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Lady Thirkie had apparently brought a selection of clothes, toiletries, and knickknacks appropriate for a country-house weekend and nothing more. After half an hour Royston raised his eyebrows at Carmichael and shook his head.
“Nothing significant,” he said.
“Did you think there would be?” Royston asked.
“Well, it’s something to know that the separate bed business wasn’t any matter of coming late to bed.
His articles are laid out in here and hers in there. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they had separate bedrooms at home as well.”
“You’d hardly expect people of their class to share a hairbrush,” Royston said, putting down a splendid silver-backed instance of the same, monogrammed at.
“No,” Carmichael said. “I think I want to see Lady Thirkie first. Half the time in a murder it’s the spouse who did it.”
“Enough to make you afraid of your nearest and dearest, isn’t it?” Royston said, with a grin. “I think you’ll find that while that may be true in the East End, or in Lancashire, this one is the exception to all your rules, sir. It looks and smells political to me.”
“Lipstick smells political now?” Carmichael asked.
“I sniffed at three on Lady Thirkie’s dressing table,” Royston said. “They’re all the stick kind, not the paint kind—one reddish, one pinkish, and one a very dark red. They didn’t smell at all like the stuff on the corpse.”
“No, you recognized it at once, didn’t you, meaning that it was a much more familiar smell,”
Carmichael said, walking over to the dressing table and examining the lipsticks for himself. Two matched, monogrammed at in gold and silver, and the third was dark blue with a gold line around it. “Cheap lip paint, not expensive. Woolworths, rather than these, which are two Chanels and a Dior.”
“Bought especially, do you think?” Royston asked. “By a man, who wouldn’t know any better?”
Page 24
“Or who wouldn’t need any better for a gag. It wasn’t meant to fool anyone it was blood; it was meant to suggest the red breast of the Farthing robin,” Carmichael said. “I’m a bit surprised at that. It shows both some planning ahead and some improvisation, and usually you see one or the other. They must have planned ahead to get the idea and the star, and the lipstick. But they didn’t bring anything to attach the star with. They attached it with the dead man’s own pocketknife.”
“Maybe they brought something and then saw the knife and thought that would be better and took their something away with them again?” Royston suggested.
“That would fit the facts. So would the idea that they already had the things. Lip paint might be bought by anyone, but it also might already be owned by a lower-class woman. The star is more difficult—but I
suppose any Jews who left the Continent might already have one. We’ll have to check if any guests or staff are Jews.”
“Mr. Kahn,” Royston reminded him.
“We’ll have to check him very thoroughly,” Carmichael agreed. “But it almost seems too deliberately intended to point at him, unless he’s a fool to do it and lay such a clear trail.”
“Who can say what Jews might do?” Royston said. “He might have been overcome with hate all of a sudden.”
“Anyone can lose their temper, but commit an elaborate and premeditated murder between one in the morning and breakfast time?” Carmichael rolled his eyes. He pulled off the dark blue cap and turned the bottom of the Dior tube and looked at the near-pristine finger of lipstick that extended. “She doesn’t use this one much. Odd shade, maybe it matched something in particular.” He examined the other two, which were older and much better used.
“The shade of the lipstick on the corpse was very close to blood red,” Royston said. “That makes it seem more likely it was bought specially. We could try inquiring in chemists’ shops.”
“And every Woolworths in the country,” Carmichael
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