“I still don’t trust the bastard,” he muttered, thumbing through another page of neatly tallied reports. “His manner with Wycombe was deuced strange, and when I questioned him myself, I found him to be disingenuous as well. I am increasingly persuaded he is to blame for the shot that wounded Izzy.”
But an important question continued to go unanswered. Why? He had yet to reach a plausible answer for that question. Still, he knew it was there. He had only to find it.
“Remind me,” Greymoor drawled as he flipped a page in the ledger perched on his lap, “why you think your steward would run about shooting like an outlaw in the wild west.”
“It was just the one shot,” he pointed out. “And Wycombe is the one who first brought my attention to the steward. Before that, I hadn’t even had a word with the fellow.”
Wycombe shrugged. “What can I say? A part of me will never cease to be a detective. It is a part of me, in the marrow of my bones. After Lady Isolde was wounded, I interviewed the domestics. The steward is the only person I interviewed who stated he was certain, without a doubt, that he had seen the butler with a weapon, claiming he was going to shoot grouse.”
“Are there grouse in Staffordshire?” Greymoor asked. “Didn’t think there were.”
“Not any longer,” Zachary said. “Which means that if Potter was indeed walking about with a weapon as Ridgely claimed, he was confusing Barlowe Park with our estate on Anglesey where my father used to host grouse-hunting parties. And if he was confused, he was more likely to go about shooting his weapon without regard for anyone else around him. We already know he is hard of hearing, and even with the device Lord Leydon fashioned to aid him, he likely would not have been warned that he was not alone at the time he fired the shot.”
“Then you have your answer.” Greymoor took another healthy sip of his beverage. “I understand your fondness for the old codger, but if he is wandering about with weapons, it is time for you to accept the truth. Next time, he may not merely maim your future wife.”
“We have made certain Potter does not possess another firearm,” Wycombe said, his head still bent over the ledger. “And therein lies some of the additional suspicion. We were never able to locate the blunderbuss Ridgely supposedly saw Potter carrying.”
The steward had suggested perhaps the elderly butler had dropped the weapon in his confusion after it had discharged. A neat solution, as far as Zachary was concerned. His suspicions were raised, and he did not think he was wrong to suspect the steward; he trusted Wycombe’s intuition implicitly, and everything he had seen thus far confirmed his friend’s concerns.
“Let us not forget it took Ridgely two bloody days to provide me with the records I requested,” Zachary added, still nettled by the brazen manner in which the steward had led him on a merry chase.
To be sure, this was the last way he wanted to spend the night before his wedding.
But it had to be done.
“You think the steward was trying to shoot Lady Isolde?” Greymoor asked, looking as perplexed as he sounded.
“I can think of no reason why he would wish her harm,” Zachary said grimly. “When the bullet grazed Izzy, however, I was walking toward her. It is possible that Ridgely was trying to shoot me, but he missed, injuring my betrothed instead. Seeing what he had done, he fled, and then was quick to pin the blame for his misdeed upon Potter.”
The marquess nodded. “I don’t doubt that could be a plausible explanation. However, why would your steward wish to shoot you? I confess, I am at a loss.”
“I found a cache of letters my brother sent to Potter,” Zachary explained grimly, the knot of apprehension in his chest growing tighter as he recalled the unintentional discovery. “In them, Horatio expressed concerns about the steward. In the last he sent, my brother asked Potter to report on Ridgely’s management of Barlowe Park and suggested there were discrepancies between the reports the steward had been sending and the finances of the estate.”
The sudden, almost desperate spurt of missives had all been dated close to the time of his brothers’ deaths.
The sight of his eldest brother’s terrible penmanship had taken Zachary aback. It had been ages since he had seen anything in Horatio’s hand. His brother had always been hasty and curt in all his missives, his handwriting barely legible. He had not been the sort to care for communication in depth. The letters to Potter had proved little had changed in the intervening years.
“Has it occurred to you that you may have both a Bedlamite nonagenarian butler running about shooting imaginary targetsanda thieving steward both?” Greymoor quipped lightly.
“Leave it to Grey to think the diabolical,” Wycombe said without any heat.
“I suppose it is possible,” Zachary allowed grudgingly.
“Unlikely,” the duke added.
“And who made you a bloody expert?” Greymoor asked. “You are a duke, not a Scotland Yard Chief Inspector.”
“Ha,” Wycombe drawled. “Clever lad.”
Zachary reached the end of a page and flipped it over, scrubbing a hand over his face with a sigh. “Christ, the hour grows late, and I am weary to the bone. Perhaps we should all simply…”
His words trailed off as his eyes caught on something peculiar on the ledger page before him. The rents he had been seeing had numbers transposed. An eight where a six should be. A nine in place of a three. He had been seeing the same entries for so long, they had all begun to blend together into a hopeless blur. But here before him on the page, he suddenly saw the changes in the similar numbers. The incoming funds had been altered so they appeared smaller. Not each item, but enough.
He flipped back a few more pages to confirm he was truly seeing the evidence before him and not just imagining it, spying a hopeful delusion.
“What is it?” Wycombe asked, his Scotland Yard detective instincts once more coming back to life. “You have spotted something, have you not?”
“Discrepancies,” Zachary reported back, vindication filling his chest with a hollow sense of anticipation. “The rents have been misrepresented.”
