The Guest Book at Greywing Hall
The morning smelled of wet stone and bacon fat. Agnes Morle sat at the window table of Greywing Hall’s breakfast room, her tea cooling beside a rack of overdone toast, and watched the lake absorb the last of the mist. The Hall was a guest house now, its former grandeur softened into chintz and slightly uneven floorboards. Agnes came every October. She liked the quiet. She liked the way the rooks gathered in the copper beech by the gate each evening, fussy and loud, and then went suddenly still.
She did not like the sound of raised voices from the kitchen corridor.
“Gone. The tray, the cream jug, the fish slice with the ivory handle.” That was Dorothea Vane, the proprietress, her voice carrying the particular tightness of someone who has not yet allowed herself to be properly upset.
“And Mr. Callister?” A younger voice. Agnes placed it as Finn, the Saturday boy who carried luggage and laid fires.
“His room is empty. Bed made. Which means either he made it himself, or he was never in it.”
Agnes set down her toast. She took her reading glasses from their case, polished them with the hem of her cardigan, and put them on, though there was nothing nearby to read.
Dorothea emerged from the corridor looking as though she had bitten into something sour. She was a tall woman, angular in her movements, and she wore her grey hair pinned so severely that it seemed to pull her expression upward.
“I’m sorry to disturb your breakfast, Mrs. Morle.”
“Miss,” Agnes said, gently.
“Of course. I’m afraid we’ve had a spot of bother. A guest has checked out rather suddenly, and certain items from the dining room appear to have accompanied him.”
“The silver tray from the sideboard,” Agnes said.
Dorothea blinked. “Among others.”
“And the cream jug. Georgian, if I’m not mistaken. You keep it on the left side of the sideboard because the right side gets direct sun through the bay window and you worry about the enamel.”
Dorothea sat down, uninvited, in the chair opposite. “The police are coming at eleven. I don’t suppose…” She stopped.
“Tell me about Mr. Callister,” Agnes said.
He had arrived Friday afternoon, Dorothea explained, in a dark green car with a cracked wing mirror. He had paid in advance, in cash, which she had thought nothing of. He had been pleasant, unremarkable. He wore good shoes. He had signed the guest book in a clear, forward-slanting hand.
“May I see it?” Agnes asked.
The guest book was a leather-bound ledger, its pages cream and slightly waxy. Mr. H. Callister, it read. The address given was a street in Shrewsbury. The handwriting was careful, each letter fully formed.
Agnes looked at it for a long moment. Then she turned back three pages to the previous weekend’s entries.
“You had a party staying last Saturday,” she said. “A walking group.”
“The Malvern Ramblers, yes. Six of them. Rather muddy, but very agreeable.”
Agnes pointed to a name near the bottom of that page. G. Hartwell. The handwriting was casual, rushed. But the capital H, the looping double-l. She placed her finger beside the H in Callister’s entry, then moved it to Hartwell’s.
“Same hand,” she said.
Dorothea leaned in. She said nothing for a moment. Then, “He came twice.”
“He came twice. Once to look, once to take. The Ramblers would have given him cover to move through the house freely. He would have noted where things were kept, whether there was a ground-floor window that latched poorly, what time you served breakfast and were therefore occupied.”
“The pantry window,” Dorothea said quietly. “I’ve been meaning to have it looked at since August.”
Agnes closed the guest book. “The signature tells you more than he intended. People’s handwriting doesn’t change much, but their names do. He forgot that he’d already been in this book. Or perhaps he thought the pages wouldn’t be compared.”
When the police constable arrived at five past eleven, a young man with a notebook and an expression of polite efficiency, Agnes left him to Dorothea and went to put on her coat. She walked down to the copper beech by the gate. The rooks had gone out for the morning, and the tree stood bare and enormously patient, its branches holding the grey sky the way a cupped hand holds water.
She thought of the ivory-handled fish slice, which she had always privately considered rather ugly, and hoped it would be recovered. Not for its value. For the principle of the thing.
When she returned to the Hall, Dorothea was standing in the doorway holding a mug of fresh tea.
“The constable has telephoned the Shrewsbury address,” she said. “Apparently it’s a laundrette.”
“Yes,” Agnes said. “It would be.”
She took the tea. It was the right temperature this time.
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