AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I imagine so. But if the matter arises, I shall take care of it. . ” She saw his embarrassment, but there was no time to be sensitive to it now. “I think money is the last thing that concerns him at the moment,” she said honestly. “He is simply a proud man trying with every skill he has to rescue what is left of his family-the truth of how his daughter died, assurance that the wrong man is not punished for it, and some remnant of her reputation preserved as the brave and vital woman she was.”
He blinked suddenly, and his marvelous eyes flooded with tears. He turned sharply away from her. “She was. .” His voice choked.
Callandra felt awkward, lumpy and ordinary, and bitterly alone. But she could not afford the self-indulgence of her own hurt. There would be plenty of time for that later, perhaps years.
“Kristian-someone killed her.” She had not intended it to sound as brutal as it did, at least most of her had not. “The best defense would be to find out who it is.”
He kept his back to her. “Do you not think that if I knew I would have told you? Told everyone?”
“If you were aware that you knew, yes, of course,” she agreed. “But it was nothing to do with Sarah Mackeson, except that she was unfortunate enough to be there, and it was not Argo Allardyce. We have exhausted the likelihood of it being anyone who wanted to collect money she owed and make an example of her so others would be more in dread not to pay their debts.”
“Have you?”
“Yes. William assures me that gamblers will injure people to make them pay, or even murder those whose deaths would become known among other gamblers, but not to cause a major police investigation like this. It draws far too much attention to them. Gambling houses get closed down. Anywhere she had been is likely to face a lot of trouble. It would be stupid. They are not at all happy that she was killed. They have lost business because of it, and no doubt Runcorn will close the house when he is ready.”
“Good!”
“Not permanently.” She responded with the truth, and then wished she had not.
“Not permanently?” He looked back at her slowly.
“No. They’ll simply open up somewhere else, behind an apothecary’s shop, or a milliner’s, or whatever. It will cost them a little outlay, a little profit, that’s all.”
He was too weary to be angry. “Of course. It’s a hydra.”
“It has to have been someone else,” she repeated. “Someone personal.”
He did not answer.
There was silence in the cell, but it was as if she could hear a clock ticking away the seconds. “I am going to ask William to go to Vienna and find Max Niemann.”
He stared at her. “That’s absurd! Max would never have hurt her, let alone killed her! If you knew him you wouldn’t even entertain the thought for an instant.”
“Then who did?” She stared straight back at him, meeting his eyes unrelenti
ngly. It hurt to see the fear deep in them, the loyalties struggling, the pain. But she had seen death often when she had accompanied her husband abroad on his duties. As an army surgeon’s wife she had mixed with other military wives on various postings in Europe, and often she had lent what assistance she could to those who were injured or ill. She had no practical training, as Hester had, but intelligence served for much, and experience had taught her more. Her husband had died before the Crimean War, or she would have seen that terrible conflict, too.
“Not Max,” Kristian insisted, but there was less certainty in his eyes, and he knew that she had seen it. “He loved her,” he repeated. “Callandra. .”
She could not wait. The constable would be back any moment now. “What was she meeting him for?” she asked.
He winced. His voice was very quiet. “I don’t know. I didn’t know he was in London until the funeral.”
“And I imagine you did not know the other times he was in London this year, either?”
He started to deny it and then stopped, seeing the truth in her face.
“He was here at least twice before,” she told him. “He saw Elissa, and not you. Doesn’t that call for some explanation?”
His face was ashen gray. She could only guess how much the thought of Max’s guilt hurt him. It was a double betrayal on top of the loss, but turning from it now altered nothing, except that it placed the truth one step further away, and his own life in even greater danger. Those were words she could say while still refusing to picture their meaning. At least while she was talking, thinking of what to do, she could keep it at bay. “If not Max Niemann, who else?” she demanded. Her voice sounded peremptory, even hostile. “Kristian! There is no time to be keeping secrets!”
His eyes opened wide. “I don’t know! For God’s sake, Callandra, I have no idea. She came and went and I barely saw her. We used to be allies in a great cause, friends and lovers once. The last two or three years we’ve been strangers meeting in the same house and exchanging empty words. I was consumed in my own causes, and I knew hers were demons, taking us both to destruction, but I didn’t know what to do about it and I didn’t alter my own cause enough to find out.”
Guilt was naked in him. She saw it and could not argue. Perhaps he had deliberately not tackled something which was demanding and dangerous, and which he feared was going to eat away a part of him he needed to keep. Perhaps Elissa had been every bit as lonely as he, and equally unable to do anything about it.
No, that was an excuse. She would have been more so. She had no occupation to use her passion and her intellect to fill her time. Even an hour ago Callandra could not have imagined feeling deep and hurting pity for Elissa Beck, however much she had wasted her talents and ignored all the causes Callandra could name. But now she could not escape pity, nor could she wholly excuse Kristian, for all her furious words.
He saw it in her face. He did not try to evade it, but accepted the unspoken change.
