You'll want to know why I wrote what I wrote on the certificate. I've had seven years of two-in-the-morning ceilings to think about it, so I'll put it down plainly and be done.

The call came through a little past seven on the twenty-third of December. I drove up with the heater roaring and the wipers going at nothing, and Hobbs opened the door before I'd knocked, white as the frost on the porch stone. Josiah Merritt was on the library floor. The fire had gone out and the room was cold enough that the blood had already gone dark and thick on the parquet, a black shape spreading out of him towards the hearth, and the smell of it sat in my throat all the way home. You don't need a medical degree to see how a man like that has died. You only need somebody willing to write something kinder than the truth, for the sake of a house already coming apart.

Here is the truth. The wound was clean. One strike. No hesitation marks, no defensive cuts on the hands, no second try. Not rage. Placement. I've jointed enough Christmas birds in my own kitchen to know a frightened hand from a practised one, and this was practised. On my way out I passed the case in the dining hall, standing open under the lamp. One knife gone out of its twelve, and the velvet still holding the shape of it, a little dark hollow like a mould. Nobody had said one word to me about the knives. I saw it, and I said nothing either. The house had enough to be frightened of that week. And some part of me, God forgive it, did not want to know yet whose hand had taken it.

He'd been vile at dinner that last night, even by his own standard. Needling Edmund about money in front of the whole table. Telling Vane there'd be changes before the partnership deed was a year older. He ignored the child completely, except once, to tell her nanny the girl ate more than she was worth to anybody. I walked out to my car glad to be shot of him for an evening. It never entered my head, driving home in the cold, that it was the last evening anyone would need to be.

Seven years I've told no one how clean that wound was, or what kind of hand makes a cut like that without flinching. I'm telling you now because there have been two more since, and I'm sick of being the only man who watched the first knife go and kept his mouth shut about it.