Free Medi-Evil 3 by Paul Finch

shame of the block and eternal infamy.”
      “Are you a madman?” Rupert breathed. “You condemned my sister to death rather than face a trial that might very well have acquitted her! And a torturous death at that!”
      “She was unconscious,” the servant replied. “She’d have felt nothing.”
      “We heard her scream …”
      “A fleeting thing, while she was deep in sleep.” Cedric seemed utterly convinced of this, or perhaps he wasn’t allowing himself to consider otherwise. “When I attended to her earlier, I didn’t actually come up here to check that she hadn’t taken a sleeping-draught, but to make sure that she had . And then I doused her bed curtains in the carrion-effluent that I used to train the Sumatran rat. Compared to the others, it would be painless for her.”
      “They’ll put you on the gibbet alive for this,” Judge Prendergast said.
      “Maybe, but you won’t decide that, my lord. Now gentlemen, if you’ll all stand together.”
      Of the three men, O’Calligan and the judge were beside each other, but Rupert was a good three feet away, close to his sister’s bedside divan. O’Calligan saw at once what the plan was. “Don’t!” he shouted. “Nobody move. He only has a single blast in that blunderbuss. If we stay apart, he can’t kill us all.”
      “One step ahead of me again, Captain O’Calligan ,” Cedric said. “As you wish.”
      With a sudden move, he grabbed the nearest candelabra and flung it at the bed-curtain, which went up in a roaring sheet of flame. More by instinct than decision, Rupert leaped away from it – and found himself next to the judge and the Irishman.
      O’Calligan shouted, but it was too late. Cedric already had the blunderbuss at his shoulder. His finger was on the trigger, and then, suddenly, he was grabbed from behind.
      It was Van Brooner .
      But the Dutchman was still dazed, his face battered and bloody, and Cedric, though old, was wiry and strong; he slammed an elbow back, catching Van Brooner in the broken rib, severely winding him, dropping him to the floor. He raised the blunderbuss again, but in that split-second of distraction there was a blur of twirling steel, and, with an ugly thunk , something embedded itself in the servant’s throat.
      The eyes bulged in his dour face, and the firearm slipped from his fingers.
      He tottered there, looking down in disbelief at the ornate hilt of the Moorish dagger quivering under his chin. Then his knees buckled and he toppled forward.
      Immediately, O’Calligan and Rupert turned and tore down the burning hangings, hurriedly stamping them out. Judge Prendergast continued to stare at Cedric’s body and at the weapon that had slain him. “A life of clandestine warfare,” he remarked. “Indeed it has served you well, my Irish friend.”
     
    *
     
    The following morning, the cloud cover had cleared and a winter’s sun shone coldly from a blue but glacial sky. The wastes of Exmoor lay silent under a glistening mantel of pristine snow. O’Calligan and Judge Prendergast stood out on the porch, awaiting the help that Rupert, having ridden for Minehead at first light, would hopefully soon bring.
      “I should have realised straight away once we found the bell-pulls in the under-stair wardrobe,” O’Calligan said with self-reproach. “We’d dismissed Cedric as a suspect because we saw him outside the drawing room shortly after hearing Lady Lightbourne’s bell. Once I knew the bell-pulls were much closer to hand, I should have reconsidered him.”
      “One thing that puzzles me about him,” the judge replied, “is that it’s only been known for three months or so that the Prince of Orange intended to invade. How could someone like Cedric have planned everything so meticulously in so short a time? How did he train the animal, or build its bolt-holes?”
      O’Calligan pondered; the same thing had been troubling him.
      “Canny men like Cedric see events coming