The Thaw Clock

Wren Calloway had until the thaw, and she knew it the moment she stepped out of the car into the snow, because the road behind her was already closing and the road was the only way down off the moor. She was an insurance assessor, which is not a glamorous thing to be, and she had been sent up to Thornfield House in the last week of an extravagant winter to do an extravagant winter's least glamorous job — to assess a claim. The owner of Thornfield, a man named Hartley Voss, had recently insured a number of objects for sums that had made an underwriter somewhere frown, and the underwriter had wanted, before the policy bedded in, a quiet professional eye cast over the house and its contents. Routine. Two days' work. Wren had brought boots and a thick coat and a paperback she did not expect to finish. She arrived to find Hartley Voss dead. She arrived, in fact, into the precise hour of its discovery, which she would reflect on afterward as either very bad luck or a piece of timing arranged by someone — the car pulling up, the snow already thick, and the front door opening before she had knocked, and a white-faced housekeeper saying, in the flat voice of a person whose afternoon has come apart, that there had been *an accident, or — not an accident,* and that the police had been telephoned and the police had said, with the regret of officials looking at a weather map, that nothing could reach Thornfield House before the thaw. So Wren Calloway, insurance assessor, had walked into a snowbound house with a body in it and eight other living people, and had become, by the simple fact of being the only person present whose job involved looking hard at things and writing down what was true, something the house badly needed and had not had: a witness who was not also a suspect. She made them show her the study. Hartley Voss was in the study, and the study told its story with a bluntness Wren found almost offensive. He was at his desk. He had been killed — she was not a pathologist and did not pretend to be one, but a man does not arrange himself across a desk like that, and there was a heavy bronze paperweight on the floor that had not rolled there — and the study had one door, and the one door had been locked. Locked from the inside. The key was the thing. Wren made the housekeeper, whose name was Mrs. Aldam, walk her through it three times, because three times was how many it took before the account stopped wobbling. The study door had a single lock and a single key, and the key was an old and particular thing, and there was no duplicate; Hartley Voss had been a man who liked to be the only person who could enter a room. He had been alone in the study after dinner. The door had been locked. And when, an hour later, he had not emerged and had not answered, it had been Mrs. Aldam's son, the gardener, a large young man named Col, who had put his shoulder to the door and broken it inward — and the key had been on the inside, in the lock, where Hartley Voss had turned it himself. A man, alone, in a room locked from within by his own hand. And dead by violence. Wren stood in the broken doorway and felt the old cold pleasure of an impossible thing, which is a feeling she was faintly ashamed of and had never managed to be rid of. Because it was impossible, on its face, and impossible things were only ever impossible because you were missing a piece, and the missing piece was always, always in the room. There were eight other people in Thornfield House, and Wren spent the first evening, by the light of the fires they had to keep burning, simply learning their names and watching their faces. There was Mrs. Aldam the housekeeper, and Col her son. There was a niece of the dead man, sharp and elegant and entirely unsurprised by anything. There was a business partner who had arrived, he said, that morning, on business that had now died with its other half. There was a doctor, a guest of long standing, who had pronounced the death and then poured himself a large drink. There was a quiet woman who said she was Voss's secretary and a louder man who said he was an old friend, and there was the cook, who had not left the kitchen all evening and said so, twice, before anyone had asked her. Eight people. And every one of them, when Wren raised the question — gently, as an assessor raises questions — swore that from the end of dinner until the breaking of the door, they had not left the drawing room. They had sat together. They had been in one another's sight the entire time. The eight of them were, each by the word of the other seven, one another's alibi, a sealed unbroken circle. Which meant that either all eight were lying together, in perfect concert, which Wren did not for a moment believe — eight people cannot lie that smoothly that fast — or none of them had killed Hartley Voss. And yet a man was dead by a hand, behind a door he had locked himself, in a house the snow had sealed as thoroughly as the study. Wren went up to her cold room that first night and sat on the edge of the bed and looked at the window, where the snow was still falling, patient and total. The thaw was her clock. When the moor opened, the police would come, and they would find a locked room and eight alibis and an assessor's notebook, and the notebook had better, by then, contain the truth. She opened it to a clean page. At the top she wrote: *One key. Eight guests who never left the room. A door no one could have used.* And underneath, because thirty years of looking hard at things had taught her where the truth in an impossible case always hid, she wrote one more line: *An alibi shared by eight is not eight alibis. It is one. And one thing can be broken.*