Secrets of the Nile--A Lady Emily Mystery by Tasha Alexander

Author:Tasha Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Luxor, 1904

21

Mr. Troubridge’s admission that he would have killed anyone who stood in the way of his learning he was little Marian’s father did not convince me he was responsible for Lord Deeley’s death. First, he seemed genuinely shocked at the news that Miss Weldon had killed herself. I did not believe he already knew anything about her death. Second, we could not be sure he was the child’s father. Perhaps what mattered more was whether Mr. Troubridge believed he was. He claimed not to have known about her existence and insisted he had never seen the picture of her with Miss Weldon, but he could be lying. Finally, even a barely competent murderer would refrain from making death threats in his current circumstances. Unless he’d done so deliberately to throw us off track. He’d balked at the idea that he’d kept the apricot pits in his room, stating emphatically that it would have made no sense if he was the killer. This gave me pause. Had he deliberately adopted a strategy of setting up evidence in just such a way that it would appear someone else was trying to frame him?

After Mr. Troubridge left the boat and I’d written a letter to Miss Weldon’s sister, Colin and I took our usual positions on the deck with the awning rolled back to reveal stars pricking through the velvety blue sky. I hadn’t yet told him about what I’d learned concerning his mother and Lord Deeley and it was time he knew. He blanched a bit when I showed him the pertinent passage in the dead man’s journal but accepted his mother’s position that there was no romantic connection between them.

“Deeley must have imagined it,” he said. “Mother has never shown any interest in having that sort of relationship again. It had to be a flight of fancy on his part.”

“I agree, but it’s rather odd, isn’t it? He doesn’t strike me as having been a particularly romantic man. I believe that he long carried a torch for her and can accept that he might have become more sentimental as he aged, but nothing rings true in his claim to have at last won her heart.”

“There’s no truth in it and we have no way of discovering what led him to write such a thing. I’m not convinced it matters in the least. It couldn’t have anything to do with his death,” he said. “I didn’t remove the papyrus from the frame to see if there was anything behind it. It was sloppy of me.”

I did not suspect—not in the slightest—that Mrs. Hargreaves had poisoned her childhood friend. Still, I could not entirely dismiss the possibility that Lord Deeley’s claims, even if untruthful, were relevant. Why had someone covered up the photograph of the two of them? Had Lord Deeley done it, and if so, why? Was he harboring affection for someone else? Someone who might be angered by the picture? Who, other than his servants, would have been in his

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