Garden of Lies(3)

One by one she removed the items that had aroused in her a deep sense of unease—an empty perfume bottle, a small velvet bag containing a few pieces of jewelry, Anne’s stenography notebook and two packets of seeds. Taken individually, each was easily explained. But as a group they raised disturbing questions.

Three days earlier, when Anne’s housekeeper had discovered the body of her employer, she had immediately sent for Ursula. There had been no one else to summon. Initially, Ursula had been unable to accept the notion that Anne had either died of natural causes or taken her own life. She had called in the police. They had immediately concluded that there was no sign of foul play.

But Anne had left a note. Ursula had found it crumpled on the floor beside the body. To most people the marks made in pencil would have looked like random scribbles. Anne, however, was a skilled stenographer who had been trained in the Pitman method. As was the case with many professional secretaries, she had gone on to develop her own personal version of coded writing.

The note was a message, and Ursula knew it had been intended for her. Anne had been well aware that no one else could decipher her unique stenography.

Behind water closet.

Ursula sat down at her desk and drank a little more brandy while she contemplated the items. After a while, she pushed the empty perfume bottle aside. She had found it on Anne’s little writing desk, not with the other things. It was unlike Anne not to have mentioned the purchase of new perfume but aside from that there did not appear to be anything mysterious about it.

The notebook, the jewelry pouch and the seeds, however, were a very different matter. Why had Anne hidden all three items behind the water closet?

After a while she opened the stenography notebook and began to read. Transcribing Anne’s cryptic shorthand was slow-going but two hours later she knew that she had been wrong about one thing that afternoon. Paying for the funeral was not to be her last act of friendship.

There was one more thing she could do for Anne—find her killer.





TWO




Slater Roxton regarded Ursula through the lenses of his wire-rimmed spectacles. “What the devil do you mean, you won’t be available for the next few weeks, Mrs. Kern? We have an arrangement.”

“My apologies, sir, but a pressing matter has come up,” Ursula said. “I must devote my full attention to it.”

A disturbing hush fell on the library. Ursula mentally fortified herself. She had been acquainted with Slater for less than a fortnight and had worked with him on only two occasions but she felt she had an intuitive understanding of the man. He was proving to be a difficult client.

He had very nearly perfected the art of not signaling his mood or his thoughts but she was increasingly alert to a few subtle cues. The deep silence and the unblinking gaze with which he was watching her did not bode well. She sat very straight in her chair, doing her best not to let him know that his unwavering regard was sending small chills down her spine.

Evidently concluding that she was not responding as he had anticipated to his stern disapproval, he escalated the level of tension by rising slowly from his chair and flattening his powerful hands on the polished surface of his mahogany desk.

There was a deceptively graceful quality about the way he moved that gave him a fascinating aura of quiet, self-contained power. The dark, unemotional manner characterized everything about him, from his calm, nearly uninflected speech to his unreadable green-and-gold eyes.

His choice of attire reinforced the impression of shadows and ice. In the short time she had known him she had never seen him in anything other than head-to-toe black—black linen shirt and black tie, black satin waistcoat, black trousers and a black coat. Even the frames of his spectacles were made of some matte black metal—not gold-or silver-plated wire.

He was not wearing the severely tailored coat at the moment. It was hanging on a hook near the door. After greeting her a short time ago, Slater had removed it in preparation for working on the artifacts.

She knew she had no right to critique the man on the basis of his wardrobe. She, too, was dressed in her customary black. In the past two years she had come to think of her mourning attire—from her widow’s veil and stylish black gown to her black stacked-heel, ankle-high button boots—as both uniform and camouflage.

It flashed across her mind that she and Slater made quite a somber pair. Anyone who happened to walk into the library would think they were both sunk deep into unrelenting grief. The truth of the matter was that she was in hiding. Not for the first time, she wondered what Slater’s motives were for going about in black. His father had died two months ago. It was the event that had brought Slater home to London after several years of living abroad. He was now in command of the Roxton family fortune. But she was quite certain that the black clothes were indicative of a long-standing sartorial habit—not a sign of mourning.

If even half of what the press had printed regarding Slater Roxton was true, she reflected, perhaps he had his reasons for wearing black. It was, after all, the color of mystery, and Slater was nothing if not a great mystery to Society.

She watched him with a deep wariness that was spiked with curiosity and what she knew was a reckless sense of fascination. She had anticipated that giving notice, especially in such a summary fashion, would not be met with patience and understanding. Clients frequently proved difficult to manage but she had never encountered one quite like Slater. The very concept of managing Slater Roxton staggered the mind. It had been clear to her at the start of their association that he was a force of nature and a law unto himself. That was, of course, what made him so interesting, she thought.