A Deceptive Devotion by Iona Whishaw

Author:Iona Whishaw
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / Women Sleuths
Publisher: Touchwood Editions
Published: 2019-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

Darling sat back, looking out the window, tapping the desk with his pencil. Lane sat opposite him.

“You said you wanted to discuss one problem,” she said. “Now it’s two. You’re concerned about what my countess is up to, and now you think there’s a man running around King’s Cove with a bayonet that he knows how to use. Anything else I should know about? I’m not finding this all that relaxing. And I’m sure my neighbours, as plucky as they are, and as apt to come together to pass buckets of water in a chain during an emergency, are not either.”

“I never said it was a bayonet. We don’t know what it is.”

“As to his running around King’s Cove, you don’t know, really, that Mr. Brodie was not killed by someone who wanted him dead, specifically. It’s a singular circumstance, in my view, that he was killed way out in the bush in a place where no one could have known his whereabouts unless he’d been followed. It doesn’t follow that whoever it is will now proceed from house to house executing people. He could have done that right at the beginning without the trouble of crashing about in the underbrush.”

“That’s a funny word to use, executing.” Darling turned back to Lane. He had mostly stopped being uneasy about her former life, but her use of the word “execute” once again stirred his anxieties about what sort of life she’d been used to. “Is there something about what I’ve told you that makes you think the man was executed?”

“That clean cut, I suppose. I don’t know much about throat-cutting, of course, but I suspect people often make a mess of it. People in general are not expert killers, even with military training. You’d be surprised how many shots taken during the war missed altogether. From that we can surmise that the average civilian, or even the average veteran, who doesn’t know how to shoot properly, or has surprised someone during a robbery and has no time to think and so on, is unlikely to go around murdering people in quite this way. This seems to me to show that the killer had time, and the element of surprise, perhaps, and a very high, not to say professional, level of skill.”

She pulled her chair closer and drew a line on the desk with her finger. “Let’s say this is the creek. You found the man on this side, where he might have been sitting in the shade of that big outcrop you mentioned, maybe even dozing, if this was an afternoon killing. He must not have heard whoever it was until it was too late. If he was the intended victim, he must have been followed by someone very patient who waited until it was safe to sneak up on him. If he was a random victim, then he must have stumbled on something someone didn’t want him to see, or maybe was trying to protect. A cache of money, for example.

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