opening.
Her shoulders tightened. There was a small pulse beating in her throat. “You think that is why she was killed? She saw something in one of us that whoever it was could not live with? Or could not let her live with?”
“Yes. Don’t you?” he asked.
“I suppose it is the only answer that makes sense.”
Was she assuming he meant the murder of the prostitute and therefore did not say so, or was she afraid it was other things, a different secret?
“Was she always curious about people’s actions and reasons?” he pressed. “The day before yesterday she was asking a great many questions, particularly of the servants.”
She frowned. “Was she? I didn’t know. I hardly saw her. She certainly made a lot of oblique remarks at dinner, as if she were determined to provoke someone. I thought then it was Cahoon, but obviously it was Julius.”
“Did she speak to you before dinner, Mrs. Quase? Or to anyone else, do you know?”
She considered for several moments before replying. A butterfly drifted across the flower heads and settled in the heart of one. Somewhere in the distance a dog barked.
“She asked my husband if he had given the Prince of Wales any wine, as a gift,” she replied. “Then she asked Mrs. Marquand the same thing.”
“And had either of you, so far as you know?”
“No. I assume it was Cahoon. If it had been Julius, she would either have known the answer already, or have asked him.”
So Minnie had known about the wine bottles, or else guessed their use!
“Thank you, Mrs. Quase.”
She looked at him curiously. “What has wine to do with it? There is any amount of the best wine in the world in the cellars here.”
“I think it was the bottles she was interested in, not the wine. Did she mention broken china to you?”
“No. Why?” She shivered. “Why does it matter now, Inspector?
Isn’t it all over? Poor Minnie asked too many questions, and found out something she would have been happier not to know. I know that is foolish. One can protect people one loves from some things, small mistakes, but not murder. I suppose he is mad.” She looked away from Pitt, over the flowers. “I knew Julius before he met Minnie, you know.
I could have married him, but my father was against it. Perhaps he was wiser than I.” There was pain in her voice, surprisingly harsh.
“Was that in Africa?” he asked.
She stiffened, almost imperceptibly. Her voice was husky, so quiet he barely heard her. “Yes.”
He remembered that her brother had died there. Was that the tragedy that touched her now? “And you met Mr. Quase, and married him instead,” he said. “Do you believe your father had some knowledge of Mr. Sorokine’s nature that decided him against your marriage?”
“He didn’t say so. It. . it was a difficult time for us. My brother died in terrible circumstances. . in the river.” She struggled to keep control of her voice as she turned away from him. “Hamilton was marvelous. He helped us both. He dealt with the arrangements, saw to everything for us. I grew to appreciate his strength and his kindness, and his extraordinary loyalty. After that. . Julius seemed. . shallow.
I realized how right my father’s judgment was.” She stood motionless, her back and shoulders rigid. “Poor Minnie, so strong, so sure of herself, so. . so full of passion and spirit. . and in the end so foolish.”
Everything she said was true, but Pitt wondered if she had liked Minnie. There was nothing he could read in her to tell him.
“Mrs. Quase, did she say anything to you about what she learned from all her questions? I need to know.”
“Why? It’s over, and Minnie’s dead.” There was a curious finality in her voice.
“It’s not all over,” he corrected her. He disliked speaking to her back. He could see nothing of her expression. Was that on purpose? “I have not proved what happened,” he went on. “Or why the prostitute was killed, and all sorts of other things that seem to make very little sense.”
“Does it really matter?” There was fear undisguised in her voice now.
“Yes. Don’t you want to clear it all up, before you leave?”
She turned even further from him. “I imagine we will leave quite soon. I don’t know how we can continue without Julius. And I expect Cahoon will hardly feel like going on, at least for some time.”
“Will that grieve you very much? Or your husband and Mr. Marquand?”
She was surprised into looking back toward him. “I don’t know. It was always Cahoon who cared about it most. I expect he will find another diplomat to take Julius’s place.”
“Did Mrs. Sorokine say anything to you about her deductions?”
he asked yet again.
Her eyes cleared. “She said she knew where it had happened,” she replied. “Rather a pointless remark, considering that we all know it happened in the linen cupboard. I thought she was simply trying to get attention. I’m ashamed to say that now.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Quase. Did she mention broken china?”
“No.” There was dismissal in her face. “But then that’s hardly very dramatic, is it?” She turned away and started to walk slowly along the grass.
He did not follow her. Instead he went back toward the entrance to the Palace again, turning her words over and over in his mind.
There seemed only one possible conclusion: Sadie had not been killed in the cupboard where she was found, in spite of the blood.
But as soon as he made sense of one set of facts, it made nonsense of another. The sheets were soaked with blood, and even a lunatic would not have killed her in one place and then carried the naked, bleeding body to the cupboard.
Had she been attacked, even fatally, and then carried, perhaps rolled up in sheets, to the cupboard, in order not to have been found in a place linked to any one person? And then the Queen’s sheets, in which she had been carried, were put in the laundry, in the hope they would never be found and looked at closely enough to be identified?
That was beginning to make more sense.
So where had she been killed? In whose bed? Surely Julius Sorokine’s. How had Minnie known?
He was back inside the Palace again. Painstakingly he spoke to all the staff Gracie had seen Minnie with the day before she died. Each one repeated what she had told him.
Minnie had followed a curious trail with growing excitement.
She had asked about sheets. She had been intensely interested in the shards of broken china, where they had come from and their color and shape. This she had apparently inquired of Mr. Tyndale, and met with a brief and dismissive answer. She had also been interested in the footmen coming and going with buckets of water. She had asked about wine, what was drunk and where it came from, yet there was nothing to suggest she knew of the port bottles Gracie had found.
The other focus of her questions had been the arrival and depar-ture of the women, and the delivery of the large wooden box of books and papers for Cahoon Dunkeld. Exactly what had happened when, and where were the books now?
Pitt was totally confused. Three women had arrived, two had left, and the third had been found dead. The carter had never been alone and unaccounted for anywhere near the upstairs floor, let alone any of the bedrooms. What, if any of it, was relevant to Sadie’s death?
He went over the facts again in his mind. The one thing that seemed to arise again and again, but of which he had no physical proof, were the shards of broken china that Tyndale had so vehe-mently refused to discuss with Gracie. Something about them had frightened him even more than the presence of prostitutes in the guest wing of the Palace, even when one of them was murdered.
Either it was something so precious it was beyond Pitt’s ability to imagine, or else its breakage, added to the other evidence, meant something so appalling it had to be concealed at all costs.
