“That’s true.”
I slanted him a look. “He seems to like you.”
“What’s not to like?” Christopher wanted to know, facetiously. “I’ve known him since I was thirteen. Of course he likes me, Pippa. Don’t turn it into something it isn’t, please.”
“If you say so.” If he didn’t want to talk about it, I certainly wasn’t going to force the conversation on him. We turned the corner into the west wing in silence. “He made it sound like they have strong suspicions of someone, as far as the murders go.”
Christopher nodded. “Maybe by tomorrow we’ll be able to go home. Or Wednesday, at the latest.”
“That would be lovely.” The idea of our own flat, with just the two of us inside it, no St George, no Scotland Yard, no murderers taking pot shots at me… it all sounded too good to be true, frankly.
He came to a stop outside my door. “I’ll come in with you and make sure everything inside is all right. That no one is lying in wait behind the draperies with a dagger.”
“It would have to be your aunt or your brother,” I said, “since everyone else is downstairs, and we know Crispin was in his room when we went past.”
“Humor me.” He pushed the door open and stepped over the threshold. And yes, did proceed to check behind the curtains and under the bed and inside the wardrobe for unauthorized visitors. That done—no one was there, of course—he took my water jug down the hall to the washroom, where he emptied out the water, dried the inside of the jug, and filled it up again from the tap. “Better safe than sorry. Anything else you need help with?”
I hadn’t needed help with any of what he’d already done, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him. “I’m fine,” I said. “I can get my own dress and shoes and makeup off. Go to sleep, Christopher. If anything happens tonight, I’m sure you’ll hear about it.”
He nodded. “Wedge a chair under your doorknob, just in case.”
I promised I would, before I saw him on his way. “You do the same. I still think that shot might have been meant for you.”
Then I checked the draperies and wardrobe and under the bed again myself—not because I didn’t trust him, but because we’d been outside the room for a few minutes—before I did, indeed, wedge a chair under the knob of the door. Feeling a little safer, I wrestled my shoes off and my dress onto a hanger and crawled into bed in my unmentionables, instead of trying to fumble myself into my pyjamas.
You might think I’d have a problem falling asleep after the day we’d had. That I’d lie awake reliving the moment I was shot, the moment Christopher pushed me into the ditch, the moments we lay there, waiting to see whether there’d be more shots coming our way.
You’d be wrong. I fell asleep a few minutes after crawling into bed, before I got halfway through the long list of reasons why Crispin was the most likely murder suspect at Sutherland Hall, and why Francis wasn’t. If I were honest, I knew in my heart of hearts that it might equally well be Francis, that his (hypothetical) motive for wanting his grandfather dead was as strong as Crispin’s (hypothetical) motive, and they’d both had access to the gun room and the rifle and the pistol and the maze… but I’d much rather see Crispin in the dock, so I kept telling myself all the reasons I thought it might be him.
I drifted off to sleep in the middle of it, and of course the neuroses of the day came out in nightmares. I felt like I spent hours running for my life, through fog and dark forests and the streets of Little Sutherland, while bullets pinged off the walls around me. I heard the sound of footsteps getting ever closer, and felt hot breath on the back of my neck.
And then, in the blink of an eye, we were in the salon at Sutherland Hall, and—
“Drink your tea, Darling,” Crispin told me, holding out the same cup and saucer he had knocked out of his mother’s hand earlier today. The liquid inside looked like a lovely milky tea, just the way I liked it… until a death’s head formed on top, shimmering a pale greenish white. The cup moved closer, insistently. Crispin smiled, but his eyes were a bright silver, flat and hard…
I sat bolt upright in bed, gasping for air, my own eyes wide and staring.
It took a while after that before I was able to sleep again. And from then on, I hovered just on the edge of consciousness, jerking awake every so often to scan the room and make sure I was alone.
I always was. At no point did anyone actually try to invade my room. The doorknob never moved, the chair stayed in place, and I heard no noises from outside in the hallway. I should have spent a peaceful night. I laid it at Crispin’s door that I hadn’t. Not that I ever planned to tell him so.
I got up in the morning fully expecting to learn that he had vanished during in the night. He hadn’t heard, the way Christopher and I had, that Scotland Yard was coming close to naming a suspect. But surely he had to expect that the investigation would conclude sooner or later, and that he’d eventually be held to account for his crimes.
Or perhaps he was so sure he had covered his tracks that he thought he didn’t have anything to worry about. When I walked into the dining room for breakfast, he was standing at the sideboard looking quite as blasé as he always did. His tie was perfect, and so was his collar. His flannel bags had a knife-edged pleat, and he had topped the ensemble with a gray, blue, and red pullover in a diamond pattern, quite vivid enough all on its own to assault the retinas.
I probably would have winced even if I hadn’t been surviving on a night of very bad sleep. “Good Lord, St George.”
He sniggered. “Morning, Darling. You look rather haggard. Rough night?”
“You have no idea,” I said, and then rolled my eyes when I saw his expression. “Come off it, St George. You know as well as I do that there’s nothing like that going on. I didn’t sleep well, that’s all.”
“Bad dreams?”
He poured a cup of coffee and handed it to me. It was quite nice of him, actually, although after the nightmare I’d had—bad dreams, indeed—I must admit that I gave it a dubious look. I couldn’t see any way that he could have managed to put anything into it, but I still had that image of the floating death’s head in my mind, and it was hard to unsee.
“Don’t worry,” he told me, obviously noticing my hesitancy, “it isn’t poisoned.”
“I didn’t think it was,” I lied, and took a seat at the table. “Thank you.”
