02 Blue Murder (18 page)

Realizing she had forgotten to introduce
herself, Kate called back, “It’s Kate. Detective Sergeant Kate
Wakefield! If you remember anything else, or if you ever need to
talk, ring the Yard and ask for me!” But this last surely went
unheard because Jeremy, in pursuit of the pregnant Phoebe, was
gone.

***

K
ate’s conversation with Jeremy Bentham cost her that first
opportunity to speak with Sir Duncan. When she turned back to where
Sir Duncan had been, there was only the horse-faced woman,
whinnying in the ear of some new victim. The crowd’s detritus—to
which Kate decidedly belonged—had been left behind. The young and
fashionably disheveled, including Kyla Sloane, had followed in Sir
Duncan’s wake.

Also gone, Kate discovered as she awkwardly
hoofed it from one side of the ballroom to the other, was
Hetheridge and Lady Margaret. Kate’s mobile, tucked in her tiny
clutch purse, could not find a signal within the cavernous
ballroom. Frustrated, Kate asked a bartender—the same impassive
bartender who’d served her Prosecco—where she could find a
landline. He pointed to the red-carpeted staircase. On the next
floor—she was informed in a tone suggesting anyone who was anyone
would already know—she would find a phone, a powder room and a
valet capable of assisting with more complex needs.

“
Cheers, mate,” Kate told
the bartender, allowing her East End bray to come through. She did
not follow Hetheridge’s example of an extravagant tip.

Climbing the stairs alone, Kate was more
than a little suspicious she’d been the butt of a disgruntled
server’s joke. But as she emerged on the next floor, she saw an
antique telephone stand bearing an incongruously modern phone.
Snatching it up, Kate dialed Hetheridge’s mobile from memory.

It rang four times. Then a recorded BT voice
told Kate the number was not available, and to please try again
later.

Kate muttered a few choice curses.
Hetheridge, like the apatosaurus and the tyrannosaurus, switched
off his mobile at public events, considering it rude to take a call
when otherwise engaged. Contemporary human beings, including
herself and DS Bhar, kept the damned things on, to get their damned
calls, especially in damned difficult situations …

“
May I help you, madam?” a
rather strangled voice inquired.

Kate put down the handset. A slender,
uniformed valet with the face of a trout stared at her, eyes
bulging, lips pursed like he wanted an excuse to toss her out.

“
Too right. I need to pee.
Where’s the bog?”

“
Madam.” Emotionless, the
valet pointed to an alcove covered by a tapestry hung from large
brass rings. “Just there.”

So much for trying to rattle him. Striving
not to look disappointed, Kate thrust back the tapestry and sailed
into the room. She hoped to find the facilities ridiculous, worthy
of a blistering complaint. Instead, what she found was almost a
religious experience.

A triple vanity in beige marble stood before
an enormous gilt-edged mirror. Three woven baskets sat on the
countertop, one filled with soaps, another with rolled hand towels,
a third with tampons. Three subalcoves, divided by smaller yet
still magnificent tapestries, awaited Kate. Peeking into the first,
she found both a toilet and a bidet. It appeared the rich needed no
locking stalls. A tapestry curtain on brass rings was sufficient;
good breeding protected the sanctity of the loo.

When Kate exited, she expected another
confrontation with the fish-lipped valet. Surely he expected her to
emerge loaded down with soap, hand towels and a month’s supply of
tampons?

No. The valet was nowhere to be seen. Kate
glanced at the landline again. No use continuing to call
Hetheridge, and if Lady Margaret had a mobile number, Kate didn’t
know it. Kate thought for a moment. And then, instead of heading
back downstairs into the ballroom, she wandered deeper into Lady
Isabel Bartlow’s home.

The first door she encountered led into what
appeared to be a salon or study—Kate wasn’t sure of the precise
term. It held a small desk, a bookshelf and a dozen wall-mounted
plaques and commendations issued to Lady Isabel’s father or
grandfather. There was no visible dust, but the room smelled
disused.

The second door Kate encountered led into a
broom cupboard. The third, to a small kitchenette outfitted with a
dorm fridge, wine chiller, hotplate and lots of cabinetry. The
fourth door opened onto an outdoor terrace overlooking the house’s
dark inner garden. Lit by two frosted glass globes, the terrace was
furnished with a wrought iron table, two chairs and a small hooked
rug. Enticed by the scent of fresh night air—October air, which
always seemed imbued with wood smoke and a hint of frost—Kate
wandered to the balcony’s rail. For what seemed like a long time,
she leaned against the chilly wrought iron, pushing her face into
the breeze. Breathing deeply, she stared, mostly unseeing, into the
darkness.

“
What are you doing
here?”

Kate’s head whipped around. Her heart
pounded so hard it threatened to leap out of her mouth. The voice
was not accusing. It was courteous, charming. But Kate’s heart beat
fast and hard, all the same.

“
Forgive me. That came out
altogether wrong,” Sir Duncan Godington stepped onto the terrace.
“What I meant to say is, how did a creature like you find yourself
here? With this sort of crowd? With these people, who aren’t your
sort at all?”

There was nothing condescending in the
question. At least, not toward Kate. Rather, it sounded as if Sir
Duncan intended disrespect toward the vast majority of his
half-sister’s guests.

“
I’m a friend of Lady
Margaret Knolls,” Kate said, sticking to the angle Hetheridge had
chosen for her. “She thought I’d enjoy myself here
tonight.”

Sir Duncan regarded her steadily. He took
one step closer. Then another. Kate was startled by her own
visceral reaction. At close range, surrounded by the fresh October
night, Sir Duncan was not handsome. He was beautiful.

“
You know you don’t belong
here,” he murmured. Pausing only an arm’s length from Kate, he
allowed his gaze to travel up her body—hips, waist, cleavage. Then
he found her eyes, holding them as he continued to speak, like a
trainer bent on mesmerizing a beast. “You’re too authentic. Too
real.”

Kate didn’t know what to say. Part of her
was frightened. The rest was too charmed to respond, to launch into
a line of questions, to do anything but gaze upon his face and his
tall, well-proportioned physique.

“
I think you’re from
Scotland Yard,” Sir Duncan continued with a slow, conspiratorial
smile. “Perhaps on the arm of that ghastly policeman. His father
was a friend of my father’s—and if that isn’t condemnation across
the board, I don’t know what is. Lord Hetheridge, isn’t it? Are you
his protégé?”

Mention of Hetheridge’s name brought Kate
back to herself. It was like being immersed in a realistic
dream—and then having the strong, unmistakable suspicion she needed
to awaken.

“
I did some research on you,
Sir Duncan,” Kate said. “To the press and the police, you’ve always
spoken of your father with the utmost reverence. This is the first
time you’ve ever said anything remotely unflattering about
him.”

Sir Duncan’s smile widened. “Ah. But the
trial’s over. I’ve been acquitted. Can’t be tried for the same
crime again.”

“
True. But supposed another
trial is looming? One involving Emmeline Wardle’s murdered guests?
Clive French and Trevor Parsons?”

Sir Duncan gave an elegant shrug.
“Everywhere I go, my dear, I find tedious policemen desperate to
saddle me with unsolved murders. Last year, in the south of France,
I was meant to be a rapist/killer who cannibalized his victims. The
year before that, in the United States, I was thought to have
committed anarchist bombings. The year before that, in Scotland, I
was believed to have strangled two old women for what amounted to
twenty pounds.” Sir Duncan put his head to one side, studying Kate
frankly. “Now I have the misfortune to own a house next door to the
site of a double murder. No doubt you were dispatched to inquire if
I have any psychosexual fixations with the axe.”

“
Do you?” Kate tried to make
it a challenge.

“
None whatsoever. Were I to
murder two university students at random, surely I could find a
better way? Something with more style and panache than an axe
buried in the skull?”

“
Did your father and brother
die with style and panache? Dismembered and mutilated, in the case
of your father,” Kate said. “Sawed in half while still alive, in
the case of your brother.”

Gaze unblinking, Sir Duncan came close
enough to touch. “Which do you prefer? Truth? Or lie?”

Kate crossed her arms across her chest.
“Lie.”

“
The way my beloved father
and brother died was far from a display of style or panache,” Sir
Duncan recited. “It was the butchery of an unbalanced mind. But I
do not believe they suffered. Their murderer, that deranged and
evil person, attacked their bodies but could never harm their
souls.”

Kate was impressed. Sir Duncan stumbled only
when he used the word “souls.” He pronounced the word with an
unconscious irony that most human beings, eager to believe the best
of their fellow creatures, would never catch.

“
Brilliant,” Kate said,
clapping. “Now. Truth.”

“
Ah, the truth.” Sir
Duncan’s smile changed like the shifting of a serpent, its muscular
coils rearranging as it took hold of its prey. “Do you recall when
the ghost, Jacob Marley, visited Ebenezer Scrooge? He told Scrooge,
‘You wear the chain you made in life. You forged it link by link—it
is a ponderous chain!’ So it was with my father and brother. They
forged the fate that took them from this world. One can only hope
they enjoyed the dénouement as much as … well. As their destroyer
did.”

“
But you killed the butler,
too?” Kate asked. She wanted to be shocked—she should have been
shocked—but mostly felt nothing but curiosity. It was curiosity
that endured, even grew, as a detective wandered further into the
excesses of human depravity. The ability to be shocked faded with
each foray into the dark.

“
Philip Jergens was your
beloved family retainer, as you called him, time and time again,”
Kate said. “I can accept that you hated your father and brother.
There’s always hatred in families. But the old butler. Why did he
have to die?”

“
Because he was loyal to
them,” Sir Duncan said. “Completely loyal, and thus undeserving of
mercy.” Still without anger, without passion of any kind, Sir
Duncan said, “Now you tell me. How could I have possibly done it?
How could I have managed such an act, in such a tight timeline, in
the manner the Crown prosecutor suggested?”

Before Kate could answer, Sir Duncan began
shrugging out of his black silk jacket. “How could I have rushed
from the airport to my ancestral home,” he freed one arm,
“committed triple murder,” he freed the other, “fled headlong to my
apartment and resumed my decadent life?” He held out the jacket to
Kate with a gentle, and gentlemanly, smile.

She stared at it, cold to the bone but
unable to accept.

“
All without witnesses,” Sir
Duncan continued, jacket still offered between them. “And not a
shred of physical evidence to connect me to the crimes. How did I
pull it off?”

“
You weren’t alone. Your
friends helped you,” a familiar voice said from the doorway.
“You’ve always had acolytes to do your dirty work, all your life.
And once the act was finished, you bound them to you in a web
tighter than anything Scotland Yard could hope to
unravel.”

Chapter Fifteen

“
A
h. And here is the ghastly policeman,
in the flesh.” Sir Duncan inclined his head at Hetheridge. “What a
pleasure!”

“
Indeed.” Hetheridge crossed
the balcony to Kate’s side. Taking Sir Duncan’s jacket as if he
were the intended recipient, Hetheridge draped it over Kate’s
shoulders with a propriety flourish, positioning himself between
her and Sir Duncan.

“
By God, it’s Lord Anthony
Hetheridge, is it not?” Sir Duncan shook Hetheridge’s hand. “Izzie
called you a tired old wreck, but I disagree. You don’t look a bit
worse than you did at my trial.”

“
I’m flattered you remember
me at all,” Hetheridge said, smiling. “I was far from a major
player in your trial, except near the end. The day that unfortunate
stalker of yours was collared wearing women’s clothes, as a matter
of fact. And by then, the die was cast.”

“
Oh, never fear, Lord
Hetheridge, I remember you well. I was only just telling your
companion here …” Sir Duncan stopped, swiveling back to Kate. “How
inexcusably rude. I forgot to ask your name.”

“
I’m Kate.” She worked to
keep her tone light. Hetheridge’s appearance had shattered her
concentration. Now she felt a bit off-balance, especially with Sir
Duncan’s weighty black jacket settled on her shoulders. It smelled
of some woodsy cologne—familiar yet sexy. The kind of scent a woman
instinctively liked. Trusted, even.

“
Kate.” Sir Duncan seemed to
taste the name as much as say it. “Forgive me. I was so captivated
by you, I dove right into the conversation, ignoring the necessary
superficialities. Call me Duncan.” His gaze shifted back to
Hetheridge. “I was telling Kate that your father was a great friend
of my father’s.”