“If we aren’t just wasting our time,” Lily retorted.
“You’re worried you’re wrong.”
“Mrs. Boyden’s death looks nothing like the other murders. Her throat was cut, not pricked and drained of blood. And she wasn’t a medium. All the rest of the victims claimed to speak to the dead.”
There was a silence. A motor car rumbled past them, engine deafening.
“Ash would tell you to trust it.” Strangford’s voice seemed closer in the darkness. “Your gift. Even if it appears to contradict the facts.”
She did not want to know what Robert Ash would say. It made her next words sharper than she intended.
“If I am wrong, Lord Deveral looks like a very strong suspect. And that would mean that we are about to interview a man who might have murdered someone you once cared very deeply for. Have you considered that?”
She felt him shift beside her. Every movement was amplified.
“I have.”
“And?”
“I know better than most that things are rarely as simple as they seem on the surface.”
That quiet reply silenced her. She understood enough of how he had come by that knowledge not to challenge it.
The carriage slowed, waiting for an omnibus to spill passengers onto the curb.
A crowd was gathered in front of one of the buildings that lined Tottenham Court Road. Toffs in silk hats mingled with working men in flat caps and patched sleeves. Lily’s attention was drawn to a pair of men approaching the place, her gaze falling onto the brass pins that decorated their lapels.
She recognized the symbol—the interlocked carats of Joseph Hartwell’s eugenics club.
There were more of them scattered through the crowd. She glimpsed the headline of a poster by the door announcing the evening’s attraction.
A Lecture Presented by The Society for the Betterment of the British Race
Aware of how incongruous her actions would look to the man who sat behind her in the carriage, Lily called out to the two gentlemen, pushed by a curiosity bordering on impulse.
“Excuse me, but is Dr. Joseph Hartwell speaking here tonight?”
The pair stopped, surprised. The surprise shifted to charm as they realized it was a well-dressed young woman who had called to them.
“Hartwell? Oh no. There’d be twice the crowd as this if himself was coming out,” one of them replied, tilting his hat back to a more rakish angle. “It’s Mr. Caymus tonight, one of his colleagues. Speaking on the virtues of marriage restriction.”
“Marriage restriction? What does that mean?”
“Nothing a fine lady like you need worry yourself about,” the younger of the two men replied, flashing her a grin.
The omnibus rumbled forward and Lily’s opportunity for further questions was cut short as their hackney trundled in its wake.
She sat back down.
Strangford shifted uncomfortably beside her.
“They want Parliament to outlaw marriage between people they deem deficient,” he said. “That’s what it means. I’ve heard talk about it in the Lords.”
“What exactly does that mean—deficient?”
“Whatever they like it to.”
There was a rare ferocity to the words. It surprised her.
“I take it you disapprove.”
“It is not the place of government to tell anyone whom they may love.”
Lily thought of many couples she had met during her time in the theater, of men like Mordecai Roth. Of Miss Bard and Estelle.
“But it does already.”
“That doesn’t make it right.”
They drove into Bayswater. A gust of wind pushed against the carriage, blowing a current of dry leaves across the road, illuminated by the gas lamps that lined the way. A couple in evening dress hurried past, coats pulled tight about their shoulders.
The carriage stopped in front of Lord Deveral’s house. It appeared dark, but Lily could see light seeping through the cracks in the curtains that covered the windows.
She waited for Strangford to descend and hold the door. The air had grown both heavier and more sharply cold, biting through her jacket.
Lily looked up at the sky, but one could rarely tell the difference between a clear night and a brewing storm in the middle of London.
“Should I have the driver wait?” Strangford asked.
“We have no idea how long we’ll be. We can have a hackney sent for when we’re through.”
As the carriage rolled away behind them, Lily could hear snatches of music from a string quartet playing in some neighboring townhouse. A coach rolled by, freshly painted with a crest on the door. She heard a burst of laughter from inside as it passed.
The street was otherwise deserted. There was no sign of a lingering constable. If anyone was monitoring Lord Deveral’s movements, they were doing it from a more discreet distance. She would not have wondered to learn that her father had something to do with that.
The house was still and silent, only that sliver of light through the curtain betraying that it hadn’t been closed up and abandoned.
Strangford stood quietly at her side as she stared up at the dark steps.
He was waiting. Lily knew that his quiet patience came from his knowledge of why exactly she might hesitate to approach that door.
It was too much. She didn’t want to be known like that—not by someone she didn’t understand herself.
“Let’s not linger in the street,” she muttered and mounted the steps.
She knocked with all the firmness she hoped to project.
Silence lingered just long enough for Lily to wonder if perhaps she’d been wrong about that light in the window.
Finally the door opened, revealing the butler who had dismissed them the day before. His face was the same mask of bored respectability.
Lily looked for some subtle marker of irritation or disapproval but couldn’t even find a flash of recognition. The man could act. She wondered if she should suggest a second career on the stage.
“Lord Strangford and Miss Lily Albright for Lord Deveral,” Strangford said. There was no hint in his voice that the man in the doorway had all but tossed them out the last time they’d met. It seemed Strangford could play a part as well.
“Please step in and I will see where his lordship would like to receive you.”
They waited in the hall. It was elegantly appointed. The marble floors were warmed by thick carpets, a few tasteful antiques breaking up the texture of a rich blue Morris print wallpaper. She wondered how much of the decor reflected Lord Deveral’s taste and how much bore the stamp of her father.
The butler returned.
“I will show you to the drawing room. May I take your coat, my lord?”
“Thank you,” Strangford replied, slipping out of the overcoat.
He handed the garment to a footman who materialized, silently, then faded away again.
“This way, please.”
The butler led them down the hall past a fine Chinese accent table and an enormous painting of some suitably dramatic seascape. He stopped at an open doorway.
“Lord Strangford and Miss Lily Albright, my lord,” he announced, then stepped aside to let them through.
The butler’s perfect formality had almost tricked her into thinking this would play out like any ordinary social call, all sherry and small talk.
One glance into the drawing room shattered that tidy illusion.
The space was dark, lit by little more than the glow of the fire raging in the hearth. Her brother was slumped across an elegant settee, dressed in pajamas and a black silk dressing gown. There was a bottle of wine on the table beside him, another—already empty—on the floor. The smell of cigarettes suffused the room, emanating from a packed ashtray on a brass stand beside him.
“Strangford. Dear sister. Forgive my admitting you while en déshabillé. But then, this is a family call, isn’t it? So we needn’t stand on ceremony.”
Lily straighte
ned her back.
“No. Of course we needn’t.”
She lowered herself into the chair across from her brother with all the demure grace drilled into her at finishing school.
Strangford remained standing. She saw his eyes flicker from her brother’s attire to the empty bottle. His jaw tightened. He turned and walked to the far side of the room, making a seeming study of the art on the walls.
“I suppose you are aware of the reason for this call?” Lily prompted.
“You mean your ghoulish curiosity? Yes. Father informed me. That’s ‘his lordship the Earl of Torrington’ to you, I believe,” he added as though in afterthought.
Every word was intended as a blow. Lily felt the impact of them like tiny stones. She met it with a smile. It was deliberately thin, an expression she had learned from her classmates at Mrs. Finch’s, girls who would likely have offered their left foot to be in the same room as the eminently eligible Viscount Deveral, heir to an earldom.
She would rather have been anywhere else, but she needed to understand how Annalise Boyden fit into this puzzle. Learning why the killer had chosen her, and why her death looked so different from the rest of the victims, could be key to uncovering his motive and identity.
Assuming, of course, that Lily was right about Mrs. Boyden being a sister in death to Dora Heller, Agnes McKenney and Sylvia Durst.
If the man sitting across from her hadn’t simply slit her throat himself.
“Could we get on with it?” Lord Deveral asked. “As you can see, I’m about to retire for the evening. We don’t all keep chorus girl hours.”
It was another blow, one that revealed knowledge he could not possibly have acquired in the last two days. There was little difficulty following the activities of the members of Britain’s upper classes—an entire industry was devoted to gossip columns and society news. Lily could hardly avoid hearing about the Torrington clan. Tracking her own history would not have been so simple a matter. It would have required deliberate effort.
That meant Lord Deveral’s dislike of her was far from casual. It was old and root-deep, and had existed since long before she crossed him at the Carfax Gallery.
This time, however, the shot had not been intended to strike her directly. Her brother’s eyes darted immediately to Strangford, watching for his reaction to what he had revealed.
There was none.
If Lord Deveral hoped to use Lily’s past to drive a wedge between her and her apparent defender, he would be sorely disappointed. There was nothing he could throw at her that night that would come as a surprise to her companion.
She supposed the notion should have been comforting.
Her brother plucked a cigarette from the case on the table and lit it, the match flaring orange light across his face. The glow illuminated a set of vivid red lines scratched across his cheek.
“Your face . . .” Lily gasped, the words slipping out of her before she could stop them.
Her mind flew back to the vision. The cruel twist to Lord Deveral’s lips, his bitter words slicing through the air. A woman’s hand flashing out, raking claws across his skin as white powder sparkled, suspended, through the air.
“Oh, this? Yes, that particularly delighted the inspector. Apparently they found blood under Annalise’s nails. It quite makes his case, I imagine.”
He exhaled, blowing a plume of smoke up toward the darkened chandelier.
It was undeniable. He had been the last one to see the victim alive and had been overheard having a vicious row with her. His initials were engraved into the murder weapon. Now blood evidence proved that he and Annalise Boyden had engaged in a physical struggle on the night of her death.
No jury would doubt such a case, not even one made up of Lord Deveral’s illustrious peers.
He would hang for this unless an equally compelling case could be made that he had not, in fact, slit the woman’s throat.
Unless the true killer could be found.
They would not even bother looking, Lily realized. Inspector Gregg and his comrades would surely assume, with ample justification, that they had found the murderer. Why waste resources continuing the investigation? The case was undoubtedly considered closed.
Which left only her to stand between the bitter man sprawled across the settee and the noose.
She took a breath, mustering her strength, her patience. He would undoubtedly seek every opportunity he could to antagonize her.
She could do this. She would do this. Because there was no one else.
“I need to ask you some questions.”
“So I was forewarned,” Lord Deveral replied.
“You and Mrs. Boyden were lovers.”
“A brilliant deduction.”
“For how long?”
He shrugged.
“I don’t know. It wasn’t a formal arrangement. You’d know all about those, of course.”
She ignored the jab.
“A year? Two?”
“More or less,” he snapped.
“Tell me what happened the night she died.”
He took a long drag on his cigarette.
“We went to an opening. I had the most charming run-in with my dear half-sister. We returned to Mayfair. There was a quarrel. I left. Then someone came in and cut her throat.”
“A touch more detail would be helpful.”
“What sort of detail would you like? What we ate for dinner? How I had her over the bench of the carriage on our way to the gallery? She was a randy little minx, our Annalise. Wasn’t she, Strangford?”
“I wouldn’t know,” Strangford replied. His tone was carefully controlled, flattened into a pretense of indifference. He appeared to be studying a portrait of a blond, blue-eyed woman in a voluminous gown. Her features were a touch too soft to be called striking. There was also something familiar about her.
Lily glanced at Lord Deveral and realized why. There were echoes of those soft features in his own visage, layered between the more familiar elements she knew belonged to their father.
The countess, his mother. That was her on the wall—the woman her father had betrayed every time he’d come to Oxford Street.
Lily looked away.
“What a pity for you,” Lord Deveral drawled.
Lily pushed on.
“Tell me what happened after you got back to Mayfair.”
“I told you. We went upstairs. We had a row. I left.”
“Who else was in the house?”
His replies grew shorter, his irritation at failing to rile either her or Strangford showing.
“Her staff.”
“List them.”
“Housekeeper. Two footmen. Her lady’s maid. A chambermaid or three—I don’t know. They all look the same.”
“No one else?”
“Not that I was aware.”
“What did you fight about?”
“Nothing in particular.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing.” Lily nodded toward the wounds on his cheek.
“She was like that at times. It was one of her less charming characteristics.”
“Had it anything to do with the cocaine?”
He shrugged.
“Anything is possible.”
“She took more of it after you returned to the house?”
His eyes narrowed.
“Yes.”
She thought of the vision. The white powder on the blade of Lord Deveral’s dagger, the storm of it suspended in the air of the room.
All this did was confirm what she already knew. It wasn’t enough. She needed something more, something useful. Something that could prove to her that Annalise Boyden had died at the same hand that had drained the life from Sylvia Durst and the others. The same hand that threatened Estelle . . . and not the hands of the man who sat in front of her, calmly smoking his cigarette.
There was the blood, she reminded herself. The splatters of it on the gauzy white fabric of the bed hangings did not seem like enough, given the violence
of the injury. The lack of gore soaking the sheets could mean that Annalise Boyden had been drained of it before her throat was cut . . . or it might merely indicate that Lily and Strangford were not physicians and therefore hadn’t the slightest notion of how such a wound would bleed.
She needed an undeniable link between Annalise Boyden to the other victims. The appropriate inquiry to settle that was as obvious as it was absurd.
“Was Mrs. Boyden a medium?” she asked.
Lord Deveral’s head snapped up.
“How the devil did you know about that?”
Her heart skipped, her senses sharpening. She could feel a similar shift in Strangford’s attention. He moved closer, coming to stand directly behind her chair.
“You mean to say she was?” he asked, his voice a low rumble.
“Yes,” Lord Deveral confirmed warily. “Or at least, she pretended to be. It was something she would do for friends—a bit of a show she put on at parties.”
“Was it a convincing show?” Lily asked.
He shrugged.
“People seemed taken in by it.”
“But that’s all it was—noise and illusions?”
“What else would it be? Unless you’re one of those fools who believes in the spirits of the dead flitting about fat housewives’ drawing rooms.”
She glanced up at Strangford. He met her gaze, his eyes communicating clearly that he had not missed the significance of this revelation.
“Who knew?” she demanded.
Lord Deveral rubbed his eyes. He could not have slept much since the death of his mistress. Another emotion was visible through the cracks his exhaustion wore in his facade—grief. The sting of it deepened the circles under his eyes and sharpened his words.
“That she purported to speak to the dead? Like I said, she trotted it out at parties. Her friends would all have known, so likely half of the ton did as well. There are no real secrets.”
That was not a narrow list of suspects. Nor did it explain the most gruesome and obvious difference in the crimes. Why had her throat been cut where the rest of the women had been quietly and delicately exsanguinated?
The cocaine, Lily thought . . . there was something about the drug she was missing, something that tickled at the back of her memory.
“What are the effects of cocaine?” she asked.
The Fire in the Glass Page 21