How confidently he spoke! How assured! How secure!
But Bea couldn’t believe it.
No, she could not. It simply wasn’t possible that four members of the same family—brothers, no less, with all the attendant rivalries and jealousies that relationship entailed—would blithely shrug off the theft of thousands of pounds per annum.
“Oh, but would your brothers agree?” Bea asked, making her last play, determined to pierce his mask of cool indifference. He exuded calm composure, but surely inside he was trembling with apprehension at the revelation of a scheme so nefarious he had killed to keep it secret. “Would they really believe they have got their fair share and to begrudge you a little extra would be churlish? I don’t think so, Mr. Mayhew. I don’t think so at all. I think they would be irate and remove you from your position at once. Would they take criminal action against you? I don’t know. That would depend on their appetite for scandal. But I do know whatever measures they took would be devastating to your comfort. You would lose your house, your staff, your horses and memberships. You would lose everything, and that is why you killed Monsieur Alphonse. Because he was about to send a letter to your brothers alerting them to your mismanagement and you were terrified of losing everything.”
Mr. Mayhew laughed.
Delighted with her tirade, utterly gleeful, he laughed and laughed, and Bea, observing the seeming sincerity of his amusement, decided he was the most diabolical villain she had ever encountered. She did not expect all murderers to crumble like Wem at Lord Stirling’s ball, to admit what they did while reverting to some childlike state, but nor did she anticipate a wall of obfuscation so immense she could not scale it.
Eventually, after a great long while during which his wife glared at him with impatience, Mr. Mayhew gained control of his amusement and turned to Kesgrave with a gleam in his eyes.
And it was such a gleam—such a bright, eager, voracious, predatory glow—that it caused everything in the room to shift. Like a portrait slightly askew, the view had been tilted for a long time and now suddenly it was straight and she could see the image for what it was.
Bea inhaled sharply and felt the pervasive relief that came with clarity.
Triumphant in his good fortune, Mr. Mayhew said to the duke, “Your wife is accusing me, your grace. I cannot imagine what kind of amends that will require.”
But in fact he could, for if the investigation itself had warranted a deposit of fifty thousand pounds, then a charge of murder in his very own home had to be worth double that.
No, triple.
Maybe quadruple.
On and on the numbers spun in his head, growing impossibly higher as he contemplated the duchess’s folly, and Bea could not understand how she had considered him a viable suspect for so long. The face he presented to the world—slack, leaden-eyed, uncomprehending—was the only face he had. There was no Machiavellian schemer plotting in secret behind the dull facade. No, it was dullness all the way through.
That was why he had no reaction to the threat of Monsieur Alphonse’s letter—he genuinely lacked the intelligence to imagine how a report detailing his managerial malfeasance might negatively affect him.
It was horrifying now to see how she had altered reality to make it align with her assumptions. Over and over again she had contorted the truth to squeeze it into a box labeled “genius,” like when she had assumed he misidentified the use of a cleaver to throw off suspicion.
But why would he know cleavers and skewers—that one chops, the other pokes and neither pinches? The minutia of the kitchens was entirely irrelevant to his existence. He never even went belowstairs. All meetings with Mr. Réjane were conducted in his study.
Mrs. Mayhew, keenly aware that another Parisian landmark would not alleviate the awkward vulgarity of her husband’s display, tried a more forthright approach. “Darling, one does not receive reparations by seeking them,” she chided gently with a contrite smile at Kesgrave.
Her husband, instantly alive to her game, all but winked at her as he apologized to Kesgrave for his faux pas. “Of course I would never expect you to increase your deposits just because your wife accused me of murder in my own drawing room. That would be dreadfully gauche. But if you do decide to make an alteration, Mayhew & Co. would have no objection.”
It was comical, Bea decided, the disparity in the two spouses, for even though they both liked to blather, Mrs. Mayhew perceived the undercurrents of a conversation as well as their implications.
She would have no difficulty in recognizing the problem a letter from Monsieur Alphonse would present.
No, she would not, Bea realized pensively, her gaze sliding to the banker’s wife to also consider her in a new light. To be sure, she had a firm alibi in her lady’s maid, but what if she did not? What if Annette had been compelled to lie or was deceived in some way by her mistress? The perpetrator of the last murder she investigated had also appeared free from suspicion, and he turned out to be a villain through and through.
Mrs. Mayhew’s motive was just as strong as her husband’s—stronger, actually, because she understood the problem in a way her plodding spouse did not. For one thing, she realized his brothers were not satisfied with the “nice living” they drew from Mayhew & Co., for she made several comments about their competitiveness. The more likely situation was that each brother was on the constant lookout for an opportunity to overcome the advantages of primogeniture and seize control of the London bank. Nobody was ever satisfied with running a modest provincial concern when there was an influential establishment in the capital to oversee.
Furthermore, Mrs. Mayhew, who made a habit of visiting belowstairs whereas her husband did not, had witnessed one of the kitchen maid’s outbursts. Unaware of her illustrious audience, Gertrude had
