“Silly thing. It looks no different than after cutting up a side of beef,” she muttered.
Parsons, who did not appear to be much more solid on his feet than the scullery maid, said defensively, “It is a little different knowing that the blood is from a human, not a cow.”
Out of respect for her superior, Gertrude granted that it might indeed be a little bit different.
Bea, holding the cleaver, noted its weight was quite substantial and its blade was remarkably sharp. It had been honed recently and had probably cut through Mr. Réjane’s neck with relative ease.
Oh, but why the neck? There were so many easier ways to kill a man than chopping off his head with a cleaver. Indeed, there were easier ways of killing a man with the cleaver—a slice in the gut, for instance, would do the deed very well. It would take a little bit longer for him to die from loss of blood, however, and he would have time to cry out for help.
Was someone nearby to provide assistance?
She turned to Parsons, whose color had yet to return, and asked him what time he had discovered Monsieur Alphonse.
Despite his agitation, he replied calmly. “I woke at five, and the first thing I do every morning after dressing is reignite the fire in the kitchen and put on a pot of water so that when Gertrude wakes up a half hour later, it is already boiling.”
Unprompted, the kitchen maid substantiated his claim. “I typically come down at five-thirty and the water is always boiling. Esther keeps the same schedule and will say so when she finishes her faint.”
Parsons then added, also without encouragement, that he had not seen the cleaver. “It was dark when I found Monsieur Alphonse—I had only my candle—and it was a very unsettling experience, so I might have overlooked it. But I really didn’t see it and have no idea how it got under the cabinet. It’s very shocking, your grace, how easily you found it. I cannot believe the murderer counted on such clever thinking. I, for one, really thought it was the le peu. The machine had so much potential to do damage.”
As she was not privy to his actual emotional state when he’d discovered the body, Bea could not evaluate the truth of this assertion. She could, however, point out that le peu had no blood on its blade.
Taken aback by her conviction, he said in amazement, “It did not?”
“It would have been scrubbed clean like everything else in the kitchen before Gertrude went to bed,” she explained, “and as it was not the murder weapon, it would have had no opportunity to get dirty.”
Defensively, Parsons said, “The murderer might have cleaned it.”
Bea allowed that it was possible but thought it made Mr. Mayhew’s determination to destroy the device all the more suspicious. Depriving anyone of the chance to examine it ensured that the story of accidental death was more readily believed.
But if Mr. Mayhew had something to do with it, then why had he left the cleaver to be found under the cabinet? Surely, he would be inclined to dispose of it with the same thoroughness as the guillotine?
Alternatively, why not return it clean to its original spot? Then no one would have cause to wonder about it at all.
Possibly, such an activity had not occurred to him—and why would it? He was the owner of a commodious home and a man of considerable material comfort. In all likelihood, he had never washed a kitchen implement in his entire life.
Or maybe it had been tossed under the cabinet in a fit of panic. Could he have still been in the room when Parsons entered the passageway, and hearing him approach, threw it under the cupboard before slipping out through the scullery?
“Was Monsieur Alphonse still warm?” Bea asked.
Parsons’s eyes grew impossibly wide and his cheekbones seemed to flare. “Excuse me?”
“When you found his body, was it still warm or had he started to grow cool?” she said. “The body’s temperature will provide us with a sense of how long Monsieur Alphonse was dead before he was found.”
The rational explanation did little to assuage Parsons’s outrage at the assumption that he had touched the corpse. “I would never do anything so disrespectful. Monsieur Alphonse deserved to rest in peace even without…even without”—it was difficult for him to get the words out but he persisted—“his head. I had barely understood what I was seeing before Thomas came into the room and started screaming. I calmed him down, then placed a tablecloth over Monsieur Alphonse to ensure his dignity and went to wake up Mr. Mayhew. After that, I did not return to the kitchen until after the constable and his men had left. I believe the same goes for everyone in the house. We allowed Mr. Mayhew and the constable to settle the matter between them.”
Gertrude confirmed this, stating that she had not entered the kitchen until after ten o’clock.
“Ten o’clock?” Bea repeated thoughtfully.
That was a full five hours after Parsons discovered the body. What did that tell her about the time Mr. Réjane was killed?
Nothing, she realized.
Accordingly, she turned to the butler and asked him to describe the puddle as he had seen it early in the morning. “Was the blood oozing or had it settled into place? And was it still warm?”
But if the servant had been indignant at the idea of touching the dead chef’s skin, he was utterly repulsed at the prospect of soaking his fingers in his blood. Sputtering in horror, he reiterated that it had been too dark to see anything and he would not have looked even if he could. “The man was dead!” he cried when he was capable of complete sentences. “That is all I know, your grace, and I must beg you to apply to Mr. Mayhew for further information regarding Monsieur Alphonse’s condition. He talked to the constable
