‘Call me Chloe. And you are Cassandra, if I remember rightly?’ She waved to several people as we passed but kept pressing on towards the refreshments. A woman after my own heart. ‘Lady Liverpool knows how to throw a party.’ She took two champagne flutes from a tray a footman was holding as we passed and gave one to me. ‘Bother tea, this will do you more good. And some of the salmon mousse and the delicious cheese puffs that are her chef’s speciality. Look, here is a free table.’
She sank down in an elegant flutter of amber silks and gestured to a footman. ‘More champagne, if you would, and a large plate of your very choicest savouries. There now, we can be comfortable,’ she added as the footman strode off.
I thanked her, took a reviving gulp of fizz, sneezed and pulled my handkerchief out of the reticule. Garrick’s sinister knife tumbled out too.
‘Goodness,’ Chloe said, prodding it with one fingertip. ‘What a very exciting life you seem to lead, Cassandra.’
‘It’s an American habit,’ I said, improvising wildly. ‘Grizzly bears.’
‘In Boston?’
I made a rapid decision. Chloe was bright, unconventional, had nothing to do with the Home Office – and I was in dire need of a female friend. ‘My cousin, Lord Radcliffe, was attacked on Friday. Someone tried to kill him.’
‘Because of the two bodies you discovered? I read about the inquests in the papers.’
‘We didn’t discover the first one exactly, but yes, because of that. Doctor Talbot was definitely murdered and we suspect that Mr Coates was driven to suicide, probably by blackmail. And they knew each other.’
‘Was Talbot blackmailing Coates and Coates killed him, then hanged himself?’
‘No, the time of the deaths rules that out.’ I broke off while the footman, accompanied by a colleague with a bottle of champagne in a cooler, covered the table in plates. I was even more impressed by Chloe if she could conjure this up with just a smile.
‘So why are you involved in investigating?’ She waved the men away with a word of thanks and topped up our glasses.
‘Mr James Franklin, Lord Radcliffe’s brother, knew both men socially. He has a strong sense of justice and felt that, unless we looked into it, whoever was responsible would escape detection.’
&nbs
p; ‘And Lord Radcliffe is a close cousin?’
‘No. Distant and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, my branch was on the wrong side of the blanket some way back. The family, other than Lord Radcliffe and Mr Franklin, does not recognise mine. Their mother, for example, has no idea that I am in London, or that I even exist.’
There were so many holes in that explanation that you could have driven a London bus – or a stagecoach – through it. Like, what was I doing in London, how come Luc and James knew and accepted me, what was I doing involved in a murder investigation?
Every one of those questions, and probably half a dozen more, had clearly occurred to Chloe as I was speaking, but she merely nodded. ‘Very exciting. So, how can I help?’
I stared at her and then said words I never thought I’d hear myself utter. ‘But what would your husband say?’
She collapsed into giggles. ‘I can wind Armistead around my little finger, the darling.’
‘That’s Lord Turnham? The family name, not his first name? I’m sorry, only we are rather less formal where I come from.’ To say nothing of when I came from.
‘The poor darling was christened Augustus and a more unlikely Augustus I never saw.’ She leaned over and whispered, ‘I call him Gus in moments of… Our closer moments, but that would never do in public. Now how can I assist?’
I demolished three cheese puffs while I thought. They were that lethally tempting size – so delicious that you had to have more and so tiny that you didn’t notice how many you were eating.
‘We did wonder if one of Doctor Talbot’s patients became rather too attached to him and a jealous husband took extreme measures. We had heard that last year one gentleman did go so far as to utter threats.’
‘That would be Mr Archibald. He is insanely jealous, which is all his own fault for marrying a pretty little air-head twenty years younger than he is. It certainly isn’t him. They have got him safely installed in a private asylum after he attacked his own valet last month under the impression that the man was taking liberties.’
‘Can you think of anyone else?’
Chloe shook her head. ‘What if it was one of his patients who killed him? Now, why would they do that?’ she asked rhetorically. ‘Let me see. To prevent him telling her husband or father some secret? Or because she had an affaire with Talbot and then he spurned her?’
‘It wouldn’t be that – he was, er, not interested in women that way, apparently.’
‘How do you know?’ She didn’t seem shocked, merely curious.
I had to be careful not to even hint that James knew all too well what Talbot’s sexuality was. ‘His valet told us.’