Page 54 of Lies in Little Sutherland
I snorted.Tom arched a brow at me, and I said, “It’s the middle of November.Surely they could find a better place to canoodle.”
“I’ll have you know, Darling—” a familiar voice drawled behind me, and I raised a hand.
“Spare me, St George.”Whether he was about to tell me that any place is a good place for canoodling, or it was the fact that Laetitia could make any place a good place for canoodling, I didn’t want to hear it.
Part of me expected him to make his point anyway, but he didn’t.“As you wish.”Instead, he leaned over my shoulder and let his eyes rove over the table.“What’s all this, then?”
“An experiment,” Tom said, gathering up Francis’s scribbled note while watching as Constance took the pen in her left hand and began writing.Her letters were more precise and less spiky than Francis’s.
And as such, also less like the note I had been shown at the constabulary.
Not that I had believed, for even a moment, that Constance had written it.
“I’ll go next,” Crispin said, as Constance started on her second sentence.“You’re planning to test everyone, I assume?”
“Unless you have a better idea.”
But Crispin didn’t.“Good luck explaining this to my father,” he merely said instead.
He left his post behind me—I breathed out, surreptitiously—and made his way to the empty chair on the other side of Constance.There, he pulled a sheet of writing paper towards himself and waited for Constance to pass him the pen before he started his own exercise.
“Is that your dominant hand?”Tom asked after a moment, as the letters took shape across the paper, beautifully controlled and in straight lines, not spiky at all.
Crispin flicked a look at him.“I’m naturally left-handed.I had it beaten into me to use my right hand?—”
I winced, and he added, “Not literally, Darling.Don’t worry.”
“I wouldn’t put it past your father,” I said.“Christopher said he tied your left hand behind your back so you wouldn’t use it.”
“Among other things.”He switched the pen to his other hand and kept going.“I won’t say it was fun.But I learned to write like a proper gentleman, and there was no permanent damage done.”
No, indeed.The letters he produced with his left hand weren’t any different from the ones he produced with his right.Neither line looked anything like the chicken scratches Francis and Christopher had come up with.
“Definitely not you,” I commented, and he put the pen down with a look at me.
“No.But then you knew that, didn’t you?”
Of course I had done.Six months ago I might have suspected him of trying to get me in trouble with the police for the fun of it.Now I knew that he’d never make that choice.
“Yes,” I said.“I did do.”
Tom grabbed the pen and used it to write Crispin’s name on the sheet of paper, and then handed the pen to me, along with a blank sheet.“Might as well do this properly.”
I arched my brows, although I accepted the pen.“You think I would accuse myself of a murder I didn’t commit?”Not to mention a murder I hadn’t had the opportunity to commit, since I had been with Christopher and had an alibi.
“No,” Tom said.“But if we’re going to do this, we’ll do it right.This way, no one can say I didn’t turn over every stone.”
Indeed not.I took the pen and began to scratch letters across the paper.The result looked quite a lot like what Constable Daniels had shown me, albeit no more so than what Francis and Christopher had produced.
“I can’t wait to see how my father responds to this,” Crispin said, watching my letters take shape with his chin on his hand.
“Do you think he’ll refuse?”
His eyes flicked up to my face for a second before dropping down to my hand again.“I don’t see how he could.Not without looking exceedingly suspicious.”
“You don’t think he’s guilty, do you?”
I pushed the pen across the table to Tom, who used it to write my name on the sheet of paper bearing my artistic contribution.
