For a moment, fleeting and intense, Bea thought he was confessing to the murder and felt that it had to be some trick, another maneuver to lull them. Quickly enough, however, she realized he was still speaking of business matters. “Extreme measures?”
Mr. Mayhew was startled by the query. “Excuse me?”
“You said you were driven to extreme measures,” Bea explained. “What extreme measures?”
The banker let out a laugh—it was a little self-conscious and somewhat affected—and insisted he had no idea what she was talking about. “Oh, dear, so much information is being shared you are growing confused.”
Although she was tempted to compliment him on the audacity of the ploy, Bea turned to the duke and asked him to speculate as to what measures Mr. Mayhew might have taken if the procedural obstacle he had erected had proved ineffective.
“I am certain Mayhew does not wish to make me exert myself in speculation,” Kesgrave said mildly, “and will simply tell us.”
It was comical, to be sure, the look of indecision that swept across the banker’s face, for his instinct was clearly to submit to the duke and yet some part of him knew he should resist the compulsion. Finally, after several moments of silent and intense struggle, he said, “It is not my fault. I tried to put him off with vague promises to look into the matter, but he refused to accept my answer. I had no choice but to invent a notoriously difficult associate and put him in charge of the request.”
Whatever extreme measure for which Bea was prepared, it certainly was not this. “You mean Mr. Bayne does not exist?”
Defiantly, he said, “I had no choice.”
“And subsection F, clause one?” she asked.
“The bylaws only go up to E,” he confessed with a hint of shame. “I did not mean to mislead him. I just wanted to avoid discussing the topic for as long as possible because refusing a loan is always so awkward. People get very stiff in the spine about it, as if it were personal and not merely a practical business decision.”
His defensiveness could, she thought, mean only one thing. “Monsieur Alphonse found out.”
Exhaling heavily, Mr. Mayhew bowed his head. “Yesterday morning. He paid a call to the bank himself and insisted on meeting Mr. Bayne. That’s when he discovered the truth. He was irate.”
“Well, naturally,” Bea said.
The banker grimaced at the rebuke but insisted he had done the only thing he could. “I do not wish to cast aspersions on the dead, but it was really most uncharitable of Monsieur Alphonse to ask me in the first place. He must have known the position he was putting me in and did not care. Now of course I did not chop off his head with a skewer—”
“Cleaver,” she corrected.
Yet again, Mr. Mayhew appeared confused. “Excuse me?”
“You cannot cut off someone’s head with a skewer,” she explained.
The minor distinction between kitchen utensils was as inconsequential as the differences between stoves, and he scoffed at the expectation that he able to distinguish between an object that cut and an object that impaled.
“Truly, your grace, your distraction with minor details has made you insensible to the larger repercussions of the event,” he said impatiently. “What you seem incapable of properly comprehending is how disastrous this event is to me personally. If word gets out that the famous chef was murdered in my own home, I will be ruined. Nobody will entrust their money with a man who cannot even provide for his employees’ safety. I understand, your grace, that you find the le peu explanation too implausible to accept and am in full sympathy with your objections. I see now that it might be difficult to insert a human head fully into the apparatus. But perhaps you are amenable to the possibility that an argument got out of hand and when it was over poor Monsieur Alphonse had been most gruesomely sliced apart? In that circumstance his death is still an accident but with a villain to satisfy your requirements.”
It was an astounding offer, as insulting as it was ridiculous, but Bea knew better than to take offense. Having prospered little with his last approach, he was merely changing tactics again.
When this new strategy failed to win the approval of his company, he turned his attention to his own suffering, which he believed had been given short shrift. With little doubt, tarnishing Mayhew and Co. was the true motive behind the senselessly violent act. “Someone is attempting to destroy my reputation, and by asking me irrelevant questions, you are allowing it to happen. I beg you, please, turn your attention to who would want to do me harm. That is how you will find the killer.”
Amused despite herself by his persistence, she affected effusive concern and urged him to compile a list of persons who he believed might want to hurt him. “You shall pursue that aspect of the investigation while Kesgrave and I pursue another.”
Mr. Mayhew did not like that at all, being relegated to his own subordinate task, but before he could protest, Bea asked if they could speak to his wife while he was composing his list. His countenance lightened even as he professed himself unable to comply with her request, for the poor dear was currently indisposed. “She slept quite horribly last night, and her nerves are monstrously unsettled because of these horrendous events. She is not intrepid like you, your grace. She is a delicate female, prone to spells, and the idea of Monsieur Alphonse’s head being”—he indicated to a nearby spot with his hand—“there and his body being…uh…well, there”—another gesture to
