Sheri Cobb South (9 page)

“Was anything taken?”

“Sixty-five pounds in five- and ten-pound notes.”

Pickett crossed the crowded room, carefully skirting several occasional tables and a large bust of an obscure Greek philosopher, and examined the windows for any sign of forced entry. He found none.

“Don’t you think,” complained Mr. Bertram, “that the public would be better served if you fellows did more to prevent this sort of thing?”

As he offered no suggestions as to precisely what might have been done to prevent such an occurrence, Pickett wisely ignored this question and instead put forth one of his own.

“I will look into your burglary later, but for now, Mr. Bertram, I must ask you where you were last night between the hours of midnight and one o’clock.”

George Bertram scowled. He was obviously attempting an air of belligerence, but succeeded only in sounding peevish. “So it has come to that, has it? Very well, Mr. Pickett, I will answer your question momentarily, but first you can answer mine. If I intended to kill my cousin, why should I have waited until now? Surely the time for murder would have been six years ago, after his betrothal was announced and it seemed likely that he would soon beget a son to supplant me in the succession. Why take such a risk once my position was assured?”

It appeared Mr. Bertram was well aware of the chief argument against him and had prepared a counterattack. Indeed, he had made such a good job of it that Pickett wondered if a written draft of his defense might be found among the papers covering his desk.

“Was your position so assured?” he asked. “You seem very confident.”

“My good fellow, I have every reason for confidence! It is common knowledge that all was not well between my cousin and the lovely Lady Fieldhurst. Not to be indelicate, but he had formed the habit of taking his pleasure elsewhere, so, even if she had not been barren, there was also the matter of opportunity, if you take my meaning.”

Pickett took his meaning very well, and wished he did not. He hated hearing Lady Fieldhurst discussed in such a way, as if she were a brood mare. More specifically, he hated the thought of Lady Fieldhurst participating in the activities necessary for giving her husband an heir. But it had, he reminded himself, nothing to do with him, and he was determined not to be drawn into reacting emotionally. He had made that mistake once already with Lord Rupert Latham, to the detriment of his investigation.

“Husbands and wives can always reconcile,” Pickett pointed out. “But even if they did not, it could not be pleasant for you, having to wait for a man still in his prime to die before you could collect your inheritance. I daresay this house must cost a pretty penny to maintain—more than I’ll ever see in my lifetime, I’ll wager.”

Whether subconsciously or by design, a wistful note crept into Pickett’s voice as he glanced around the cluttered but expensively furnished room.

“It’s not cheap, I’ll grant you that,” Mr. Bertram admitted grudgingly. “Add to that my wife’s determination to be a leader of fashion amongst a set of women whose husbands have twice my income at their disposal, and—well, much as I regret the manner of Fieldhurst’s death, I’ll not deny the timing was providential.”

“Providential,” echoed Pickett thoughtfully. “An interesting word for murder. Somehow I’d never pictured a Divine Providence going about sticking scissors into the necks of mortal men.”

Mr. Bertram flushed an angry scarlet. “You are impertinent, sirrah! You ask where I was last night between midnight and one; very well, I shall tell you. I was at my club. I only returned this morning, just in time to be informed of my cousin’s death.”

“Which club was this?”

“White’s. The Bertrams have been members there for generations.”

Pickett jotted down this information in his notebook. “Were you often in the habit of spending the night there?”

“Not often, no,” Mr. Bertram conceded. “But I’d had, er, unpleasant words with Mrs. Bertram earlier in the evening, which left me disinclined to endure more of her company.”

“You quarreled over her spending habits?”

A stiff inclination of the head was the only reply, but it told Pickett far more than any number of words. Had the quarrel left Mr. Bertram so desperate for funds that he had stormed out of the house, not to spend the night at his club, but to remove the only impediment standing between himself and a fortune? A word with the porter at White’s should supply the answer to that question, but another emerged. Had Mrs. Bertram, desperate for a style of living just beyond her reach, taken advantage of her husband’s absence to secure the fortune for herself? There was still the puzzle of how she came to be in the viscountess’s bedchamber, but here, too, a possibility arose. She had no doubt heard from her husband of the estrangement between the Fieldhursts; had she then, in an attempt to catch the viscount off his guard, offered him those favors he no longer obtained from his wife? Ludicrous, of course, to think that any man married to the beautiful Lady Fieldhurst could be tempted by the likes of Mrs. George Bertram, but there was no accounting for tastes.

He thanked Mr. Bertram for his time, feeling well pleased with this interview. He thought he had acquitted himself rather well against the new viscount; it was only with her ladyship—and, it must be confessed, Lord Rupert Latham, her lover—that he tended to make a fool of himself. He thought again of her insistence that nothing had happened between herself and Lord Rupert. Had she been telling the truth, or did he believe her because he wanted so desperately for it to be so?

“Mr. Pickett?” George Bertram’s voice penetrated Pickett’s reverie. “Have you anything else to say?”

With an effort, Pickett forced his attention back to the matter at hand. “I should like a word with Mrs. Bertram, if you please.”

“Very well.”

Mr. Bertram tugged the bell pull, and a moment later a footman came to show him to the drawing room where he might await Mrs. Bertram’s pleasure. Pickett followed him as far as the door, then paused and turned back.

“By the bye,” he addressed Mr. Bertram, “are you acquainted with a deacon named Toomer?”

“Never heard of him,” Bertram stated decisively. “Why do you ask?”

Pickett shook his head. “No special reason.”

The drawing room was as expensively and tastelessly furnished as the rest of the house. Mrs. Bertram entered the room in such a flutter of black crape that one might have supposed it was her husband, rather than his cousin, who had died.

“I can only spare you a moment,” she informed him without preamble. “I have an appointment with my dressmaker. I must have new blacks made, you know, for square necklines are quite out of fashion this year, while as for trains, why, one might as well wear homespun! Still, at least it is only for a few weeks—not like my dear cousin, who must spend the next twelvemonth in a color so very unbecoming to her! Really, I thought the poor thing looked quite haggish. But so it always is with ladies who possess that pale sort of beauty: dark hues steal what little color they have.”

Jealous old bat, thought Pickett. Aloud, he said, “I’ll not take much of your time, your ladyship—”

“Oh, you must not call me that!” simpered Mrs. Bertram, in a voice which clearly communicated her pleasure in hearing herself thus addressed. “At least, not until after the funeral. It wouldn’t be proper.”

“As you wish, Mrs. Bertram. Can you tell me where you were last night between the hours of midnight and one o’clock?”

Her brow furrowed in concentration as she considered the question—trying, no doubt, to decide how best to answer without dredging up her quarrel with Bertram, Pickett thought.

“George and I—Mr. Bertram, you know, at least until after the funeral—attended the opera last night. It finished at about eleven—interminable, all that caterwauling, but simply everyone attends!—and we returned home.”

“Where you both remained for the rest of the night?”

Mrs. Bertram nodded. “As you say.”

Pickett made a great show of flipping through the pages of his notebook. “Then I must have been mistaken. I understood your husband to say that he had spent the night at his club.”

Mrs. Bertram’s face grew pale beneath her black-bordered lace cap as she rushed into speech. “Did he say so? And so he may have done. I daresay he left for White’s after I had retired for the evening.” She gave a brittle laugh. “Between you and me and the lamppost, Mr. Pickett, my husband and I were quite put out with one another. I fear he has little understanding of what it costs for a woman in my position to dress appropriately. But I am sure that is all settled now, for I know he will not wish to be behindhand in any courtesy due Fieldhurst or his widow.”

“His widow?”

“Why, yes, for it is not her fault that she failed to give Fieldhurst a son. I believe such is often the case with these frail beauties. But since George and I have three sons—one at Oxford, one at Eton, and one still in the nursery—it is not as if the line will die out due to her negligence. Indeed, if she does not wish to live with the dowager, I think we must consider letting little Edward’s nanny go, and giving him over to his dear auntie’s care. I daresay the boy will eventually become like the son she never had, and she may be assured that she is still one of the family.”

The prospect of Lady Fieldhurst spending the rest of her life as unpaid drudge to her successor momentarily deprived Pickett of speech. “You seem to have matters well in hand,” he said, when he could talk at all. “I only hope her ladyship will give your offer the consideration it deserves.”

Mrs. Bertram, oblivious to irony, preened. “Yes, well, as Shakespeare said, blood is thicker than water.”

Pickett, living only a stone’s throw from Drury Lane Theatre and frequently to be found occupying its pit, was fairly certain that Shakespeare had never said any such thing, but declined to argue the point. He only wished Mr. Colquhoun had been present to witness this interrogation. Here was evidence aplenty of Lady Fieldhurst’s innocence, for what woman of beauty, wealth, and position would willingly cast herself upon the charity of the new viscount and his wife?

“And so,” continued Pickett, returning to the subject at hand, “you returned from the opera shortly after eleven, quarreled with Mr. Bertram, and then retired to your room. What time would you say this was?”

Mrs. Bertram shrugged her shoulders, setting her black draperies aflutter. “Goodness, I don’t know! Midnight, perhaps, or a little after? I fell asleep so quickly, I never even heard the clock chime.”

Pickett could not have said why he was so certain she was lying. Perhaps it was the way her gaze slid away from his, or the manner in which her unquiet hands twisted her black-bordered handkerchief. He made a note in his occurrence book, watching her all the while out of the corner of his eye.

“You are a very fortunate lady, Mrs. Bertram. I understand you might have been murdered in your bed.”

Her agitated hands grew still, and her handkerchief floated to the floor unnoticed. “I beg your pardon?”

“Your husband tells me you suffered a burglary last night. His strong-box, to be exact.”

“Oh, that!” Finding her hands unexpectedly empty, she spied her handkerchief on the floor and stooped to pick it up. “Yes, shocking, is it not? Really, one wonders how much a single family must be called upon to endure!”

Pickett regarded her with a puzzled frown. “Unwelcome though it is, surely the theft of sixty-five pounds hardly compares with the murder of a man in cold blood.”

“Of course not,” agreed Mrs. Bertram, flushing an unbecoming red. “But surely anyone capable of cold-blooded murder would not balk at petty thievery.”

“You believe, then, that the murderer and the thief are the same?”

“Surely they must be!”

“I wonder,” said Pickett thoughtfully.

“Some low person with a grudge against the family,” suggested Mrs. Bertram, warming to this theme, “or riff-raff hoping to initiate a revolution in the French tradition. Most uncomfortable for us all, if that should prove to be the case.”

Pickett agreed rather mechanically and took his leave. Once on the street, however, he paused to look back at the house. Something about the Bertram burglary did not ring true, in spite of the incriminating marks defacing the front of the strong-box.

Obeying a sudden impulse, Pickett vaulted the low wrought-iron railing and hurried down the narrow staircase leading to the service entrance below ground level. He knocked on the door and was soon admitted to the kitchen, which was already bustling with preparations for an elaborate evening meal.

“ ‘The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables,’ “ quoted Pickett, before recalling that Shakespeare’s lines dealt with a new widow’s too-hasty second marriage. He wondered if Lord Rupert Latham’s courtship would prove more successful this time, then pushed away a thought too repugnant to contemplate. He reminded himself sternly that any union between Lady Fieldhurst and Lord Rupert was none of his affair; he had all he could do merely seeing that she escaped execution.

Still, it was a rather deflated young man who requested of the housekeeper a private word with Mrs. Bertram’s abigail. He was shown into the housekeeper’s own parlor, where a frightened, somewhat mousy young woman soon joined him.

“Yes, sir? You wanted to see me?”

Pickett gave her a reassuring smile. “Only to ask you a few questions.”

She slid into a chair and sat ramrod-straight, hands clasped tightly in her lap. “I don’t know if I can answer them, but I’ll do my best.”

“That’s all I ask. Tell me, what is your name?”

“Nancy, sir.”

“Well, Nancy, what time did your mistress retire last night?”

The nervous Nancy hesitated for a moment before replying. “She came home from the opera at almost half-past eleven.”

“Yes, but what time did she go to bed? Surely you must have helped her undress, put away her clothes. What time was that?”

“I can’t rightly say what time she came upstairs. The master wanted a word with her first, and—well—”

“Yes, I know all about that.” Pickett grinned. “I’ll wager you got a rare earful afterwards.”