopped at the door and looked in. He’d half-convinced himself that this wasn’t the crime scene after all. The young patrolman had been talking about something else when he’d said he wouldn’t go back in this room. The medical examiner and the rest of the patrolmen were wandering around upstairs somewhere, where something serious was going on. But something serious was going on here. There was indeed a corpse, stretched out against the fieldstone hearth of the fireplace, its skull smashed. There was a corpse, but there was nothing else.

  Gregor had almost decided he’d followed Alice down the rabbit hole, when he heard steps behind him. They were very forceful steps, nothing that could have belonged to either of the two patrolmen. He turned quickly—and found himself staring into the most physically perfect face he had ever seen.

  Male. Black. Furious. Familiar.

  And dressed in one of those matte-brown suits bought only by the heads of homicide squads of major suburban police forces.

  Gregor Demarkian did not have an exceptional memory for faces, but he remembered this one. It would have been hard to forget it.

  “Oh, damn,” Gregor said.

  “I don’t know what you’re swearing about,” John Henry Newman Jackman said. “I’m the one who ought to be swearing. What the hell are you doing in here?”

  2

  Gregor had never thought about the problems of beautiful men—or even their existence—but standing in this hallway with the broken body of Robert Hannaford in the room behind him, it occurred to him that John Henry Newman Jackman had an unfortunate face. It might have been all right if Jackman had been an actor. As a policeman, he was doomed to be an inhabitant of the worst of memories, and with that remarkable bone structure he was further doomed to be unforgettable. Maybe that was part of what was making him so jumpy, although Gregor doubted it. He’d encountered that kind of jumpiness before. It was called FBI Fever, and its most common verbal expression was: Get off of my turf.

  Gregor stepped away from the door, to make room, and said, “It’s all right, John. I’m retired.”

  “You’re retired?”

  “Two years. Over two years.”

  “But what are you doing here?”

  Gregor supposed he could tell the truth, but that seemed less than tactful. He’d met Jackman in Philadelphia during Jackman’s rookie year, on a case so gruesome it had given everyone involved in it nightmares for months. From what Gregor remembered, Jackman had been a smart rookie, what the Bureau would have called an automatic rise-through-the-ranks. Now he seemed to have done just that, although Gregor couldn’t be sure how he’d landed in Bryn Mawr. Built a reputation in the city and been hired away as a prize, most likely—and that made it all the more important that Gregor not say anything about the patrolman who wasn’t at the door and the medical examiner who seemed to have disappeared. God only knew what was going on here.

  Instead, he said only, “I was invited to dinner. When I got here there were all the cars parked outside and nobody around, so I came in.”

  “And straight to the crime scene?”

  “It didn’t look like a crime scene, John. There were just these two patrolmen. I was looking for anybody at all.”

  Jackman gave him a long look, angry and exasperated. “Crap,” he said. “You’re all I need. I mean that, Demarkian. You’re all I need.”

  If you can’t fight, feint. That’s what they’d taught him in self-defense classes. Gregor remembered it, even though he’d flunked out of every one. He said, “Do you know yet why he was dragged so far across the room? Why somebody didn’t just use his wheelchair?”

  Jackman stiffened. “What do you mean, dragged across the room?”

  “You can see it on the carpet,” Gregor said. He went back to the door and pointed inside. “The nap is all flattened. It goes in an arch from the wheelchair—I assume this was Robert Hannaford?”

  “Of course it was Robert Hannaford. I thought you knew him. I thought you said you’d been invited to dinner.”

  “Hannaford was confined to a wheelchair. You can see it in the way his legs have atrophied. He couldn’t have walked across the room himself—”

  “Why couldn’t he have been sitting in the chair?”

  The chair was an antique wing back, standing against the hearth about a foot from where the head now rested—but not where the head had rested when it had been smashed. Gregor was sure of that. The raw facts of the case were easy to see, even at a superficial glance. There was the body with its shattered skull. There was the wheelchair in the far corner of the room. There was a large black bust of Aristotle, made of marble and smeared with blood along the base. A great deal of blood.

  “The chair,” Gregor said, “is what he stood on.”

  “What?”

  “The chair is what he stood on,” Gregor insisted. “Or she. You can see it. It was in that corner before,
where the indentations are. The bust was what killed him?”

  “There has to be an autopsy, Demarkian. You know that.”

  “Of course I know that. But there’s a lot of blood—a lot of blood. His heart must have been beating when his head was smashed. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be nearly so much. And look at what you can see of the wound. It’s nearly flat.”

  “So?”

  “So, if someone had picked it up and hit him in the normal way, they would have hit with the edge. There’d be an edge line. There isn’t one. Try picking up that thing and aiming it at something. See what it makes you do. It must weigh fifty pounds.”

  “Forty,” Jackman said.

  “It had to have been dropped right on top of him, John. That’s the only way the wound would be flat. Why was he moved?”

  Jackman stirred uneasily. “We don’t know. The daughter found him—Bennis. She found them both.”

  “Both?”

  “Mrs. Hannaford was in here when Bennis Hannaford came in. She’d picked up her husband’s head and was cradling it in her lap. At least, that’s what Bennis Hannaford says.”

  “What does Mrs. Hannaford say?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Nothing?” Gregor raised his eyebrows, but Jackman was turning away, looking back into the room and at the scene. There was so much blood soaked into the rug at the edge of the hearth that even from a distance that spot looked wet. Robert Hannaford didn’t bear looking at. Gregor put his hand on John Jackman’s arm and said, “He’d have been drugged. He’d have had to have been.”

  “Drugged,” John Jackman repeated.

  “As I said, I’d never met him. But I’ve talked to people who knew him, and I’ve talked to him. He was a vigorous old man. He wasn’t senile and he had a temper. Nobody could have dragged him out of that wheelchair and across the room if he wasn’t drugged.”

  “Nobody around here looks like they’re on drugs,” Jackman said. “One of them looks like he has AIDS, but that’s not the same thing.”

  “This is a house full of rich people, John.”

  “Meaning they all go to psychiatrists and get Valium? Maybe.”

  “And there are two invalids,” Gregor pointed out, “or were. There may be painkillers around. I don’t know the nature of Mr. Hannaford’s disability.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” Jackman said, “you know entirely too much. Is there anything else, Mr. Demarkian? Mrs. Peacock in the conservatory with the candlestick? Anything?”

  “Did you find a briefcase?” Gregor asked.

  “No,” Jackman said.

  Gregor almost hated to do it. He could only remember one case like it, in Yellowstone Park in 1971. It shamed him a little to remember how excited it had made him: not potential spies or low-rent drug dealers or even homicidal maniacs, but real people pushed to the edge and over. Pushing themselves over, to be honest. That was how it happened.

  In this case, Robert Hannaford himself may have done the pushing. He sounded to Gregor like a man who played dangerous games on a regular basis. But whoever had done the pushing, here they were.

  He pointed across the room toward the body and said, “Do you see that thing on the floor? That flat metal thing?”

  “What thing?”

  “It’s buried in the carpet to our side of the patch of blood.”

  Jackman gave Gregor an odd look, but he put on a pair of white cotton gloves, crossed the room, and knelt where Gregor was pointing. A moment later, he stood up again, holding a piece of tin about the size of his palm. It was a very flimsy piece of tin, and old. It had begun to crumble around the edges.

  “What is this?” he said.

  “I don’t know,” Gregor said. “I know what it looks like. There are Christmas decorations on the walls outside. Old-fashioned bells and angels. They’re made of that kind of tin. But they’re the wrong shape.”

  “A Christmas decoration.”

  “There aren’t any in here,” Gregor said. “In fact, from the look of this room, I think Mr. Hannaford may have belonged to the bah, humbug school of holiday celebrations.”

  Jackman let the piece of tin drop. “I think it’s time I got you out of here,” he said. “You’re beginning to make me feel weird. You always made me feel weird.”

  “Why? I’m just—”

  “Don’t,” Jackman said. “I’ve heard your lecture on internal consistency. I’ve memorized your lecture on internal consistency. I don’t want to hear it now.”

  “I wasn’t going to deliver a lecture,” Gregor said.

  “You aren’t going to get the chance.” Jackman took off the gloves and put them in the pocket of his jacket. They made a bulge that reminded Gregor of the bulges guns made.

  “Mr. Demarkian,” Jackman said, “you are a suspect in this case. As a suspect in this case, I think you ought to meet the other suspects in this case.”

  “You mean you think I ought to get out of your hair.”

  “Interpret it any way you want to. You’re going to get out of here. Now.”

  TWO

  1

  CORDELIA DAY HANNAFORD WAS sitting in a yellow wing chair next to the fireplace, directly in line with the open door. She was the first thing Gregor saw when he came into the room. She was the only thing he saw for many minutes afterward. She had her arms propped up on the arms of the chair, her back propped up by its back, and her feet flat on the floor. In repose, she was perfect, a Lady of the Manor as imagined by Turner. Her bones were fine and delicate. Her eyes were large and widely spaced and deeply blue. Her hair was white, but thick and glossy, as if it had turned early. It was only when she moved that Gregor realized something was wrong. She tried to turn her head when he came into the room. Her effort was not only slow and painful, but completely without control. First she jerked right. Then she jerked left. Then her hands and arms began to shake. Once they started, she couldn’t make them stop. It was like watching that terrible old movie, Lost Horizon. Cordelia Day Hannaford was physically disintegrating in front of his eyes.

  With Elizabeth, until the last year, reality had been less obvious. In fact, it hadn’t been obvious at all. In the early days, living with Elizabeth’s dying had been an almost hallucinatory experience. She looked well. She almost always felt well. Every once in a while, she went off to the hospital for chemotherapy—and then she was sick. Gregor had come to hate the chemotherapy with a fine hot passion he’d never been able to work up for serial murderers. Or presidential assassins. Elizabeth looked terrible when she came back from the hospital and felt worse. He would leave for work in the morning and hear her vomiting in the bathroom, vomiting and vomiting, like someone who had swallowed poison. When he got drunk enough—and there had been nights; he hadn’t been able to help himself—he started to think they were giving her poison. Then the chemotherapy would be over, and she would be fine again. So fine, he might as well have imagined the whole thing.

  Elizabeth’s last year had been a shock. After five years of sick-and-well, well-and-sick, he hadn’t been prepared for it. Cordelia Day Hannaford’s children would have no such problem. Gregor didn’t know what she had, but looking at Cordelia Day he was sure it had been a progressive disease. Muscles didn’t melt into Silly Putty overnight—and if they did, their owner didn’t accept the change without a lot of panic and denial. Cordelia Day was in pain, but she was at peace, at least about herself.

  The room was very hot. The fire was blazing. Gregor became suddenly aware of a number of unpleasant things. He was still wearing his heavy winter coat over his best winter wool suit. All those layers of insulation were making rivers of sweat run down his back. Then there was Cordelia Day. She was staring at him and he was staring at her—and her children were staring at both of them. Now the movie all this reminded him of wasn’t Lost Horizon, but something by Antonioni, or maybe Bergman, one of those endless black-and-white productions with very little dialogue and a lot of long silences.

  He tried to pull himself back emotionally,
and in the process noticed a few things he should have noticed right off. Cordelia Day Hannaford was covered with blood. There was so much of it soaked into the skirt of her pale blue dress, it had probably been wet when Jackman first saw her. Now it was drying. Thick, stiff clots of it were webbed across the material that covered her knees. They made the dress look embroidered.

  The other people in the room, the children, were not as hostile as he’d expected them to be. Bennis he recognized from her author photos. She was almost too cordial. The tall, lanky young man with the weak mouth and the frightened eyes wasn’t frightened of Gregor. The very young woman who looked so much like Bennis, but wasn’t as pretty, barely registered his existence. What animosity there was, and it was palpable, came from the man with his left leg in a brace and the stout middle-aged woman who stood behind Cordelia Day Hannaford’s chair.

  He looked around the room. There were holly bows everywhere, and candles and ribbons, and clusters of the same kind of decorations he had seen near the study, the ones that were too small to account for the piece of tin on Robert Hannaford’s study floor. There were miniature Christmas trees and miniature Santa Clauses. There was even a miniature crèche, with the Christ child missing from the manger. Tibor would have approved.

  He turned his attention back to the Hannafords, shrugging off his coat as he did so. The two people in the room he hadn’t paid attention to before—a man who epitomized the Complete Corporate Yuppie and a woman dressed like a thirties movie star playing a tramp—were just shell-shocked. Gregor turned to the stout middle-aged woman. Her manner said he’d have to deal with her first. He thought he’d give her what she wanted. Besides, he felt a little sorry for her. She was a mess. Her tweed skirt was wrinkled. Her cashmere sweater was stained and out of true. Even her pearl necklace was hanging out-of-kilter. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who usually allowed herself to look out of control.