Verse of the Vampyre (25 page)

“Apparently.”

“While you were busy with Catriona.”

He shot her a sideways look. “While I was with Catriona.”

“Talking.”

“We had a lot to talk about.”

“Gosh, I could sleep for a thousand years.” She flopped back on the other twin. “The bed is spinning.”

The room was nearly dark.

Grace’s eyes flew open as Peter’s weight settled on the bed beside her.

“Oh, hi.”

“Hello.” He traced the outline of her lips with a light finger. “Why don’t I trust this sudden lack of curiosity on your part?”

“I don’t know. After all, we each have our little secrets.”

His fingers stilled.

Grace smiled. His head bent, but before he could kiss her, Grace sat up, narrowly missing denting his rather haughty nose. She turned on the bedside lamp.

“Speaking of secrets, if Derek didn’t kill Theresa, and you didn’t, and Catriona says she didn’t, and Lord Ruthven didn’t…who
did?”

The chief constable was studying a report and sucking meditatively on his pipe when Grace was shown into his office.

“Glad to see you safe and sound after your adventures, Grace,” he said once she was seated on the other side of the desk. “You took a great chance.”

“Sometimes you have to,” Grace said.

Heron shook his head, and to head off the dire prophecy she suspected was coming, Grace said, “I believe I know who killed Theresa Ives.”

“Indeed.” He knocked the bowl of the pipe against the ashtray.

“I think it might even have been an accident.”

Something in Heron’s shoe-button eyes told her she was on the right track.

“He had been drinking heavily that night, and I think he knew that she was having an affair. I think it wasn’t the first time for her.”

“Nor for him,” Chief Constable Heron said grimly.

Startled, Grace met his eyes. “Then…it’s true?”

He nodded curtly. “Oddly enough, it was your suspicion of Miss Coke that put us on the right track.”

Momentarily sidetracked, Grace asked, “What’s happening with Miss Coke? Did she shoot at the hunt?”

“We believe one of the Shog—Mr. Okada’s former caretaker fired in the air to scare the hunt. The man has since returned to Japan, and there’s no way of verifying whether he intended real harm, but it seems unlikely.”

“And Miss Coke?”

“Miss Coke has received official warning about her antihunt activities.”

“That’s
it?
”

Heron’s eyes narrowed a little.

“I’m not suggesting we burn her at the stake,” Grace said defensively. “I just don’t think she’s quite as harmless as you seem to.”

Heron shook his head a little, as though Grace was demonstrating some uniquely American paranoia.

Through the closed door she could hear someone typing. Typing? Did people still use typewriters? She gave it up, returning to the thread of their original conversation.

“You looked into the death of Sam Jeffries?” she guessed.

“That’s right. Jeffries was always one for the ladies, and Lady Theresa, well, she was a bit younger than her husband, and had time on her hands. He blamed it the first time on Jeffries, I suppose, but when it happened again…”

“He decided to solve the problem once and for all.” Grace was thinking aloud. She could almost see it from the murderer’s standpoint: humiliated and betrayed by his younger wife, a wife unsuited to the role she had been granted—so unlike Allegra Clairmont-Brougham, who was everything a squire’s lady should be…and still available after all these years.

Perhaps it had seemed like Fate.

Jeffries death had most likely been an impulse, and he had gotten away with it; so when he found his wife alone in the garden fresh from making a spectacle of herself all evening with Derek, perhaps he had struck out in jealous rage. Perhaps he had simply seized another opportunity.

The door to Heron’s office opened. A PC stood there with crisply typed sheets. “We’ve got the warrant, sir.”

Heron rose slowly and wearily from behind his desk. Grace preceded him out, watching as he got in the black car and drove off to arrest Sir Gerald Ives for the murder of his wife.

T
he parcel arrived with the first official snowfall, an ordinary brown package addressed to Peter.

The postmark read Paris. Grace did not recognize the handwriting. She was sure she had never seen that precise black script before, but she recognized Peter’s reaction to it.

He slit the brown mailer open and slid out the book.

Opening it, he smoothed his hand down the frontispiece. Grace watched his face, caught the tightening of his jaw, the way his lashes lowered, veiling his eyes, keeping his thoughts.

Then to her surprise he handed the book to her and went to the bow window, staring out at the white feathers pouring out of the leaden skies, blanketing the world in mysterious white.

Curiously, Grace examined the book. It was a leather-bound volume of Byron’s poems. She read the inscription. It was a fragment of a poem first published in 1812.

She felt a pricking beneath her eyelids, without understanding quite why, and closed the cover, setting the book aside and joining Peter at the window.

The snow was falling more heavily, shrouding the woods in a white hush.

Peter put his arm around her shoulders, drawing her near and kissing the top of her head. They stayed so for some time.

Then Grace said, “You know, that gypsy fortune-teller was wrong.”

Peter smiled wryly. “I can be trusted?”

“Not that.” Grace brushed this aside. “There was no hidden room, there was no lost treasure of an ancient king, there was no lost manuscript.”

His eyes were the blue of shade on new-fallen snow. His head bent, his mouth seeking hers. “But you know,” he said softly, “the story’s not over.”