Chapter Seventeen
“Darrow is watching us from across the road,” Solomon murmured. He sat opposite Constance for once, so that he could see out the back window without twisting. “Do you suppose he is working up the courage to confess?”
“I don’t think he lacks courage,” Constance said thoughtfully as the carriage swung around the corner. She used her umbrella to knock on the carriage roof, and the coachman pulled up the horses.
Solomon leapt out and strode back toward the corner, mingling with other pedestrians. A few moments later, he loped back and ascended smartly, and the carriage moved on.
“Well?” Constance demanded.
“He just strolled past the shop, then sped up and kept walking. He hasn’t tried to find the way in at the back.”
“Then what the devil is he up to? Trying to intimidate us, like our prim neighbors in Grosvenor Square?”
A couple of months ago, when they had returned from Venice to find two bodies on her establishment doorstep, there had been something of an intimidation campaign conducted against the house of ill repute. That storm had been weathered. But if Darrow truly was a murderer, he had a lot more to lose.
“I don’t know,” Solomon said. “But I think I shall interrupt his morning practice to ask him.”
“What if he comes back during the night?”
“I doubt he’d be that stupid,” Solomon said. “But we could catch up with him easily enough to ask.”
Constance hesitated. “No, you’re right. And I’d rather make sure my mother is still where she should be.”
“I’m not sure Darrow’s the confessing type,” Solomon mused. “But he might have decided to tell us something new, particularly if it reflects badly on Montague.”
“I wonder…” Constance frowned. “If Montague was suspicious of his wife, did he go searching passenger bookings too? Some paper was burned in Caterina’s grate, surely around the time she died.
It could have been travel tickets.” She answered her own question with an irritable hand gesture.
“Could have been. Always could. There is no evidence in this wretched case!”
“Stop thinking about it,” Solomon said, shifting across the carriage to sit beside her. “This evening is just for us.” His fingertips glided over her wrist and inside her glove.
“I like that idea,” she said huskily.
Solomon peeled back her glove and softly kissed her wrist, exactly where he had already made the skin tingle with his caress. “Good. The shop is still open.”
Constance blinked, having lost track of where they were. The carriage slowed and she pulled down the window. Gerry was outside the shop with a customer, showing him something from the front display. But in the way of street boys, he saw her at once and grinned.
Constance mouthed, Where is she?
Gerry jerked his head toward the inside of the shop. And indeed, Juliet’s familiar bright dress swept past her line of vision.
“She’s fine,” Constance said, refusing to admit the strength of her relief as she raised her hand to Gerry and closed the window again.
“Don’t you want to go in?” Solomon asked.
“No. I want to begin this evening that is just for us.”
Solomon gave a slow smile, his dark eyes warm with promise. And suddenly it was easy to banish everything but him from her mind.
*
“I wonder if she knew she was dying and came to say goodbye.”
“I have several of his notices and reviews…”
“I never heard the man play—always in the wrong place at the wrong time…”
“She wanted to go over old times…”
“We talked mostly of music and musicians.”
“Of Carl Darrow, perhaps?”
Solomon opened his eyes with a snap, the remembered words still bouncing around his mind. Most of them had been spoken by George Martin yesterday. The final question had been Constance’s.
“…she knew she was dying,” Martin had said sadly, “and came to say goodbye.”
And again, Constance’s interpretation: “…she was saying goodbye because she was leaving the country with Darrow.”
Solomon sat up. “What if she wasn’t?” he said aloud. Old words and new ideas still spun around his mind, and his heart raced as though he had been running instead of sleeping.
“Who wasn’t what?” Constance mumbled, throwing one arm across his middle and burrowing back into the pillow.
After their luscious night of love, this was not how Solomon had imagined their morning greetings. But the idea was vital and had to be captured—it had to be the center of everything.
“Caterina,” he said. “What if she wasn’t at Martin’s house to say goodbye at all?
He was an old friend who shared her love of music, but beyond that we know nothing about him.
Except that Caterina hadn’t seen him very often since her marriage, before visiting him three times in one week for several hours at a time.
Not to say goodbye but to go over old times and to talk mostly of music and musicians.
Why go to Martin and no one else? Who and what is he? ”
Constance opened her eyes and hauled herself into a semi-sitting position, leaning against his shoulder. She was frowning with the effort to throw off the mists of sleep and think.
“He listened to her sing at various places across the country,” she recalled.
“He wasn’t really a teacher, but she used his opinions to help her improve because he was so knowledgeable.
But somehow, he kept missing Darrow’s performances.
Which surely implies he heard lots of others in his travels.
A keen music lover, known as ‘the professor,’ who has collected no doubt many program notes, notices, and reviews of performances. ”
“A source of information, in other words,” Solomon said, excitement soaring. “Information about Darrow? We know she talked about him.”
“But it doesn’t matter what she talked about, does it? It matters what she saw, what Martin might have let slip or let her see among his reviews. He could have kept whole newspapers.”
“So she could have discovered anything,” Solomon said intensely, “about her husband, about Darrow, even about Kellar. Both Montague and Kellar are music lovers, after all, an amateur violinist and an amateur singer. Martin could have seen any of them where they had no business to be. Or Caterina could have learned of it by herself. Montague’s scandal in India?
Sophie Worthington’s death… Or where Darrow was when he was not at the Royal Academy.
God knows what she could have discovered about Kellar.
But she was looking, Constance, I’m sure of it. ”
“If one of them threatened her, then she needed to fight back,” Constance said. “With information of her own.”
“She could have been trying to win her freedom from Montague,” Solomon said, “or to counter some threat of Darrow’s or Kellar’s. She needed to keep one of them away from her… Or all of them?”
Constance’s eyes, no longer clouded by sleep, were sparkling. “It’s a better theory, but we need to know. We need a plan.”
She scrambled out of bed, still naked from last night’s passion, and found her bag, from which she dragged all her notes before climbing back onto the bed.
“When I established the schedule of Caterina’s movements, I also noted when Montague left the house for work, alone, and when he returned.
If we can find any discrepancy, any time unaccounted for…
The trouble is, we can’t go there without incurring the wrath of Montague and his police protectors. ”
“We haven’t been forbidden his place of work, though,” Solomon pointed out, peering over her shoulder at the notes.
Having seen what he needed to, he all but leapt out of the other side of the bed.
“And if we’re early enough, he need never know we’ve been.
After that, I suggest we return briefly to the office to see if Janey’s back and what she has discovered.
And then I’ll go and shake Darrow while you call again on Martin and find out what information he has in that house.
I’ll join you there as soon as I can. Agreed? ”
“Agreed,” Constance said with enthusiasm.
She had that euphoric feeling, perhaps similar to Caterina’s on the night she died, that the mystery was almost solved at last.
*
Montague’s home, so full of Caterina’s presence, still felt heavy with her loss, tugging his spirits downward.
But today, as he closed the front door and marched briskly up the path to his waiting carriage, he realized the oppression of his grief lifted in the fresh air.
It was a new day, and he had dealt rather neatly with the obstacles of Silver and Grey.
He had been right to go straight to Galsworth at Scotland Yard.
By now, surely, the prying pair were well warned off and would not dare come near him again.
He had the chance of revival, in every way, and he was going to snatch it with both hands.
He would embrace the hard work. It was all that kept the guilt and grief at bay.
His spirits lifted further as his carriage trundled through the morning sunshine toward the offices of Montague and Son.
It would soon be a proud firm once more.
As soon as he had his hands on Caterina’s money, his troubles would be over.
In the meantime, he had the promise of it to buy him more credit—and the patience of his current creditors.
Money from the next shipment was about to pour in…
He was almost at the door when he caught the distinctive sight of the Greys together, descending the steps from his office door.
They made a rather charming picture with their beauty and their closeness, her hand casually in the crook of his arm.
Happily trying to destroy what was left of Montague’s life.
For a moment, the blood froze in his veins. And then anger flooded in.
How dare they?
The carriage had come to a halt. John Coachman was actually opening the door, so God knew how long Montague had been sitting there, staring and fuming, his good spirits vanishing like the sun behind that cloud just drifting over the river toward him.