Funeral in Blue

by Anne Perry

  Could she cope with that, survive it and go on? She was not sure.

  The constable had already spoken to her twice, and she had not responded. He was beginning to fear that she was unwell.

  “Of course,” she said briskly, swallowing hard. She did not know what he had said, but that seemed a satisfactory response. He led the way down a narrow, echoing passage, her footsteps sounding as if she were shod with iron. He produced a huge key and let her into a cell where Kristian was standing in the middle. He was wearing a collarless shirt and plain, dark trousers. He looked exhausted, and there was a grayish tinge to his skin, even though he appeared to have shaved very recently.

  A flicker of surprise crossed his face, pleasure, and then a guardedness. He had had too many shocks, and he looked at nothing without suspicion. He smiled very slightly. It did not touch his eyes.

  She realized with a jolt, as if she had missed a step, that he did not know what to expect from her. Somehow that surprised her, even though it was totally reasonable. After all, she had not known what to expect of herself.

  Was the constable going to stand there forever? She turned to him. “You may go now,” she said briskly. “Lock me in, if it pleases you, or your instructions require it. I shall be perfectly safe. You may take my reticule, if you fear I have some weapon in it. I shall be ready to leave again in an hour.”

  “Sorry, Miss, you can’t stay that long,” the sergeant replied. “ ’Alf an hour.”

  “I am not ’Miss,’ I am Lady Callandra Daviot,” she corrected him firmly. “Then be so good as to return in half an hour—not twenty-five minutes. And don’t waste the little time I have by standing there eavesdropping. I have nothing secret to say, but it is private, and not your concern.”

  He looked taken aback, but decided he could not afford to be offended. “Yes, my lady,” he said, locking the door sharply behind him as he retreated.

  There was a flash of humor in Kristian’s face, but it died immediately. He struggled to find something to say that was not absurd, and discarded each idea as it came to him.

  “Stop it!” she said sharply. “Stop trying to be polite. We have to talk about what matters. Half an hour will go by far too quickly as it is.” She saw relief in his eyes, and then fear, real and deep, gouging into the heart of her. It shocked her more than anything physical could have. But before she could respond to it, it was masked, gone again by an effort of will.

  She tried to swallow, but her mouth was dry.

  There was nowhere to sit down but the cot, and she was not going to sit side by side with him on that. It was low and awkward.

  “Oliver Rathbone is in Italy, so Pendreigh has offered to conduct your defense,” she said abruptly.

  He breathed in, surprised, not certain if he had heard correctly, if he should believe it.

  “He is certain you are not guilty,” she added.

  Bitterness filled his face, and he turned away from her. “Not guilty,” he repeated the words softly. “Not guilty of what? I didn’t put my hands around her neck and break it, certainly. I was with a patient. I may have miscalculated the time, but not the essential facts.” His voice dropped still lower, filled with bitterness. “But am I ’not guilty’ of ignoring her, allowing her to fall further and further into gambling and debt and the kind of desperate boredom that took her to Allardyce’s studio, alone, where she could be killed?”

  She wanted to deny it immediately. It was an absurd assumption of responsibility for someone else’s weaknesses, but she could hear in the strain of his voice that it was more real to him than the physical imprisonment of his own circumstances. Perhaps it was easier to consider that kind of guilt than the future and the accusations he would have to answer in court.

  He straightened his shoulders, but he still did not turn to face her. His voice shook when he spoke again. “She was so full of life in Vienna. She made every other woman look gray in comparison. She would have stayed there, you know? It was I who was sick to the heart of it and wanted to come to England.”

  Callandra said nothing. She sensed in him the need to talk; she was only the audience for something he was saying to himself, perhaps putting into words for the first time.

  “She would have gone to Paris, Milan, Rome, anywhere that the struggle was still going on. But I brought her here and turned her into a housewife to spend her time ordering groceries and exchanging gossip about the daily trivia of lives she saw as perfectly safe and ordered, and with nothing on earth to fight for.”

  “What absolute rubbish!” She exploded in real anger. “There is everything to fight for, and you know that, even if she did not. There is ignorance and pain to battle, disease, crime, selfishness, domestic and social violence, prejudice, authority, bigotry and injustice of every kind and color. And when you have conquered all of those, you can always try addressing poverty, madness, and perfectly ordinary dirt. Or, if those seem too large and indeterminate, what about common or garden loneliness and fear of death, hungry children with no one to tell them they are good . . . and lonely old people neglected by the rest of us—in a hurry and too busy to listen anymore. If she didn’t find that exciting enough, or glorious . . . that is not your fault!”

  He turned slowly to face her. For a moment, surprise was sharper in his face than anything else. “Honest to the last,” he said. “You really are angry! Thank you at least for not patronizing me with false comfort. But I did ignore her. I knew her, and if I had thought more of her and less of myself I would not have tried to change her. Her gambling was beyond control, and I didn’t do anything about it. I argued with her, of course. I pleaded, I threatened, reasoned. But I didn’t look at the cause, because that would have meant I would have to change as well, and I was not prepared to.”

  “It’s too late for that now, Kristian,” she replied. “We have only fifteen minutes left at the most before the constable comes back. Pendreigh will defend you in court. I don’t know whether he expects to be paid for it or not. He may do it simply out of belief, and because he would naturally prefer that you were shown to be not guilty, because it reflects less badly on his daughter if she were killed by someone outside the family. It raises less unfortunate speculation in the minds of others. And if he is in control of the defense, he can exercise some restraint over the exploration of her character by the counsel for the prosecution. At least he can do all that anyone could.”

  “I can’t pay him,” Kristian said ruefully. “Surely he is as aware of that as I am?”

  “I imagine so. But if the matter arises, I shall take care of it. . . .” She saw his embarrassment, but there was no time to be sensitive to it now. “I think money is the last thing that concerns him at the moment,” she said honestly. “He is simply a proud man trying with every skill he has to rescue what is left of his family—the truth of how his daughter died, assurance that the wrong man is not punished for it, and some remnant of her reputation preserved as the brave and vital woman she was.”

  He blinked suddenly, and his marvelous eyes flooded with tears. He turned sharply away from her. “She was . . .” His voice choked.

  Callandra felt awkward, lumpy and ordinary, and bitterly alone. But she could not afford the self-indulgence of her own hurt. There would be plenty of time for that later, perhaps years.

  “Kristian—someone killed her.” She had not intended it to sound as brutal as it did, at least most of her had not. “The best defense would be to find out who it is.”

  He kept his back to her. “Do you not think that if I knew I would have told you? Told everyone?”

  “If you were aware that you knew, yes, of course,” she agreed. “But it was nothing to do with Sarah Mackeson, except that she was unfortunate enough to be there, and it was not Argo Allardyce. We have exhausted the likelihood of it being anyone who wanted to collect money she owed and make an example of her so others would be more in dread not to pay their debts.”

  “Have you?”

  “Yes. William assures me that
gamblers will injure people to make them pay, or even murder those whose deaths would become known among other gamblers, but not to cause a major police investigation like this. It draws far too much attention to them. Gambling houses get closed down. Anywhere she had been is likely to face a lot of trouble. It would be stupid. They are not at all happy that she was killed. They have lost business because of it, and no doubt Runcorn will close the house when he is ready.”

  “Good!”

  “Not permanently.” She responded with the truth, and then wished she had not.

  “Not permanently?” He looked back at her slowly.

  “No. They’ll simply open up somewhere else, behind an apothecary’s shop, or a milliner’s, or whatever. It will cost them a little outlay, a little profit, that’s all.”

  He was too weary to be angry. “Of course. It’s a hydra.”

  “It has to have been someone else,” she repeated. “Someone personal.”

  He did not answer.

  There was silence in the cell, but it was as if she could hear a clock ticking away the seconds. “I am going to ask William to go to Vienna and find Max Niemann.”

  He stared at her. “That’s absurd! Max would never have hurt her, let alone killed her! If you knew him you wouldn’t even entertain the thought for an instant.”

  “Then who did?” She stared straight back at him, meeting his eyes unrelentingly. It hurt to see the fear deep in them, the loyalties struggling, the pain. But she had seen death often when she had accompanied her husband abroad on his duties. As an army surgeon’s wife she had mixed with other military wives on various postings in Europe, and often she had lent what assistance she could to those who were injured or ill. She had no practical training, as Hester had, but intelligence served for much, and experience had taught her more. Her husband had died before the Crimean War, or she would have seen that terrible conflict, too.

  “Not Max,” Kristian insisted, but there was less certainty in his eyes, and he knew that she had seen it. “He loved her,” he repeated. “Callandra . . .”

  She could not wait. The constable would be back any moment now. “What was she meeting him for?” she asked.

  He winced. His voice was very quiet. “I don’t know. I didn’t know he was in London until the funeral.”

  “And I imagine you did not know the other times he was in London this year, either?”

  He started to deny it and then stopped, seeing the truth in her face.

  “He was here at least twice before,” she told him. “He saw Elissa, and not you. Doesn’t that call for some explanation?”

  His face was ashen gray. She could only guess how much the thought of Max’s guilt hurt him. It was a double betrayal on top of the loss, but turning from it now altered nothing, except that it placed the truth one step further away, and his own life in even greater danger. Those were words she could say while still refusing to picture their meaning. At least while she was talking, thinking of what to do, she could keep it at bay. “If not Max Niemann, who else?” she demanded. Her voice sounded peremptory, even hostile. “Kristian! There is no time to be keeping secrets!”

  His eyes opened wide. “I don’t know! For God’s sake, Callandra, I have no idea. She came and went and I barely saw her. We used to be allies in a great cause, friends and lovers once. The last two or three years we’ve been strangers meeting in the same house and exchanging empty words. I was consumed in my own causes, and I knew hers were demons, taking us both to destruction, but I didn’t know what to do about it and I didn’t alter my own cause enough to find out.”

  Guilt was naked in him. She saw it and could not argue. Perhaps he had deliberately not tackled something which was demanding and dangerous, and which he feared was going to eat away a part of him he needed to keep. Perhaps Elissa had been every bit as lonely as he, and equally unable to do anything about it.

  No, that was an excuse. She would have been more so. She had no occupation to use her passion and her intellect to fill her time. Even an hour ago Callandra could not have imagined feeling deep and hurting pity for Elissa Beck, however much she had wasted her talents and ignored all the causes Callandra could name. But now she could not escape pity, nor could she wholly excuse Kristian, for all her furious words.

  He saw it in her face. He did not try to evade it, but accepted the unspoken change.

  “I’ll ask William to go to Vienna,” she said again.

  He was about to speak when they both heard the constable’s footsteps loud and sharp along the corridor. There was no time for anything except the briefest of good-byes before she was escorted out and back up the steps to the entrance, gulping in the tainted air of the street, the sunlight and the everyday noises of horses and wheels and people shouting and jostling, exactly as if life were as always.

  She found her carriage and gave orders to go straight to Monk’s house in Grafton Street.

  She found him in, as she had expected. It was still only early afternoon, and they had no plan to follow yet, no ideas to pursue.

  Again she did not pretend to the usual courtesies. As soon as the door was closed she began. “I can think of nothing we can do except pursue Max Niemann,” she told Monk and Hester. “Kristian says he is certain Niemann could not be guilty, but I think that is loyalty speaking rather than realism.” She ignored the sudden widening of Monk’s eyes. “It seems from the evidence that Mrs. Beck was bored and hungering for excitement such as she had known in the past,” she continued relentlessly. “Perhaps she was remembering her days in Vienna with regret compared with the present. Niemann turns up in London, still in love with her, remembering her as she was.” She took a deep breath, avoiding Monk’s eyes, and Hester’s also. “She may have led him to suppose she returned his feelings, and then realized what she was doing and changed her mind. We will probably never know what was said, or quite what emotions drew him. People in love can do things they would be incapable of in other circumstances.”

  What an idiotically facile understatement. She dared not even guess what lunacy she herself could commit. Friends of a lifetime would think she had lost her wits, and probably they would be right.

  “He will have gone back to Vienna now,” Monk was saying reasonably. Was that pity in his voice?

  It stung her. She felt peculiarly naked in his gaze, which saw so much. His own vulnerability had made him attuned to the weaknesses of others, even those he cared for, and on whose grief or foolishness he would rather not have trespassed.

  “I assumed he had,” she said crisply. “If not, then I have very little idea where to look for him. Also I know of no one in London, except for Kristian, who will hear no ill of him, who can tell us anything of what manner of man he is.”

  “Vienna?” Hester said in surprise, looking from Callandra to Monk.

  “Can you think of anything better?” Callandra asked. She sounded more defiant than she had intended, but she did not apologize.

  “I don’t know Vienna,” Monk said hesitantly. “And I have no German at all.” He gave a slight, embarrassed shrug. “I should be no use. Perhaps I could find someone who would?”

  “I need a detective, not an errand boy!” Callandra said, fear eating away at her self-control. “If we don’t succeed, Kristian could hang.” She had put it into words at last. Only anger gave her any semblance of dignity.

  “I’ll find someone to translate for me,” he said with sudden gentleness. “And to guide me around the city. Perhaps the British Embassy can help. I’m perfectly happy to lie to them. Kristian is not British, but Elissa was, and Pendreigh’s name might help. From what you say, he has friends in powerful places.”

  The relief in Callandra was visible, like color returning. “Yes . . . I’ll write letters. There’s bound to be someone who can spare the time to go with you. You’ll have to be discreet about considering an Austrian subject possibly responsible for murder.” Her face darkened again. “I don’t know how you will be able to bring him back to London. Perhaps it d
oesn’t matter, if you could show that he is guilty—or even that it is extremely likely . . .” She stopped. They all knew that an acquittal for lack of proof would ruin Kristian. He would be free, but only physically. Emotionally, he would be imprisoned in suspicion for the rest of his life. It was a mark of how desperate they were that they even considered it.

  Hester glanced at Callandra and then away again. Monk saw her do it, and knew how intrusive and helpless she felt. And yet he had racked his mind over what they might do, even the most ridiculous things, and nothing was better than this.

  “I’ll go as soon as I’ve spoken to Kristian and you’ve written some letters of introduction for me,” he promised. “And if Pendreigh knows anyone, you are right, it might help.”

  “You’ll ask about Niemann, his character, his reputation, especially with women, won’t you?” Callandra urged. “Someone is bound to know if he had a temper, if he was obsessive about Elissa. There may be stories about the past that someone will know.” Her voice was gathering speed, a semblance of conviction in her face. “If he really loved her all that time, as Kristian says, then his closest friends will be aware of it. You’ll have to be careful, of course. They won’t want to believe ill of him, and certainly not to—”

  “Callandra!” he interrupted her. “I know what is necessary. I’ll do all that. I’ll even bring people back to testify, if I find anything worth telling the court. I promise.”

  She colored very faintly, but she was not ashamed. The slight treading on someone else’s feelings was not even noticeable, far less did it matter. She could think of only one thing—proving that Kristian could be innocent. “I’m sorry,” she said briefly. “I wish I were coming with you, but someone must be here, apart from Pendreigh, to see to all that must be done.” She did not add “and to pay,” but they all knew it was so.