Page 48 of Nature of the Crime
Hugh held up a hand. “Slow down, Mrs. Plimpton. What did…Sinnyand Charles tell you?”
She tangled her fingers together. “Sinny came back from France last year saying the duke weren’t dead. He’d found out from a reliable someone that it was all faked. Well, when he told me and Charles—the baron, I mean—Charles saw a way to make some blunt.”
“Through blackmail,” Hugh said. She nodded.
“I always got the feeling Sinny didn’t care much about the money. He told me what he wanted to do was expose the duke’s lie.” The innkeeper shifted her eyes to Audrey. “He said you knew about it.”
Only by providence were the three of them here, alone. But there was no denying that Philip’s secret was closing in around them like a noose.
“That is absurd,” Audrey said, stiffly. She didn’t need to convince Mrs. Plimpton; the woman was too panicked to care.
“Who hired Vaillancourt?” Hugh asked.
“Charles,” she answered. Then clarified, “He’d hired him before.”
“And what was Mr. Vaillancourt’s mission?” Audrey asked.
“To follow you,” she answered, looking contrite. “To see if you met with the duke. And if you did, to then follow the duke to wherever he’d been hiding.”
Hugh suspected Vaillancourt had intercepted their letters to look for information about Philip. Hoping, perhaps, that they would share something revealing for him to take back to Burton and St. John.
Audrey pressed, “How did Sinny and Lord Burton react when their plans fell short?”
The innkeeper’s face said it all. She slowly shook her head. “Charles was upset. He’d only wanted to make a little coin off of it. But Sinny…he was livid. Blew off to Calais on the tide.”
It all made sense now. Hugh paced in front of the table where Audrey and Mrs. Plimpton sat. “And have you seen him since?”
She lifted her chin, as if in defiance. Though she was still relatively attractive, her middle age showed in the faint creases of her skin on her neck. The skin there was blotchy with hives, too, a reaction to the stress of the interrogation.
“No. But when Vaillancourt turned up dead on the packet and that note pointed toward the duchess, Charles was sure it had something to do with him.”
That would surely give the baron a motive to pin the crime on Audrey, if only to suppress St. John’s involvement, and hence, Burton’s own role in the situation. He’d turned from thinking about blackmail and bribery to saving his own skin.
“Do you know where Sinny stays when he’s in Dover?” Hugh asked.
The woman raised a brow. “With me, mostly. If he’s got another place, I don’t know about it.”
Hugh wasn’t sure whether she was being completely truthful, but enough pieces of the puzzle had come together now to be certain that Lord St. John was the mysterious man Audreyhad seen in her vision, conversing with Vaillancourt aboard theBritannia.
“Mrs. Plimpton, my late husband had dealings with St. John. Sinny, as you know him.” Audrey stood up from her chair. “He is a dangerous man. If you do see him, I advise that you let us know straightaway.”
The innkeeper looked appropriately shaken as she bobbed her head. Audrey and Hugh stepped from the dining room, and then into the front sitting room. He took her arm and brought her closer.
“If Mrs. Plimpton is still alive, it must mean St. John decided she didn’t know enough to kill her the way he did the baron. But she could still be in trouble.”
“So could Becky,” Audrey agreed. “If that was St. John near the barracks, and I think it was, he may have heard her confession.”
Hugh raked a hand through his hair, his whole body strung tight as a bow string. “Burton wanted to blackmail Philip, and St. John wanted to draw Philip out of hiding and expose him.”
“And when Mr. Vaillancourt failed to locate him on the Continent through me, St. John decided to try and bring Philip here, to England, himself.”
“By implicating you in a scandal that would cause a stir not only here, but across the Channel, into France. He’s wagering he will come back here to try and help you.”
It was madness. There was no way to know if Philip would ever even hear of it.
Audrey sighed. “It’s not going to work. He isn’t going to return.”
Which, Hugh thought, might push St. John to act even more rashly. Desperately.
