Carys turned her attention to Avery markedly. “So you know about that then?” The words growled out of her. Then her antagonistic stance relaxed with a sniff. “Of course you do. I imagine all of London knows about it by now.” She began to pace in the entryway, walking in and out of the shafts of cool light that poured in from behind the old curtains. “She couldn’t just leave menothing, no, she had to gift me with one last insult. Herhumility, ha!” She whirled back on Avery. “Tell me, Inspector, does that sound like the words of ahumblewoman?”
Another deep breath, and Avery focused on keeping her voice grounded. “No, I suppose not.”
“Spitefulcreature,” Carys continued, practically spitting the insult. “I suppose we never did get along—but our mothers were so close, you’d think she’d at least have remembered me forhersake.” She wrapped her arms around herself and gazed upward at the vaulted ceiling. “This monstrosity doesn’t keep itself, you know.”
“I can only imagine what it costs to maintain its grandeur. You were counting on Eira leaving you something financially substantial,” Avery concluded gently.
“Yes, of course!” Carys exclaimed. “How else am I going to preserve this legacy? I can’t be expected to work.” It was at that instant that she remembered that a police inspector was standing in her foyer. “Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
Avery cleared her throat and clasped her hands in front of herself. Hervoice’s usual magic did not seem to be having even the slightest effect on Carys Varney, which worried her for the reaction her next words would incite. “Alistair Campbell was found murdered in his home yesterday.”
Carys brought her hand to her heart as if she’d been shot. “My God…”
“We understand that in Eira’s will he was left a rather substantial sum.”
“Well, they all were: the doctor, her friends, her son the serial fornicator, even that conniving little towhead pretending to be her boyfriend. OnlyIwas left in the cold.”
“Do you know why she was so generous to the doctor in particular?”
Carys bristled. “He was her charity case. She was always trying to recommend him for things. She tried to foist him on me when my mother got sick—sent him over here without even consulting me. I wasn’t going to have it, mind you, the disrespect of it all.” Carys huffed, forgetting again that she was being questioned by the police about a man’s murder. “I bet that’s why she cut me out, for sending her doctor away, but if he couldn’t helphermother, what arrogance to think he could help mine.”
Avery exchanged a look with Saga briefly. “So Campbell was Mari Goff’s doctor as well?”
“To every last one of them, even Elis when he was a boy.”
“And Osian?” Avery prompted, relieved she was finally gaining some ground with this woman’s ramblings.
“Oh,him,” Carys said darkly. “Not a word for years, and then one day there’s just a single line buried in the obituaries about him passing in his sleep.”
“When was that, roughly?”
“Nearly two decades ago, but I haven’t forgotten how they treated me, mind you. I wasn’t invited to the funeral—no onewas, from what I hear. If you ask me, Eira didn’t want anyone knowing he’d done it to himself.”
Avery frowned, finding this even more suspicious. “You think Eira was trying to cover up her father’s suicide?”
“What else could it be? And nowshe’sdead because the doctor couldn’t help her either. And now the doctor is dead too? What an utter failure, theman couldn’t even help himself. I was right to turn him away. Does that lawyer know about this? I could fight the will with this, couldn’t I?”
It took every ounce of willpower Avery had to not look at Saga once more. This woman might not have the physical prowess to commit the murders, but her complete lack of empathy was making her a more likely candidate. “Doctor Campbell isn’t the only inheritor to meet great misfortune. Were you aware Elis was admitted to the hospital a few nights ago due to liver failure?”
Carys scoffed. “I’m not surprised. Drinks like a fish, that one. You’d barely know when he had time to breathe air.” She paused, realized what company she was in once more, and quickly asked, “Is he all right?”
“He barely survived,” clipped Saga.
“And we have reason to believe something more nefarious than alcohol poisoning caused his liver to fail,” added Avery.
Carys frantically glanced back and forth between the two other women. Uncertain and off-balance. “Like…what?”
“We aren’t at liberty to share that information at this time.”
Carys blinked. “How would one even cause liver failure? And why? Are you sure it wasn’t just the alcohol that did it? I’m sure his liver would have to be a sorry sight, with the amount he drank you had to keep him away from open flames.”
“Someone might have wanted it to seem like alcohol poisoning, but we’re certain,” Avery confirmed gravely. She needed to press her. Carys was not the most stable of creatures, and perhaps with a little more deliberate pushing, she would show her hand. “You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that?”
“Why would I? We barely spoke.”
Avery began to wonder if “we barely spoke” was Carys’s favorite method of deflecting any kind of suspicion. “It seems a strange pattern of misfortune is targeting the heirs of Eira’s will, and you have already made your anger about being excluded clear.”
At last, true realization dawned. “Oh you don’t think that… Surely,I’mnot a suspect!” She laughed. Nervously.
