It was strange, she thought, to contemplate how close she had come to living so near to the distinguished chef whose work she had admired from afar for years. She would have very much liked to have tried his flaky kipferl and his croquantes and any of the dozens of superb dishes he chronicled in his tome.
’Twas a shame, a very great shame, that such a talent was gone from the world.
Sighing lightly, she returned to the matter of Parsons and asked what other details he had supplied.
“He revealed nothing else of note,” Joseph replied. “The exchange we had was hurried and disjointed. He had come to our door looking for smelling salts, you see, for Mrs. Mayhew had fainted dead away when she heard that Monsieur Alphonse’s head was lying in a different room from his body and the maid could find none among her mistress’s things. Parsons came dashing over here to borrow ours, but I think he really just wanted an excuse to be away from the house for a few minutes. He said several times the accident was horrible, but it was only when he was leaving—after Mrs. Wallace had given him her own smelling salts—that he actually said what happened. It was all so distressing, and not just because Monsieur Alphonse’s head had been decapitated, although that is too horrifying to contemplate. But also because the thing was deemed an accident. I tried to ask Parsons how they could be so sure, but he insisted it was the only possible explanation. Then he raised the salts to his own nose because he must have felt a little faint himself and left.”
By any account, it was deeply suspicious behavior, the man who had found the body insisting that his explanation was the only viable one. “What time did Parsons call?”
“A little after ten,” he said. “I was returning the breakfast tray to the kitchen when he arrived at the door. Dolly immediately went to look for smelling salts, and I stood with him in the entryway, tray in hand, while he waited. He was quiet at first, but then he started talking and he couldn’t seem to stop. That was when Mr. Marlow invited him to sit down, but he refused. He said he could not stay that long.”
That the butler had also heard the tale firsthand came as a surprise to Bea, who had assumed from his stony silence that he had been in a different part of the house. “Tell me, Marlow, does Parsons’s story sound plausible to you? Do you think it is possible that Monsieur Alphonse inadvertently sliced off his own head with his chopping implement?”
Although she readily recalled the contempt with which Marlow had ordered his underling never to speak of the death again, Bea did not ask the question out of an impulse to embarrass him in front of a subordinate by requiring him to violate his own rule. The anger that had spurred the discussion had long since been supplanted by a desire to do right by the talented chef. The murder of any man was a tragedy, to be sure, but there was something about cutting this man down in his prime that felt especially calamitous to her.
Marlow’s reply was simple. “No, your grace, I do not.”
Bea nodded solemnly and considered the next step in her investigation—a deliberation that was not at all necessary, as there was only one reasonable prospect and that was to interview Mrs. Wallace.
Obviously, she did not relish the task, for interrogating the housekeeper on a deeply personal matter was not among the options she had considered when she had sought the woman out for their first discussion earlier that morning. Her plan to be either ingratiatingly deferential or offputtingly demanding was for naught, and as much as she would have preferred to delay the awkward scene, she had too much pride in her proficiency as an investigator to allow mortification to affect her inquiry.
She would conduct the difficult interview before visiting number forty-four to speak to Mr. Mayhew’s staff.
Although resolute, she could not quite smother the sigh that rose to her lips and to cover it, she assured Joseph that the matter was under her control now. If something nefarious had happened to the famous chef, he could trust her to bring it to light.
The relief that briefly overtook his expression was gratifying, even if Marlow’s visage remained impassive. To the butler, she requested that Mrs. Wallace be sent to the drawing room, and although it was on the tip of her tongue to ask him not to tell her the subject they would discuss, she realized such a cautionary measure was not necessary. Informing the housekeeper that her mistress wished to interrogate her on her flirtation with a servant from a neighboring house who had just been beheaded was not a duty any butler would voluntarily perform.
Mrs. Wallace, therefore, had no idea of the topic of conversation and entered the drawing room with a compact little book in her hands for taking notes. Naturally, she assumed she had been summoned to confer on various domestic matters, such as menus for the week or the new duchess’s preferred level of firmness in a pillow, and appeared eager to do so. Whatever grief she felt on the horrendous death of her beau was carefully concealed, and the only emotion Bea could discern on her lightly wrinkled face was curiosity. A petite woman with a slight frame, she wore a dark brown dress that could indicate mourning, but as it bore a marked resemblance to
