Chapter Twenty-Four #2
Elizabeth returned her cup to its saucer. “Cybil, forgive me. I’ve just remembered, I’m expected at four, and I’ve kept the poor woman waiting once already this week.”
Cybil’s eyes met Elizabeth’s for the briefest moment.
“You are leaving?” Lenoir was out of his chair before Cybil had left hers, both hands spreading. “Stay, ma chérie, we can talk about old times. Or, dinner perhaps? Anywhere you choose, the finest table in the city.” He flicked a glance at Elizabeth. “Just the two of us.”
“And what of Madame Lenoir?” Cybil reached for her cigarette case and tucked it inside her bag. “Will she be joining us? Or will she be at home with the baby?”
“You cannot blame a man for trying, non?” He chuckled and pressed a hand to his chest.
They were almost at the corner before Cybil spoke.
“You know, don’t you?”
“I think I do, yes. But first, I need to find a kiosk.”
“A kiosk?” Cybil didn’t break stride. “There used to be one on the corner of the Place de la Bourse, by the Métro steps. It’s not two minutes from here.” She cut left, Elizabeth falling in beside her. “Might I ask what we’re after?”
“A magazine.”
“A magazine?” Cybil sidestepped a man wrestling a crate through a doorway. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what a magazine has to do with any of this, but I’ll take your word for it.”
The Place de la Bourse opened ahead of them, the crier still working the Métro steps, and there on the corner stood the kiosk, its front hung with journals on wooden dowels.
Elizabeth ran her eye along the display – dailies, a motoring weekly, L’Illustration.
“Which one are we looking for?” Cybil was already scanning the other side.
“La Belle Saison. The fashion magazine, Clemmi had a copy in the salon.”
“Here.” Cybil pulled it from its dowel and handed it across.
Elizabeth pressed the coins into the vendor’s palm and stepped clear of the kiosk, turning back the pages. The Lanvin collection, a dozen pages in – the ivory taffeta, the gold thread, the page of blue where sleep had got the better of her. She turned past it.
There.
A single photograph filled the page. A ring – square blue stones set flush in a pale band, a thin line of black enamel tracing the design – laid out on velvet above the name of the maison and a notice of its showing on the rue de la Paix.
“Look.” Elizabeth folded the page back and held it out.
“The day I left you at Café Colette, Miss Bembridge was at the apartment when I returned, wearing a ring identical to this one. I admired it, and she laughed it off – a flea-market find, only paste. And I was so tired that afternoon I thought nothing more of it.”
Cybil studied the photograph. “No woman living on a secretary’s wages could afford a ring like that.”
“Indeed.”
Cybil handed back the magazine, the corners of her mouth pulling downward.
“It’s a start, Elizabeth, but it’s a long way from proof.
You can’t walk into the chancery and lay a magazine on Oliver Sterling’s desk.
A ring can be explained away in a dozen ways – an inheritance, a windfall on the horses, a gift from an admirer too married to be named. ”
“If that were all, yes. But there are other things, all inconsequential on their own.” Elizabeth tucked the magazine beneath her arm and began to walk, Cybil keeping pace beside her.
“Think about the chancery. Maggie borrowed the key to Ashby’s office from Miss Bembridge’s key-board.
Every lock in that building answers to her.
The offices, the registry, the cabinets… ”
And Oliver’s desk drawer. Only three people had seen those false terms – Oliver had been so certain of it.
He’d written them, Jonathan had read them, Arbuthnot had been left alone with them, and the rest of the time the paper had sat locked in Oliver’s drawer under the assumption his was the only key.
Except perhaps it wasn’t. Their trap had needed no Arbuthnot at all.
“Half the buildings in Paris are run by women like her. It doesn’t make them murderers.”
“Then consider the night Sir Conrad died.” Elizabeth kept her voice low.
“When Lady Davenport directed me to the bathroom, she said the fourth door on the left. And Miss Bembridge corrected her – the third, actually – without so much as pausing for thought. The Ambassador’s own wife, corrected on the layout of her own residence … by a secretary from the chancery.”
Cybil’s pace slowed a fraction.
“She knew that house, Cybil. Well enough to walk its corridors without a single servant thinking twice. And she was wearing her grey doeskin day gloves, indoors, of an evening – a faux pas someone as fastidious as Miss Bembridge would never commit. And she still wouldn’t remove them, not even when Lady Davenport spilt tea on them and offered to have them cleaned. ”
“Unless there was something on her hands she’d rather no one saw.” Cybil came to a stop altogether. “A mark or a bruise, perhaps?”
Or worse, gunpowder. Elizabeth left it unsaid.
And that was only half of it. The suicide note, written in a hand that never wavered, by a woman who had answered Sir Conrad’s letters and signed his name for years because he was too idle to lift a pen. The wound at his temple, too clean for the pistol beneath his hand.
“There’s more, isn’t there? Things you can’t share.”
“I gave my word.” Elizabeth held her friend’s gaze.
Things like Miss Bembridge lying about sharing a car home from the soirée with Clemmi…
“Elizabeth? Whatever’s the matter?”
“Clemmi.” The magazine slipped from her arm. “Clemmi was meeting Miss Bembridge this afternoon at the Bois at half-past three.”
Her eyes went to the clock above the Bourse. Ten-to-four.