Read Online The Palace Guard by Charlotte MacLeod - Free Book Online Page B

other side of a connecting door and perhaps that door hadn’t been quite shut. And Nick was supposed to be an old boyfriend of Lydia’s. But Nick was old in years, too, and he’d said he had to audition a tuba player at the crack of dawn. Surely he wouldn’t have gone dashing over to Ipswich Street last night to inform the countess that Max Bittersohn, with whom she was evidently acquainted mainly by wishful thinking, might or might not be having a little something on with the widow Kelling whom Lydia had met only that same afternoon.
    Of course Nick might have seen Lydia sometime today. And today Brown the guard had died from drinking paint remover, as surely no sane man would do of his own free will. And Lydia Ouspenska was an artist. And paint remover was the sort of thing an artist might think of. And she was also a superb copyist. And what had Brooks found out to bring him tearing over here again tonight?
    Maybe it wasn’t anything so very urgent at that. Brooks was in no hurry to leave Mrs. Sorpende. Sarah and the magnificent Max had plenty of time to settle themselves in the two bergères and sit until the silence became awkward.
    At last Bittersohn remarked, “I like this room.”
    “It’s rather small.”
    “Maybe that’s why it’s so pleasant.”
    He did have a sensitive, curving mouth for a man whose other features had at first looked so rugged in contrast to her late husband’s. She tried to picture Alexander’s face and found to her secret horror that she could remember him best as a pair of long legs in impeccable gray flannel, taking a little girl to feed the ducks in the Public Gardens. Yet she’d loved Alexander with all her heart. Well, of course not entirely all. She’d loved her parents, she supposed, and she loved Aunt Emma and dear old Anora Protheroe and Uncle Jem and maybe his faithful henchman Egbert a little and she was getting extremely fond of Cousin Mary and even, after all these years, of Cousin Dolph. There had to be many different kinds of loving, and hearts couldn’t very well be amenable to quantitative analysis. And what on earth was keeping Brooks?
    He came curvetting in at last, sleek and lithe as an elderly chipmunk. “Good evening, children.”
    “Hi, Kelling,” said Bittersohn. “Found any more bodies?”
    “Not yet, but point me in the right direction and I’ll be glad to go hunting. I came for my instructions.”
    “Nice of you. I don’t suppose there’s any chance of finding the bottle Brown really drank out of?”
    “Naturally I conducted a thorough search of the premises and it’s nowhere to be found. That in itself is a telling point, don’t you think? I daresay it was tossed out somewhere in the Fens. Another broken whiskey bottle over there would hardly be noticed. I’ve written to the Christian Science Monitor about littering more than once.”
    “And scholarly epistles they were, no doubt. Why else do you think Brown was murdered?”
    “I knew the man, if one could dignify him by that name. Brown was a slug. Slugs don’t go around committing painful and melodramatic suicides but they can easily be tricked into swallowing poisoned bait.”
    “Any idea who laid the bait?”
    “If I had, I’d be with Lieutenant Davies instead of you. Ratting, I believe it’s called.”
    “On one of your colleagues at the museum?”
    “I think a guard would be a viable hypothesis. The murderer must have known, to begin with, that Brown kept a fifth in his locker. He’d have to be able to gain access to the locker room without making himself conspicuous. That in itself mightn’t be difficult since our only bathroom is next to the locker room and he could always pretend to be visiting the facilities. However”—Cousin Brooks paused impressively—“he’d also have to know which bottle belonged to Brown.
    “Good point. He’d also have to know when it was safe to sneak back and switch the whiskey for the paint remover, and plant the note in Brown’s