Page 62 of Death at the Dower House
The chief inspector hesitated for a moment before he nodded. “It was on the bed in Lady Peckham’s room. The crime scene.”
I felt all the color drain out of my cheeks. “I didn’t notice it.”
“I imagine you had other things to think about,” Pendennis said simply. “But it was in the bedclothes. And so was this.”
He conjured up something small and shiny that he placed on top of the handkerchief. Crispin and I both leaned forward. “A cufflink?”
Pendennis nodded. “Yours?” he asked Crispin, who made a face.
“It looks rather like one of mine.”
“Can you tell me how it got there? Next to the body?”
Crispin shook his head. “I wasn’t there. I left her outside in the garden and went to my own room. My cousins were there. They can tell you.”
“Did you wear it yesterday?” I asked Crispin. “Do you have more than one pair?”
He looked at me as if I were some poor waif who had just crawled out of a tenement house in Southwark. “Of course I have more than one pair, Darling. No one has just one pair of cufflinks.”
Pendennis’s expression twitched. Maybehehad only one pair of cufflinks. Or perhaps he simply thought Crispin’s offense over it was humorous.
“Of course not, St George.” My voice was dry. “My apologies for suggesting that you might be so economically disadvantaged as to only possess one pair. Was this the pair you wore yesterday?”
He shook his head. “That’s the set with the onyx. I wore that the day of the funeral.”
“The day before yesterday,” I told Pendennis. “We were still at Sutherland Hall then.”
I turned back to Crispin. “Could they have been in your pocket and got tangled up with the handkerchief? Or did Johanna perhaps undress you after the funeral and decide to hold onto one as a keepsake of a lovely moment?”
“Don’t be crude, Darling.” His cheeks turned pink. “Johanna did not take my cufflinks off, nor any of my other clothing, after the funeral or at any other time. I already told you that. I have had no intimate relations with Johanna de Vos. Ever.”
“Just kisses,” I murmured. Saccharinely.
“I can’t help that, Darling!Shekissedme!”
“Of course she did,” I said. “I have no idea how you’ve managed to get a reputation as such a consummate seducer, St George. From what I’ve observed this week, you hardly have to lift a finger.”
A clearing of a throat brought me back to myself, and Crispin and I both looked at Pendennis. I felt my own cheeks flush. “Sorry, Chief Inspector.”
“Don’t mention it,” Pendennis said. And added, “I mean that. Please don’t mention it again. Lord St George…” He turned to Crispin, “you can’t tell me how this cufflink came to be next to Miss de Vos’s dead body?”
Crispin shook his head, the heat in his cheeks fading at the reminder that Johanna was dead and he was a suspect. “No, sir.”
“When was the last time you saw it?”
“If it’s mine,” Crispin said, “the last time I remember seeing it was when I put it on before the funerals on Thursday morning. I must have taken them off again later, but I don’t remember that.”
He looked lost. Normally I would have twitted him about his memory loss, but seeing as it had been the evening after watching his mother’s coffin being lowered into the ground, I thought perhaps I could forgive him a moment or two of inattention. He had been in terrible shape by the time we got back to Sutherland Hall that night.
“Did you bring this set of cufflinks with you to the Dower House?” Pendennis asked.
“I may have. But I didn’t pack my own bag. My father’s manservant at Sutherland Hall did that.”
Pendennis nodded and made a note.
“If you did,” I commented, “the other one ought to be here somewhere. In your room. With your other luggage. Or in the pocket of your dinner jacket, if that’s where this one came from.”
Pendennis looked at me, blandly.
