Chapter Two
As he followedConstance and Kellar upstairs, Solomon’s unease stemmed partly from a sort of fellow feeling for Montague, another man who had married out of his worldly class. No matter how successful and admired Caterina di Ripoli had been, she performed on the stage for money, and that made her an unsuitable wife for a respectable man. For some reason, this made Solomon feel just a little grubby for poking around the man’s grief.
And Kellar, taking advantage of the widower’s shock, was managing the business. Solomon did not like that either.
The doors in this house were all of the old-fashioned variety, with latches. Kellar walked straight to the second of these off the landing and opened it with familiarity.
The room smelled of roses.
It was quickly clear why. Although the curtains were drawn, there was easily enough light to see the large glass vase full of glorious red blooms that stood on the table at the center of the room. But Solomon’s eyes were quickly drawn to the four-poster, curtained bed opposite the window.
Caterina di Ripoli lay as though sleeping, her eyes closed, the quilt drawn up over her shoulders. Kellar turned up the lamp by the bed. Solomon recognized her at once from the Covent Garden stage as well as from her portrait downstairs. Her clear skin was of the slightly darker complexion seen more in the south of Italy and the Mediterranean in general, her features delicate and even. The tragedy hit himafresh. That anyone so young and vital and talented should be struck down seemed utterly wrong. And yet it happened every day, and to those much younger, too.
“May I see her hands?” Constance asked, reaching for the quilt.
Kellar was before her, drawing the covers down far enough to show the dead woman’s slender hands lying against her chest, palms down. A gold wedding ring adorned her left hand.
Constance lifted her right hand. The stiffness of death, rigor mortis, was already fading from her muscles, for it came easily. Solomon knew she was looking for any signs of a struggle, but the palms and fingertips appeared as smooth as the backs of Caterina’s hands, and the nails were clean and shapely.
“Has the body been moved at all?” Solomon asked. “Or is this just how she was found? Were her hands in this position?”
“More or less,” Kellar said, “but the doctor examined her, so she may have been laid out like that later. You should speak to the maid who found her.”
Constance, no doubt remembering a previous case, drew up Caterina’s eyelid, looking for the tiny red dots that could be a sign of asphyxiation. There were certainly no marks on the slender throat revealed by the fine lawn nightgown.
She looked up at Kellar. “Do you want us to look at the rest of her?” she asked bluntly.
Something very like a spasm passed across Kellar’s face and vanished, though he stepped away from the bed and turned his back, walking quickly toward the roses. Taking that as assent, Solomon raised the body in his arms, letting Constance look first beneath and between the two pillows on which Caterina’s head had lain, and then under the nightgown at the skin of her back. Solomon laid her back on the pillows and drew back the covers.
Despite his usual dispassion in their investigations, Solomon looked away, relying on Constance to do the observing. It felt like aviolation, and he wasn’t at all sure the widower downstairs had agreed to this in his unspecified permission.
At last, Constance spread the nightgown carefully back down and rearranged Caterina’s hands exactly where they had been. Solomon drew the covers back up.
Constance smoothed the lace-trimmed pillowcases on either side of the dead woman’s head. “I can’t see any marks on her at all, let alone any of violence.”
The bed was smooth, too, quite without the tangle that would have been created by a struggle for life.
“Will you look around?” Kellar asked, although it sounded more of a curt order than a request. At the same time, the plea in his eyes overcame Solomon’s reluctance.
Kellar cared.
While Solomon went toward the little bureau in the window embrasure, Constance began by looking under the spare two pillows on the bed.
He dealt quickly with Caterina’s correspondence, largely because there wasn’t a great deal. Most of it was to do with singing engagements at theatres and private concerts. She appeared to have been a shrewd businesswoman, and her English was fluent. There was one unfinished letter in Italian, to an old friend in Rome, mentioning people he had never heard of, telling amusing stories of her life. Her husband’s name was scattered across the page, and Solomon found no expression of discontent, let alone fear or concern.
“Do you really suspect Montague?” Solomon asked, tucking the letters away and moving to the lower drawers.
“You don’t?” Kellar returned. “Please don’t be misled by his maudlin talk of love at first sight and the perfect marriage. It was not.”
“In what way?” Solomon asked, rifling through the contents of the last drawer without much expectation. “He does not give the impression of a straying husband, and he is only three years married.”
“I did not say he strayed. But she did so.”
Both Solomon and Constance straightened and looked at Kellar.
“With whom?” Solomon asked.
He would not have been surprised if Kellar had answered,Me.It would have explained his almost proprietary attitude toward the dead woman.
