WALKING BRISKLY, Richard Poole left the heavier shade around Ashpole Manor and stepped into the blue open twilight of the grounds. He was pleasantly tired—not really exhausted, as he thought he might be—from the effects of jet-lag. But he wanted to see the manor’s vast grounds before darkness finally descended. His sense of time was somehow distorted, another strange effect of all the unaccountable Englishness that surrounded him.
He had been on English soil for almost a day, but he was still mentally across the Atlantic, and he counted on the sights and sounds of the estate to soothe him before he found his bed. Dusk was settling, so he walked briskly down the gentle slope from the house through a broad swatch of formal gardens, the brilliance of clumped roses and other flowers muted by the slanted light.
His goal was a dovecote at the base of the shallow hill, a squat tower of soft gray and yellow stone surmounted by an odd ogee-roofed cupola. He had seen it from the dining room windows and resolved to explore it. One of the staff had identified it as a dovecote when Poole enquired about the strange tower poking up through the trees. Not that he had an interest in doves, culinary or ornithological. But he knew what a dovecote was, and the peculiar beehive-shaped roof on the building intrigued him. It was another strange sight in this strange little country that reinforced his sense of being transported to a brave new (or old) world.
Poole had never traveled in England, though he had been stationed in Europe with the Army (Germany, France) and had made frequent trips to the Middle East in his years with the agency. He had changed planes at Heathrow and looked idly out the windows of the passenger terminal, but he had never thought about being in England. Now here he was, on assignment by TransAtlas, set out on his own for two weeks in rural England.
Poole followed the little graveled path between low hedges, across a knot-garden dotted by showy roses, their colors almost luminescent in the late daylight. A bird sang in the dense shrubbery across the broad lawns of Ashpole Manor, a birdsong alien to him. Gravel shushed and clicked under his shoes. Otherwise, it was a silent world, a peace of country forty minutes from Heathrow, miles from the train he had ridden out, from the world of business and bustle which was his normal environment.
He stopped in the center of the garden, stretched, sniffed and stared around. Behind him, the immensity of Ashpole House stretched, its dozens of tall windows catching the sunset and turning blindly bronze, like shields or tablets set into the buttery stone. Someone walked across the raised terrace, the small figure lending a sense of scale to the house, accentuating its vastness. Poole shook his head at the idea of someone calling this place “home,” at the notion of a “house” larger than most hotels.
But the quiet of the scene was most important to him. He needed peace, a respite from the usual pace of his life, and the assignment to this executive training conference was almost an offer of a paid vacation. When Harvey Lewis had called him into the cavernous penthouse office at TransAtlas headquarters and laid out the assignment, Poole had restrained himself from leaping across the monstrous mahogany slab Lewis called a desk to hug the old pirate. Two weeks in England! A placid stint of executive-sitting. A few pages of perfunctory reporting on the processes of the conference. A piece of cake, solid angel food.
In the west, the sun slid behind clumps of deep-green forest, a golden ball balanced on the edge of the world. Then Poole noticed shapes on the acres of lawn between himself and the verge of the forest. He thought of statuary, but one shape moved slightly. A herd of small deer drifted from the shadows, grazing on the rich, green grass. What next?—Robin Hood and his band come to poach the King’s red deer? Poole watched the shapes for a moment. Light was failing rapidly, and he wanted to inspect the little tower of the dovecote before he returned to the house and bed he hoped to be large, deep and soft. He continued down the hill.
The dovecote was a solidly-built stone edifice about two stories tall, a squat tower with a slate roof, the whole structure like a pepper grinder set down on the grassy quilt of the rose garden. As he approached, he read a small sign planted next to the iron-bound oak door: DOVECOTE BUILT 1611. England, a land of convenient, legible labels.
He made a circuit around the building, looking up at it. A smooth cylinder of small stone about the size of building bricks, each stone carefully shaped and set. The roof incorporated three small dormer windows and rose to a cupola of slatted wood—where the birds, evidently, came and went. Something moved on the dark gray roof tiles. A dove—he would call it a pigeon—strutted there. A gray-and-white fancy bird with a spreading lyre-like fan tail. It marched along the verge of the roof, shook itself, glanced down with one dark eye then spread its wings and flew off toward the woods.
Stopping by the door, Poole glanced around. Then he decided to be bold, visitor or no, cheeky Yank abroad or not. He turned the big iron ring that served as a handle, and the heavy door swung inward. He stepped into the wide doorframe. Dim light fell through the windows above and through the slotted cupola, enough to outline the walls, punctured by many indentations or slots, places where the birds rested. Poole understood the term “pigeonhole” graphically for the first time. The middle of the cylinder was occupied by a large wooden structure, a giant’s ladder made of oaken beams built as a helix, big steps that twisted around a massive vertical axle. Ingenious: the dove-tender could thus climb up and swing himself around the walls to harvest the squabs from their nests in the stone.
Poole pushed at the oaken steps in front of him. On an impulse, he stepped up onto the bottom rung of the ladder. And felt something hard bump his temple. He looked up into the thick shadow and saw the polished toecap of a shoe. As the structure swung slightly under his touch, the shoe also turned a little before his eyes, revealing another shoe next to it, also pointed delicately downward. Richard Poole squinted up into the darkness to make out the body that dangled there above him from the ladder, a strange harvest in an empty dovecote.
* * * * *
In ten minutes, Poole was back with the porter’s flashlight. A cock-and-bull story about a lost cigarette lighter had gotten it. Now the grounds were velvety with darkness, the tower of the dovecote only a shadow rearing above the blackness of the garden. He glanced back to see if anyone had followed him from the house. He had a strong, unsettling intuition telling him to keep his discovery to himself.
Poole re-entered the dovecote, pulled the thick door nearly closed and shone the light upward. A man in a dull-gray business suit hung neatly from the top of the turning ladder by a blue-and-red striped necktie.
The hanged man turned very slightly, hands at his sides, like a manikin in a Grand Guignol display. His head was twisted sideways by the noose, his face black and distorted, tongue extended rudely, eyes bulging and opaque. Richard Poole had never seen a hanged man before, but this is what he assumed a hanged man would look like, all right. Gingerly, Poole ascended the big rungs until he was level with the dangling man. The silk tie was wedged and folded into the base of the topmost rung of the ladder. It had slid around the man’s neck, its knot tucked under his ear like the fat knot on a true hangman’s noose.
In the next minutes, Poole examined the corpse and ladder carefully. There were scuffs in the high polish of the shoes and small marks on two rungs of the ladder, where the feet had kicked at them. Bits of waxy wood were wedged under the nails on one hand, as if the man had scrabbled at the old tarnished oak of the rungs. Why couldn’t he reach the ladder? Poole asked himself. His hands were free. The crystal of the man’s wristwatch—a cheap Swiss model worn on the left wrist—was fractured, as if he had flailed his arms wildly against the heavy central axle-beam of the ladder.
On the cold stone floor of the dovecote, Poole found a thin leather wallet. In it were twenty-five pounds and several documents in a language he could not read. He guessed it to be Hungarian on a vague hunch. A business card smudgily printed in English read James Drus * Sales Representative * TAC Hydraulics, followed by what Poole assumed to be a telephone number. Poole slipped the wallet and its contents into his own jacket pocket, extinguished the flashlight and stepped outside. A gibbous moon had risen, and pale gray light suffused the quiet garden. The heads of the roses were now monochromatic, little clouds of paleness in the shadow. Richard Poole felt he had escaped from a mausoleum into a graveyard. All that was needed to complete the gothic feeling of the nightscape were an owl, a bat and a raven. He walked quickly up the graveled path toward the gigantic bulk of Ashpole House, now outlined by floodlights and punctuated by tall lighted windows in the staterooms on the ground floor and a few lights in the stories above.
The house was a solemn face of the night, the windows eyes. Poole hurried toward it, nevertheless, to find haven from the horrid quiet of the dangling man in the dovecote. ###
luminance
