Page 60 of Corpse in the Canal

“I said we’d meet him at the inn. I think Adelaide and Clarence had been with him.”

Solomon made no comment on that. She didn’t really expect him to.

He said, “I met a farm laborer who told me something interesting and rather disturbing.”

“What?”

“That he didn’t see Percy on the day he was shot, but he did see Mrs. Harvey. He thought she was collecting brambles, but her basket had a cover on it, so it could have contained anything.”

Constance stared at him. “Like a pistol? You think Percy gave her his pistol when she told him to—she is his mother, after all—and then she shot him with it, afterward hiding the pistol in her basket?”

“Unlikely, I know, but possible, surely? Percy was seen near Channing House—perhaps. If he was looking for Adelaide… If he found her and his mother interrupted…”

“She’d have to be a little mad,” Constance said shakily.

Solomon turned his head and met her gaze. “Do you think that she isn’t?”

Chapter Thirteen

Mrs. Henriette Harvey, Etta to her family and friends, lay very still, waiting for her husband to close her bedroom door behind him. She listened to his footsteps fading down the hall away from her, and the silence closed in. She hated being alone because she could not then stop thinking.

The thoughts were already there, swirling around her head, black, grim, hopeless.

She kept her eyes closed, trying to listen to the birdsong in the tree beyond her window. But in her head, they sang words, dark, evil words. Shame and sorrow devoured her.

I won’t give in, I won’t…

Richard wanted her to sleep, as if she could, as if it could possibly make her feel better if she did.

With a gasp, she threw off the covers and jumped out of bed. Tears streamed down her face as she stumbled to the wardrobe and wrenched open the door. There were three shelves here, containing hats and reticules. On the bottom shelf was an elegant leather holdall, with an old carpetbag stuffed down behind it. The carpetbag looked empty, but Daphne knew it wasn’t. She wrenched it out and opened it, dragging out what had been within.

A small black pistol.

She stumbled to the basket in the corner of the room containing several old garments for charity. Seizing the woolen gown at the top, she wrapped it round and round the little pistol until she could not feel its cool, hard seduction. Then she crammed it back in the carpetbag and fastened it.

It wasn’t enough.

She dragged the chair over from her dressing table and stood on it to reach the smaller valise on top of the wardrobe. She climbed off the chair and opened the valise so that she could stuff the carpetbag inside it. She turned the little key and thrust it in her pocket.

It still wasn’t enough.

Grabbing the valise, she left her bedroom. The maids had long since finished up here, so it was easy to reach the attic stairs without anyone seeing her. She ran up and opened the door at the top.

There was a satisfying amount of junk here. She had been talking to Richard only the other week about getting someone to take the whole lot away as rubbish. She raked around the dusty piles until she found the oldest trunk with the missing handle and a rusty key. Pausing for a moment, she whipped a moth-eaten Holland cover off what had once been her late mother-in-law’s favorite chair, and wrapped the valise in it like a parcel. Then she placed the lot in the trunk, turned the key with some difficulty, and put that in her dress pocket with the other.

She pulled some other boxes on top of the trunk, then, taking a deep breath, she rose and dusted off her gown.

There. That was enough, until the attic was cleared. Providing she got rid of the keys. She hurried back down to her room and took a black coat from the wardrobe. Richard would be in his study, drinking, probably, and telling himself or his friends that he was looking after his poor wife. He wouldn’t notice she’d gone, and she could easily be back for tea with their guests from London.

She was just tiptoeing across the hall to the front door when she heard the maids chattering in the morning room, which they were no doubt meant to be dusting and hanging with black crepe.

“Oh, no,” Maisie said. “Patrick saw her walking along the far side of the canal, staring at the ground and hitting the grass with a stick! He were doing the same in the wood.”

They must be talking about those very odd guests Richard had brought home to find Percy, and now to discover what had happened to him as if it were not perfectly clear…

“What, like looking for something?” Jenny asked avidly. “I wonder what?”

“The gun!” Maisie said impatiently. “Of course they’re looking for the gun what shot poor Mr. Percy!”