“I told him I didn’t kill the man.”
She waved a hand in the air as though shooing away a fly. “Oh, well, then, that’s all that needs to be done. It’s not as if a guilty person would proclaim to be innocent.”
He was rather regretting coming to her, because she was making him realize that he might be skatingat the edge of naivete when it came to how this matter could resolve itself. “He didn’t arrest me.”
“Swindler is incredibly thorough. He’ll wait until he has sufficient evidence.”
“He won’t find any pointing to me.”
“Don’t you understand? He already has. It’s the reason he questioned you.”
“Daisy—”
“Marguerite.”
He waited, studying her. She looked up at the ceiling, down at the floor. Shook her head. “I told you that my mother called me Daisy. Therefore, I used it as my name when I came to work at your residence because Marguerite sounded too posh for a servant. To be honest, I never really liked Marguerite... until you said it. Be that as it may, please tell Swindler that I was with you Thursday night and what we were doing.”
“Kissing?”
A swatch of red blossomed over her face and neck. “Everything that needs to be told.”
“It wouldn’t make any difference. I don’t know the details of how they figured it out, but they determined that Mallard died around midnight. I left you shortly before eleven.”
“Enough time to get to him and do the deed?”
“Yes.”
She held up a finger. “But your coachman and footman—they would have known where you went after you delivered me to my aunt’s.”
He sighed. “After seeing you to your destination, I got out at the next street over. I needed a walk.” To stop thinking about her. “I sent them on. I don’t havemy staff stay up until I return home because sometimes, I’m out until all hours.”
“No one knows when you returned to the residence?”
“I’m afraid not. Although the hour of my return would not have exonerated me.”
“What time did you get back there?”
“A little after one.”
“That’s a lot of walking.”
“I was trying to convince myself that nothing about you was real. I failed miserably at it.”
She’d failed miserably as well, trying to convince herself that he’d just been playacting, and the man she knew was not the man he was. She suspected a few things about each of them wasn’t the truth of them, but they were probably minor. She knew him well enough that even though he had no alibi, and he could have left her and had time to do it, in her heart of hearts she knew he hadn’t.
She had worked with the police a few times and had once observed them using the temperature of the body to determine the approximate time of death. That Bishop had no alibi for the period when a fatal blow was struck was disconcerting.
“We need to figure out who killed Mallard,” she stated succinctly.
“You said this Swindler fellow was clever and would determine the real culprit.”
“You were evasive, which will increase his suspicions that it’s you. That’s what he’ll be striving to prove. We need to go to him and tell him everything.”
“No. The women who have come to me are entitled to their privacy.”
“I think you’re just afraid that your reputation as a seducer will become tarnished.”
The smile he gave her was completely untarnished and definitely designed to seduce. She was surprised the buttons on her frock didn’t simply set themselves free, granting him access to whatever he wanted. How could a flash of teeth accompanied by a heated glance be so beguiling? “Stop.”
