I took a cigarette from Peter and went to smoke it outside, my breath billowing like smoke. More snow had fallen and for as far as the eye could see the ground was pristine, luminous, and still beneath the moon, so that the courtyard and the rose garden seemed like a stage set.
After the wine at dinner, the cold air with the cigarette made my head spin. I took hold of Marcus to keep steady and he removed the cigarette from my hand and flicked it into a flower bed. David and Em were in the doorway watching us. As though I were an actress, and for the first time in a long time, I huddled in against Marcus and kissed him, feeling his body first tense in shock and then soften.
But I slept alone. I went up first and took the room with the window that looked over the courtyard, and before I threw off my clothes and the necklace and crawled into the icy bed, I know I locked the door. I heard the others come to bed and later slow footsteps in the corridor that seemed to reach my door and go no further, but I ceased to know what was dream and what was real and my sleep became seamless. And yet, when I awoke in the bright light of morning, the necklace was gone.
* * *
They were sitting round the kitchen table, all of them, drinking coffee and scarfing toast and eggs, and I had the unpleasant feeling that after I had gone to bed they’d all become the best of friends without me. It seemed horribly certain that I’d been the subject of conversation, of gentle mocking, at which Peter, Em, and Marcus had laughed, guiltily no doubt, but laughed none the less.
“Missing something?” Peter asked, and then, seeing my face. “Fuck, give her a coffee.”
“Rob drank every last drop of brandy, didn’t you, Rob? And now he’s vile,” Priss said.
“I am vile. Vile.” And as though to prove it, Rob shot up, white-faced, and went outside. The dogs followed him out and when he came back in, wiping his lips, he said gravely, “I strongly advise you not to accept any kisses from Goli this morning.”
“So who took them?” But I already had an idea. Em tiptoeing in on her little feet.
“We came up with it last night. You were in the right room, after all.”
“I heard footsteps, but no one came in.”
“It was this morning at six. I crept in. I was sure you were going to wake up, my heart was hammering so loud. I’m not surprised Mortimer had a heart attack.”
“They want to play,” David said. “We agreed last night, Em was to get the necklace and hide it if she could.”
“And I did. I did everything just right. I went everywhere it says he went.” Her face wrinkled. “It was ever so odd. I think it was the oddest thing I’ve ever done, like painting on the most giant of canvases. And it was so quiet.” Seeing me soften, she said, “I mean, with all of us looking we might find the real ones. It’s not impossible. It’s as close as we’ll ever get. With the snow and everything, don’t you see?”
I did, and already I could see the appeal, but I didn’t want to show that I was keen, that they had won, so instead I walked over to the door that Rob had left open and looked out.
“Just one thing missing,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“A corpse on that bench out there.”
“Early days,” said Rob. “Early days.”
* * *
“Got any skates, Rob?” Priss asked, but the question wasn’t meant seriously, for while the ice on the lake was thick enough—so thick that when I picked up a stone, a fist-sized rock, and launched it with all my strength at the cold rink, it merely bounced, skittered, and then slowed to a sliding halt out in the middle—there were ominous black patches, lacunae in the cloud of ice suggestive of the dark and freezing depths beneath. Goli wove her way down to the edge of the lake and rested one clawed paw and then the other on the ice, before creeping backward, hackles raised.
“Of course, you could give the game away, Em. They are your oldest friends after all,” Alice was saying.
“No cheating,” Marcus said.
“Are you quite sure about that?” Alice’s voice had an edge to it and in response Marcus flushed.
“Maybe you want to check our bags when we leave, Alice. If you think we can’t be trusted—”
Rob stepped between us.
“Calm down, Andy. Alice didn’t mean anything. Let’s all play nicely now.” He turned to Zack. “I’m really not capable of doing this straight. I’ll need a line of your coke. Chop, chop. There’s a fellow.”
“Didn’t bring any, old chap.”
“Liar!”
“Does the person that finds them get to keep them?” Priss asked. We all looked at Em.
“I think they should,” David said carefully. “Finders keepers to make it more interesting.”
“What if we find the real ones, Rob?”
“Finders keepers,” said Rob. “Same if I find Zack’s coke while searching for the necklace in his bag. Finders keepers start to finish. My money is on Peter, of course. We don’t know what he’s capable of, you see.”
The tour had been for Priss and Zack, who didn’t know the layout of the grounds.
“How do we start?”
In the end, we went back inside, to the room where I had slept.
“Can we have a clue, Em?”
She shook her head. “They’re somewhere clever.”
“You have to lie on the bed, Andy,” Peter said.
So I did. I got up on the mattress and lay back feigning sleep while the others stood around me in a circle.
“Go on,” Zack said.
So I raised by arms and stretched them out while miming a yawn, and then, rolling over, I reached out a hand for the bedside table, groped at its surface, drew myself up, and then howled, howled loud enough to shake the windowpanes.
“My necklace, it’s gone. Someone has stolen my diamonds!”
* * *
On the first-floor landing, Peter and I barged at one another, grappling for the cupboard handles.
“No, you don’t!” he cried. I shoved him with my hip. There was a brief scuffle.
Between gasps I said, “She’s not put it somewhere she’s used before. It’s somewhere new.”
“How can you tell?”
“She’s too pleased with herself.” This was true. Her face was inscrutable but there was a smile to Em’s movements; the secret hiding place was giving her pleasure. Another thought occurred to me. “Anyway, what’s up with Rob? What’s with the You don’t know what he’s capable of shit?”
He backed away. “Because Rob is a fucking cunt, Andy.”
In the laundry I found Priss elbow-deep in a box of washing powder and she raised her eyebrows at me. Alice I spotted through the window out in the rose garden walking with purpose toward the outbuildings. In the library, Em sat resplendent in one of the armchairs, a book in her hands, her feet resting on a tapestry-bedecked footstool.
“You’ve a hole in your sock,” I told her. She did not look up, or meet my gaze, but her lips twitched.
I wandered, not quite aimlessly, occasionally spying one of the others in a passageway ahead or rooting through a set of drawers. Zack peered out at me from beneath a bed. From the tiny staircase window to the attic, I saw Rob falling down in the snow and then struggling up, even from a distance comically enraged, a murderous blue-anoraked ant, shaking his fists at the sky as he went down again.