“Wasn’t he married to your aunt for those years?”
“Some of them,” Christopher said, looking around for a towel. There was one there, next to the basin, with fresh ink smears from my fingers, and he picked it up. “Uncle Harold and Aunt Charlotte married later than my parents. She’s younger than him by a few years, too.”
“More than a few.”
Christopher nodded. “And it took them a while to have Crispin after they were married, as well. All of which leads me to think that there might be bye-blows. But it’s not something I know anything about. So Crispin grabbed you? What did he want?”
He plopped his posterior down on the edge of the bed next to me and crossed one knee over the other.
I made a face. “To tell me he knows that I lied to the police about being outside in the garden with you last night.”
“Wonderful,” Christopher said, in a tone which indicated, clearly, that it was anything but. “I knew you shouldn’t have lied. Now he’ll tell them you did—”
“He won’t. We made a deal.”
He slanted me a look. “What kind of deal?”
“He’ll keep quiet about that if I forget what I heard—whatweheard—through the door to his room yesterday.”
Christopher’s forehead wrinkled. “The conversation with his father? Why would he care?”
“I have no idea,” I said, “but he was adamant about it. Told me his affairs were none of my business—yours, either, I assume—and that I’d forget the whole thing if I knew what was good for me.”
Christopher’s eyes widened. “He threatened you?”
“Just enough to make sure I knew he meant it.”
Christopher didn’t say anything in response to that, and I added, “For some reason, he really doesn’t want anyone to know anything about it. I’m not sure what the problem is. Or rather, there must be something I’m not seeing, because from where I’m sitting, the problem is obvious. He has fallen in love with some actress ordanseuseor something, and his father won’t approve of him marrying her…”
Christopher nodded. “But there’s no reason you or I, or anyone else, can’t know about that. We don’t care who he’s in love with, and I would be delighted to see my cousin marry for love instead of duty.”
He made a face. “Of course, Uncle Harold has a rather different view of that whole thing. He wants Crispin to marry an heiress with a title of her own. If it had been him who was murdered, that would have been a different story. But since it wasn’t…”
I widened my eyes until they felt as if they might roll right out of my head. “Surely you’re not suggesting that St George would have shot his father over this… this…”
Chit? Trollop?
I couldn’t come up with a word that was bad enough, so I settled for, “—affair?”
“With Grandfather and Uncle Harold dead, he’d be Duke of Sutherland,” Christopher said, “so it’s not like he would have lacked incentive. With both of them gone, he could marry anyone he wanted.”
I suppose he could. “Good thing it was Grimsby, then, and not your Uncle Harold who ended up dead.”
And then I thought about what I’d said. “Wait a moment. You don’t think…?”
“I don’t see how that makes any sense at all,” Christopher said. “Grimsby is probably the one who found out about Crispin’s love affair, and he clearly told both Uncle Harold and Grandfather about it. Remember what Uncle Harold said? ‘Your grandfather won’t approve, and neither will your mother and I’? And if the secret was already out, Crispin had no reason to kill Grimsby.”
“Unless he was angry about it being found out. And he killed Grimsby in revenge.”
“There would be nothing to gain from that,” Christopher said firmly. “And he’s not stupid, you know, in spite of you not liking him very much.”
No, he wasn’t. “I guess we’re back where we were, then. Someone else killed Grimsby.”
“Someone did,” Christopher nodded. “It wasn’t me. And I don’t think it was you.”
I shook my head. “I had no reason to. Unless I did it for you.”
“Please tell me you didn’t.”
