Under the Guise of Death

by Under the Guise of Death (epub)

  “What?” Jasper tilted his head, not following.

  “One of the black pages in Venice’s history. When one man could accuse another of treason by putting his name and the accusation in a letter and leaving it, anonymously, in the mouth of a lion’s head. Imagine officials touring the lions’ heads day by day looking for such accusations.” Vernassi shivered. “It’s no longer a live practice, but the idea behind it stays the same. An accusation from the safety of anonymity, like a dagger in your back.”

  “I will not risk your position here.” Jasper smiled at his friend. “Just give me one more day to tie everything together. If I don’t succeed, I’ll leave and continue in England.”

  Vernassi sighed. “You can have your day. Provided you do not go to Marcheti again and harass him or his protégé.” He looked him over. “And I warn you that if you intend to incriminate them, you better have very strong evidence. Irrefutable proof of their guilt. Else you will get nowhere.”

  He added in a grim tone, “And my head will roll anyway.”

  * * *

  Sir James waved Jasper into his study, taking a leather chair by the hearth and gesturing for him to sit opposite to him. “Have you found anything? Can you tell me who killed my daughter?”

  Jasper sat down and looked at the empty hearth with a frown. It was warm enough outside to do without a fire in the room. He rested his hands on the armrests and collected his thoughts.

  Sir James leaned forward. “Speak, man. I can take a blow. If you cannot solve it, tell me. You couldn’t solve it years ago.”

  Jasper looked up as if stung. “There didn’t seem to be anything to solve. The car crashed, Lady Bantham died.”

  “The car cannot have crashed at high speed. There was no one driving it. It must have been pushed down the bank. Someone should have noticed that the damage to it was less than should have been in the case of a high speed collision.”

  “Drivers do brake once they believe they are going to crash. There were traces of braking left on the road. The brakes had not been tampered with. We did check all of that.” Jasper shaded his eyes as if he was deep in thought but he peeked at Sir James through his fingers. “You have driven along that road yourself.”

  “Countless times. Read all the newspaper accounts of the accidents happening there. But roads are often dangerous. You can’t help that. My daughter was just a… well, I won’t say a bad driver, but she never liked it. She usually took a chauffeur along. Not that morning. Which you should also have looked into.”

  “We did. It appeared that Lady Bantham took a chauffeur along when she went to friends and parties. Whenever she went to London however, she went on her own.”

  Sir James’s features seemed to tighten.

  Jasper pulled his hand away from his face and looked the distraught father over. “You suspected she was having an affair, didn’t you?”

  Sir James sighed.

  Jasper said, “If you had told the police at the time, we might have looked more closely, then we would have had a reason to assume someone might have wanted her dead.”

  “Her husband?” Sir James scoffed. “You could have assumed that anyway. He fought with her the night before, at the party, because of Biancci.”

  “Yes, but nobody told us.” Jasper feigned more frustration than he felt. He knew it was quite common in higher circles to be tightlipped about anything that could be damaging to names and reputations. “You could even have sent an anonymous letter if you had wanted to inform us.”

  Sir James waved impatiently. “I had no intention of drawing attention to my daughter’s silly infatuation with that violinist. A mere boy at the time. In fact, I don’t think he has matured much since. He still seems very volatile. Explosive even.”

  “Could he have staged the accident with her at the time?” Jasper knew Vernassi had impressed upon him not to go after Leonardo Biancci and Marcheti any more, but he did want to know what Sir James thought.

  The man shrugged. “How do I know? She might have driven away from the estate and met him somewhere. They might have carried out the plan together. They had a chance to discuss it the night before at the party. He was alone with her, for a while.”

  Jasper nodded. “I see.”

  “The body in the car must have been… Well, I can’t see my daughter killing someone. Her accomplice must have done that.”

  “But it could have been her maid, Agnes. It makes sense to think the killing of the maid, if it was indeed her dying in the car, taking place before Lady Bantham left the estate. I imagine the body having been stashed in the back of the car when she drove away.”

  “I will not let you shame my daughter’s memory in this manner. She was not a killer.” Sir James pointed at Jasper. “Someone else may have killed the maid and moved the body away from the estate, to the meeting place where the accident was then staged.”

  Jasper nodded. “It doesn’t answer the question of who her accomplice might have been. Biancci perhaps. But how about her husband? Or her best friend Larissa?”

  Sir James looked appalled. “Her husband? Helping her fake her own death?”

  “It seems he was very concerned about her behaviour, not spending enough time in the country and… her death solved a problem for both of them. She could continue her life elsewhere and he could marry again. Someone more suitable.”

  “The new Lady Bantham is not more suitable.” Sir James laughed. “She is not worthy of the title. She has not borne him an heir and that useless brother of hers is just involving Bantham in scams. This whole scheme about a gold mine… I don’t believe in it for one moment. Bantham shouldn’t have told me about it, but I pressed him and he let something slip. Not much but enough for me to know something was wrong with it. Arundell is just taking his money and then he will go back to America and never give anything in return. Mark my words.”

  “The new Lady Bantham and George Arundell weren’t in the picture at the time. I’m looking at three years ago, to understand what happened here on the Ponte della Musica.”

  “You might be deceived. It might not be related. I mean, you cannot simply exclude the new Lady Bantham just because she wasn’t there three years ago. She stands to lose everything by my daughter’s return. She could have killed her.”

  Jasper feigned disbelief. “Why would she have? Her marriage was never valid. The death of Lady Bantham now doesn’t change that. She’s intelligent enough to understand that. You must remember this, Sir James. Whoever killed her didn’t stab her on impulse. In a moment of fear and shock. No, the murder happened afterwards.”

  “It can still have been an act of fear. Consider a meeting between the two ladies. My daughter and her successor. The new Lady Bantham pleads with her to leave again and not damage her marriage. Take away everything she had gained by wedding Lord Bantham. My daughter laughs at her and says she has no such intentions. She wants her former position back. Then Lady Bantham might have, in a rush of anger or despair, stabbed her.”

  “Pushed her off the bridge, yes, I can picture that. A push and a fall with fatal consequences? Yes, I can see that. But stabbed? With what? Do ladies usually carry around daggers?”

  Sir James seemed to scramble to find an answer to that one. “Perhaps there was some pointed object within reach and she grabbed it and used it. Afterwards she might have thrown it into the water.”

  Jasper nodded. “Yes, I did realize that and I will have men dredge the canal at that point tomorrow morning. Please do not tell anyone about this.”

  Sir James nodded. “Of course not. I hope you will find something. But I don’t know how deep the water is at that point or how the current may carry things away.”

  Jasper studied him. It seemed Sir James had been thinking about a lot of things.

  Before or after the fact?

  The idea that a father would kill his own daughter was abhorrent to him, but he had encountered cases of it before. Was it so odd to think Sir James would have wanted to meet with his daughter to as
k her why she had pretended to be dead for years? Leaving him in anguish?

  Was it so odd to assume he would have been angry with her and that callous behaviour on her part could have driven him into a real rage? He could have lashed out at her.

  But again, there was the problem of the weapon used. Had it been brought along? Premeditation?

  Or picked up on the spot? A killing in a sudden outpouring of emotion, not planned at all?

  “I hope you will keep me informed of what the dredging turns up.” Sir James leaned back and rubbed his face with a weary gesture. “I haven’t slept a wink since I saw her dead body. Her face seems to haunt me wherever I go. Her eyes accusing me.”

  The dead body’s eyes had been closed by the policeman who had arrived first on the scene. Out of respect for the dead. So Sir James had never seen his daughter’s dead eyes. Was he speaking of her face in life, coming back to him as he pondered her death?

  Or had he actually seen her dead eyes, because he had been the one stabbing her?

  But the killer had stabbed her in the back. From behind.

  Unless…

  Jasper sat up, his mind racing. He needed to speak with the policeman who had found her. Ask him exactly how the body had lain there.

  He saw a new scenario now. One which only worked if he assumed something about the killer. Something that could eliminate some and bring others higher up the suspect list.

  He thought of Sir James at the party, in his toga with a laurel crown. He had wondered then which emperor he was supposed to represent. Now he asked himself if it could have been that iconic first emperor, Augustus. A devoted father to his daughter Julia, until she had shamed him with her constant affairs and he had sent her far away from Rome where her behaviour could no longer hurt his reputation.

  Chapter Twenty

  Sir James paced the room after Jasper had left. He was so cold he wanted to call a servant in to make a fire in the hearth, but he didn’t want to attract attention. He had a sudden feeling Jasper was watching his every move. He should never have asked him to look into the case. But it had seemed like the natural thing to do. It would have looked odd if he had not wanted answers. If he had simply hoped the woman looking like his daughter would disappear again. Back into her grave?

  He laughed, a sudden hollow sound in the room. Venice was a city of illusions. It lured the tourists with its grandeur: its canals on which the gondolas floated and the gondoliers sang; its houses with marble and silk; its elegant bridges, impressive church spires and long history of dominance in trade. But when you looked closely, the canals stank, the plaster peeled away from house façades and the marble was a painted effect, the silk falling apart. The people at his party had hidden behind masks and once those had been removed, death had been among them. It had smiled down on him from his lost daughter’s daring face.

  She should never have returned.

  But she had, she had played with fire, and it had burned her. It had burned them all. They were caught up in the investigation Jasper was conducting with the tenacity of an old hunting dog who had not yet forgotten his trade. Sir James had expected Vernassi to throw stumbling blocks into his path, the city itself mystifying him with her foreign language, many narrow alleys and confusing combination of elegance and decay. Jasper was a man who noticed every little detail and here there were so many details a man’s senses could get overstimulated and dazed. Yes, he had pictured Jasper going round in circles, seeing everything a dozen times like in the mirrored ballroom in his palazzo; from a slightly different angle in each instance and beguiling in a disorientating way. He would chase his own tail and get nowhere, have to admit defeat as he had been defeated years ago. He had been given another chance but he would fail again.

  He had to.

  Sir James closed his eyes a moment, fighting the conviction that took hold of him from his feet up, encasing his body. Jasper had seemed somehow… onto something. Had he told him the truth about going to dredge near the Ponte della Musica, or merely been testing him?

  Should he intervene? Do something? Confuse things? An object thrown off the bridge tonight, before the dredging started in the morning…

  But suppose Jasper had foreseen that. Suppose he had placed a man somewhere to watch the bridge. Venice was full of windows. Shuttered windows, barred windows, open windows, mere holes in the walls for ventilation. Eyes could be watching. He could be making the biggest mistake of all. Why get nervous and act? Why not wait it out?

  The door opened, and he turned in a jerk. On the threshold a woman stood, holding something in her hands. There was no servant with her.

  “I came in through a side door,” she said, her voice soft and beguiling coming through the slit of her mask. He tried to determine who she was, by her clothes, but they were dark and simple. Her height, her build…

  “I have something you will want to have.” She came closer. “It belonged to the maid Agnes. Saint Agnes as they called her. But she wasn’t a saint at all. Far from it. She enjoyed digging up people’s best-kept secrets.”

  Sir James’ mouth was desert dry. He stared at the bundle in her hands.

  The woman said, “She made notes of her discoveries in her psalter. I have it here. How much is it worth to you?”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about. How did you get in here? Who are you?” He wanted to walk up to her, but she raised the bundle between them and he stepped back, his breath catching.

  “It doesn’t matter who I am. I want to know what you are willing to pay for this book.”

  “I don’t know what book you mean. I will ring for my servants to throw you out into the street.”

  “That’s fine with me. Then I’ll go to Inspector Jasper and give the book to him. I’m sure he will see immediately what it means.”

  Sir James licked his lips. “Not so fast. Let me see it.” He reached out to her but she made a tutting sound. “I will show you the first page where her name is.” She unwrapped the bundle. “See? It says Agnes Miller right here.”

  Sir James stared at the neat lettering. That little creature slipping around the house as quiet as a mouse, into this room and that, cleaning here and gathering things for her mistress there. She had been listening in, she had…

  His heart beat in a dull rhythm under his chest bone. “How much do you want for it?”

  “How much is it worth to you?”

  He stared at the bundle, at the woman’s hands. He didn’t see a ring there or any other identifying mark. He didn’t know who she was, only that she spoke English without an accent.

  He went to his desk in the corner of the room and sat down beside it, opened the drawer. He looked down at the pistol lying there for his protection. He could snatch it up and point it at her and pull the trigger before she would even know what was happening to her. She would be dead.

  But the shot would ring out and send servants rushing to the room. He would be arrested and… everything would come out.

  He ignored the pistol and picked up the box beside it. His money chest. He put it on the desk, and with a key from the keyring he carried on his person unlocked it and looked inside. He pulled out a stack of bonds.

  “Give me everything that is in there.” She came over to the desk with determined strides. Greed flickered in her eyes. Those eyes… Did he know them? He had to know them.

  He took out all the bonds and the cash and showed her the empty box. “Satisfied?”

  “For now.” She put the psalter on the desk and gathered her payment in the bundle.

  Sir James’ hand itched to reach for the pistol and shoot her, just to see the disbelief in her eyes before her hands would go limp, no longer able to clutch at the riches she had just acquired. If only to get even with her.

  But his freedom was precious to him and he watched as she left the room, pulling the door shut behind her. Then he grabbed the psalter and leafed through it. There were some notes in the back, dates and cryptic remarks. After he had studied them for a whil
e, he sat up and banged the desk with a fist. This could be his way out. If he dared to gamble. If he could twist this evidence to his own advantage. Agnes had been clever, not wanting to write full names or mention exact circumstances. Because he knew what she had been writing about, it made sense to him at first glance. But an outsider who had never known the situation might interpret it differently.

  Fear whispered across his spine at the thought of how wrong this could go. But he had to act. He couldn’t just sit here and let things unfold. The woman who had brought him this had believed he would want to pay for it. But why? Because she had guessed the notes were about him? No. She could never have guessed that. His name was not there and the initials given pointed to his son-in-law and his daughter. She must have brought it to him believing he would want to protect his daughter’s name.

  Who had she been? A servant from the Bantham household? The new Lady Bantham herself? Larissa Kenwood, so close to the family, and so eager for money to maintain her extravagant lifestyle.

  Did it really matter? He had the book now with the notes and he could show it off to Jasper as important proof. He just had to decide what the proof would say. Whom it would point the finger at.

  Sir James wet his lips. Someone would die for his daughter’s murder. And he got to decide who it would be.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “Try some of this apple. It’s delicious.”

  “Don’t treat me like a baby.”