“You’re the reality perceiver, M. Standard. First assistant and heir apparent to Dame Margaret herself, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Well, when it comes down to emotions, I’m not sure any of us are very clear realizers.” Aelfric sighed and turned back to the moon. “Outscapes we can recognize the minute we see them in a good light. Inscapes ... you fanciers may actually be better at reading inscapes.”
He leaned on the rail, thinking what, if anything, to say next. A heavy thud hit the back of his head, and the problem ceased permanently on that particular plane of his existence.
Chapter 3
As usual, Angela Garvey Garvey was the first one up, even before the servants. Sunrise was still cheerfully early at this time in this latitude—06:03 today—and she almost always woke half an hour before sunrise, just time to dress and be ready for it without rushing more than she liked to rush. Angela’s slow gear was comparable to many other people’s fast. Everyone else would probably sleep till at least seven-thirty or eight, which was why the servants, bless their hard-working hearts, wouldn’t need to be up and singing at their tasks till six-thirty or seven.
She heated her own water for morning coffee in the pretty little porcelain plug-in teapot, with its hand-painted roses that matched the wallpaper and bedcurtains in her room. The squire had provided Zemo Instant, her favorite brand, with the creamer already mixed in: ivory crystals and rich brown all speckled together. She washed, dressed in her white suit and pink chiffon blouse. The water broke into a boil as she secured her rakish scarf collar with a butterfly stickpin. She stirred steaming water and Zemo crystals together in the mug that had a rose pattern to match the teapot, unplugged it, and went downstairs to sip her frothy coffee on the east terrace while she enjoyed the sunrise.
It was another beautiful sunrise and promised another beautiful day. As the glow brightened and brightened toward that thrilling green-flash instant when the first arc of sun touched the horizon, she began to see the chirruping birdlets as well as hear them. When she sat still, they hopped quite close. The instant she lifted her mug to sip coffee, they scurried and flurried away, pretending she might hurt them. It was all a great game between her and Nature.
One of the birds hopped up on the trousered leg of a man lying beside the balustrade. The lacy-wrought-iron table painted white had hidden all of him but his legs from Angela’s line of sight, and since his trousers were dark she hadn’t seen him in the morning twilight until the bird drew her attention.
He must have taken advantage of the mild weather to sleep out here all night beneath the star-washed sky. But now he was sleeping through the sunrise, and that seemed a waste! She put her mug down and went to wake him.
No, she saw now, his trousers weren’t dark. They were white, and his shirt had black and white vertical stripes. That was how she always saw Standards dressed, as referees. Which was what they were, in a way, but sometimes she could hardly keep from laughing when she saw them with formal tailcoats and bowties over their striped shirts, even though she knew in her brain that other people probably saw them dressed more staidly.
“M. Standard!” she called softly. Then, as he did not wake, she greeted him in a louder voice: “M. Aelfric! You’re missing a glorious sunrise.”
Still he did not stir. He must be a very deep sleeper. Maybe he had drunk too much last night and was sleeping it off. But he was lying face down, and that would make him stiff when he woke. She pulled and tugged him to the chair beside hers, but he was too heavy for her to lift to its seat. And still he wouldn’t wake up! She propped him upright against the chair legs so that he would see the eastern sky as soon as he opened his eyes. Then she settled down again and shared companionable silence, watching the sunrise and listening to the birds.
Someone else was an early riser, coming down to join them on the terrace. Angela turned. “Good morning!” They had been introduced yesterday afternoon; Angela couldn’t quite remember this young woman’s name, but she wore a blouse with black and white stripes running diagonally. That meant Angela associated her with the Standards, but that she wasn’t exactly a Standard herself, so she must be the squire’s new protegee, that quiet, pretty supervisor from the Fitzhugh clothworks. “It is a beautiful morning, isn’t it?” Angela went on.
“Lovely.” The realizer covered a yawn and drank from her own mug, striped to match her blouse. “I thought I might be able to sleep late for once, but ... Oh! Good morning, Aelfric.”
“Shh!” Angela said playfully. “He’s still asleep, poor man. They must have had a riotous night.”
“Asleep? His eyes are open.” The newcomer put down her striped mug and crossed to M. Standard where he was sitting on the terrace floor with his back against his chair. “Aelfric? Aelfric—Oh, my God! No! No!”
Chapter 4
“One of them might have killed him to perfect an oldfashioned ‘the reason you’ve all been called together in this isolated old mansion’ whodunit,” said Junior Detective Sergeant Click.
Senior Detective Sergeant Rosemary Lozinski Lestrade sighed and shook her head. “It’s a far gone fancier who doesn’t understand that proving oneself a danger to society leads to getting locked away for life.”
“It’s happened before,” Click insisted. “The Charpentier case six years ago.” Click had been a rookie at the time, and followed that case as if it was the kind of thing he’d joined to solve.
“Yes, and there was Marline Vanderhoven Roxburge back in ’38, who thought she was only giving her victim a twenty-four-hour drug to add a bit of color to the party.” A textbook classic. “Squire Fitzhugh’s house parties always have plenty of color without something like this.” Shaking her head again, Lestrade looked at the murder weapon, a heavy brass cordless lamp. They had found it in the eastern garden, where the killer must have hurled it after striking the fatal blow. They had also found a bloodstained dishcloth, obviously used to wipe the lamp and probably hurled along with it. “No,” the senior sergeant went on, “whoever did this had enough grip on reality to know it was murder, enough premeditation to wipe the fingerprints off with a cloth from the kitchen. Probably even brought the cloth along. Let’s hope there was motive as well as planning.” She sighed more heavily. There were no signs of break-in, theft, or struggle, and that pointed to someone who belonged inside the house this weekend. Three surviving reality perceivers—M. Weaver and the two servants—and nine members of the fancy class made the line-up. Violent crime always depressed Rosemary Lestrade, but especially when there was not even a reason, however warped, behind it. She spent most of her working hours in a state of chronic depression, but someone had to do this kind of work.
“What did The Standard say when you called?” Click asked.
“She’s flying right out. She’ll be here this afternoon.” Lestrade shrugged. “She might as well join the party. They’ll expect us to demand they all stay put in Fitzhugh Manor until we solve the case, so we’ll oblige them as long as we can. Most of them were supposed to stay the week anyway. None of them has a job to show up for.”
“Except Weaver.”
“She’s supervisor at one of Fitzhugh’s fac’s.”
Click tabbed his notecom. “The Superfine Loomery. Been in the Fitzhugh family since before the Great Rebellion, hasn’t it? So there shouldn’t be any problem about her staying as long as the rest of them.”
“The fancy class could ruffle if we let her go early. Too bad. She might prefer to get back to work. But we’ve got to coddle the moneyed majority. Well, Click, they also expect the traditional one-by-one interviews.”
“We’ll take the realizers first,” he suggested. “Jones, Portent, and Weaver. Let them get the wait over with.”
Lestrade nodded. “The fanciers are probably enjoying the anticipation, in their own way.” The guilty one might be enjoying it as much as the innocents. Assuming the guilty one was a fancier. “Click,” she reminded herself as well as
him, “we have to watch out we don’t assume the realizers are innocent because they’re realizers.”
* * * *
“M. Weaver,” said Click, bringing her into the library first. Lestrade tried not to like her looks too much. Neat, middle-sized, short hair, eyes red and cheeks puffy. According to Squire Fitzhugh, Weaver had never met the deceased before yesterday—not even Fitzhugh had known Aelfric Standard from more than a few social affairs—but Lestrade always felt a little cleaner for seeing honest tears shed over murder. Even if they were shed by the murderer, as sometimes happened. Apparently Weaver had not changed clothes since discovering the body. She wore red slacks and a tunic with a bold geometric design, out of keeping with her expression but a change from the everlasting whites, beiges and browns of the fancy class.
“M. Pamela Weaver?” said Lestrade, consulting only her mental notes.
“Yes. Do you want my family name, too?”
“Not necessary, M. Weaver. Just your prints.”
“It doesn’t matter. Bludso.” Weaver sat and stretched out her right arm for Click to take her fingerprints.
“By the way, this is Sergeant Click, and I’m Sergeant Lestrade.” The policewoman pointed to the murder weapon. “M. Weaver, what is that?”
Weaver looked at it. “A plain brass lamp. Cordless. Dented. I think it’s the one someone took out to the table on the balcony last night when they wanted to play…checkers? I assume,” she went on flatly, “it’s the thing somebody used to…to kill M. Standard. Does it have fingerprints?”
“Wiped clean,” said Click.
“You assume,” Lestrade went on, “but you didn’t actually notice it.”
“No.” Weaver closed her eyes. “Not this morning. No, I don’t remember it on the balcony table this morning. Where was it?”
“Ready for your other hand, M.,” said Click.
“In the garden,” Lestrade decided to go ahead and tell her. “A glint in the sunrise, maybe?”
“No. If I did notice it, I must’ve thought it was—I don’t know what, whatever fanciers have lying around their gardens in the morning before the servants clean up.”
“Yes. Now you told us earlier that M. Garvey had already propped M. Standard up against that chair before you came out?”
Weaver nodded. “I didn’t understand at first. I’ve never seen a corpse before. But his eyes. Oh, God, his eyes.” She rested her face in her free hand. “Fancy class or not, how could she not have seen his eyes? No, I don’t mean that,” she went on, lifting her head. Her fingertips, still inked, left black smudges on her forehead and cheek. “Angela Garvey seems to have a—a completely cheerful perception of everything. I’m sure she really thought he was just asleep. She might not have guessed even if ... if rigor mortis had set in.”
It had probably begun to, but Lestrade did not mention that. Chris Grunewald had estimated the time of death as between 01:00 and 02:00, and Portent’s auto-registering home thermometer had marked last night’s low at 33 deg. centigrade in Fitzhugh’s garden. But the stiffening had not become so general as to disturb M. Garvey’s cheerful perceptions. “It’s too bad you or the servants didn’t find him first, M. Weaver,” said Lestrade. “From our point of view.”
“I’d rather it was the servants. Or M. Poe. I’m sure he’d have recognized…that…for what it was.”
Click handed Weaver a clean rag. Mechanically she began to wipe her fingers.
“M. Weaver,” said Lestrade. “I have to ask this. What were you and M. Aelfric Standard to each other?”
“Nothing.” She gave a shaky laugh. “Nothing. We were just introduced yesterday afternoon, we’d never even seen each other before. One of Squire Fitzhugh’s famous match-made couples. But I think we might have been something. Given a little time.”
“Then it could have been worse,” said Click in an apparent attempt to be comforting.
“Then it might never have happened.” Weaver raised the rag toward her eyes but stopped in time to inspect the pulpcloth for inky places. (Someday the Police Standard might okay instaprint film if they could ever develop a kind that didn’t start blurring in a couple of years.)
“Don’t forget your forehead,” Click reminded her gently.
She nodded and located a clean expanse of cloth for her face. “Not that they’d notice any smudges,” she remarked. “Except M. Jones and M. Portent. And maybe M. Poe, who’d see it as blood or bruises.” She looked at the pollies and tried to grin. “Sergeant Lestrade—you really chose that name for yourself?”
Lestrade returned the grin. (Guarded on the inside, free and easy on the outside.) “It makes most of the fancy class perceive me as your traditional bumbling sidekick, usually male. Sometimes that can be a help.”
“To catch them offguard? M. Lestrade,” said the young woman, “give me a favor? Let me sit in on the rest of your interviews.”
Click shook his head. “Sorry, M. We couldn’t do that for the President himself.”
“I could sit behind those bookshelves—”
“You want to help us find the killer? Well, Weaver,” said Lestrade, dropping the ‘M.’ for a greater effect of camaraderie, “our book says all suspects are entitled to the rules of privileged communication. At this point, Sergeant Click and I are still acting as pollies and defense attorneys rolled into one.”
“Privcom Rule of 1999,” said Click. Every sergeant remembered that date. It was always on the exam, a guaranteed easy point.
Lestrade tapped her empty pipe on her knuckle. “You might help us, however, by observing them when they’re not in our presence.”
“Spying.” Weaver smiled slowly. “Can I know one thing, at least?” She pointed to the murder weapon. “Can you let me know how each of them perceives that?”
Click rubbed his chin. “Well, that doesn’t sound like the kind of thing the Privcom Rule had in mind ...”
“We’ll think about it,” Lestrade said firmly.
Chapter 5
Squire Thurby Fitzhugh Fitzhugh secretly considered himself almost a realizer. Better, in a way. He perceived people as they wanted to be perceived, and what was that but perception of an even deeper reality than the poor, washy stuff realizers perceived?
Squire Fitzhugh had not always possessed this rare gift. In his callow youth he had seen everyone right for the setting he provided ’em. He had come into the property young. His pater had not actually died, only suffered a midlife change of perception and rode off into the sunset like Lawrence of Arabia on a white horse. Thurby knew this in the way everyone knew “reality” existed out there somewhere you couldn’t quite see it, but for all practical purposes the old sire had passed on in a hunting accident, and when he came home for visits Thurby perceived him as a friendly family ghost. Eventually Thurby’s mater, known affectionately as the Dowager, had passed over to join his pater. The two family ghosts usually paid their infrequent visits to the old house together these years.
For the first decade or so of his tenure, Thurby had engaged in an active quest to find a bride and carry on the line. He had not found a bride, but he had learned quite a bit about the courtship dances of the human species. His avocation of throwing young couples together—well, not to put too fine an edge on it, matchmaking in an avuncular way—had grown naturally out of his own youthful missteps. A failure on his own count, he took comfort not unmixed with pride in his number of successes on other people’s counts.
It was also during his search for a compatible mate that he had slowly learned to see people, women at first and then fellow males as well, pretty much the way they saw themselves. Even his servants, most of the time. With an effort, he could see M. Jones as a proper cook in white cap or housekeeper with keyring at her waist, Portent as a correctly turned-out coachman, footman, or upstairs maid, and whichever of ’em was playing butler at the moment in white gloves and formal tailcoat; but most of
the time M. Jones was the motherly female who had once been nurse and governess, Portent a gangling black in his late twenties who looked about to play a practical joke on somebody, anybody. And the clothes they both of ’em wore! Thurby would have liked to insist on livery to match the surroundings he saw around them, but so long as they both did their work and Portent did not, in fact, try any practical jokes, and so long as everybody else saw them fitting in, where was the harm in humoring ’em? Good servants were hard to find nowadays. At least he still perceived his house and its furnishings as they’d looked and felt since he was a tad settling his imagination on the old stories of Dickens, Thackeray, Scott, Farnol, Wetherby, and all that set.
He wondered how the old estate and new people in it looked to his pair of realizers this weekend. No. One realizer now. M. Weaver, poor gel. Dreadful business. His first experiment with realizers. He’d found M. Weaver on a tour of one of his mills. Reality-perceiving managers tolerated his poking about because he owned eighty percent of the stock by inheritance and had bought back another fifteen percent from Dame Abbey Black Adams, Tertius White’s mother, back when Tertius was a toddler.
There she’d been, hardworking mill girl, having worked her way up to overseer on her own merits—sturdy, spirited, brown as a berry, cut out for better things. And who better than The Standard’s young heir? He’d met M. Aelfric a few times in business and light social ways. Good chap, clear eye and firm handshake. Put those two young people together ... yes, quality stock. Seemed a fine idea, one of Thurby’s best. And look what had come of it. Poor gel.
The squire had wanted to see the Bow Street pair first, but pollies didn’t understand or respect the duties of a host, and the best he could arrange was fourth slot. Well, just as well for M. Weaver for her to get it over and done with. She’d took young Standard’s death hard. And he could trust M. Jones to see what needed doing and get Portent and herself about doing it as soon as they were done being interviewed. Pollies could be sensible folk, and it made good sense to free the servants for serving. M. Jones was getting luncheon right on schedule, Portent moving with his tray of drinks between the drawing room where a dwindling group waited and the den where a growing group gathered after their jaunt through the wringer.
The Fanciers & Realizers MEGAPACK Page 15
