Last Suspect by Susan Evans McCloud

Author:Susan Evans McCloud
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Deseret Book Company
Published: 2019-10-29T22:18:09+00:00

Chapter Twelve

June Taylor, Linton’s London housekeeper, was as efficient and reasonable a woman as Callum could ask. She and the cook, Millie Powers, were a great help to him. Here he found a gleam of humanity at last. And here, for the first time, he found a possible clue.

“Anyone else?” he pressed. “Men of importance, recurrent visitors, family . . .”

They had already gone over the list of women—“feminine admirers” Millie called them—with whom Linton had had to do.

“Mr. Archie wasn’t as much of a ladies’ man as people wanted to make him,” June explained.

“It was just that the hussies wouldn’t leave him alone.”

They isolated four who would be worth talking to: the actress, Irene Sullivan, Gertrude Diller, Gloria Hadley, and Constance Peacock.

“Why did Linton choose Cecilia? She doesn’t seem—” Callum paused, searching for words, attempting a measure of diplomacy.

“She doesn’t seem like Mr. Archie? Worthy of him?” Millie Powers was bristling. “None of them was. But she—she knew how to work him, play the ‘poor little thing.’ He was a sucker for anything hurt or defenseless.”

Callum took a mental note of that. It fit in well with what he already knew of the man.

They exhausted what they knew. “Keep thinking,” Callum urged them. “Any little thing you can remember or recall. A small, seemingly inconsequential detail may prove of vital importance.”

Meanwhile he set his Scotland Yard friends at searching out information on Celia: Cecilia Lampton before she became Mrs. Linton. The woman must have a past. It may have no bearing, but then he was stopping at nothing; especially now, when nothing was about all he had in his grasp.

Tomorrow Callum would check out the women, and also those who had worked for Linton in one capacity or another. Tedium, when things got to this point, searching for something, anything—a chance remark, a casual word dropped. He spent the remainder of this first day in Linton’s private study, going through his papers, the drawers of his desk, the stacks of books he had lying around. This could be tedium also, but Callum relished it. The sense of the living man remained here, in this room, nearly as much as it did at Windermere. What’s more, Linton had been an orderly man. After an hour or two of reading his papers, Callum felt he had real insights into the man; it was a bit eerie to develop a liking, even a feeling of kinship, for a man who was dead. June Taylor brought him tea, and he continued, unmindful of the sooty dusk of twilight settling over the London streets. He was left at peace, and the hours fled as he sat at the large cherry wood desk, intent on his work.

◆ ◆ ◆

Laura stayed longer than she should have. It was raining when she made her way back to the cottage, and the dank, unpromising darkness of evening was already choking the hollows and the closely-grown copses of thin, yearling trees that hugged the lakeside. She set her things in order quickly, feeling a need to return to the warmth and normalcy of Jane Reid’s house.

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