The Ledger of Lies — Chapter 1

The study door had been locked from the inside, the single window was three floors up and painted shut, and Lord Thornwick was, by every account and every measure available to them, no longer in the room he had walked into forty minutes earlier.

“Impossible,” said the youngest of the six heirs, which was, the detective reflected, an extraordinarily unhelpful thing to say about a room they were all currently standing inside.

The muddy footprint by the window matched no shoe at the dinner table. The will, still unread on the desk where he’d left it, sat waiting for an audience that had suddenly gotten one fewer reason to be there — and one considerably stronger reason to stay.

“No one leaves this house,” the detective said, “until I understand how a man vanishes from a locked room without a key.”

Six faces looked back. Exactly one of them did not look surprised enough.