He started across the floor towards us, skirting the other tables and chairs. “We’ll just stay in here for this one. I sent Collins back upstairs to continue the search. I’ll take my own notes.”
He dropped into the chair between me and Uncle Harold with a little noise. It sounded like pleasure. Perhaps the chairs were more comfortable in here than where he’d been, or perhaps he was simply tired. He had driven here from London and then gone straight into a long line of interviews, so small wonder if he were.
He pulled his notebook and pencil out of his pocket and put them in front of him, and then he addressed the uncles. “Your Grace. Lord Herbert.”
“Tom,” Uncle Herbert said pleasantly, while Uncle Harold inclined his head in a barely polite nod.
“I don’t suppose either of you know anything about this?”
“Nothing you haven’t already heard from other people,” Uncle Herbert said. “We arrived too late for any of the excitement last night or this morning. Roz has spoken with a few people since we arrived, but I’ve really only spent time with my own family.”
“We saw that unfortunate young lady collapse,” Uncle Harold added, distantly, “but I didn’t notice anything untoward before that.”
“You didn’t see anyone put anything in her tea?”
Herbert shook his head. When Tom glanced over at him, the Duke did the same. “No, Detective Sergeant.”
“And you didn’t hear anyone say anything that might be germane to the situation?”
They both shook their heads again. I wouldn’t have put any money on Uncle Harold telling the truth—he had been sitting with the Marsden family and with Crispin, and he had every incentive to support the status quo as far as his son and heir was concerned, so if anyone at that table had said anything incriminating, Uncle Harold would keep it to himself—but unless I was right in my outlandish suggestion that Laetitia and her mother were to blame, Uncle Harold wasn’t likely to have heard anything interesting anyway. Certainly nothing worthy of lying about. They had probably been making wedding plans. And of course Uncle Herbert had been sitting with Aunt Roz, Francis, and Constance, and neither of them was likely to know anything, either. Nothing they wouldn’t have told Tom already, at any rate. I’m sure Aunt Roz had shared every word Olivia and Violet had said upstairs.
Tom seemed to come to the same conclusion, because he nodded. “Very well. You can go.”
Uncle Herbert didn’t need to be told twice. “Come on, Harold.” He jumped up from his chair and waited for his brotherto rise, with a bit more dignity, before he added, “I’m going to go find my wife. It was good to see you, Tom, even under the circumstances. Go easy on my children.”
“Have fun, Uncle Herbert,” I told him, even as I felt a warm sort of glow inside at being included among the children in question. Christopher, meanwhile, rolled his eyes at the idea that Tom would be anything but perfectly pleasant.
The two of them headed for the door, and Tom waited for it to shut behind them with a decisive click before he turned to us. “So.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“So,”Christopher echoed. “Here we are.”
Tom nodded. And then neither of them said anything else for a few seconds while they stared at one another.
I cleared my throat. “It was good of you to come, Tom.” If I didn’t speak up at some point, I thought we were likely to sit here for rather a long time.
“Of course, Pippa.” If I had interrupted anything important, he gave no sign of it. It was Christopher who looked pink and flustered. “I can’t have people taking potshots at the two of you and not come down to have a look around.”
“And we appreciate it,” I said. “So what have you found out?”
He chuckled. “You realize that this is supposed to be me interviewing you, don’t you?”
“Of course I do. But it’s not as if you suspect us of anything, so you might as well just tell us what you’ve learned, and we’ll fill in as much as we can, with anything we know that you don’t.”
Tom nodded, and flipped the notebook open. “Let’s start from the beginning, then. Miss Cecily Fletcher died.”
“From what we think was an overdose of pennyroyal,” I confirmed. “Although I don’t know if the doctor has had a chance to confirm that.”
“He has. I saw him upstairs. He had time to get started on the post mortem before the next body dropped.”
“An overdose of pennyroyal, then. We think it might have been administered by two different people—one during after-dinner cocktails, and the other in a cup of what she thought was peppermint tea that she drank later.”
“She told you this?”
“She intimated it,” I said. “She had an upset stomach, and she mentioned, specifically, that it was peppermint tea. But when I smelled it, it smelled more like spearmint, which was why I thought of pennyroyal.”
“But that was later,” Tom said, and I nodded.
