Royal Blood (20 page)

“But someone thought it might be murder?”

“I did,” Lady Middlesex said. “I’m Lady Middlesex, the wife of the British high commissioner in Mesopotamia. My husband has represented the British Crown all over the world. I know poison when I see it.”

“And what poison would that be?”

“Why, cyanide, of course. Red face, staring eyes and the odor of bitter almonds. A classic case. I saw it once before in the Argentine.”

Patrascue turned back to me. “Did you see somebody administer this poison?”

“No. I saw nobody come near the table except the servers and Count Dragomir.”

Dragomir made a coughing noise in his throat and said, “I resent the implication that I was somehow involved in this farce. Why would I want to kill a man I had never met before? It is my duty to make sure all servers perform flawlessly. Naturally I was standing behind the table, in a position where I could watch them all.”

“And yet you saw nothing amiss?” Patrascue asked.

“The men performed flawlessly as always.”

“We have no idea how the poison was administered,” Nicholas said. “I sat beside him. All food and drink was served from the same platters and carafes and with great speed. It would have been impossible to select a poisoned morsel for a particular person.”

“Then I would suggest that it was placed in his glass before the meal,” Patrascue said smugly.

“But we were told cyanide acted almost immediately,” I said. “The field marshal had cleared his plate, had second helpings and had his wineglass filled countless times from the same carafe as everybody else.”

“If the poison was indeed cyanide,” Patrascue said. “I take it no doctor was present to make an accurate diagnosis. Amateurs are frequently wrong in my experience.”

“There is no physician in the castle, unfortunately,” Anton said. “But I have studied a bit of medicine at the University of Heidelberg and I can tell you that the telltale odor of bitter almonds was present and the face was flushed.”

“Ah, a so-called expert,” Patrascue said. “It is unfortunate that the body has already been transported away from the castle, or I myself could have determined what poison had been administered. I hope that somebody had the sense to put aside the utensils this person used at the dinner table. I shall send them off for testing and then we shall know.”

“They did and they have been taken with the body to be examined by a competent laboratory,” Nicholas said. I thought I detected a note of glee in his voice. “Naturally we didn’t expect a trained policeman like yourself to arrive so soon, given the condition of the pass.”

“Ah.” Patrascue tried to come up with a response to something that might have been a compliment. “Then the next step is to interview those who served the meal. Count Dragomir, you are in charge of the running of this place, are you not?”

“You know very well that I am,” Dragomir replied curtly. No love lost between those two, I thought.

“Then please be good enough to have those men who served at dinner brought to the library instantly for questioning.”

“If we do that, then word will spread around the castle rather rapidly that the field marshal is dead, and probably murdered. That is the last thing we want at this moment,” Nicholas said. “The men were questioned discreetly last night.”

“And it is as I told Their Highnesses,” Dragomir said. “These are all local men, simple men who have been in the service of this castle for most of their lives. Why would any of them want to poison a foreign field marshal, even if they had the means to do so?”

“Money,” Patrascue said. “Enough money can persuade a man to go against his conscience and to perform in a most ruthless manner. How many footmen were there serving at dinner last night?”

“There were twelve,” Dragomir said. “But we would only be concerned with those who served the field marshal. Those who waited on the other side of the table would never have come near him.”

“Ah, I see.” Patrascue nodded jerkily. “And it would be impossible to lean across this table?”

“Any servant who leaned across a table would be instantly dismissed,” Dragomir said. “Our standards of etiquette are of the very highest.”

“I will speak with these men, one at a time,” Patrascue said. “I will swear them to secrecy. They know enough of my reputation to realize what would happen to them if they were rash enough to lie to me or to break their vow. And if one of them has accepted money to commit this heinous act, then I shall make him confess, I promise you.” He smiled unpleasantly. I noticed his teeth were unnaturally pointed.

“Of course we could have made a mistake all along,” Anton said in a different, breezy voice. “As you say, we are only amateurs. Perhaps we were misinterpreting what was only a simple heart attack after all. It was this lady who suggested that she smelled the odor of bitter almonds, and we know that ladies are inclined to be hysterical in the presence of a body.”

“I absolutely resent—” Lady Middlesex began. I kicked her hard, under the table. She looked at me in astonishment and shut up.

“As soon as the car bearing Field Marshal Pirin’s body reaches civilization we shall know the truth,” Anton went on smoothly. “Why don’t we wait until a competent physician has given his assessment of the situation? It would be a tragedy if false rumors leaked out to my country and a regional war began for nothing. It wouldn’t make you look good either, if you started a witch hunt for something that turned out to be a simple heart attack.”

Patrascue stared at him, trying to assess the implications of what he was saying. There was a pitcher of water on the table. He reached forward, poured himself a glass and drank from it.

“There is something in what you are saying,” he said. “I have no wish to destabilize this region or cause any unpleasantness with our neighbors at this moment of joy and celebration. We will await the doctor’s opinion. But in the meantime I will keep my eyes and ears open. Nobody will be above my scrutiny. Nobody!”

He put down his empty glass firmly on the table. The participants rose to their feet. Except for me. I was staring hard as if I were seeing a vision. I had just realized something that threw a whole new light onto this situation.

Chapter 23

I stood staring at the table until the others had left. In my mind’s eye I could visualize Field Marshal Pirin giving his drunken, rambling toast. He had reached for a glass, and he was holding it in his left hand. Hannelore had mentioned that his table manners were abysmal and he never used the correct fork. Apparently he didn’t use the correct glass either. It was not his glass at all he had grabbed for, but Prince Nicholas’s.

It took me a moment to grasp the implication of this. The intended murder victim was not Pirin at all, but Nicholas. And the reason Nicholas hadn’t drunk his own wine and died was that he had switched to champagne when the toasts started and had not touched his red wine after that. This would indicate that the glass had originally been free of cyanide during the main course when Nicky was drinking red wine with the wild boar. Somehow, someone had introduced the cyanide after that, unfortunately not realizing that Nicholas was going to call for champagne for his toasts. And if someone had introduced the cyanide, it had to be one of the servers or Dragomir.

Wait a minute, I thought. I was discounting the other diners at the table. Pirin obviously wouldn’t have put cyanide into a glass he was going to drink himself. On Nicholas’s other side was his bride and she was hardly likely to want to kill off her bridegroom. Opposite him was his brother, Anton, and as Dragomir had said, it was frightfully bad form to reach across the table. It would have been noticed instantly. And besides, the brothers seemed to be on good terms. Anton wouldn’t have wanted his brother dead. I paused, considering this. Anton had made jokes about not being the heir and having no purpose in life. Did he secretly wish that he’d be king someday and not his brother? And of all the people around, he would have had a knowledge of poisons. After all, he had told me that he was studying chemistry in Heidelberg. And he was the one who had persuaded Patrascue to do nothing for now. Which would give him ample time to dispose of any traces of cyanide if he needed to.

“Lady Georgiana!” Lady Middlesex’s strident voice cut through my thoughts. “Aren’t you coming?”

“What? Oh—yes,” I stammered. Now there was the question of whom to tell. I wished that Darcy hadn’t gone away.

Lady Middlesex grabbed my arm with her bony fingers. “We must go somewhere to plan strategy.”

“Strategy?”

She looked around. “Obviously we must make sure that everything is kept from that odious little policeman. We must work fast before he makes a complete mess of everything. Typical bungling foreigner. No clue how to run things properly. It is up to us now to unmask the murderer.”

“I don’t see how we’re ever going to do that,” I said. “I was there, facing Field Marshal Pirin all the time. If it was Dragomir or one of the footmen who slipped the cyanide into the glass, he was very slick and I don’t see how we’d ever find out who did it.”

“That’s if it was Dragomir or one of the servants,” Lady Middlesex said knowingly. She drew me closer. “Deer-Harte thinks she saw something. Of course, she is prone to flights of fancy, as we know.”

“I am an excellent observer, Lady M,” Miss Deer-Harte said, “and I know what I saw.”

“What did you see, Miss Deer-Harte?” I asked.

Her face went pink. “As you recall on the first night here I was not invited to join the company for dinner. Lady M thought it wouldn’t be right for a mere companion. I was told my supper would be sent up to my room. But after a while I thought that it wasn’t fair to one of the servants to have to walk up all these stairs with my tray, so I decided to come down and fetch it myself. Well”—she paused and looked around again—“as I passed the banqueting hall I heard the sound of merry voices, so naturally I lingered and took a little peek inside.”

“This was the first night,” I interrupted. “The night before Pirin was murdered.”

“It was, but what I saw could be significant. There was somebody watching from the shadows on the far side of the hall. He was dressed in black and he was standing half hidden behind one of the arches. He just stood there, not moving and watching. I thought it was odd at the time. I remember thinking, ‘That young man is up to no good.’ ”

“You always think things like that, Deer-Harte,” Lady Middlesex said. “You think that everyone is up to no good.”

“But in this case I was proven right, wasn’t I? And I’d like to wager that he was the same young man I saw creeping along the corridor in the middle of the night. I couldn’t see his face clearly on either occasion, but the build and demeanor were the same. And the way he was slinking along, he was clearly up to no good.”

“I am inclined to think she’s been letting her imagination run away with her again,” Lady Middlesex said, “but at the moment we are grasping at straws, aren’t we?”

“I don’t believe it was simply imagination,” I said. “What color hair did he have?”

She frowned, thinking. “It looked light to me. Yes, definitely light. Why do you ask?”

“Because a strange man came into my room on the first night, and then my maid came to me in great distress the next night to report that a man was in her room.”

“A young man with light hair?”

“Exactly. A good-looking young man with a Teutonic face.”

“I didn’t see his face, but I definitely saw the hair,” Miss Deer-Harte said.

“He came into your room?” Lady Middlesex demanded. “With what intention? Burglary or designs on your person?”

“I didn’t take the time to ask him. I rather fear the latter,” I said. “He was bending over me with a smile on his face. But when I sat up he disappeared hastily.”

“And your maid? Did he have designs on her person too? Clearly a man of great depravity.”

The thought struck me that a man would indeed have to be desperate to have designs on Queenie’s person. I knew it was deadly serious but I had to stop myself from giggling. I suppose it was the tension. “He didn’t touch her. He stood inside her door and when she gasped, he slipped out.”

“And did you report these effronteries to anyone?”

“No, I didn’t.” I paused.

“I would have. If any man had dared to come into my room, I should have reported him immediately.”

I hardly liked to say that nobody was likely to pay a nightly visit to Lady Middlesex. Nor did I want to bring up the possibility of vampires. Miss Deer-Harte, the one who had worried about vampires on the train, did not seem to connect her lurking young man with anything supernatural. And if the same man was our poisoner, then it was unlikely that he was anything more than a normal human. Vampires don’t need to poison people. In fact they wouldn’t want to taint their blood supply.

“One can only conclude,” Lady Middlesex went on, “that he was casing the joint, as criminals would say. It is most probable that he is a trained assassin and has been hiding out, waiting for the right moment to kill.”

I considered this too. It made sense that he was a trained assassin and that he was hiding out in the castle. But as Prince Nicholas had pointed out, there were surely easier ways to kill someone in a rambling old building like this than risk being detected at a very public banquet.

“And did you happen to see him at the banquet last night?” I asked Miss Deer-Harte.

“No, but then I was included in the party last night, not standing outside as an observer. One looks down to eat, so that one doesn’t risk spilling food, doesn’t one? One looks at the person to whom one is speaking. And I was naturally at the far end of the table, among the least important of the diners. But the interesting thing was I checked this morning that the spot where he had been standing was exactly behind Field Marshal Pirin’s seat. If you want my opinion, he was planning a dummy run, plotting when he could dart out and put the poison in the glass.”

“But I would have noticed any intruder, I’m sure,” I said. “So would Prince Anton and Princess Hannelore, who were sitting on either side of me.”

“Are you so sure?” Miss Deer-Harte said. “Supposing, for example, that you were in the middle of being served. Your server offers you the platter and says, ‘Some cauliflower, my lady?’ And you nod and say, ‘Thank you,’ and watch while it is put on your plate. For those moments you are not watching what is happening across the table, are you?”

“No, I suppose not,” I said.

“And if someone were dressed in black, not unlike the footmen’s uniform, or he had actually managed to procure himself a footman’s jacket, then nobody would look twice if he passed the table with a carafe in his hands. Servants are always too busy making sure they do their job to perfection to notice other servants. And it has been my observation that people simply pay no attention to servants.”

“Dragomir would have noticed,” I said. “He was hovering behind Prince Nicholas, directing the proceedings. As he said, he would have noticed anything slightly wrong.”

“Then let us consider that this Dragomir chappy is somehow involved,” Lady Middlesex said.

I couldn’t see why Dragomir would want to kill Prince Nicholas any more than he would want to kill Pirin. But if he were, in fact, from the Macedonian province that was now part of Yugoslavia it was just possible that he might want to cause civil war in Bulgaria as a way to reclaim its Macedonian lands. And what better way to do that than to assassinate its crown prince? Binky had said that they were always assassinating each other in this part of the world, hadn’t he? I decided that I’d risk a little chat with Dragomir myself.

“We obviously can’t snoop through every room in the castle,” Lady Middlesex said, “particularly now that the royal party has arrived, but it seems to me that the first task is to find out how he came by the poison and where he’s hiding the vial it came in.”

“I presume that any assassin could have the poison in his pocket when he came into the castle and would leave again with the empty vial,” I said.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed,” Lady Middlesex said brusquely, “but there are no footprints leading from the castle, apart from yours and Mr. O’Mara’s this morning. I checked particularly when we went on our little walk. He is still here, you mark my words.” She looked down at Miss Deer-Harte and nodded.

“I shall be extra vigilant, Lady M,” Miss Deer-Harte said. “If he is hiding somewhere he will have to come out eventually. He will need a bathroom and food and drink. I shall be watching for him.”

“Well said, Deer-Harte. Splendid stuff. We’ll show them how quickly and efficiently things are done when the flower of British womanhood takes over.” She slapped Miss Deer-Harte on the back, almost knocking her over. “Onward and upward then.”

And she marched down the hall like a general leading troops into battle.