Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [108]
“Mrs. Quase, did she say anything to you about what she learned from all her questions? I need to know.”
“Why? It’s over, and Minnie’s dead.” There was a curious finality in her voice.
“It’s not all over,” he corrected her. He disliked speaking to her back. He could see nothing of her expression. Was that on purpose? “I have not proved what happened,” he went on. “Or why the prostitute was killed, and all sorts of other things that seem to make very little sense.”
“Does it really matter?” There was fear undisguised in her voice now.
“Yes. Don’t you want to clear it all up, before you leave?”
She turned even further from him. “I imagine we will leave quite soon. I don’t know how we can continue without Julius. And I expect Cahoon will hardly feel like going on, at least for some time.”
“Will that grieve you very much? Or your husband and Mr. Marquand?”
She was surprised into looking back toward him. “I don’t know. It was always Cahoon who cared about it most. I expect he will find another diplomat to take Julius’s place.”
“Did Mrs. Sorokine say anything to you about her deductions?” he asked yet again.
Her eyes cleared. “She said she knew where it had happened,” she replied. “Rather a pointless remark, considering that we all know it happened in the linen cupboard. I thought she was simply trying to get attention. I’m ashamed to say that now.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Quase. Did she mention broken china?”
“No.” There was dismissal in her face. “But then that’s hardly very dramatic, is it?” She turned away and started to walk slowly along the grass.
He did not follow her. Instead he went back toward the entrance to the Palace again, turning her words over and over in his mind. There seemed only one possible conclusion: Sadie had not been killed in the cupboard where she was found, in spite of the blood.
But as soon as he made sense of one set of facts, it made nonsense of another. The sheets were soaked with blood, and even a lunatic would not have killed her in one place and then carried the naked, bleeding body to the cupboard.
Had she been attacked, even fatally, and then carried, perhaps rolled up in sheets, to the cupboard, in order not to have been found in a place linked to any one person? And then the Queen’s sheets, in which she had been carried, were put in the laundry, in the hope they would never be found and looked at closely enough to be identified? That was beginning to make more sense.
So where had she been killed? In whose bed? Surely Julius Sorokine’s. How had Minnie known?
He was back inside the Palace again. Painstakingly he spoke to all the staff Gracie had seen Minnie with the day before she died. Each one repeated what she had told him.
Minnie had followed a curious trail with growing excitement. She had asked about sheets. She had been intensely interested in the shards of broken china, where they had come from and their color and shape. This she had apparently inquired of Mr. Tyndale, and met with a brief and dismissive answer. She had also been interested in the footmen coming and going with buckets of water. She had asked about wine, what was drunk and where it came from, yet there was nothing to suggest she knew of the port bottles Gracie had found.
The other focus of her questions had been the arrival and departure of the women, and the delivery of the large wooden box of books and papers for Cahoon Dunkeld. Exactly what had happened when, and where were the books now?
Pitt was totally confused. Three women had arrived, two had left, and the third had been found dead. The carter had never been alone and unaccounted for anywhere near the upstairs floor, let alone any of the bedrooms. What, if any of it, was relevant to Sadie’s death?
He went over the facts again in his mind. The one thing that seemed to arise again and again, but of which he had no physical proof, were the shards of broken china that Tyndale had so vehemently refused to discuss with Gracie. Something about them