And I knew then that he’d been just as aware of all those young women gazing at him adoringly while he read his classics as I had been.
“Did Pamela know she was one of many?”
“Like I said, I don’t know what their relationship was. They may have just been friends.”
“What about Jeremy?”
He went back to running his thumb up and down the closed pages of his book. “They aren’t my closest friends. Alex, Jeremy and Dolph all went to Eton together. They go way back, but I’ve only known them a year or so. I thought Pamela had been seeing Jeremy. In fact, it might have been Jeremy who introduced her to Alex. I don’t know. But something was up between those two that night. There was definitely tension. Normally Jeremy always sat beside Alex at those dinners, but he was at the other end of the table.”
I thought of that Instagram photo featuring Jeremy and Pamela from last July. Had Jeremy been a stepping-stone to Alex? The one she really wanted?
“How long was it until Charles came back into the dining room?” I asked Miles.
He looked at me with a pained expression on his face. “That was pretty late into the evening, Lucy. I’m sorry to say it’s all a bit fuzzy.”
I was trying to think of more questions to ask him. Particularly I wanted to know what they’d been talking about when I hadn’t been in the room. But I doubted that Miles would be too quick to share the kinds of things that eight drunk undergrads would talk about when I wasn’t in their presence. I was still mulling over how to tactfully begin when he raised his hand in a wave and I turned around to see the Colombian, Gabriel Parkinson, coming in. With him was a stunningly beautiful young woman, and I nearly choked on my beer when I saw that behind them was Carlos and, looking far more cheerful than the last time I’d seen her, Hester. She looked less than pleased when she realized that I was at the table they were about to join, but by that time, we were pulling in stools from other tables and turning our group of two into a group of six.
Miles made everybody welcome and said, “Do you all know each other?”
He then saved me from having to lie by automatically going around and introducing us all.
Gabriel said, “I was practicing my Spanish with Carlos. It’s amazing how quickly it gets rusty. I miss hearing my own language.”
I could imagine. Sometimes I missed hearing my own accent. Once in a while it would be nice to hear the word chips and not have to translate in my own head to french fries. Or be able to say trash can and not have to substitute the word bin. Anyway, it was nice to see that Carlos and Gabriel had found a common pastime.
Hester sat maybe a little bit closer than was entirely necessary to Carlos, but he didn’t seem to mind. Gabriel’s friend?—date?—was blonde and so skinny she must either be an anorexic or a model or both. She was awfully pretty, though. Naturally, Gabriel and Miles had the murder in common and immediately asked each other if they’d heard anything. Both shook their heads. I thought they looked worried and wondered what Miles hadn’t told me.
I glanced around, hoping that the rest of the guys from the dinner party might show up, but no such luck. I asked, “How is Alex doing?”
I knew I’d pushed the right button when Gabriel and Miles exchanged another glance and their expressions grew even more concerned. It was Gabriel who answered, “His parents have asked him to stay on at his home. At least for now.”
“But it’s nearly the end of term. Can he really afford to miss school?”
“I don’t think he has a choice,” Miles said through pinched lips.
Gabriel said what we were all thinking. “The police believe he might have killed that young woman.”
“But why? Why him more than anybody else?” I’d done the timeline myself. It seemed to me that everybody had left the room or been on their own at one time or another. Any of them could have killed Pamela.
“He received a phone call from her. And then he left the room and was gone for—” Gabriel rubbed his forehead. “Those dinners. I really shouldn’t drink so much.”
Miles nodded. “We’ve all got the same problem. We all saw him leave, and no one saw him come back. But he had to be gone at least twenty minutes.”
Gabriel asked, “Is twenty minutes really enough time to kill someone?”
Carlos and Hester shared a glance tinged with smugness. Then Hester said in a soft voice, “You’d be surprised.”
Wow. It really didn’t look very good for Alex. He’d just gone to the top of my list of suspects too, and I was trying really hard not to come to any conclusions too quickly. As I had discovered from bitter experience, the minute you were convinced of someone’s guilt, your mind spent all its efforts trying to prove your theory correct.
Far better to keep an open mind. Believe everyone was guilty and then eliminate the suspects one by one. Trouble was, I hadn’t yet been able to take anyone off my list. If only I could get back into that house. I had a feeling that if I focused, I might be able to get a sense of what had happened in that billiard room. Maybe if Pamela hadn’t passed all the way over, she’d even be able to get me some kind of a message. Somehow I had to let her know that I wanted to help solve her murder.
Chapter 12
I said, “I’d really like to visit Alex and let him know that I don’t blame him for my friend’s death. Maybe he’s got some kind of information that would help us clear his name.”
I didn’t
