An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6)(90)

I shrugged. “It is possible he is responsible for Yelena’s disappearance,” I said. “He is a moustachioed man,” I reminded Stoker. “Just like the fellow on the mountain when Alice died. J. J. thinks it was Douglas Norton, but what if it was Durand? He might have had a hand in Alice’s death and Yelena knew too much to be trusted.”

“He is going to marry her,” Stoker protested.

“All the more reason to dispose of her if she proves a liability,” I said. “She is a nasty little blackmailer.”

“Your opinion of your sex is chilling,” Stoker said.

I said nothing as I turned my attention to the various impedimenta of travel in the room. I detected the baroness’s meticulous hand in the orderly piles of trunks and stacks of baggage. Everything was neatly labeled and arranged according to the importance of the owner. A single carpetbag bearing Yelena’s name was perched on a shelf in the corner.

“You are quite right. She did not leave,” I told Stoker. “Not without her bag.”

I went and opened it, expecting to find the usual odds and ends that accumulate during travel. Instead, I reared back in horror as I saw the face of a man staring up at me.

“What is it?” Stoker hurried to my side as I reached into the bag with nerveless fingers. “What in the name of the seven devils is that?”

I lifted out what was—mercifully—not a face, but a canvas mask, fully painted with features, including a pair of dark moustaches. “It is a climbing mask,” I told him in some relief. “I read about them in Alice’s notes. Some alpinists wear them to protect the skin from the sun at altitude.” I turned it over in my hands.

“Yelena is no climber,” Stoker pointed out. “So what is she doing with that thing?”

I stared down at the monstrous thing, looking for all the world like a trophy, a visage peeled away from a defeated foe.

And suddenly I knew.

“Alice’s death. That mysterious moustachioed man on the slopes of the Teufelstreppe,” I began.

I did not have to finish. “My God,” Stoker breathed. “The murderer used it to conceal his features. He must have been known—too well-known to risk anyone recognizing him.”

“Most likely not Durand, then. This points to the duke,” I reasoned.

“What if Gisela found this?” he asked. “Max already had a worthy motive to put Gisela out of the way to gain a throne for himself. If he murdered Alice and the princess discovered his guilt, then he would be stupid not to remove her.”

“Or he might have done it at her behest,” I pointed out. “Without Gisela here to answer for herself, there is no way to know if she is author of a plot or its victim.”

“And if Yelena discovered it among his things, she would recognize a tidy opportunity to blackmail him for money to keep quiet. Yet another desperate turn of the rack screw on a man already pushed to his limits.”

He folded the mask and tucked it into his shirt for safekeeping before moving on to Max’s trunks. He poked idly through the silk linings and boot compartments. “Nothing here,” he said in a tone of marked disappointment.

I passed to the chancellor’s boxes. Some were locked and marked with his cipher—no doubt for the storage of confidential papers and valuables, although the costliest items, the parures of the princess’s jewels, were secured in the locked strongbox in the princess’s bedchamber. I carried on, opening the baroness’s bags. There was precious little inside them, I realized as I searched. A bit of spilt face powder, a lace shoe with a broken heel and its mate, tied together with a bit of ribbon. No doubt they were favorites and meant for the cobbler to be mended.

I closed her boxes with a huff of annoyance. I had been so certain we would find something of note, I reflected peevishly.

“Veronica,” Stoker said in a slightly strangled voice.

“What is it?” I asked as I opened a hamper of tinned Alpenwalder delicacies. I pulled a face at the pickled cabbage and pungently aged cheese.

“Come and see this,” he said.

“I am rather busy,” I told him as I opened a box of cheese experimentally and gave it a sniff. I reared back as if I had been struck. It was utterly vile. Little wonder Julien d’Orlande did not like it in his kitchens.

“Veronica, now,” Stoker ordered.

I turned, prepared to give him a piece of my mind for his peremptory tone when I saw his face. It was set in a grim expression as he stared down into a trunk marked BOOKS. I went to him, but I knew. Of course I knew. Before I looked down into the open trunk and saw her, nestled there amidst the magazines and books that had been tucked neatly around her, I smelled her—the faint, unmistakable fragrance of death.

Yelena.



* * *



? ? ?

Of course she is dead,” I said, striving for calm. “I mean, we knew it, did we not?”

Stoker did not reply. With a surgeon’s practiced eye, he was surveying the body.

“How?” I asked.

He shook his head. “Poison? There are no visible marks of a weapon. Ah,” he said, bending swiftly. He tugged aside the collar of her dress to reveal a livid line of dark violet. “Strangulation, I would guess from the bruises,” he said, bending to examine her hands. “No indication that she struggled, so whoever attacked her did it swiftly and with strength. She had no chance, poor girl.”