by Robin Paige
“You do, sir,” Charles said. He smiled for the first time since he had come into the room. “Kate has agreed to become my wife.”
The Prince hooked his fingers in his waistcoat pockets and heaved an exaggerated sigh. “So another American woman is about to invade one of our staid old families, eh? You can’t be content with one of our English girls?”
“I have always believed that if I could make a marriage with a kindred spirit, her nationality would be irrelevant.”
The Prince made an expansive gesture. “Well, I must say I like the originality of these American women. They bring a little fresh air into society. They are livelier and less hampered by etiquette, are they not? And I do believe that they are not as squeamish as their English sisters, and better able to take care of themselves.”
“Kate is decidedly unsqueamish,” Charles said, “and most certainly able to take care of herself. In fact, she would protest the very idea of my taking care of her.”
“What a prize,” said the Prince admiringly. “For heaven’s sake, old chap, marry the lady forthwith. However, by way of caution I should probably report a remark of Lady Neville’s on the occasion of Jenny Jerome’s marriage to Randy Churchill.”
“Oh?”
“Yes.” The Prince chuckled. “‘I like the Americans very well,’ Lady Neville said, ‘but there are two things I wish they would keep to themselves. Their girls and their tinned lobster.’ ” He extended his hand. “I do congratulate you, Charles. She is a lovely woman.”
“Thank you, sir,” Charles said.
“Now, then,” the Prince said, returning to the desk. “There are two more bits of business. At luncheon, I suggested to the company that you might tell them something about modern methods of crime detection. Several seemed quite interested in the topic. What would you say to giving us a short lecture after dinner this evening, before the fireworks are set off?”
Charles nodded reluctantly. He had no difficulty speaking to the subject, but he should have to be careful that what he said did not alert someone in the audience as to his methods and intentions. “And the second bit of business?”
“When you go to Wallace’s room, send Kirk-Smythe down here—as soon as you’re done with him, that is.” The Prince picked .up a sheaf of papers. “There are several telegrams to be sent off. I shall leave them here for him. And oh, yes, would you mention to him that I am about to exhaust my supply of cigars?”
20
It has long been an axiom of mine that the little things are infinitely the most important.
—SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE “A Case of Identity”
It was an hour before tea when Kate dismissed the last of the upstairs maids, shuffled her notes, and sat back in her chair in the morning room, filled with weary frustration. The interviews had to be done, of course; it was necessary to question anyone who might have information about the movements of the guests the night before. And she had looked forward to it. In fact, when Charles had told her that she was to interrogate the women, Beryl Bardwell had given a joyful hurrah—internally, of course. She would be doing real detective work at last, work that would provide her a glimpse into authentic investigative procedures and would serve as a rich mine of valuable information for her future fictions. More than that, she would be able to see into the criminal mind, even into (she thought with a tremble of excited and half-fearful anticipation) the very heart of darkness.
But as far as Kate could discern, this afternoon’s interrogations had yielded only little things—odds and ends of information of trivial significance. Instead of looking into the heart of genuine evil, she had been given glimpses into the gray soul of boredom and dispirited ennui, which fostered petty misconduct, moral dissipation, and promiscuous behaviors not criminal in themselves and prosecutable chiefly in the divorce courts. However, Kate reminded herself, the fear of public exposure was real and powerful enough to motivate all sorts of criminal actions. It was entirely possible that Reginald Wallace had been killed because he knew some secret thing—a small, secret thing, perhaps, but potentially embarrassing to someone who could not afford to be embarrassed. What had he known? Who had a secret to hide?
As it turned out, however, all of the women seemed to have secrets to hide, and it proved almost impossible to obtain an honest answer to the question, “What did you do after everyone else retired?” Kate had not imagined that the female guests would be so expert in dissembling, or that answers would have to be got by taking so roundabout a path, challenging the respondent, if necessary, to the point of tears or near hysteria.
By this circuitous and painful means, she learned that Celia Rochdale, against the express prohibition of her mother, had met Andrew Kirk-Smythe for a late-night tryst at the Folly. Collapsing in sobs, the frightened girl swore that the lovers had neither seen nor heard anything suspicious during the two hours they had spent there. She could not swear, however, that they had not been seen, either at the Folly or coming or going. Indeed, upon her return to her room an hour or so after midnight, Celia herself had caught sight of Lady Metcalf, wearing her robe and clutching a decanter of wine, groping her way down the hall from the direction of the west wing, where the men’s sleeping rooms were located.
“I’m sure she didn’t see me, though,” she added tearfully. “If she had, she would have told Mama this morning. As you must not,” she implored Kate once again. “Mama would immediately marry me to that wretched Baron Smartly, and I have given my heart to Andrew!”
Kate promised and made a note to suggest to Charles that Kirk-Smythe be interrogated. It was possible that Wallace had gotten onto the lovers and threatened to reveal their liaison to Lady Rochdale, who was obviously bent on keeping her daughter virginal until the day of her marriage to a lord—a marriage that would amplify the family fortune. Confronted by a blackmailer, Kirk-Smythe might have chosen to commit murder, rather than risk his sweetheart’s reputation.
Felicia Metcalf was more resistant to Kate’s questions, but after offering several different renditions of her narrative, she broke into a fit of noisy weeping and produced what she swore was the final, truthful version. The night before, after retiring, she had arrayed herself in a seductive negligee and sat by the fire, emptying a decanter of Madeira while she waited in vain for Reginald Wallace. After several hours, she finally fell into her bed alone, having concluded that her faithless friend had retired with someone else.
“I felt it was Lillian Forsythe,” she said bleakly. “Some people simply cannot resist an opportunity for deceit.”
To judge from the heavy bags under her eyes, Lady Felicia was still suffering from her physical and emotional excesses. She was also suffering, or so she claimed, from a desperate remorse. For instead of having spent the night in the arms of Lillian Forsythe, Wallace had been lying murdered on the cold ground in the garden of Daisy’s Folly.
“And I doubted his faithfulness!” Lady Felicia moaned, rolling her eyes. “Oh, if only I had gone in search of him, or raised an alarm. I might have saved him!”—a speculation which inspired another round of fresh weeping.
But Lady Felicia’s theatrical grief had something of the ersatz about it. More importantly, Kate was in possession of a key contradictory fact: that Celia Rochdale had seen Lady Metcalf about one a.m. returning from the west wing. Confronted with this intelligence, the lady produced yet another version of her narrative. Around three quarters past twelve, having consumed her decanter of wine, she had taken her candle and made her way to Wallace’s room. The empty room confirmed her suspicion that her lover was in Lillian Forsythe’s bed. She snatched up his decanter and carried it back to her room, where she attempted to quench the fires of her jealousy with yet more Madeira. She had drunk herself into a stupor about three a.m.
Whether this new version was the truth or only another embroidery, Kate could not be sure. Beryl Bardwell, however, proposed an alternative, and quite plausible, theory. When Wallace did not appear, Lady Felicia might have gone to the Folly, where
(she supposed) he was dallying with Lady Lillian. Encountering him on the path, she charged him with betraying her, took out a gun, and shot him dead. Kate made a note to discuss the matter with Charles.
As for Lady Lillian herself, she had no tears to shed over Reginald Wallace. “Felicia has it all wrong, as usual,” she said coolly. Then she added, with some smugness, “I spent the night with Friedrich Temple—and if you don’t believe me, you can ask him.”
According to Lady Lillian, Temple had suggested the dalliance, their first, during the last waltz of the evening, just before the company had assembled to pick up their candle-sticks and troop off to bed. Lady Lillian was nothing loath, albeit rather taken aback by such a precipitous proposal from a man who had hitherto been a bit above such friskiness. The liaison had apparently been to the liking of both, for Temple remained with her until her maid appeared to open the curtains and bring in the tea tray.
“I trust, Miss Ardleigh,” Lady Lillian added in a chilly tone, “that my confidences will go no further than this room. I have told you these things only because His Highness directed us to be forthright.”
Kate suspected that Lady Lillian was less interested in honesty than in flaunting the fact that she had not gone to bed alone-especially after Sir Charles had rejected her. But her liaison with Sir Friedrich came as something of a surprise to Kate, who had herself received his attentions. In lieu of questioning Sir Friedrich, she queried Lady Lillian’s maid Adelma. The girl substantiated her mistress’s story, reporting that yes, a tall gentleman with sandy hair and beard had been in madame’s room as she arrived with the tea tray. She had been a bit startled by his presence, she confessed, since ma-dame’s lovers were usually sent packing before the maids were about.
The other interviews were no less interesting. Malvina Knightly testified to having spent the night in the company of her husband Milford, a fact borne out by her lady’s maid, who had seen the couple to bed with cups of hot chocolate and awakened them with a tray of tea and toast around eight. In response to Kate’s question about whether the Knightlys shared the same bedroom at home, the maid reported tartly that they did not. Kate smiled, speculating that a weekend in the country might have awakened the couple’s romantic ardor.
Eleanor Farley reported that she had gone to sleep immediately upon retiring and slept the night through, with the exception of two inconvenient visits to the water closet at the end of the hall, near her room. On the first of those visits, at about twelve-thirty, she recalled a brief and somewhat embarrassing encounter with Samuel Isaacson, wearing a brown silk dressing gown and slippers and tapping at the door of Verena Rochdale’s room.
“To tell the truth,” Eleanor giggled, “I couldn’t decide which of them would have the worst of it. Samuel Isaacson is so old, and Verena Rochdale is such a prude.”
Lady Rochdale, for her part, asserted in a tone of high dudgeon that she had slept entirely and indisputably alone, her husband having occupied another room some distance down the hall, and that if Mr. Isaacson had attempted to enter her room (mistaking it for his own, no doubt) she knew nothing of it. But there was an apprehension in Lady Rochdale’s tone that made Kate wonder if the woman was telling the truth. The upstairs maids were more forthcoming in their replies to Kate’s questions, but they had been asleep in the servants’ wing of the house, quite distant from the guests’ bedrooms, and could only confirm the hours at which their mistresses retired and rose.
Finally, the only lady remaining to be questioned was the Countess herself. Kate was about to go in search of Charles to ask if she should undertake the interview when there was a tap on the door and he came in. Her heart lifted with pleasure and she went to him eagerly, hands out, but stopped when she saw that he was accompanied. The man with him was tall and slightly stooped, in his late thirties, clean-shaven except for brown muttonchop whiskers, and pale, as if he spent most of his time indoors. He walked with a noticeable limp, Kate saw, a kind of quick, crabwise scuttle, his right leg being shorter than the left. His name was John Miles, and he and Charles were obviously well acquainted. He was the surgeon from Chelmsford who had been summoned to perform the autopsy.
Kate extended her hand when Charles introduced them. “I am glad to meet you, Doctor Miles,” she said. “I hope the autopsy has yielded some useful information.”
Miles’s eyes widened and he turned to Charles with undisguised disbelief. “Oh, come now, Charlie. You don’t mean to say that this woman is your associate?”
“And soon to be my wife,” Charles said, and put his arm around Kate’s shoulders. “You’ll find her, as I have, a remarkable woman, with uncommon interests.”
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the doctor muttered in an astonished voice, fixing Kate with a penetrating stare. She was not sure whether she should feel affronted or complimented.
“You certainly will be,” Charles said, “if you go about regularly insulting your friends’ wives-to-be.” He smiled at Kate. “Pay no attention to this rogue, Kate. He knows so few singular women that he does not know how to respond when he meets one. Were your interviews productive?”
“I have certainly heard enough lies,” Kate said, rueful. “The ladies seemed remarkably unwilling to part with their secrets, and the servants appear to have none.” She gave the surgeon an inquiring look. “Was anything learned from the autopsy?”
“John is about to tell us,” Charles said. He pulled out a chair at the table and Kate took it. Charles took another, and motioned to the surgeon. “Sit down, John, and give us the gory details.”
“I doubt Miss Ardleigh will want to hear,” Dr. Miles said, seating himself.
“You have nothing to fear in that regard,” Charles said. “Kate is no doubt curious.” He took her hand. “Say on, John.”
The surgeon gave Kate a doubtful look, but obeyed. “Very well, then. From the damage to the cranial region—specifically, the two frontal bones and the frontal lobe of the brain—I have concluded that the path of the bullet was almost perfectly horizontal.”
Kate was listening attentively. “Then he was sitting down when the bullet struck him,” she said thoughtfully, “and the assailant was standing.”
The surgeon gave her a searching look. “I believe you are correct, Miss—”
“Kate, please.”
“Kate, then.” He shifted in his chair. “You are correct. The victim was six feet two inches tall. Had he been standing, and his assailant standing, the missile would most likely have taken an upward trajectory.”
“If he were seated, however,” Charles said, “he should have pitched forward and fallen facedown. Yet he was found faceup. His killer must have turned him over. I wonder why.”
“Perhaps to be certain that he was dead,” the surgeon remarked.
“Or to be certain that the note in his pocket should be noticed immediately,” Kate said. “It was loosely folded and inserted into the pocket with a good bit of paper protruding—hardly the way a gentleman would have safeguarded an appointment for an assignation.”
Charles nodded, and she knew he had made note of her point. “I take it that we can discount the probability of suicide,” he said to the surgeon.
“It would have been most awkward for the victim to have held the weapon horizontally in front of his forehead, with the barrel perfectly level,” Miles replied. “In my experience, suicides shoot themselves in the temple or behind the ear, with the muzzle held against the head.”
“When I examined the body,” Charles said, “I noticed powder bums to the forehead, suggesting that the weapon was discharged at a distance of six inches or less, but not in contact with the skin.”
“Agreed again.”
“You recovered the projectile?”
The doctor produced a small glass vial. Charles uncorked it and shook out a lead pellet about the shape and size of his small fingernail. He examined it, then gave it to Kate. It was heavier than she had expected, with a slightly roughened, silvery-gray surface. The base was concave
and the nose, originally round, was now somewhat flattened. She shivered, thinking that the thing had just been plucked out of Wallace’s brain, and placed it back into Charles’s extended hand.
“Soft lead,” Charles said thoughtfully, turning it over in his fingers. “Perhaps a hundred grains, probably thirty-two caliber. Fired from a derringer or a small revolver.” He turned to the surgeon as if for confirmation.
“You’re the expert, Charlie,” the doctor said with a shrug. “But yes, I would agree. A derringer or revolver.”
“Why did it not ... go all the way through?” Kate asked.
“Because the handgun in question fires a low-weight, low-velocity bullet,” Charles replied. “It lacked sufficient momentum to penetrate the occipital bone.” He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and took out a small leather kit. From it he extracted a short knurled rod with a needle fixed to one end and began to inscribeaWupon the base of the bullet.
“What the devil are you doing?” Miles demanded.
“I am marking the fatal missile with the victim’s initial so as to prevent its being confused with any other.”
“But we have no other,” Kate said.
“Not yet.” Charles reached into another pocket and took out a small hand lens. “If, however, we come upon a weapon similar to the one that discharged this bullet, we will fire it and compare the test bullet against this one. The more significant similarities we find, the more confident we can be that we have discovered the murder weapon.”
John Miles brightened. “Of course!” he exclaimed. “As Professor Lacassagne did a few years ago in Lyons. Now, that was a brilliant piece of forensic detecting!”
“Almost,” Charles replied. “Good enough to convince the court, at any rate. I fear, however, that the fact that a weapon has fired the fatal bullet does not, in and of itself, tell us who fired it.” He turned the bullet under the lens. “Six grooves,” he murmured, “with a right-hand twist.” He pointed with the needle. “And this groove is noticeably deeper than the others.”
