Midnight Masquerade (11 page)

“It does look black for her,” Pronto agreed, much impressed with this tirade.

“No,” he said softly, but very firmly. “This doesn’t jibe. It is out of character. Lenore has easier, less dangerous means of procuring diamonds. I don’t say she wasn’t involved—it looks very much as if she were, but I don’t believe she is behind it all. I want to catch the instigator. In the first place, she wouldn’t have used her own stocking if she were involved. She’s too clever for that, and she wouldn’t have left the other for you to find if she had. Whoever did it made free of the house—took my pistol from my room, the sheet from the cupboard. Why then take her own stocking?”

“Still don’t see why they bothered to pull the diamond from the chain,” Pronto said in an important way. “Way I see it, after a deal of deducing, either the clasp thing or the chain might have gotten pulled off, but not both of ‘em. You want to solve the case, Dick, that’s the line to take. Why yank ‘em off the diamond?”

“Let’s think about it a little,” Dick said. “What did they plan to do with the diamond? Either sell it or strike a deal with Lloyd’s.”

“Good lord, do you mean to say you think Lloyd’s is in on it?” Pronto gasped.

“Possibly, but in no illegal way,” Belami told him. “Now, if they meant to sell it back to Lloyd’s, I think they would have kept it intact. Don’t you agree, Deirdre?”

“I suppose so,” she agreed reluctantly, still angry that he refused to accept Lenore’s obvious guilt and do something about it. “In either case, he’d have to go to London. He’ll want to get it out of here very soon.”

“It won’t be hard to hide till he can get away,” Pronto pointed out. “Ten million places to hide it, a thing that size. Can’t hardly go searching your guests either.”

“No, but he must be on coals worrying all the same,” Dick said, with a thoughtful smile. “He knows I’m on his tail. He might fear I will search my guests. Where would you hide it, if it were you, Pronto?”

“Toe of my boot,” he answered promptly. “They’re a size too big.”

“You, Deirdre?” he continued, glancing to her and making it an excuse to examine her thoroughly, from head to toe. “Coiled up in that bun you wear on the back of your head?”

This weak attempt at humor was scorned. If the jewel were hers to hide, she would deposit it somewhere in her underclothes, but this was not a thing that could be even intimated to gentlemen. “In my clothing,” she said vaguely.

“I wouldn’t keep a stolen jewel on me for all the money in the Bank of England,” he said. “Once it is discovered on your person, you’d have uphill work convincing anyone you were innocent. Why do it, with so many other places to hide it for a few days?”

“You’d hide it in your room,” Deirdre said.

“No, I’d hide it in any room other than my own,” he told her. “To be found in one’s room is nearly as damning as to be found on one’s person. I’d hide it in some room that isn’t much used—say, in winter, the summer room. Hmmm,” he finished, tapping his lean cheek with his finger. “Shall we just fan up the coals a little? Make a noisy display of searching unoccupied rooms, and see who comes peeping over our shoulders? If you two will be kind enough to carry out that exercise, there is something else I must investigate.”

Till nearly dinnertime, the two helpers searched every unoccupied room in the large house. From cellar to attic they went, very methodically, going through cupboards and into pots and vases and making no effort to conceal their movements, as half their aim was to fan the coals and turn the thief into a quivering mass of jelly.

They concluded between them that they were dealing with an extremely hardened criminal, when none of their suspects showed any stronger emotion than mild curiosity. Bessler was annoyed to have his billiards game interrupted, which sent Pronto delving into side pockets, cue rack, and potted plants, all without a bit of luck. Lady Lenore stopped Deirdre in the hallway upstairs and asked her if she had by any chance happened to pick up a pair of flesh-colored stockings while she was borrowing the red ones. She was sure she had brought them with her, but couldn’t find them. She could only surmise, by the pink face of Miss Gower, that the chit had pocketed them on the sly. Imagine, the duchess’s niece!

Deirdre went looking for Belami to tell him of this incident. She did not think to look in the attic, where his investigation had taken him. He sat at the window ledge in a dilapidated wicker chair dragged from another room, looking at the prints on the roof, surveying his clues. Method and motives did not run in harmony.

Method—so public, so pointedly stealing the Charney Diamond and ignoring equally valuable stones—indicated an insurance fraud. This had taken firm possession of his mind. Yet to disassemble it made identification for insurance purposes less certain. Something had arisen between the theft and the disassembling to make the insurance deal no longer feasible. The thief had not known the insurance had lapsed; he had discovered it later. But Bidwell and Bessler claimed to have known. One or both of them had lied. On the other hand, Deirdre had assembled a rather strong case against Lady Lenore. He himself was tiring quickly of the woman. Had her other lovers been similarly tired, and less than generous in their rewards?

When at last Deirdre noticed the open attic door and went running up to find him, he narrowed his eyes. What he had discovered in the attic had thrown a new suspect into his orbit. The unlikeliest one that had come along yet. “Come and have a look at this, Deirdre,” he said, observing her closely.

She walked most reluctantly to the window, seeing the greatcoat and galoshes she had worn were still on the floor beneath the window, and the traces of her footprints on the roof. “Someone has been on the roof,” she said quietly with a stain of pink spreading forward from her ears to her cheeks.

“What do you make of this?” he asked dispassionately. “There’s nothing in the pockets of the coat, nothing to indicate who wore them. They belong to my late father, were left up here to perish. Now, why would anyone have gone out on the roof just a few minutes before the robbery? The tracks lead to the west side, giving a view of the road. Someone was playing lookout up here. Waiting for someone to arrive, probably by horseback. It’s my belief some signal or message was to have been relayed. Or possibly it was just a quick check to see if the other person had arrived, through the snow.”

“That’s possible,” she agreed in a small voice, while her face turned a delicate shade of rose.

As Belami observed her reaction, he reviewed the facts in his head. Last night, Deirdre’s arms had been cold as ice when he touched her, and her skirt was all bedraggled with water around the hem. “You have nothing more to tell me?” he asked gently.

“No. That is, Lady Lenore asked me just now if I had seen her silk stockings, the ones used to make the mask. Do you think she would have mentioned them if she were guilty? I told her I hadn’t seen them; I don’t think she believed me.”

“That’s interesting, but do you have anything to tell me about these footprints?”

His dark eyes gazed into hers. It was completely silent in the airless attic. A bright shaft of sunlight turned the motes of dust in the air a pretty gold and green. Her eyes met his. Unaware that she did it, she grabbed her lower lip between her teeth, then her eyes dropped.

“No, nothing,” she said, in a guilt-ridden voice. How could she tell him it was her? She couldn’t.

“I see,” was all he said.

She ventured a peep, and discovered a very compassionate face looking down on her. The agitated surprise was controlled within Belami’s breast. He felt he was looking at a woman he had never seen before, so great was his shock to learn that Deirdre Gower was dashing enough to be involved in a robbery. Who would have thought it—that tower of rectitude! What other surprises might such a woman have in store?

To complete the charm of her, she was sorry for what she had done. She was worried, guilty, and sooner or later, she would throw herself on his chest and confess all. Why she had done it was the next question to ponder. Any behavior so deviant from the norm must have an excellent, a compelling reason, and he feared that he was it.

He quickly decided that the way to handle this particular suspect was with kind sympathy, generously tinged with flirtation. She had taken pretty well to flirtation in her aunt’s conservatory. He allowed a sleepy smile to settle on his lips. With a playful gesture, he reached out and touched her hair. It was soft and fine, but so closely bound up in pins that he couldn’t loosen one hair as he hoped to do.

“Why do you wear your lovely hair in this knob?” he asked.

The unexpectedness of the question threw her into a tizzy, but a grateful tizzy, since he abandoned the thorny subject of footprints on the roof. “It’s tidy,” she said.

His fingers fell from her hair to her neck, where they felt warm, and shockingly intimate, stroking her with caressing movements. A heat formed inside her and spread outward in a glow that brought to mind the sun on a summer’s day. “Will you wear it down tonight, for me?” he asked in a quiet, meaningful tone.

“It looks horrid,” she told him.

He continued in this playful vein, pulling out a few pins, till her curls toppled about her ears. “No, it looks enchanting,” he said softly. Then he lowered his head and placed a chaste kiss on her ear.

“I must go,” she said in breathless accents. “My aunt will be looking for me.”

“At the moment we’re still officially engaged,” he pointed out. “Even your aunt would not be so gothic as to find anything amiss in our spending a moment alone together.”

“Yes,” she answered, quite at random. With a soft swish of her skirts, she turned and sped down the stairs, while Belami shook the two hairpins in his hand, looking after her.

Deirdre hardly knew what to make of the meeting. All thoughts of the footprints on the roof dropped from her mind as she went to her room alone, to relive the magic of Belami’s fingers on her neck, the touch of his lips on her ear. Was it possible he loved her after all? It looked remarkably like it.

In the attic, Belami turned to the coat, to examine it thoroughly. From the collar, he extracted two black hairs. He removed from the hairpins a hair that was wound around them, and placed the three on his palm. They looked identical. The galoshes too were small enough that few men could get into them. Almost certainly it was a lady who had put them over her slippers, and equally certainly, that lady was Deirdre Gower.

So who was her partner? Not Chamfreys, a married man. Bidwell? She had run after him with an unexpected haste that morning. She had also used the word forced in connection with her marriage to himself. If the duchess were indeed forcing her into the marriage, it might be enough to turn her into a criminal. And if Bidwell had been making advances to her, she might have confessed her dilemma to him. He was sure the idea for the robbery had come from Bidwell. It would also account for the fact that only the duchess’s diamond had been taken. It was to be Deirdre’s one day in any case, and of course she knew it was to be worn at the ball.

He sank onto the wicker chair, stunned by his conclusions. He thought he knew something about human nature, but it could always surprise him. That was its fascination, really, but he wasn’t fascinated now. He was aware of a strong feeling of injury. He had come home determined to be free of the wretched girl, but now that she was in tune with his desires, he felt piqued.

How could she prefer that man-milliner to him? The rotter had been making up to her on the sly, that was it. Everyone had a weak point, and Deirdre’s was a susceptibility to flirtation. He had known there were hidden passions beneath her frosty exterior. She kept her fire well banked, but it was there, glowing beneath the frost.

He went to his laboratory and put the three hairs under the microscope. There was no doubt in his mind that all came from the same head. They were the same size, the same color, all three with a twist that denoted naturally curled hair. Such a vital new clue should have cheered him. It opened vast horizons for deduction, yet he felt a sense of loss. An idol had been shattered. Deirdre Gower was made of mortal clay after all, and not marble, as became a goddess. It did not occur to him just yet how little he really cared for marble statues, and how much for mortal clay, when modeled in the feminine form.

Chapter 8

Pronto Pilgrim came puffing up the staircase as Belami was running down.

“Clue!” Pronto told him, eyes wide with importance. They went to Snippe’s study and sat down. “Well, what is it?” Belami asked impatiently.

“Bidwell’s been asking how the road to London is. Asked Snippe. Seemed mighty anxious to get away too. Said ‘Oh, damme’ when he learned it was blocked solid with snow.”

“To London?” Belami asked. “I made sure it was the Great North Road he’d be interested in.”

“No, he lives in London. Why would he want to be rushing north in the middle of winter? Nothing there but Scotland.”

“There is Gretna Green,” Dick answered with a mysterious smile.

“What of it? Bidwell don’t have a ladybird, not that I ever heard of.”

“True, and he wouldn’t be likely to marry her if he had, though I expect his abstention from the muslin company stood him in good stead in certain quarters.”

“Wouldn’t matter a tinker’s curse to old Carswell, if that’s your meaning. He’s got his light o’ love tucked away right and tight.”

“No, that was not my meaning.”

“What did you mean, then?”

“Prepare yourself for a shock, Pronto. I have made a startling discovery.”

“Knew it. Can always tell when you get to smirking like a jackdaw that you’ve been deducing to good purpose. Well, out with it. Who stole the diamond?”

“This is in the strictest confidence, you understand. The fact is, Deirdre is involved in it with Bidwell.”

Pronto stared at his friend a long moment, blew air out through his lips, then finally spoke. “You’re sick, my lad. Sick as a dog. Sicker. In fact, you’re crazy. Bidwell and Deirdre, when the duchess has managed to get the rope around your ankle. Not bloody likely!”