Twisted Root - Anne Perry [121]
"What about the brother, Campbell?" Rathbone asked.
Monk shook his head. "Unlikely. He lives in Wiltshire somewhere. Only came up for the engagement party. I did check, and as far as the other servants knew, he barely saw Treadwell. He had his own carriage and driver, and no one ever saw him go anywhere near the mews while he was staying there. And Treadwell never went to Wiltshire in his life. And as for Campbell’s killing Mrs. Stourbridge, they were very close, everyone agreed on that, had been ever since they were children."
"Even close siblings can quarrel," Rathbone pointed out.
"Of course," Monk agreed a touch sharply, staring down at the polished fender where his foot was resting. "But no one with enough cold-blooded nerve to murder rather than pay blackmail is going to kill the sister who is his only link with a fortune the size of the Stourbridges’. Now she is dead, he has no claim at all. He is not especially close to either Harry or Lucius. They are friendly enough, but they will not continue Verona’s generosity."
Another blind alley.
Hester bit her lip. "Then we must find out if it was Major Stourbridge. However unpleasant, if that is the truth, we should know it."
"It would make sense," Rathbone admitted, pushing his hands into his pockets and taking them out again immediately. He had been taught not to put his hands in his pockets in boyhood, because it looked casual and pulled his clothes out of shape. He turned to Monk.
"Yes," Monk agreed, not to the likelihood but to accepting the task before Rathbone could ask him. "I should have pursued it before. I didn’t look at the Stourbridges, either ofthem."
"I don’t know what you can find in a day or two," Rathbone said wretchedly. "I’m going in with nothing! I have no other reasonable suspect to offer the jury, only ’person or persons unknown.’ Nobody’s going to believe that when Cleo and Miriam have perfect motives and every appearance of guilt."
"They may be guilty," Monk reminded him. "Or one of them may, perhaps in conspiracy with someone else."
"In the Stourbridge household?" Rathbone said with some sarcasm. "That has to be Miriam. And why, for the love of heaven?"
"I don’t know," Monk said angrily. "But there is obviously some critical feature about the whole story that we haven’t found—even if it is only the reason both women would rather hang than tell the truth. We’d better damned well discover what it is!"
Hester looked from Monk to Rathbone. "How long can you prolong the trial, Oliver?"
"We seem to spend our time asking him to sing songs while we scramble to find something vital," Monk said bitterly. "I’ll start tomorrow morning as soon as it’s light. But I don’t even know where to look!"
"What can I do to help?" Hester asked, more to Rathbone than to Monk.
"I wish I knew," the lawyer confessed. "Cleo admits to taking the medicines. There is nothing we can do to mitigate that except show how she used them, and we already have all the witnesses we need for that. We have dozens of men and women to swear to her diligence, compassion, dedication, sobriety and honesty in all respects except that of stealing medicines from the hospital. We even have people who will swear she was chaste, modest and clean. It will achieve nothing. She was still paying Treadwell blackmail money, and he had all but bled her dry. The only decent meals she ate were those given her either at the hospital or by the people she visited. She even dressed in cast-off clothes left her by the dead!"
Hester sat silently, steeped in misery.
"I must go home," Rathbone said at last. "Perhaps a good night of sleep will clear my mind sufficiently to think of something." He bade them good-night and left, acutely conscious of loneliness. He would lie by himself in his smooth linen sheets. Monk would lie with Hester in his arms. The clear, moonlit