Sheri Cobb South (8 page)

“You could always stay with me in Audley Street,” suggested Lady Dunnington. “Heaven knows I have plenty of room.”

The viscountess arched a skeptical eyebrow. “Wouldn’t Mr. Blakeney-Hughes find my presence a bit de trop?”

Lady Dunnington dismissed her latest lover with a wave of her hand. “Mr. Blakeney-Hughes and I are quite exploded. I gave him his congé these three days past.”

“Indeed?” asked Lady Fieldhurst, her mind distracted, at least for a time, from her present difficulties. “But you seemed so taken with him!”

“Indeed, I was—taken with him, and taken in by him! His wife was brought to bed of a son a fortnight ago, and the wretched infant looks just like him! If I am going to cuckold Dunnington for his sake, the least he can do is be faithful to me. And so I told him,” she added with a self-righteous sniff.

“Really, Emily!” scolded Lady Fieldhurst, choking back a wholly inappropriate urge to giggle. “The things you say! I think you delight in shocking people.”

“You are quite mistaken, my dear; I only delight in shocking you. In some ways, you are just as green as you were when you first came to London.”

“And in some ways, I only wish I were,” said the viscountess with a sigh of unexpected longing for her childhood home in the West Country. “You realize, do you not, that I am the most likely suspect? It is no secret that Frederick and I were not upon the best of terms.”

“Nonsense! If that in itself were a motive for murder, half the ton would be gallows-bait, and the other half would be dead.”

“I daresay you are right, and Bow Street Runners interrupt me at breakfast merely for the pleasure of my company,” suggested Lady Fieldhurst with gentle irony.

“No, but they would, if they knew how fetching you looked in black—rather fragile and innocent. If you must stand trial, my dear, take care to wear black. No jury in the land would convict you.”

The soft sound of the door opening on well-oiled hinges made Lady Fieldhurst look around. Thomas, his expression one of well-trained impassivity, stood with one hand on the doorknob. Pickett, apparently finished with his interrogations below stairs, stood framed in the doorway, twisting the brim of his shallow-crowned hat in his hands.

“I—I beg your pardon, your ladyship,” he stammered, glancing at the footman for assistance, but finding none. “I was just coming to take leave of you. I didn’t realize you had guests.”

“Think nothing of it, Mr. Pickett. Lady Dunnington is quite like one of the family.”

“When one considers her nearest and dearest, one can hardly be flattered by the comparison,” put in Lady Dunnington. “Still, I shall strive to accept the encomium in the spirit in which it was no doubt intended.”

“Pray hush, Emily! You will give Mr. Pickett the oddest notion of the company I keep!”

Pickett hastily denied having any such thoughts in his head and imparted the additional information that, should her ladyship have further need of him, she had only to send to Bow Street for him. Having delivered himself of this communication, he made his bow and betook himself from the room.

The door had scarcely closed behind him when Lady Dunnington gave vent to the peal of laughter held in check since Pickett first appeared in the doorway. “That is your Runner? I was not aware that Bow Street was in the habit of employing babes in arms! Still, I daresay he will do you no harm—although I question his ability to do you much good, either.”

* * * *

Thomas, being thrust all unprepared into the rôle of butler, had yet to acquire several of those sterling qualities which had made the absent Rogers so indispensable to the Fieldhursts’ comfort, chief among these being an exquisite sense of timing. As a result of this lack, he was both a bit early in opening the drawing room door and a bit late in closing it.

Pickett, therefore, both entered and exited the room to the accompaniment of Lady Dunnington’s candid impressions of him, both personally and professionally—neither of which was flattering, and both of which cut a bit too close to the bone. He was forced to concede the lady’s point where the former was concerned, as he could do nothing about his years or lack thereof; however, he took umbrage with the latter. Not only was he persuaded of his ability to do the viscountess a great deal of good, but that morning’s interview with the magistrate had left him convinced that he was the only one who might do so.

Granted, things looked awkward for her ladyship, but she was not the only one who might stand to profit from the viscount’s death. Nor, for that matter, was her would-be lover, Lord Rupert Latham, although Pickett felt no such chivalric tendencies where his lordship was concerned. There was, for example, Mr. George Bertram, heir presumptive to the title, whose wife appeared eager to assume her new status. Mr. Bertram himself had been more restrained, but the fact that he did not flaunt his ambitions did not necessarily mean they did not exist. Or had he perhaps murdered his cousin in order to please his wife? Mrs. Bertram hardly struck Pickett as the sort who might drive a man to murder for love of her, but human nature being what it was, one never knew.

Then there was the matter of the disappearing letter. Had Sir Archibald Stanton killed Fieldhurst in order to gain possession of it, after trying without success earlier in the evening to procure it by less drastic means? The disarrangement of the viscount’s coat could have been due not to any amorous intentions on Fieldhurst’s part, as Mr. Colquhoun had suggested, but to a frantic (and apparently unsuccessful) search on the part of Sir Archibald after the viscount was already dead. Every instinct urged him to demand an answer of Stanton at once, before the letter found its way into the post or onto the fire.

As luck would have it, a crisp, white rectangle of paper lay on a small side table near the front door. Pickett had the impression that Lady Fieldhurst’s friendship with her present guest had long since moved beyond such formalities as calling cards, and dared to hope that the card might have been left earlier that morning by Sir Archibald Stanton. He bethought himself of a clever bit of sleight of hand learned in his misspent youth, and paused beside the table as Thomas opened the door for his departure.

“By the bye,” he asked, “how long have you been in the viscount’s employ?”

“Ten years,” the footman said with a hint of pride.

“You must have been just a lad, then.”

“Aye, that I was. Worked my way up from kitchen boy, I did.”

Pickett encouraged these reminiscences, and when he left the house a short time later, he was on excellent terms with the footman and the card was secreted up his sleeve.

He progressed up Charles Street, well past Berkeley Square, before examining his ill-gotten gain. As he had hoped, it was engraved not only with Sir Archibald Stanton’s name but also with his direction, which proved to be a very short distance away in Curzon Street. He turned his steps southward and was soon knocking upon the door of Sir Archibald’s domicile. It was opened by a dour-faced butler who looked at him as if he were a particularly repugnant species of insect.

“John Pickett, Bow Street,” said the Runner, handing the butler his unfashionably low-crowned hat, “here to see Sir Archibald Stanton.”

The butler took the hat by its brim, holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger as if fearing contamination, and placed it on an elaborately carved and gilded console table, where it looked ridiculously out of place even to its owner’s untrained eye. The butler then flung open the door to a small sitting room. “If you will wait here, sir, I will inform Sir Archibald of your arrival.”

As the sound of the butler’s measured tread faded away, Pickett took stock of his surroundings. Besides being cramped, the little room was cold and dark. No fire burned in the grate and, although one wall contained no fewer than three tall, narrow windows, any warming sunlight was blocked out by heavy, brown velvet curtains. As for the furniture, the straight chairs along the walls looked decidedly uncomfortable—an impression which was confirmed the moment Pickett sat down on one of them. He suspected unwelcome guests were left in this room for extended periods of time in the hope that they would give up and go away. He was not surprised, therefore, when fully half an hour passed before his host put in an appearance.

“Good afternoon, Mr.—Plunkett, is it?”

“Pickett.”

“Yes, yes. So sorry to have kept you waiting. Now, what may I do for you?”

“I’ve just come from Lord Fieldhurst’s house, where I managed to—misplace—a potentially valuable bit of evidence. Since you were there at the same time, I wonder if you might have walked off with it—purely by accident, of course.”

“Misplacing valuable evidence? Tut-tut, Mr. Pickett, how very careless of you. I regret that I am unable to assist you.”

Pickett rose from the uncomfortable chair and regarded Sir Archibald from his superior height. “Then you have no knowledge of the letter that disappeared from Lord Fieldhurst’s desk at the same time you left the viscount’s house?”

Alas, Sir Archibald was not so easily intimidated. “Did I say that? I am quite certain I did not. In fact, I am fully aware of the letter and its contents. I said merely that I am unable to assist you. You may console yourself with the knowledge that it was valueless as a clue, in any case.”

“I think I would be the best judge of that.”

“Perhaps, but as the letter has been disposed of, we shall never know, shall we?”

“Disposed of?” Pickett seized upon the telling phrase. “How? In the post, or on the fire?”

“Does it matter? It is lost to you either way. Suffice it to say that it has been dealt with in such a way that it need cause a lady no distress.”

“Lady Fieldhurst?” demanded Pickett, rapidly losing his composure. “What has she to do with it? Just what was in that letter?”

“Come, Mr. Pickett, we are both men here, well versed in the ways of the world. Surely Lady Fieldhurst has suffered enough already, without discovering amorous correspondence among her husband’s papers.”

“You would have me believe that the letter was a communication between Fieldhurst and his mistress? But it was written in French and directed to a French address. That’s a long way to go for a tumble.”

“Perhaps it was written in that language to confound prying eyes,” Sir Archibald said pointedly.

“If the Fieldhursts’ marriage was as troubled as everyone seems to believe, it’s unlikely her ladyship would be shocked to discover that her husband had a mistress in his keeping.”

“Perhaps not, but why take the chance? Sometimes, Mr. Pickett, it is best to err on the side of caution.”

“It would seem you think so, at all events. Sir Archibald, where were you last night between the hours of midnight and one o’clock?”

Sir Archibald bristled, and Pickett was more than ever convinced that his motives in taking the letter went beyond mere gallantry. “I was here, reading in my library.”

Pickett hoped for his sake that the library was furnished with more comfortable chairs than the sitting room they now occupied. “Would anyone else in your household be prepared to swear to that?”

“Why the devil should they? A fine thing it is, when a man can’t enjoy the comforts of his own fireside without a damned Nosey Parker from Bow Street treating him like a common criminal!”

Pickett, realizing no more information was to be had from his belligerent host, quitted the cheerless little room and picked up his hat from the console table near the door. As the butler opened the door to speed his departure, Pickett turned back for one parting word of advice. “Sir Archibald, a man has been murdered and you, by your own admission, removed something from his house the next morning without his widow’s knowledge or permission. If I were you, I would make it my business to find someone who could testify to my whereabouts at the time of Lord Fieldhurst’s death. Good day, sir.”

Chapter 7

The Heir Presumptive and His Mate

The Bertram domicile in Half Moon Street was not nearly so imposing as the viscount’s Berkeley Square residence but, as if in compensation for this deficiency, it was far more ornately decorated, with much gilding and numerous pieces of frankly fake Grecian statuary. Upon stating his business with the master of the house, Pickett followed the butler to a small, cluttered study, where George Bertram sat behind a desk whose top was scarcely visible for the piles of papers littering its surface.

“So it’s you, is it?” Mr. Bertram complained in a tone which, in a less reedy voice, would have been a growl.

“I told you I would come,” Pickett reminded him.

“You certainly didn’t let any grass grow beneath your feet.”

As Pickett approached the desk, Mr. Bertram swept a number of papers into the long, shallow drawer in the center, but not before Pickett (who in his short time on the Bow Street force had developed the useful talent of reading upside down) had recognized the names of a number of fashionable shops in Bond Street. They were, in fact, tradesman’s bills, most containing numbers with double or triple digits, and several of which had “past due” scrawled boldly across the top. Here, it seemed, was motive enough, even for Mr. Colquhoun.

“But so long as you’re here,” continued Mr. Bertram, “you might as well make yourself useful. My strongbox was broken into last night—there, what do you make of that?”

He lifted the small metal box from the desk and turned it around so that Pickett might inspect the damage. The lock itself was intact, but long scratches on the face of the box surrounding the lock bore mute witness to the fact that it had been breached with a sharp object.

“Interesting,” remarked Pickett, although he could not see precisely how this relatively minor crime might fit in with the viscount’s murder, if in fact the two were related at all. Still, robbery and murder within the same family, all in a space of less than twenty-four hours, were rather too coincidental for his liking. “When did you discover the burglary?”

“This morning, shortly after I returned from my late cousin’s house in Berkeley Square. I entered my study, and discovered—that.” A sweep of his hand indicated the ravaged strongbox.