raised her chin. I'll do it, I promise you I will.”
“Swell. When they come, you can explain what you were doing here at two o’clock in the morning.
She put her hands on the bed and she leaned toward me. I'll tell them…” Her face was growing red and she was nearly sputtering. “I’ll…”
“Come on, Cecily. It’s time to leave.”
She stared at me again. She widened her eyes. “You only let me stay so you could ask all those boring stupid questions of yours. Didn’t you? You don’t care about me at all!” She narrowed her eyes and she slapped at the bed with both hands. You… you took what you wanted and now you're throwing me out!
“Yeah,” I said.
“You were toying with me!” Her eyes were slits now. She swung around and tore away the bedspread and grabbed a pillow with both hands. Her mouth open, her teeth clenched, she spun back and hurled it at me. I caught it.
“You used me!” She jumped off the bed. “You… filthy rotten bastard!”
She stalked around me, her shoulders hunched, keeping as much distance from me as the bed allowed. At the door she turned around. Her face twisted into a snarl and she said, “I hope David beats you to a pulp!”
She turned back, grabbed the doorknob, ripped open the door, and stomped out, slamming the door shut behind her.
Chapter Twenty-eight
“Phil?”
My eyes fluttered open. Slowly. Reluctantly. While I was asleep someone had pried out my eyeballs, dipped them in sand, then hammered them back into their sockets.
“Phil?”
The Great Man. He stood beside my bed, wearing a dark gray three-piece suit. He looked fresh and chipper and eager. If I’d had the Colt in my hand I would have shot him.
“Phil,” he said, “it is a quarter after six.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It is time. Sir David.” He grinned at me and clapped his hands together. “Up and at him, Phil!”
“Yeah.” I closed my eyes. “Yeah. You go ahead, Harry. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
“But Phil. I am your second. We must arrive together.”
I opened my eyes again and looked up at the ceiling. It hung over me like a huge white anvil about to fall. “Right. Right. Okay.”
I rolled out of bed, groaning, and I cranked myself upright. My muscles were stiff, my joints were grainy.
Sunlight was trembling throughout the room. England is only a few miles south of the North Pole and in summer the days are longer, at both ends, than they have any right to be.
I staggered past the Great Man into the bathroom. I stripped off my pajamas, stepped into the bathtub, got down on my hands and knees, and turned on the cold water. I leaned my head into the stream. It hit me like a sledgehammer.
“Hold on, Harry,” I said. I was dressed and we were in the hallway outside the suite of Mrs. Allardyce and Miss Turner. The door was shut. I knocked on it. Waited. Knocked again.
“We will be late, Phil,” said the Great Man impatiently.
I tried the door. Locked. I turned to the Great Man and nodded toward the lock. “Do your stuff, Harry.
“Phil!” He looked at me as if I’d just told him I carried the plague.
“It’s important,” I said. “We need to get in there. Before the maid does.”
“Whatever for?”
“I’ll tell you later. Come on.”
The small white card with the names of Mrs. Allardyce and Miss Turner was still thumbtacked to the door. The Great Man peered at it.
I had forgotten that he didn’t know who was staying in each room. He knew which room was his, and that was all he needed to know, or wanted to.
He looked at me. “The two women, they are in danger?”
“Maybe.”
“But you are not certain?”
“It’s important, Harry.”
“But Phil!”
“We’ll be late, Harry.”
Frowning the whole time, he tugged his wallet from his back pocket, opened it, plucked out a pick, bent forward, slipped the pick into the keyhole. Click. He stood up, still frowning, and he turned the knob and opened the door. He stepped back. I stepped into the room.
Mrs. Allardyce’s bed was empty, the sheets and the blanket thrown back. There was a depression in the mattress deep enough for a yak’s nest.
I walked into Miss Turner’s room, the Great Man trailing behind me. Frowning, probably.
The bolster still lay beneath the blanket. Miss Turner had done a good job with her dummy-even in daylight it looked like a sleeping form. I put my knee on the bed and leaned forward to examine the blanket. About a foot down from the pillow, there were eight narrow holes in the fabric, each an inch wide, all within two or three inches of each other.
“What is it, Phil?”
“Just a minute.”
I tossed back the blanket and the sheet and I took a look at the bolster. It was plump and soft, covered with satin and stuffed with down. There were eight narrow holes in the cover, identical to the holes in the blanket. I stuck my finger into one of them. When I pulled it back, a small white feather came puffing out. It floated briefly in the air and then settled back against the bolster, quivering.
“ What, Phil?”
“Someone stuck a knife into this thing last night.”
“A knife?”
“While Miss Turner was out.” I pushed myself off the bed.
“A knife?”
“Yeah.” I glanced around the room. Nothing.
“But for what purpose?”
“To kill Miss Turner, it looks like.”
He looked from me to the bed, looked back at me. Are you joking with me, Phil?”
“I’ll tell you about it on the way downstairs.”
A servant-a new one, for me-told us that everyone was wait ing out on the patio, by the conservatory. When the Great Man and I arrived, I saw that everyone was.
Even Lord Bob was there.
During the night, or sometime this morning, someone had used a white powder-lime, maybe-to mark off a neat square on the grass, beyond the flagstones of the patio. The square looked to be the size of a standard boxing ring, about twenty-four feet on a side. There were no ropes and no posts, but two wooden stools squatted in opposite corners. Beside each stool was a straight-back wooden chair and, beside that, a small table supporting a heavy glass goblet, a crystal decanter filled with water, and a thick stack of white towels.
People were sitting in chairs arranged around three sides of the square and set back from it by a couple of yards, behind low tables that held big pots of tea and coffee. Nearly everyone was dressed in black, but most of them were chatting and sipping at china cups, and the whole thing seemed very jolly.
Miss Turner, Mrs. Corneille, and Mrs. Allardyce sat in a group to the left, on the south side of the ring. Lady
