“It isn’t haunted,” Millicent said, her tone impatient. “However, Helen did seem upset that the home had been given to you, Inspector, and Miss Spencer. Perhaps she went there to see it one last time.”
“In the middle of the night?” Nadia dismissed the idea with a roll of her red, teary eyes. “Helen is sentimental but not reckless. To go all the way to London at that hour, alone… No. She simply wouldn’t have done that.”
Jasper accepted Millicent’s handwriting sample. She wouldn’t meet his eyes.
“What do you know so far, Inspector?” Frederick asked as he, too, handed him a writing sample. Jasper collected them but did not look at them, not wanting to be distracted.
“Information is still being gathered,” he replied, purposefully vague. He kept his gaze on Frederick. “You could help answer a question, however.”
The man’s forehead furrowed. “Whatever you need.”
“I happened upon you last night,” Jasper began. “Just outside the billiards room, you were chastising a maid. Quite harshly, I thought. What was it over?”
The viscount’s son hitched his chin. “Hiding in the shadows, were you?”
Jasper smiled thinly. “I didn’t want to interrupt.”
After a brief glance toward Millicent, as if to check her reaction—though she was staring straight ahead with pursed lips—Frederick answered, “That was Ursula. A fine enough maid, but she is far too free with her opinions and relishes spreading gossip. I suppose I lost my patience with her last night.”
“What did she say?” Jasper asked.
He shifted his footing and then shrugged. “I can’t recall the exact wording, but she was weighing in on my sister’s choice to give the house on Craven Hill to strangers. She was out of line, and I asked her to mind her tongue.”
It matched with what Jasper could recall of the conversation. Frederick had told the maid to mind her own business if she wanted to keep her position at Cowper Hall.
“Oh, Freddie, the poor girl means no harm,” Nadia admonished. “She is surely upset over my mother’s death.” She looked to Jasper and explained, “Ursula was my mother’s maid.”
He nodded, understanding why Ursula might have felt compelled to give an opinion on Francine’s odd choice. And aftera trying day, in which Frederick himself had not been welcomed to his older sister’s will reading, he might have been feeling bitter and tense.
“It might not have any bearing on the case,” Jasper said, eyeing the viscount again. He’d lifted his head from his hand, but he still appeared ashen and morose, and as if hardly listening to the conversation around him. Jasper pressed on, “I would like to know, however, why you, my lord, and you, Mr. Cowper, were not at the will reading.”
The viscount’s beady glare sharpened. “You are correct, Inspector—it does not have any bearing on my granddaughter’s murder.”
“I would like to be the one to determine if that is so,” Jasper replied. “Were the two of you not invited?”
He knew they would bristle and think him ill-mannered and prying, but that was just the way of things. Jasper did not expect, nor even want, to be liked by the people he was questioning. He wanted them upset, unbalanced, flustered, as that was when the truth most often slipped free.
“There was no reason for my son and me to be there,” the viscount answered, his temper flickering higher. “She left her possessions to her children, as she should have. And to you and that morgue worker, although I cannot begin to comprehend why.”
Just as quickly as Lord Cowper’s temper flared, it ebbed again. His shoulders sank, and he again lowered his head to his hand. Jasper didn’t miss how he had not answered the question of whether they had not been invited. But he would leave it for now. Just as he would leave getting the viscount’s handwriting sample and his movements the night before. There would be more opportunities to question Lord Cowper, but Jasper did not believe the old man could have rushed to London in a storm, killed his granddaughter, and then made it back to Cowper Hallin time to sit down to breakfast before Jasper had arrived shortly before eight.
“I’ll need you, Mr. Dalton, to come to London to formally identify your wife’s body,” Jasper said, switching tracks.
Anthony’s initial reaction was to grimace. Before he could make any reply, Frederick said, “I will accompany him.”
At this, Millicent whipped her head around to peer at her husband. “Is that necessary?”
Frederick glowered at her with a visible command for her to hush. She straightened her spine and looked away from him.
“I’ll check in with my constable and sergeant to see how the questioning of your staff is proceeding,” Jasper said, moving toward the drawing room exit. “We’ll leave for London at dawn.”
“We will be ready,” Frederick said, his tone bleak.
Jasper left them to their grief, hoping Warnock and Price had discovered something useful from the viscount’s staff.
Chapter Nine
Amiserable pall hung over the morgue the following morning. Leo supposed that to most people, this was what a morgue was supposed to feel like. However, it had never felt like a forbidding and sorrowful place to her before, so the unwieldy quiet between her and Connor stood out as new.
