Buckingham Palace Gardens - Anne Perry [81]
“It’s fish,” her husband told her. “Stop indulging your imagination, or you’ll end up in hysterics. Have a glass of water.” He held up his hand. “Somebody, fetch her a glass of water!”
Gracie stepped forward, picked up the crystal water jug, and poured a wineglass full. She gave it to Mrs. Marquand, who took it with a startled gesture and drank a couple of sips before putting it down.
Gracie retreated to the wall again, hoping to resume her previous invisibility.
“He still relies on you, though, doesn’t he, Papa?” Mrs. Sorokine took up the previous conversation as if nothing had happened. “I think there will be no question of his complete support.”
“Let us hope so,” Mr. Dunkeld replied. He did not look as pleased with her as Gracie would have expected. After all, she was in a way complimenting him.
“There is no one else with better credentials,” Mrs. Quase said with forced cheerfulness. “In fact, I’m not sure there is really anyone else at all.”
“There will always be other offers,” Mr. Sorokine pointed out. “But I agree, they are not nearly as good.”
“I expect they’ll try, though, don’t you?” Again Mrs. Sorokine was looking at her father. “The Prince of Wales’s support will make all the difference, won’t it?”
“Obviously!” Dunkeld said with considerable sharpness. “That is what we are here for. You do not need to keep repeating what is already obvious.”
“We can hardly be complacent.” Mrs. Dunkeld spoke for the first time. “After all, however good we are at building railways, apparently one of us killed that poor woman.”
“She was a street whore, Elsa,” Dunkeld said brusquely. “Don’t speak of her as if she were some poor girl attacked on her way to church.”
Mrs. Dunkeld looked at him with a sudden flare of fury in her blue eyes. “So were the victims of the Whitechapel murderer. They’d have hanged him just the same, if they had caught him.”
Mrs. Quase gave a gasp. Mrs. Marquand was ashen.
Mrs. Sorokine raised both her hands in mock applause. “Oh, bravo, Stepmother! That’s the perfect remark to season the fish course! Now we shall feel so much more like choosing game. What is it, pheasant in aspic, jugged hare, or a little venison perhaps? Nothing like talk of a good hanging to improve the appetite.”
“Yours anyway, it would seem!” Mrs. Dunkeld shot back at her. “It is idiotic to sit here and talk of the plans for a railway the length of Africa when one of us is a lunatic who kills women, and the police are here and not going to leave until they find out which one of us it is.”
“We are all powerfully aware of that,” Dunkeld said freezingly, his face set hard. “It appears to have escaped your intelligence that we are trying our best to have a civilized meal and behave with some dignity until such time as that is. Always assuming that idiot policeman is capable of doing anything more than sitting in his chair and asking endless, stupid questions. He doesn’t appear to be any further forward than he was the morning he arrived.”
Gracie was so furious she almost choked on her own breath, perhaps partly because she had a terrible fear that Mr. Dunkeld was right about Mr. Pitt’s lack of progress. They had as evidence the Queen’s sheets, the knife, the bottles, and knew about the broken dish that wasn’t supposed to exist, and buckets and buckets of water, but none of it made any sense. She ached to be able to snap back at him that they wouldn’t know anything about what progress Pitt was making anyway, until he was ready to arrest someone, but she could do nothing but stand there against the wall as if she were a bundle of clothes on a peg.
Almost unbelievably, it was Mrs. Sorokine who said what Gracie wanted to say. “He might know all kinds of things, Papa. He would hardly be likely to tell us. After all, we are the suspects.”
“Only if he’s a fool!” Dunkeld snapped at her. “I wasn’t even in Africa when the first woman