And Then She Fell(96)
The murderer wanted to stage a double murder and make it appear to be a believable murder-suicide, with echoes of Lady Winston’s murder thrown in, and chances were he intended to carry out the foul deeds in the order he’d described, namely killing Henrietta first . . . and given the murderer’s cold-bloodedness, James had no difficulty believing that the blackguard intended to kill Henrietta in front of his own eyes.
From all Barnaby and Stokes had said, the murderer was more than sadistic enough for that.
But killing Henrietta and James in the basement wouldn’t support the fiction of a murder-suicide; such a setting would strike a discordant note, especially if Henrietta’s murder was supposed to be a replay of Lady Winston’s. The basement was hardly the place for a lovers’ rendezvous, and this murderer was very intelligent, and very aware of how the ton thought. So he would shift James to some more believable location.
“For instance, a room upstairs.” Twisting his still aching head, James glanced at the basement stairs, closer to him now; in the strengthening morning light he could see them clearly. There was no landing at the top, and the door opened inward. If he were free and ready to engage, and standing on the stairs when the murderer opened the door . . . James grimaced. “He’ll have plenty of time to shoot me, and if we grappled, I would be the one most likely to end falling down the stairs and breaking my neck.”
While that might put a crimp in the murderer’s plans, it wasn’t how James wanted this to end.
And such an end wouldn’t save Henrietta, and that, after all, was his principal and dominant aim.
From his strained position on the floor, he glanced at the windows, then sighed. Even once he was free, there was no way he could break out of the basement; the door was bolted on the outside, the windows were small, too small to fit through even if he could break their thick glass, and the murderer had told him the houses were deserted, so there was no reason to suppose that there would be anyone passing outside the windows for him to hail.
It took him a little while to convince his brain of what would have to be, and even longer to get his body to cooperate. Getting up onto his legs again was an excruciating feat, but eventually he managed it, and managed to laboriously work his way back across the room and set the chair down, with him still lashed to it, in exactly the same place where the murderer had left him. There was, thankfully, enough dust layered on the floor, smudged not just by the murderer’s boots but by countless others previously, for his shuffling progress across it to have left no obvious trail, and the murderer must have dragged him in, because his evening clothes were already too filthy for his recent brush with the floor to have made any additional impression.
Shifting on the chair, James settled again; closing his eyes, he concentrated, and managed to ease and inch the glass shard up beneath his shirt cuff, along the inside of his right wrist. He wriggled his fingers, shifted his hands, but the shard remained safely tucked away, ironically held in position by the rope that bound his hands.
Slumping in the chair, he ran through the possible scenarios again, but there was nothing more he could think of to do.
Closing his eyes, he worked at relaxing his muscles and getting what rest he could—until the murderer returned to fetch him to wherever the blackguard intended to bring Henrietta.
Henrietta kept her distressing news entirely private all through the morning. Not because she wished to but because she had to; given that James’s life was at risk, she had to take the murderer at his word and assume he would know if her family was alerted to his plan. So she couldn’t allow anyone who might react precipitously to know of the murderer’s demand. And she had to go about her life as if nothing at all was wrong.
It was early afternoon before, by dint of a whispered word at this at-home, at that morning tea, she managed to arrange a meeting restricted to those she felt sure she could trust—her three sisters and her sister-in-law. They, she knew, would understand her predicament; at the very least she could rely on their advice.
After reassuring her mother that she would remain safely indoors and would be sufficiently well entertained by the other four, all of whom, having answered her summons, seconded that assurance, Henrietta watched Louise leave on her usual afternoon social rounds, then she shooed the others, all curious as to why she was suddenly so intent, into the back parlor and firmly shut the door.
Turning, she watched as Amelia and Amanda sank onto the old chaise, and Portia sat in one armchair, while Mary curled up in her usual position on the love seat. Walking to the armchair facing the chaise, as the others settled and focused their attention on her, Henrietta surveyed their expressions, intrigued, expectant, and eager to hear what she had to tell them.