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Portia and Lady Jane gasped with me.
And again, the man’s throat convulsed with his swallow.
This meant Ian’s deductions were correct.
“She also let you in,” Ian continued, “Giving you access to the corridors, and probably keeping a lookout, or placing the items herself in rooms that have no access, like the Smoking Room and the Jacaranda Room.”
He stared at Ian and kept his silence.
More proof, in my estimation, what Ian was saying was true.
“It wasn’t meant to be Daphne you drugged. It was meant to be Portia. And me. Why me?”
“You’re bloody perceptive,” the man spat.
Indeed he was, for he was proving that right now.
“Ah,” Ian replied. “So you wanted me fuzzy so I wouldn’t notice your shit.”
“It didn’t bloody work,” he muttered. “I told her to put more in. With your size, you’d metabolize it too easily. She didn’t like doing it in the first place. She refused to do it again.”
“That might serve her well now,” Ian drawled. “As for the psilocybin?”
The man glanced at Portia.
I moved protectively toward my sister just as Daniel circled her with both arms, his glower on the man outright vicious.
I turned again to the man on the couch to catch him looking back to Ian. “She was the one who was supposed to leave here and tell others the story. You bloody lot keep your secrets. You would never do it.”
“And Dorothy haunting the manor would sell more books, wouldn’t it, Mr. Clifton?” Ian surmised.
I gasped again.
So did Portia.
Lady Jane obviously knew him, so she did not.
“You watched Dad enter the code when he let you in all those times to do your research,” Ian said. “The combination to the safe, when he took you to the Brandy Room. So when you maneuvered your way back in, you could get what you wanted. Your mouse in the house told you about Portia and Daniel, how Portia was coming to visit. And you hatched your plan.”
The man slumped into the couch, crossing his arms like an angry child, and said, “You’ve figured it all out. So I don’t have to say anything.”
“Yes. My investigators are thorough with bank records and ferreting out royalty statements and tracking prescriptions. It seems I’m not the only one who thinks your book is absolute rot.”
The man’s face flushed with anger.
“Dorothy was loved by her family, she takes care of you all to this day in a manner, does she not?” Ian asked.
The man looked away.
She did.
“The dedications in your book, both of them were sarcastic. Your private joke. You didn’t think Dorothy had talent. You scorned her because you thought she slept her way to the top. And your parents didn’t support you. They thought you were the piece of shit you are and disinherited you. So you used the only thing you had, and it was still Dorothy’s, to make money off her very dead back. Going so far as to take her things from your family’s archives, should you need to use those too. Like her shoes from that night. Her dress. One way or another, you were going to use all you had of Dorothy to line your pockets, and you did.”
Boy, Ian’s investigators didn’t mess around.
And microdoses of Valium did nothing to affect Ian’s perception.
Not at all.
