He moved slowly, purposefully. He displayed absolutely no emotion, He was living furniture. And yet, he was always right where he was supposed to be. The pantry was a good two-minute walk from the front door, but when someone rang the bell, he was opening the door within 30 seconds. “If you need anything else, I'll be in the pantry, Mum,” he was always saying. No one had ever seen this alleged pantry. No one knew where it was in the mansion.

He was a jack of all trades. Farlowe House didn’t have any other staff. A cook came in three or four nights a week, but didn't live there. Brought with her a small gang to do the prep work and the washing up. But The Butler was the one who prepared the menu, did the shopping. Made sure the table linens were clean and pressed. There was a hive on the grounds, tucked away past a few acres, and one time he appeared at the factory shed, wearing beekeeper's whites, fresh jar of honey in his hand, like it was the most natural thing in the world. And you got the feeling that either he was out there every day, tending bees, or it was the first time, ever, and he just knew what to do, instinctively. For The Butler, doing something once was as straightforward as doing it for the hundredth time.

He was predictable, accessible, accommodating, trustworthy. He was a cliché. He was as much a part of the house as the walls, the address. Normal people have their moments, good and bad. Not The Butler. He only was what he ever was. You could not imagine that he had ever been a child, or that he was growing older. He seemed to be forever 63 years old. You could make up stories about him, based on observations, the way he pronounced "Mum," or the way his feet shuffled as he walked, and you could try to juggle those observations into a story of him as something other than butler. A young soldier, a spurned lover, an out of work hotel manager. But you always ended up inserting butler behavior into the story, and you always ended up just making him a butler.

He'd had a name, but since he rarely needed to be called, his name had gone into disuse. If people new to Farlowe House where in temporary residence, they might go a few days before even realizing he was a human being. And then he was just "The Butler." When speaking to him, you quickly learned to forgo niceties. They seemed to irritate him, although irritation was only ever displayed in very small pauses. "And how are you today?" you might asked, and the reply was. "...” and then, “thank you for asking, Mum. If you need anything else I'll be in the pantry."

Men created civilization, an arbitrary set of rules to define and govern it, created society, and its seemingly random folkways and mores. The Butler seemed to be nothing more than the inevitable consequence, the details that naturally evolve out of the systems men put into place. He didn't seem planned, or created out of forethought. He was just there.

And so, when it came to pass, in those decades when the world was mad for parlor mysteries, and some clever jack thought it would be amusing to pen "The Butler did it!" and in a post-modern world where that sort of thing caught on, and everyone started to use it, the people at Farlowe House were fools not to catch on. Because "The Butler did it," unfortunately entered the zeitgeist.

The Butler had no choice, but, to do it.

He was not, after all, his own person, but a product of his environment. The environment of the house, the estate, the country side, the whole world, the tons of pages of fiction that did more to spread the word about estate living than any meager collection of history book or travel documentaries.

The tragedy was not the way in which The Butler ritualistically slaughtered Lady Farlowe and three of her guests one quiet snowy weekend in February. The tragedy was that very few of those books went on to explain what happened after a butler was nicked. In prison, The Butler became truly invisible, since no one knew what a butler in prison would be like.

Which is why I was not at all surprised to find the same Butler, some few years later, in some other manor home not far from where Farlowe House had been razed after the murders. Not surprised to find him, in the pantry, sharpening knives.