Dinner Most Deadly Read online

  “Please don’t distress yourself, my lady. I believe you said the front door was open as well?”

  “Yes.” As she stepped gingerly around Sir Reginald’s body, she was certain of one point she had previously missed. “He wasn’t lying like that. His face was turned to the floor.”

  “Yes. I was obliged to turn him over to examine the body,” Pickett reminded her.

  She shuddered. “Oh. Oh yes, of course. You said so, did you not, when you told me Emily had become ill.” She opened the front door, pushing it wider until it was almost perpendicular to the wall. “There. It was about like that.”

  “It appears someone was in a hurry to get away,” observed Pickett. He stepped out onto the front stoop and looked at the tall, narrow houses on the other side of the street, their darkened windows staring indifferently back like blinded eyes.

  “Surely whoever shot him has long since run away,” Lady Fieldhurst pointed out from just inside the door. “And if he has not, he has certainly had more than enough time to reload his gun by now. Will you not come back inside, Mr. Pickett?”

  “Oh, I didn’t expect to see him lurking about,” Pickett assured her, pleased beyond all reason by her apparent concern for his safety.

  “What are you looking for, then?”

  “I’m looking at the houses across the street. I wonder if anyone may have heard the shot, or seen someone running away. I shall have to make inquiries.”

  “I am sorry to disappoint you, but most of the houses will be empty,” she told him. “The Season is long since over, and most of the aristocracy have retired to their country estates for the winter.”

  “You are still here, and so is Lady Dunnington,” Pickett pointed out. “And so, for that matter, were half a dozen gentlemen.”

  She wrinkled her nose in distaste. “I am still here because the alternative is to join my mother-in-law at the Fieldhurst estate in Kent. Lady Dunnington lives in Town year ’round, as she is estranged from her husband. As for the gentlemen,” she began ticking them off on her fingers. “Sir Reginald was still here because of his daughter’s upcoming wedding at St. George’s, Hanover Square. Lord Dernham is still in Town because Parliament is in session, and he occupies a seat in the House of Lords. Captain Sir Charles is obliged to remain here with his regiment. Lord Rupert is here because he prefers Town life to rusticating at the estate of his elder brother. I daresay Mr. Kenney is still here because he can’t afford to travel anywhere else. Lord Edwin—” She stopped, arrested.

  “Lord Edwin?” Pickett prompted.

  “To tell you the truth, I can’t quite fathom why Lord Edwin is still in Town. He is an avid sportsman, and now that the hunting season is open, I should think he would be off somewhere in the country.” She frowned. “Unless he was more interested in hunting Sir Reginald than in running foxes to ground. Do you think he might have stayed in Town expressly for the purpose of killing him?”

  To Pickett’s way of thinking, it was infinitely worse. He very much feared that Lord Edwin had stayed in Town because he entertained hopes of becoming Lady Fieldhurst’s lover.

  “I couldn’t say, my lady. Perhaps I shall know more after talking to the gentleman tomorrow.”

  “I wish you would come back inside,” she said uneasily. “I can’t help feeling that he is still lurking out there somewhere with his gun—not Lord Edwin necessarily, but whoever the killer is—ready to strike again.”

  “I don’t think so, my lady,” Pickett assured her, wishing for some reason to linger just so that she might continue to fret over his safety. He glanced up and down the street and then, finding no excuse to remain, turned to go back inside.

  “Hsst!”

  He froze in mid-stride, looking back to identify the source of the furtive summons, but saw no one.

  “Hsst! Down here!”

  Like most of the houses in the better parts of Town, Lady Dunnington’s residence was fronted by wrought iron railings, which partially concealed a staircase descending to the servants’ entrance below street level. Pickett glanced down into the stairwell and discovered Lady Fieldhurst’s fears were not so farfetched after all.

  There at the foot of the stairs stood a wild-eyed young man brandishing a pistol.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Continuing Investigations of John Pickett

  “Here now, stop waving that thing about,” Pickett scolded. Rounding the wrought iron railing at a run, he hurried down the stairs.

  “Shh!” The young man ducked back into the shadows, but at least he lowered the gun. “Don’t let her ladyship hear you! I mustn’t be found here.”

  Pickett wondered what possible threat Lady Fieldhurst might pose to a youth still in his teens. Then he realized the stranger referred to Lady Dunnington, the mistress of the house.

  “Her ladyship is upstairs, well out of earshot. Who are you? What are you doing with that gun?”

  “You’re from Bow Street, aren’t you? Someone was shot tonight, weren’t they?”

  Pickett nodded. “Sir Reginald Montague. What has it to do with you?”

  “I found the gun.” He looked down at the pistol as if wondering how it came to be in his hand. “I heard the shot, and a moment later, this thing came flying over the railing. It clattered down the stairs and landed almost at my feet.”

  “Who are you?” Pickett asked again. “And what were you doing down here?”

  “Beg pardon, sir. My name is James Marlow. I’m a footman at the Fanshaw house three doors down.” He jerked his thumb in the direction of the house in which he was employed.

  “Yes? Then why are you here and not there?”

  The footman’s expression became rather hangdog. “The Fanshaws have gone to their country place, leaving naught but a skeleton staff at the town house. Seeing as how I’m not needed there, I thought it would be a good time to come calling on Polly, Lady Dunnington’s kitchen maid. We’ve been walking out together since last Christmas. My intentions are honorable,” he added quickly. “I mean to marry Polly as soon as I have enough money saved up.”

  “I see,” said Pickett. Apparently the lovers’ tryst was interrupted by the same gunshot that killed Sir Reginald. “So where is Polly?”

  The footman gestured toward the door leading into the servants’ hall. “I pushed her back inside as soon as I heard the shot.” He ducked his head. “To tell you the truth, I thought at first it must be that someone found out about Polly and me.”

  “I take it Lady Dunnington, or the Fanshaws, or perhaps both, don’t approve?”

  “We’re servants, aren’t we?” James said sullenly. “We’re not allowed to have lives of our own.”

  From his own brief stint as a footman, Pickett knew the young man had a point, but he had more pressing concerns at the moment than the thwarted ambitions of young lovers. “So someone shot Sir Reginald and then threw the gun down here while making his escape?”

  “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  “Did you see anyone leave the house?”

  James shook his head. “No, sir, not a soul.”

  Which was hardly surprising, thought Pickett. Besides the fact that James and his Polly had been standing well below street level, their attentions had been otherwise engaged. But at least the murder weapon had been found; the next step was discovering to whom it belonged.

  “I’ll take that, if you please,” he said, holding out his hand for the pistol.

  “You won’t tell anyone it was me that found it, will you? It would likely cost me my position,” said James, unwilling to relinquish the weapon without some assurance of his own anonymity.

  “If you thought your position might be jeopardized if you were found here, why are you still here? I wonder you didn’t take off for home long before now.”

  “I couldn’t run off when my Polly might be in danger, could I? Besides,” he confessed sheepishly, “never mind what they say about curiosity killing the cat, I just had to know what was going on. You see how it was, don’t you?
You won’t tell anyone?”

  “I can’t make any promises,” Pickett said, unwilling to raise false hopes. “But if I must bring you into it, I can assure you I’ll present you in as heroic a light as possible. Surely the Fanshaws would be reluctant to part with a servant who was instrumental in maintaining the peace and safety of the neighborhood by turning in a dangerous weapon to the authorities.”

  James grinned. “Polly wouldn’t mind it being known she was keeping company with a regular hero, neither.”

  So pleased was the footman with this rosy picture of his future that he surrendered his prize without further ado. Pickett took the gun and sniffed the end of the barrel, wrinkling his nose at the smell of burned powder. He tucked the pistol into the waistband of his breeches and went back up the stairs and into the house. He passed through the hall where Sir Reginald still lay, and thence into the drawing room. There he found Lady Fieldhurst along with Lady Dunnington, the countess still a bit pale but otherwise recovered from her earlier indisposition.

  “I have returned, Mr. Pickett, and await your convenience,” she announced with an air of bravado that did not quite ring true. “You may do your worst.”

  “You have nothing to fear from me, your ladyship, I assure you,” Pickett said, then turned to Lady Fieldhurst. “You are free to go, my lady, if you wish.” There was a chilling finality to the words, too suggestive of the ones he would have to speak to her in little more than twelve hours.

  Julia glanced uncertainly at Lady Dunnington. “If you would prefer me to stay, Emily—”

  “Nonsense!” declared the countess, reaching for the bell pull. “I daresay your Mr. Pickett will not eat me.”

  She gave the bell pull a tug, and a moment later a maid entered the room, a slender young woman in a starched white apron over a demure black frock. Ash blonde hair peeked from beneath her frilled cap. Her large brown eyes opened wide at the sight of Pickett, but it was Lady Dunnington to whom she addressed herself.

  “Yes, my lady?”

  “Fetch Lady Fieldhurst’s cloak and then have her carriage brought round, if you please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” She bobbed a curtsy to her mistress and then, with one last glance at Pickett, left the room.

  “I’ll see you out, my lady, if I may,” said Pickett, unwilling to make Lady Fieldhurst walk past Sir Reginald’s body again on her own.

  “Thank you, Mr. Pickett.”

  She allowed him to lead her back into the hall, where the maid was already waiting with her velvet evening cloak. Pickett wished he had the audacity to take the cloak from the maid and place it around his lady’s shoulders himself. A month earlier, in Scotland, he would not have hesitated to do so; now, however, she seemed so uncomfortable in his presence that he dared not make any move that might be construed as taking liberties.

  Having completed this operation, the maid excused herself to summon Lady Fieldhurst’s groom with her carriage, leaving the two of them alone in awkward silence.

  “I hope you will be gentle with Lady Dunnington,” Julia said at last. “She—she is not so hardened as she appears. Or, I suspect, as she would like to believe.”

  “I will bear it in mind,” he promised.

  “Until tomorrow, then.”

  She hesitated for a moment, then offered her hand. He took it and held it uncertainly, as if he were not quite sure what to do with it. In any case, the decision was made for him by the return of the maid.

  “Your carriage, my lady,” she said and flung open the front door just as the equipage drew up before the house.

  “Tomorrow,” Pickett said, and relinquished his lady to the coachman.

  “I’m sorry to keep you waiting, your ladyship,” said Pickett, returning to the drawing room.

  “Not at all,” Lady Dunnington assured him, gesturing for him to take a seat. Apparently no longer content with sherry, the countess had confiscated the gentlemen’s neglected bottle of port from the dining room and now poured herself a generous measure. Her hands, Pickett noted, shook so violently that she splashed several drops onto the carpet. “Will you have a glass?”

  He shook his head. “No, thank you.”

  “Now, where do you want me to start?” Lady Dunnington took a long pull from her glass. “The dinner party, I suppose. Yes, well, Julia—Lady Fieldhurst, that is—has been curiously blue-devilled since her recent sojourn in Scotland. I thought she needed a lover, and I told her so. In fact, I organized a dinner party, inviting some half-dozen candidates for her consideration. I daresay she has already told you the names of all the gentlemen in attendance, so I shan’t bore you by naming them all again.”

  Pickett flipped back a couple of pages in his occurrence book. “I believe I have all the names here, your ladyship.” He should not ask; it had absolutely no bearing on the case, but he could no more stop himself than he could make his heart stop beating. “Who did her ladyship—that is, did Lady Fieldhurst express a preference?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?” she retorted, albeit without malice. “In fact, so would I, Mr. Pickett. Unfortunately, Sir Reginald was shot before I had an opportunity to ask.”

  “Can you think of a reason why any of the other gentlemen in attendance might wish to shoot him?”

  She waved one hand in an expansive gesture. “Oh, I daresay any one of them might have been jealous. Sir Reginald has—had—a certain air of danger about him that women find simply irresistible.”

  Pickett had no cause to doubt it; he was aware of a distinct pang of jealousy himself. “Would any of them be jealous enough to want him dead?”

  She shrugged. “How should I know? If they did, there was no sign of it over dinner. No one threatened to stab him with the butter knife, or anything of that nature.”

  “Lady Fieldhurst mentioned some unpleasantness—not an argument, but veiled hints of some sort.”

  Lady Dunnington’s eyebrows rose. “Did she? I didn’t notice any such thing.”

  “I believe she said you had been obliged to leave the room for a time, so I daresay you must have missed it.”

  “Yes, I remember now,” Lady Dunnington said brightly. “I splattered soup over my gown, clumsy me, and was obliged to leave the room in order to clean it up before the stain set.”

  Another lie, Pickett thought. Lady Fieldhurst had spoken of some vague domestic calamity. Aloud he merely noted, “It must have been a very light stain, your ladyship, or else you cleaned it very thoroughly.”

  “I will thank you, sir, to keep your eyes off my bosom,” she said, fixing him with a stare almost as lethal as the gunshot that had felled Sir Reginald.

  If she had meant to discompose him, she succeeded admirably. Flushing, he asked, “If there were no hard feelings between any of the other gentlemen and Sir Reginald, why did they all decline to take port with him?”

  “Lord Edwin was following his physician’s advice, and Captain Sir Charles will be on review in the morning. As for the others, I daresay they had their reasons, and felt no compulsion to share them with me. Or do you suspect one of them of lurking in the hall with pistol cocked until Sir Reginald took his leave? You will catch cold at that, you know, for Dulcie must have seen him, if that were the case.”

  “Dulcie?”

  “The maid who showed them in. And out, for that matter.”

  As if on cue, Dulcie appeared at the door. “Begging your pardon, ma’am, but the coroner is here.”

  “I’ll see him, your ladyship, if you’d rather not,” Pickett said.

  “Thank you, Mr. Pickett,” said Lady Dunnington with real gratitude. “I should be obliged to you.”

  “And you, Miss—Dulcie, is it? I should like a word with you, if I might.”

  “You may remain here, Dulcie, and await Mr. Pickett’s pleasure. As for me,” she added, grimacing, “if you are done with me, Mr. Pickett, I suppose I must inform poor Sir Reginald’s widow.”

  “I can relieve you of that task, if you will allow me,” Pickett offered.


  “And to think I once questioned your competence!” marveled her ladyship. “I see now that you are a very useful sort of fellow to have about. Yes, Mr. Pickett, I would be only too happy to shove the unpleasant duty onto your shoulders, if you would be so kind.”

  Having reiterated his willingness to take on this disagreeable task, Pickett excused himself to the countess and her maid, then met the coroner in the hall for a brief consultation over Sir Reginald’s body. Afterward he exchanged a brief nod with this worthy (whom he would no doubt see again in court, provided he could piece together enough of a case to bring someone to trial) before returning to the drawing room.

  Lady Dunnington, correctly assuming that Pickett would wish to speak to the maid in private, had taken herself off to some other part of the house, leaving her servant in sole possession of the drawing room. Dulcie in her maid’s costume looked very young and very out of place sitting on the same furniture she would no doubt be dusting the following day. She looked up at him with wide, frightened eyes. He thought she couldn’t be more than eighteen years old, if that. Pickett, who endured many a slight due to his lack of years, felt gratified to be, for once, several years older than the person he was called upon to question. He smiled kindly at her.

  “How do you do, Miss—?”

  “Dulcie, sir.”

  “Yes, but surely you have a last name?”

  “Monroe, sir, but here I’m just plain Dulcie.”

  “I very much doubt you could ever be ‘just plain’ anything,” said Pickett, and was rewarded with a shy smile. “I’m John Pickett of the Bow Street Public Office. I understand you’ve had a busy night of it.”

  “Yes sir, what with the butler gone and the footman sick.”

  “I’ve done a stint as a footman myself. It’s a demanding life, being a servant. I understand you had to answer the door in addition to your other duties.”

  “Yes sir, but I didn’t mind, not with her ladyship being short-handed as she is.”

  Having succeeded in setting the girl at ease, Pickett withdrew his occurrence book and a pencil from the inside pocket of his coat. “Will you tell me what happened tonight, as much as you can remember?”