Summary
A candlelit manor on the Danish coast becomes a labyrinth of whispers when its patriarch is found lifeless beneath a tapestry of family secrets. The widowed matriarch, her face a cracked porcelain mask, clutches a will whose ink might still be wet with forgery. Across the oak-paneled corridors, a taciturn nephew calculates inheritance while the housemaid’s candle gutters over blood-spattered gloves. Into this chiaroscuro steps a Scotland Yard detective whose moustache alone could slice bread; he paces the rotunda, counting heartbeats between thunderclaps, certain the murderer breathes the same salt-heavy air. Every creak of ancestral armor, every sigh of velvet drapes, tightens the noose of guilt around someone who once carved childhood initials into the same banister now smeared with fingerprints of deceit. By the time dawn pales the herringbone parquet, three confessions have been hurled like wine-stained napkins, yet only one soul exits in handcuffs, leaving the manor to swallow the rest in perpetual twilight.
