“Would you kindly ask her to join us?” Hawke said, and Pelham, a look of distress on his face, rushed from the dining room.
“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’, Alex?” Tex said gravely.
“We’ll know in a moment,” Hawke said, and sniffed the soup once more.
Pelham ushered in a pretty, dark-eyed young woman, mid-twenties, wearing a white apron with a toque blanche atop her black curls. She wore an expression of calm despite the unusual summons. Pelham looked stricken. Something clearly was amiss.
“Good evening, I’m Alex Hawke. You’re new here, I understand.”
“Oui, Monsieur Hawke. One month since I arrive from Paris.”
“Bienvenue, mademoiselle. I wonder. Why would a pretty young woman want to leave Paris and move to the dreary English countryside? Seems a bit odd.”
“To learn some English. And, because of my boyfriend, he have a job at the Lygon Arms in town.”
“Did you prepare this soup?”
“Mais oui, monsieur. I hope you are enjoying it. C’est bon? Encore un peu?”
“Quite delicious. Has an odd, nutty aroma I can’t quite identify.”
“C’est un pate de noix moulues, monsieur, a paste of ground walnuts. Peut-etre cela—perhaps that is—”
“Eh bien. No. That’s not it,” Hawke said, dipping his spoon into the soup. “Here, you taste it and tell me what you think it is.” He handed her the spoon but she simply stared at it.
“Is there a problem?” said Hawke.
“Non, monsieur.”
“Then taste it.”
“I cannot, monsieur. It is not proper.”
“Did you put something in this soup that should not be there, mademoiselle?”
“What are you saying, monsieur?”
“I am saying that if you don’t taste that bloody soup in the next two seconds I’m going to have my friend Chief Inspector Congreve over there arrest you.”
“Of what charge, monsieur?”
“Attempted murder should do it.”
The girl’s eyes flared angrily and she flung the spoon to the floor. Before Alex could react, she bent forward and grabbed his soup bowl from the table and raised it to her lips.
“I would sooner eat all of it!” she shouted defiantly and tilted the bowl toward her open mouth, wolfing down the contents in one long, single swallow. She stood then, looking down at them, eyes blazing, yellow soup smeared on her chin and down the front of her apron.
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, eyeing all of them insolently.
“Porcs infidels! Je vais au paradis sachant que mon valeureux successeur reussira la ou j’ai echoue!” she said, smiling at them.
A second later, she made a small noise and collapsed to the floor.
Congreve shoved back his chair and went to her, kneeling at her side. He placed two fingers at the carotid artery just beneath her ear, paused a moment, then shook his head.
“Unconscious?” Alex Hawke asked.
“Dead,” Ambrose said. “What was it, Alex, in the soup?”
“Aflatoxin, most probably. Derivative of the extremely toxic mold produced by peanuts when they go bad. Brilliantly disguised, I almost missed it. She was very good at her trade, this one. She’d most likely have gotten away with it.”
“Alex is right,” Tex said, holding the soup bowl under his nose. “Aflatoxin’s a tough one to catch. Our postmortems would show only damage to the liver. Shucks, after all the port wine we’ve had today, nobody would —” He put the bowl down.
“What was her name?” Alex asked Pelham.
“She called herself Rose-Marie, sir,” a very shaken Pelham said, gazing down at the lifeless figure. “I must say I’m thoroughly mortified, your lordship. Someone should have—”
“Rose-Marie…Rosemary…” Congreve said, more to himself than anyone in the room. He placed the sprig of herb on his linen serviette and doubled it over.
“Now, you listen here, old thing,” Alex said, putting an arm around Pelham’s frail and trembling shoulders, “There’s no way anyone in this household is to blame. You’re shaking. I want you to go into the library, pour yourself a largish whiskey, and put the whole matter behind you. We’ll join you in a moment. It’s quite over as far as I’m concerned.”
“I’ll just go ring the constabulary, your lordship,” Pelham said, and disappeared as if in a daze.
Alex eyed the fragrant twig in his fingers. “Rosemary. It appears you’re quite right, Ambrose. First Iris in Maine, then Lily in Paris, and now I find this little sprig of rosemary right here under my own nose.”
“You’re forgetting one, Alex,” Patterson said. “Rose.”
“Rose?”
“When we pulled Simon Stanfield out of the Grand Canal, he was wearing a single rosebud in his lapel. According to his wife, he hated flowers, especially roses.”
“This Dog calls all of his sharp teeth by the names of flowers, or, in this case, he takes a wee license with an aromatic shrub,” Hawke said. “Quite the romantic, our homicidal assassin. Please tell me, Ambrose, the late unlamented, what were her final words?”
“She addressed us as ‘infidel swine,’ ” Ambrose said, staring down at the dead assassin, and shaking his head. “And then informed us that ‘I go to Paradise knowing my worthy successor will succeed where I have failed.’ ”
“Let’s keep a weather eye out for her successor, shall we, Ambrose?” Hawke said.
“The supply would seem endless,” Congreve said, and sipped his wine.
Chapter Thirty-Three
London
BODY OF LIES WAS THE HOTTEST TICKET IN LONDON. IF YOU could even get your hands on one, that is. The tabloids joked that the sizzling waiting list for tomorrow night’s gala premiere was so long some members of the Royal Family were embarrassingly midlist. Adverts for the latest epic spy flic were everywhere. Marketing declared war on every square inch of London. Space not plastered with Nick Hitchcock’s picture was space wasted. Airtime, radio or television without a mention of the “Sexiest Spy Alive” was precious time lost forever.
Marketing had spoken. Cry havoc, and let slip the hounds of publicity, they said. Legions went forth, and it seemed every corner of the capital was plastered with Ian Flynn’s cruelly handsome visage.
Looming above a rain-soaked Piccadilly Circus, a giant billboard cutout of a smirking Nick Hitchcock dominated the skyline. There was the prerequisite luscious babe on his left arm and a lethal-looking black automatic in his right hand. Every ten seconds, his gun emitted a loud pop, and a perfect round smoke ring wafted from the gun’s muzzle to be borne aloft high above the hurry of swirling umbrellas, the glistening red buses and gleaming black taxis. The sound effect of Nick’s gun, the Lies marketing gurus soon learned to their chagrin, unfortunately could be heard only in the quiet of the wee small hours, when the hooting armies of the night had tented down.
Francesca, emerging from a Soho theatre into a surging sea of paparazzi shouting her name, glanced up at her giant cardboard costar just as Nick’s gun went off. “Firing blanks,” she said to Lily and her director, Vittorio de Pinta.
Vittorio, who clearly had a lot more riding on this picture than she did, mainly his future, draped an arm around his star’s bare shoulders.
“Mi amore,” the handsome Italian said, smiling broadly for the flashing cameras, “Please do not behave this way. Be a good girl. Smile for the cameras.”
“What’s my motivation?” Francesca said.
“Money, darling.”
