Tom’s lips quirked. “So I gathered.”
“If you discussed anything else of interest, we didn’t hear it.”
“We didn’t,” Tom said. “The more interesting conversation took place in the staffroom between tea and supper. Any questions we had were answered then.”
Of course. “Are you…” I hesitated. “Do you know who shot Grimsby?”
Tom looked at me for a moment. It was quite a curious look, as if he were trying to read my mind, an attempt to turn my brain inside out to discover what I already knew, or perhaps what he thought I suspected.
“I know a few people who didn’t,” he said eventually. “If the shot you heard between eleven and eleven-thirty was the fatal shot, the maids are all alibied. They share rooms, and were together at the time. The same goes for the footmen. Mrs. Mason has her own room, and so does Cook and the butler.”
“But surely nobody thinks that Tidwell or Mrs. Mason or—God forbid!—Mrs. Sloane ran out into the maze with a pistol to shoot Grimsby?”
Not that Cook would be able to run if you prodded her with a horsewhip. She must be in her sixties, if not seventies, by now, and would make two of Mrs. Mason. Cook is, not to put too fine a point on it, a big woman.
Besides, what kind of secret could she possibly have, that Grimsby could blackmail her over?
“Nobody thinks so,” Tom confirmed, “but as long as they’re not alibied, they stay on the suspect list. It’s the only way it works.”
“Good thing you and I were together,” I told Christopher brightly, “or we’d be on the suspect list, too.”
He looked at me. So did Tom. After a moment, Tom turned back to Christopher. “What sort of mess have you gotten yourself into, old chap?”
“Don’t know what you mean,” Christopher muttered, and if ever someone looked guilty, it was my cousin facing Detective Sergeant Thomas Gardiner.
I sighed. “Christopher—”
But… “Kit,” Tom said, and the familiarity brought Christopher’s head up in a way my addressing him hadn’t done. “I don’t know what you’re trying to do here, but I know very well that you and Miss Darling weren’t having a romantic stroll to the fountain and back at eleven o’clock last night.”
He glanced at me, and then turned his attention back to Christopher. “Not only because it only takes a few minutes to walk from the conservatory to the fountain, and because the weather wasn’t conducive to strolling around after dark, but because unlike some people, I know that you didn’t stop to canoodle along the way.”
Christopher’s face twisted automatically, and so did mine. He glanced my way, gauging the expression on my face. When he saw that the suggestion caused the same revulsion in me that it did in him, he smirked, and looked for a second disconcertingly like his cousin.
“Fine,” he told Tom. “We didn’t just walk to the fountain, and we didn’t stop anywhere to canoodle.”
“And please don’t make that suggestion again,” I added.
Tom glanced at me, and then at Christopher. He had obviously identified the weak link here. “Were you even together?”
“Of course we were together,” I said. At the rate this was going, with the way Tom was practically wrapping Christopher around his finger, we’d both end up without alibis if we weren’t careful.
Tom ignored me, just kept his eyes on Christopher’s face. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me the truth, you know.”
“Thatisthe truth,” I said.
Tom’s eyebrows rose, and he shot me another look before he turned back to Christopher. “Kit?”
Christopher squirmed. There’s no other word for it. He wriggled like a worm on a hook, or like a little boy who had been caught with his hand inside the biscuit jar. When he glanced at me, guilty conscience was written plainly all over his countenance. I threw my hands up, literally and figuratively. “Fine. It’s your funeral.”
“Hopefully not literally,” Tom said dryly. “Spill, Kit.”
“We went out together,” Christopher said. “But Pippa stayed in the conservatory. Both because the weather wasn’t great—there wasn’t any point in us both being wet and cold—and because I thought it would be easier to negotiate with Grimsby on my own.”
“So you had an assignation with Grimsby?”
“You don’t have to make it sound like that,” I interjected. “That wasn’t romantic, either.”
Tom looked like he wanted to smile but knew he shouldn’t. “I assumed as much. What was it, then?”
