Paragon Walk - Anne Perry [45]
“It seems Fulbert Nash has disappeared,” Vespasia spoke as if she herself could hardly believe what she was saying.
George breathed out in a sigh, and the fork clattered from his hand.
“What on earth do you mean, disappeared?” he said slowly. “Where has he gone?”
“If I knew where he had gone, George, I would hardly say he had disappeared!” Vespasia said with unusual acerbity. “No one knows where he is! That is the point. He did not come home yesterday, although he had no dinner engagement that anyone knows of, and he has not been home all night. His valet says he has no clothes with him other than the light suit he was wearing for luncheon.”
“Are all the coachmen or footmen at home?” George demanded. “Did anyone take a message or call a cab for him?”
“Apparently not.”
“Well, he can’t simply have vanished! He must be somewhere!”
“Of course.” Vespasia frowned still more and at last took herself a piece of toast and spread it with butter and apricot preserve. “But no one knows where. Or, if they do, they are not prepared to say.”
“Oh God!” George gasped at her. “You’re not suggesting he’s been murdered!”
Emily choked on her tea.
“I’m not suggesting anything.” Vespasia waved her arm at Emily, for George to do something about her. “Slap her, for goodness’ sake!” She waited while George obliged and Emily pushed him away, finding her breath again. “I simply don’t know,” Vespasia finished. “But doubtless there will be suggestions, all of them unpleasant, and that will be one of them.”
And it was, although Emily did not hear it until the following day. She had called upon Jessamyn and found Selena already there. So soon after Fanny’s death, social visits were being kept very much within their own immediate circle, possibly as a matter of good taste, but more likely so that they might be freer to discuss it if they wished.
“I suppose you have heard nothing whatever?” Selena asked anxiously.
“Nothing,” Jessamyn agreed. “It is as if the ground had opened up and swallowed him into it. Phoebe came this morning, and naturally Afton has inquired as much as is possible, discreetly, but he is not at any of his clubs in town, and no one else can be found who has spoken to him.”
“Is there no one in the country he might have visited?” Emily asked.
Jessamyn’s eyebrows shot up.
“At this time of the year?”
“It’s the height of the Season!” Selena added, a little disparagingly. “Whoever would leave London now?”
“Perhaps Fulbert,” Emily was stung to reply. “He seems to have left Paragon Walk without a word of explanation to anyone. If he were in London, why should he be anywhere but here?”
“That makes sense,” Jessamyn admitted, “since he is not at any of the clubs, and he does not seem to be visiting any other friends up for the Season.”
“The alternatives are too dreadful to contemplate.” Selena shivered, then instantly contradicted herself. “But we must.”
Jessamyn looked at her.
Selena was not going to draw back now.
“We must face it, my dear. It is possible he has been done away with!”
Jessamyn’s face was very pale, very fine.
“You mean murdered?” she said quietly.
“Yes, I’m afraid I do.”
There was a moment’s silence. Emily’s mind raced. Who would murder Fulbert, and why? The other possibility was, at once, worse and also an infinite relief—except that she dared not say it—suicide. If he had after all been the one who killed Fanny, maybe he had taken this desperate way to escape.
Jessamyn was still staring. In her lap her long slender hands were stiff, as if she could neither feel with them nor move them.
“Why?” she whispered. “Why would anyone murder Fulbert, Selena?”
“Perhaps whoever killed poor Fanny killed him also?” Selena replied.
Emily could not say what was in her mind. She must lead them to it, gently, until one of them had to say it for herself.
“But Fanny was—molested,” she reasoned aloud. “She was only killed after that—perhaps because she recognized him, and he could not then let her