Too curious.
“Kesgrave,” she said thoughtfully, “what is the likelihood that not a single one of the fourteen employees who could easily afford the sugar supplement enjoys sugar in his tea?”
He glanced at her inquisitively, then back down at the sheet of paper as if looking for something in particular. “Highly improbable.”
“I agree, and yet that it precisely what has happened here,” she said, explaining the discrepancy she had observed. “I cannot believe the figures are legitimate. Something is being misrepresented here.”
Kesgrave agreed. “Mr. Bayne is in fact fictional.”
“As are Mr. Keel, Mr. Dore, Mr. Munyard, Mr. Tablin, and the rest of their so-called colleagues,” she said, reading from the list of names. “Mr. Mayhew has invented an entire staff of well-paid clerks and is defrauding the bank for three thousand three hundred and sixty pounds per annum. There it is, your grace, the perfectly reasonable motive we have been looking for. Mr. Réjane’s murder was not any of the things we thought: petty, irrational, spontaneous, revengeful. It was an act carefully planned by a man who knew his livelihood was at stake. If his angry chef managed to send a letter of complaint off to his brothers about a fictional clerk, they would have investigated and almost certainly discovered Bayne in the ledger. His scheme would unravel almost at once. We found it after a haphazard ten-minute search.”
Although her voice lilted in disgust, she was actually relieved to have discovered a motive that was commensurate with the profound loss of the gifted chef’s talents. At least he had been slain to preserve an avaricious man’s wealth and status, not just his vanity.
But it had all been for naught, for his brothers would learn the truth anyway.
“We must go back,” Bea said insistently. “We must confront him with his perfidy at once. There is no time to waste.”
But Kesgrave disagreed. “At the risk of earning your further contempt for my lack of urgency, I think we should devise a more nuanced plan than barging into his office and hurling accusations at him.”
As much as she wanted to give a full-throttle defense of her own proposal, she realized the response lacked refinement and decided to hear him out. “Continue.”
“Knowing why he did it does not prove the case,” he said reasonably. “Cause does not equal guilt, and even if it did, it doesn’t prove it. Mayhew seeks my favor, but he won’t confess to murder to earn it.”
Having witnessed the banker’s recent obsequious display, Bea was tempted to disagree with that assessment. If some beneficial bargain could be arranged to ensure deposits and status from a cell in Newgate….
But obviously, no.
Always delighted to entertain a scheme, she asked him what he had in mind. “Given your recent descent into gothic-style thinking, I have great hopes for something at once byzantine and lurid.”
He laughed and assured her he was about to disappoint her, then.
“Not possible!” she said with sincerity—which turned out to be true, for his proposal entailed using the information about Mr. Bayne to trick Mr. Mayhew into confessing. “If hiring an actor to play the clerk did not remind me of Tavistock, I would insist we drive to the Particular at once and enlist Mr. Steagle.”
“Fortunately, I do not think we will have to go to such lengths,” Kesgrave said. “The specter of him should be sufficient. As loath as you are to bestow your attention on Mayhew, I trust you will make an exception, as I think we will have a greater success if we confront him in his own home.”
“A drawing room vignette!” she said with deep appreciation for his sense of drama.
“Precisely.”
“Very well,” she said, giving her approval of the plan, “but if we are to put on a show, we must invite Marlow, for all of this was done for his benefit.”
His grace refused to discuss it.
Chapter Nineteen
As much as Beatrice wanted to ask the Mayhews to dinner and coerce the banker into revealing his guilt over syllabub, she decided such a course was a little too vindictive. Receiving an invitation to dine at Kesgrave House was among the mushroomy couple’s most ardent desires, and allowing them to believe they had reached the summit of their social ambition mere seconds before pushing them off the peak had an unwanted air of poignancy.
She could not bring herself to condone the arrangement even though it would have provided Marlow with an opportunity to observe her investigative acumen firsthand.
Her original plan of bringing the butler with them to number forty-four had also not prospered. Its failure wasn’t due to Kesgrave’s insistence that taking one’s butler on social calls was entirely beyond the pale, even for her. She had heard the argument frequently enough from Aunt Vera—decorum, decorum, decorum—to ignore it easily now. The fact that decapitation was somehow not further beyond the pale denoted the limitations of propriety itself.
No, what had caused her to change her mind was the realization of how the invitation to the neighbors’ house would appear to Marlow.
What she had told Kesgrave the day before was true: Her intention in identifying Mr. Réjane’s murderer was to establish herself with the staff. Marlow, casually dismissing her success and skills, had left her no option other than to prove herself.
He could not know that, of course, and Bea wanted to keep it that way. Insisting he accompany her and the duke to the Mayhews would reveal how much she desired his good opinion.
Surely, there was no faster way to lose a butler’s esteem than making an effort to acquire it.
Hours later, while listening to her hostess discuss her and her husband’s imminent plan to visit Paris, Bea thought again of Marlow and smiled as she imagined him trying to maintain that calculatingly bland expression in the face of such tedium.
“It is de rigueur to proclaim oneself averse to foreign travel, for it involves
