It angered Solomon. Clearly, it had shaken Constance, and would do long after all physical signs of the outrage had gone. She clung to his fingers and took a deep breath.
“So much for civilized neighborhoods. I suppose you saw or heard no sign of the delivery, Jeremy?” she asked.
He shook his head. “Reckon it was before light.”
“Maybe,” Solomon said as another possibility struck him, “it’s supposed to be a warning to us to stop asking questions.”
Constance shook her head. “Even if we do stop, the police won’t. They might if it was just Nevvy. But for St. John?”
“Respectable families don’t want the police poking around,” Solomon reminded her. “I doubt they want us either.”
“A pity when they’ve just got my attention.” Her voice was still hard, and for the first time he caught that hint of ruthlessness that had helped her build her business from nothing, besting rivals and enemies alike to reach her goal. This establishment was her achievement, her life’s work, her pride. And she, who called herself all sorts of names without illusion, was insulted. And frightened.
“It’s trivial,” Solomon insisted. “Now, let’s have a cup of tea inside and concentrate on the reasons we came. Jeremy, how thoroughly did the police search the garden the morningthe bodies were found? Could they have missed a bottle, for example?”
Jeremy, filling a fresh bucket from the pump under the window, spoke over his shoulder. “I don’t know. I didn’t watch them. But I never found no bottles hiding under bushes, nor in the potting shed, nor the wood shed, neither.” He carried his bucket to the step, threw the water over it, and brushed it clear before indicating they could now pass cleanly to the back door and tea.
*
Constance didn’t wantto admit how shaken she was by what looked like a silly schoolboy prank. She wasn’t quite sure what upset her so, whether coming so soon and in the same place as the bodies made it disrespectful, or whether it was simply the idea of someone actively hating her enough to do this.
She was used to being disapproved of. In many ways, she even gloried in it. But hate was different.
However, after a few minutes with Solomon in the familiar surroundings of the kitchen, she was ready to face the garden again, and they took their tea outside.
“Would drunks bother to hide their evidence?” Solomon asked. “Aren’t they more likely to just abandon it or toss it to one side, out of the way?”
Constance sat down on the clean, drying doorstep and made throwing motions with her right arm, at first straight ahead in the direction of the herb garden, which Jeremy tended religiously, and the little lawn beyond. Then she tossed her imaginary bottle to the right and suspected it would have broken on the path or rolled into the wall. She tried to the left.
At best, it would probably have hit the potting shed door and probably broken on the path or…
Jeremy leaned his broom against the wall. “Sometimes things get stuck under the shed,” he said, ambling toward it.
The shed was on a stone plinth but built to overhang it by several inches. Jeremy crouched down, peering into the space.
“It’s not a bottle,” he reported, much to Constance’s disappointment.
But he stretched flat on the stone and thrust his hand under the shed. Constance and Solomon were on either side of him when he bounced back up and revealed his discovery.
Not a bottle, but a gentleman’s leather-and-silver pocket flask.
For a second, all three of them stared at it.
“Oh, well done, Jeremy,” Constance breathed, and the gardener shook a couple of insects off it and held it out toward them with distinct unease.
Solomon took it, checked the stopper was in place, and gave it a little shake. It seemed to be empty. He took out the stopper and sniffed it, then jerked his head back almost immediately, grimacing.
“Opium,” he said, holding the stopper out to Constance.
She smelled it too, stale, but still distinctive, invoking distant memories from childhood that she hadn’t understood at the time, and more recent ones of sickbeds and lost friends.
Solomon replaced the stopper. “Well, that’s how he took the opium.” He dusted some dirt and a clinging leaf from the flask and turned it over. “Smells like laudanum, only more intense. Definitely St. John’s, I’d say.” The engraved initials were clear enough:TSJ.
“Not new,” Constance observed, touching the old scratches and the worn patches of leather. She glanced back at the step. “If he’d thrown this away, would it have slid under the shed like that? Or did he put it there deliberately?”
“Why would he do that?” Solomon asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. To hide his identity? Conceal the opium? Perhaps Nevvy hid it, because the opium was his and he was afraid of a murder charge.”
