Tom shook his head.
“I don’t know what to think about that,” I said. “We know he had information about Christopher. And there must have been something about me, if the duke—the late duke—wanted Christopher to propose to me. We know there’s plenty of dirt available on Crispin.”
“But Grandfather might not have wanted Grimsby to unearth information about that part of the family. There wasn’t anything about Uncle Harold or Aunt Charlotte, was there?”
Tom shook his head.
“There should be something about you and me, though,” I told Christopher. “We know that Grimsby looked into us. He said as much. The fact that those pages aren’t there, seems very suspect.”
“Maybe someone is trying to make us look guilty,” Christopher suggested. “As if we’d be stupid enough to tear out the pages about ourselves while we left everything else.”
I nodded. “You’ll be looking for the pages, I assume? Going through everyone’s rooms? All the common areas?”
Like the books in the library, every one of which could have a couple of sheets of notebook paper tucked inside, and nobody would ever know.
“Tomorrow,” Tom confirmed
..
.. “Whoever has those pages goes to the top of the suspect list. Although I don’t expect to find them anywhere. Whoever took them has surely set fire to them by now.”
“Hopefully not.” I glanced at Christopher. “I think I’ll go to my room now.”
He nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Pippa.”
I waited, but when he made no move towards the door, I headed off on my own and left them there. One of them had something to say to the other, it seemed, and it was probably none of my business what it was.
FOURTEEN
The west wingwas deserted when I came through the door into the hallway, so it was easy to scurry the few yards to my own door and duck inside without being seen by anyone. I shut the door behind me before I flicked on the light on the night table and went to the window. There was no movement in the maze tonight. I looked.
It didn’t matter anyway, because the next second I had yanked the drapes across the window, and whoever might have been out there couldn’t see what I was doing through the thick fabric even with the lights on.
But even so, I made sure to move away from the window before I lifted the dinner dress I’d brought to wear yesterday, and had ended up wearing tonight instead, over my head and onto a hanger. Then I divested myself of my undergarments and slipped into the pale blue silk pyjamas Aunt Roz had given me for Christmas last year, and a pair of quilted slippers.
All that done, I positioned myself in the middle of the floor and surveyed my room.
Like all the rooms in Sutherland Hall, it was big and opulent and full of old furniture, expensive rugs, and heirlooms. The wallpaper was damask. The bed was a canopy-style with velvet draperies and intricately carved posts. Everything was heavy and dark and ornate.
What I really wanted to do, was crawl into that bed, pull the draperies down around me, and forget that this weekend had happened. It had been a very long Sunday, full of a lot of upsetting incidents, from the quarrel with St George over breakfast and then seeing Grimsby dead in the maze, to the conversation we’d just had with Tom Gardiner across the hall. Sleep—oblivion—beckoned, but I resisted the call. If Tom was right that several pages had been ripped out of Grimsby’s notebook, and Christopher was right that whoever had ripped them out was the killer, and Tom had told the truth when he said that whoever was found with the pages in their possession would be of interest to the police… well, I thought I had better make sure that the pages hadn’t somehow found their way into my room.
I knew, of course, that it hadn’t been me who ripped them from the notebook. I hadn’t known that the notebook existed until Tom told us about it. It hadn’t crossed my mind to go looking for something like that in Grimsby’s room, although in retrospect, perhaps it should have. It had obviously occurred to someone else.
There were, to my mind, only two reasons why someone might have taken those pages. As I had told Tom myself, it was much more logical for the killer to take the whole notebook. If he or she had, who would have known that Grimsby had even had a notebook in the first place? And taking the pages pertaining to oneself while leaving the rest of the notes would only draw attention to the fact that they weren’t there.
No, whoever tore the pages out, those specific pages, must have done it to make someone else look guilty. Specifically, the people mentioned in the missing pages. And so it was that I had determined to search my room, every nook and cranny, to make sure they weren’t here. I sincerely hoped Christopher had the wherewithal to do the same when he made it back to his own room.
I started with the most obvious places: the drawers in the night tables, the little escritoire over by the wall, and the wardrobe.
There was nothing in the night tables, nothing taped to the back or underside of the night tables, and nothing taped to the underside of the night table drawers. Since I was close to the bed anyway, I checked under the pillows—nothing—and ran my hands under the edges of the mattress as far as I could reach. There was nothing there either.
The escritoire was next. It boasted writing paper and pens, ink, a dictionary, blotting paper, all the usual things you can find in an escritoire. None of it looked like notebook paper. I riffled the papers and shook the dictionary before I checked under the piece of furniture and under each drawer there too, to be thorough. That done, I moved on to the wardrobe into which I had decanted my weekender bag yesterday afternoon.
I started with the outside, and felt my way around the bottom and back of the wardrobe as far as I could reach.
It was a large and unwieldy piece of furniture, and it didn’t look as if it had been moved away from the wall in recent memory. There were no scratches on the floor in front of it, which I thought there would have to be, if Grimsby’s killer had been at it. We weren’t dealing with a syndicate, but a single person, and a single person couldn’t have moved the wardrobe out from the wall without dragging it across the floor, which would have left marks.
I pulled the desk chair over to the front of the wardrobe and climbed up on it. There was nothing on top of the wardrobe except a lot of dust. Whichever of the Hall’s chambermaids was in charge of this room, obviously hadn’t been as thorough as she should have been when she readied the room for occupancy this weekend.
