The Serpent on the Crown - Elizabeth Peters [138]
Emerson had maintained his silence; now he could control himself no longer. “She killed Petherick?”
“We will never know for certain,” I replied. “What we do know is that Daffinger increased his demands. One of the men who had served in his unit during the War was a young archaeologist named Lidman. They became friends and talked about their various interests. In the final bloody weeks, Lidman was killed—blown to bits, as Daffinger put it.
“Daffinger had learned a great deal from Lidman, including the value of antiquities. He wanted half of Petherick’s estate. Magda fled, taking with her the most valuable object in the collection. Furious at what he considered her betrayal, he pursued her.”
I turned over another page. “By the time he tracked her down, Mrs. Petherick had got her nerve back. She pointed out that if he spoke she stood to lose her inheritance, but he stood to lose everything, and might have to face a charge of blackmail. They entered into negotiations; fearing he might attempt to steal the statuette from her room, she presented it to us. She had already concocted her story about the curse and taken another room in the name of Mrs. Johnson, in order to set up her scheme.”
Emerson had heard most of this before, and was waxing restless. “She took us in completely,” he growled. He does not like to be taken in. “With all that talk of curses and black afrits.”
“I didn’t believe it, and neither did you,” I retorted. “But I admit we might have been more skeptical about her motives. At any rate, Daffinger was furious when he found out what she had done. He made several attempts to break into the house; being unsuccessful, he tried another trick, representing himself as his deceased friend in order to be hired by Cyrus, which would, he hoped, gain him entry to this house. He was an intelligent man with an excellent memory, and he had spent hours listening to Lidman expound on Amarna. I suppose there wasn’t much else to talk about in the trenches.”
“It was he who killed her, then?” David asked. “Why? It’s usually the blackmailer who is murdered, not the victim.”
“She tried to kill him,” I said. “That night when they went walking along the river. She had offered to meet him to discuss his demands. She was a large, strong woman, and he wasn’t expecting danger. It was pure bad luck for her that he survived. Naturally that angered him even more, and when they met next, in the Winter Palace garden, he was in no mood for trifling. Seeing her sumptuously attired, bewigged and bejeweled, with no sign of remorse, was bad enough; then she made the fatal mistake of offering him a trumpery pair of diamond earrings and told him this was her last payment. She had learned that he had a criminal record in Germany; now he was the one who stood to lose most. In a fit of rage he attacked her, and in the process of stifling her cries for help, caused her heart to stop. He claimed he didn’t intend to kill her. Perhaps he didn’t; but once the deed was done he had no choice, as he explained, but to conceal the body. He took the earrings, though, and stripped her of her jewels, in order to give the impression that robbery had been the motive. The strangest thing of all was what he did after he had placed her under the coral vine. Daoud’s informant was right; there were white petals strewn over the body. Ayyid, who is not interested in horticulture, did not observe them; but white roses were her favorites.”
Nefret shivered. “Why do I find that horrifying?”
“Ambivalence,” I said. “Love and hate intertwined and inseparable. To those of us who never feel such conflict