James opened the door of the study for me. ‘Miss Lawrence has arrived, Luc.’
Both the men who had been standing by the desk looked round and Luc came across and kissed my hand. ‘Not the welcome I would have hoped for you, Cassandra. Our friend Adrien has just made a most unpleasant discovery.’
Adrien was as gangling, tall and mousey as I remembered him, which was not surprising as it was scarcely a month in his time since we had last met. But he was also subdued and pale, not the energetic, enthusiastic young man I had come to know and like.
‘James told me.’ I held out my hand and shook his. ‘I am sorry to meet you again at such a difficult time.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘My poor cousin.’
I wondered how long it would take before he realised that, with his employer’s death, his first foothold on the ladder of a successful political career had been knocked away, and with it his hopes for securing Rowena McNeil’s hand. Here at least, I thought, was someone with good reason for wishing his cousin a long and healthy life.
‘Now that you and James have joined us, I should summarise before we go around to Tillingham’s house to make certain I have the facts correct,’ Luc said. ‘He was working on a speech on the subject of the taxation of food imports.’ He looked at Adrien who nodded. ‘His staff knew not to disturb him and were not alarmed at his absence from his bed in the morning. The butler was puzzled when he could not see him in the study, but was not unduly concerned, even then.’
‘I learned very quickly that Cousin Henry was very rigid in his work routines,’ Adrien said. ‘And the staff were trained not to disturb him. If I had not called to bring some statistics that I had been gathering for him, I do not know when he might have been discovered. Perhaps not until it was time for luncheon. It was his habit to attend Evensong, not Matins.’
‘So, you went to the study to leave the figures and found him?’ I asked. ‘How could you see him when the butler did not?’
‘I noticed that the papers on his side of the desk were not quite tidy, which is most unlike my cousin. The desk is very wide, the kind they call a partners’ desk with drawers on both sides. I would work on one side and he on the other, so it was not until I walked right around it that I saw him lying on the floor between the desk and the chair.’ Adrien had become even paler. ‘I did not see the blood at first and I thought he had fainted and perhaps hit his head, but then the side of his coat fell back when I tried to lift him and I found my hand was red…’
‘What did you do next?’ Luc was brisk and the tone had its effect on the younger man.
‘I realised he was cold. There was no pulse and the blood was not flowing. He was clearly dead and I did not think the body should be disturbed, so I called Grainger, the butler, and left him on guard outside the study while I came for you, sir. I knew you would see things that would be missed if I let the doctor and the constable loose in the room first.’
‘It appears I have an unfortunate reputation for dealing with murders,’ Luc said, his smile wry. ‘Very well. We will come and inspect the study and the body and then you must summon the doctor and inform the nearest magistrate.’
I remembered to ring for a maid to fetch my bonnet from the store of clothes I left at both the Town and the country houses. Ladies inspecting corpses was bad enough, but without bonnet and gloves it would be a scandal, as I remarked to James, who almost had a fit of unseemly laughter.
Viscount Tillingham’s house was virtually next door but, as all the houses in the Square were built individually, it was arranged differently inside from Luc’s. However, the study was in much the same position, with a view over the small back garden. The window was the kind that reached down almost to the ground and the sash could be raised so that it was possible to step out directly onto the terrace.
‘Was the window closed?’ Luc asked as we entered past a grey-faced butler. The desk was set in front of the glass with the chair’s back to it and with about three feet of clear space between curtains and chair legs.
‘It is just ajar. I did not touch it.’ Adrien edged around the back of the chair, clearly trying not to look down, and peered at the catch. ‘It is completely unlatched. It was warm last night, I thought.’ James nodded agreement. ‘My cousin would often work with the window open, even in the winter – he was a great proponent of fresh air.’ He shuffled back to us. ‘He’s… You can observe that the body is not visible from here.’
Luc walked around the desk and looked down, his expression grim. James followed and stood at his shoulder, but I went around the other side and, as Luc knelt, I did too.
‘He seems completely rigid,’ I observed, summoning up all my Special Constable training to try and study the body dispassionately – and yes, that is every bit as difficult as it sounds. ‘But all we can really deduce from that is that it is probably at least twelve hours since death.’
I sat back on my heels and studied the way the body lay. ‘There are so many variables – the temperature, his health and so forth – but I suppose we can be fairly certain he was killed not long before, or just after, midnight. It does not look as though he was moved after rigor began to set in. The way he is lying seems perfectly natural, as if he was standing at the desk and simply slumped down.’
I met Luc’s gaze, saw his agreement, and thought how good it felt to be working with him like this. If only the cause was not so grim…
* * *
Luc gingerly turned back the sides of the Viscount’s evening coat to expose a blood stain across the left breast of the pale blue silk waistcoat. ‘Stabbed or shot in the heart by the look of it. Stabbed, I would assume, as the waistcoat seems intact and I can see no powder marks.’ He took an ivory page-turner from the desk and gingerly probed the silk. ‘There’s a slit here, I think, although the blood is so thickly clotted…’ He broke off.
‘A shot would have roused the household,’ James observed, looking more than a trifle green.
‘You would think so, but if all the staff were downstairs… Still, this looks like a stab wound to me.’ He lifted the man’s arms as best he could and studied the hands, which were clenched. ‘Can’t tell if he was holding anything until the stiffness wears off.’
Luc stood up and looked around the room. ‘Prescott, can you see if anything is misplaced, or if there is anything here you do not recognise?’
I stood too, as Adrien began a slow, careful scrutiny of the study, then checked the papers on the desk. ‘I can see nothing missing, moved or unusual,’ he said, after laying the paperwork back as he had found it. ‘Those papers look as though he disturbed them slightly standing up, that is all.’
‘Then we had best send for the magistrate, the constable and the doctor, or the delay will seem very strange.’
‘Where is the paperknife?’ I asked, scanning the floor around me. In my experience every desk at this time had a paperknife for slitting seals and cutting the pages of new books and some of them had struck me as lethally dangerous.
‘It should be in here.’ Adrien opened the small top drawer on the right-hand side and lifted out a slender ivory blade with a silver handle.