A Monstrous Regiment of Women - Laurie R. King [74]
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FOURTEEN
Saturday, 15 January
A woman’s guess is much more accurate than a man’s certainty.
—Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936)
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Miles was with her, the two of them nearly concealed behind the heaps of flowers, fruit baskets, cards, books, and magazines. Neither of them recognised me. He rose warily, but politely; she looked up politely, and then her face beneath its bruises and bandages changed.
“Mary? Good heavens, it’s you, Mary! You look marvellous!”
“The astonishment in your voice is so flattering, Ronnie. Oh don’t be silly, I know I usually look like a dog’s dinner, but if I don’t spend some of this money, the revenue people will eat it all. Good afternoon, Lieutenant Fitzwarren. Sit down—I’m not staying.” Of course he did not. “Ronnie, tell me what happened.”
“I don’t know, Mary, truly I don’t. All I can remember is, it was such a crush—there’d been something on the line and the trains hadn’t been coming in, something like that. And then it was cleared and I remember feeling the air moving down the tunnel, and then people started to push forward, and that’s all, and I’m very glad I can’t remember the rest of it.”
“You didn’t see anyone you know?”
“If my own mother had been there, I shouldn’t have seen her, unless she had been immediately in front of me. Why do you ask?”
I studied her carefully and decided her colour wasn’t too bad.
“Because there’s a possibility you were pushed, Ronnie.”
“But of course I was pushed, I told you—now wait a moment, do you mean… ? You mean deliberately pushed, don’t you? What a mind you have, Mary. Why on earth would anyone want to do that? It was an accident.”
“Has it not occurred to you that there have been rather a lot of fatal accidents around the Temple recently?” I asked her gently.
“No, Mary! Don’t be absurd. That’s… No.”
“Why do you think we haven’t let you be here alone? First Holmes, then either Dr Watson or Lieutenant Fitzwarren.”
That took most of the splutters out of her mouth, so that she lay there, as white as her sheets. Her hand sought Miles’s, who looked, I thought, as ill as she did.
“I’m very sorry to do this to you, Ronnie, but something is going on in the Temple, and I have to find out what it is.”
She looked at me for a long minute, her face growing ever more pinched. “Iris?” she said finally.
“She was part of it, made to look like some kind of warning from the drug world. And in October, Lilian McCarthy. And late August—”
“Delia Laird. You actually believe this.”
“I don’t know, yet. Ronnie, how much are you leaving the Temple in your will?”
“Twenty thousand. Why do you… No. Oh, no, Mary, you can’t mean it.”
“Ronnie,” I said clearly and with all the honesty I could manufacture, “I don’t think Margery is involved.”
“How could she not be, if you’re right?”
Good question.
“She could not have been personally involved with any of the deaths,” I said. “She had alibis for all three of those periods of time.”
“Someone else, then?”
“It’s possible that someone close to Margery is doing it. Even if it’s something Margery could do, I don’t see that it’s something she would do. I’m sorry, I’m not being very clear.”
“Yes, I see what you’re saying,” she said eagerly. “Even if Margery could commit… murder, she wouldn’t do it for money.”
It was not quite what I had meant, but I left it.
“Then who?” asked Miles.
“Someone, as I said, close to Margery, someone ruthless, intelligent, and who either benefits somehow from Margery’s wealth or who imagines he or she is doing Margery a service.”
“Marie,” whispered Veronica.
“Would Margery have gone to York without her?” I asked. Veronica’s face fell.
“No. Probably not.”
“I’ll find out, but I doubt she has the brains for