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“The one that Clarence gave you, the one you handed to me. You thought it was Ada’s but it couldn’t have been. She still has hers; she wears it around her neck.” Darcy’s eyes settled, latching on to every word. “And then she told me you had one of the exact same likeness. And it … it had a ring inside, with Ada’s name on it. It didn’t make any sense to me at the time. But of course you’d keep it, you’re her … her father,” he choked out.
Darcy nodded his head, letting his words sink in. “Bron, you suspect me in this plot of yours? What else have I done? Go on—tell me.”
Something still didn’t make sense, of course. The motive. What of the motive.
“The will …”
“Aha—there it is! You see an inheritance, and our life becomes an Agatha Christie novel! Tell me, what do you think you know about the bloody will?” Darcy’s voice was a guttural snarl.
“I know that you are a poor man, that you have nothing.”
Darcy nodded along with Bron’s revelations. “And so I am guilty of what? Arson? But then what of these papers?” Darcy stumbled over to the bookshelf, where he pulled the album off the shelf. He dropped it to the floor, scooped up the pages that escaped. The will, the proof of Darcy’s lack of inheritance. “Why would I burn the library, supposedly to dispose of the evidence,butremovethat very evidence from the room prior to setting the fire?”
Bron stumbled. “I don’t know …”
Darcy pressed on. “And what of the lawyers’ copies, the will filed away online for safekeeping? This is the twenty-first century, Bron—there are safeguards for these things.”
Nerves weighed heavy on Bron’s belly. He had nothing left to say.
Darcy moved suddenly to the writing desk, pulled out a drawer in such a fit that it came away from the mechanism in his hands. He slammed it on the desk, a loud bang, and the bottom gave upward. Darcy picked at it, tossed the wooden layer aside. Below it was another small box. A box which Darcy brought out, shoved into Bron’s hands.
“Go on, Poirot, open it.”
“What’s this?”
“Now,” he ordered.
Bron lifted the lid, which opened with a little pressure. Inside it was a locket. A locket resembling the one Ada wore around her neck. The one Bron had stashed in his own bedroom.
“I don’t understand.” He looked up at him.
Darcy snatched it from his hands, clicked the sides to open it, and placed a ring into his hands. “Look,” he said, and when he did he saw the letter inscribed there:D.
“You are quite the tale teller, Bron, and me? Taunting and sardonic. In your story I have claimed the character of villain. I do not live up to my name, but I suppose neither do you. I pray you never take on the role of writer, for there are several holes in this plot of yours. Let’s start with the fire, which seems to me the originator of these fantasies—well, we know it might have been a fault with the electricity, although I suspect it to have been Ada’s carelessness, and I, blinded in my rage at her snooping, was the fool who left the candle burning. Now the lockets, you see? They carry our wedding rings. Mine and Toni’s.”
“But there are … three?”
“Ada wears her mother’s ring—she’s had it ever since she was born. It has anAon it, does it not?Afor Antoinette. This one here that I have placed in your hands is my own. And finally, the one you have yet to place in your plot? Well, it must be Toni’s.”
But how could it be Toni’s? And as though Darcy could read the question in his eyes—
“Toni had one made for herself as a token, in remembrance of the daughter she had given up. It has Ada’s name imprinted there, does it not?”
Everything crumbled before him—his thoughts, his accusations. Shame hung over him like a cloud. It was Toni’s locket?
“That can’t be true. Why would it have been in the house? And on that night?”
“What had you down as my movement prior to meeting you in the library? Was I plotting, indeed? Waiting for our guests to leave so that I could set the place on fire? Christ, Bron. It was Gio and Toni who so provoked me. Why I was in such a foul spirit. The both of them, and Father—they all thought it was time to tell Ada the truth, now that I was home. But I just couldn’t. Maybe Toni left it in the library for Ada to find, in the hope she’d start to ask questions—I don’t know.”
Bron shook his head. Everything was unraveling. He’d been led by ghouls and plots and running thoughts. Darcy had made a mockery of him.
He wished the Edwardses had just told him—and everybody else—the truth. “But Mr. Edwards, how did he die?”
“Cancer, so they tell me. He was suffering for a long time. He hid it well.”
Darcy looked at him with a penetrating gaze. What must Bron have looked like then? Eyes rimmed and wet, his throat tense; a flailing creature who brought his hands to his face and wished to evaporate. To disappear. He couldn’t look at Darcy.
Darcy’s fingers were coarse as he pulled Bron’s hands away from his face, gripped him by the chin, and forced him to face him.I’m sorry.The words spiraled around in his head.I’m so, so sorry. I’m so foolish, I—
