And One to Die On(41)

Kelly might still not have approached Gregor Demarkian, on the principle that he would only be borrowing trouble, except that it turned out to be so easy. Nobody had really had the heart for drinking liqueurs after Hannah Graham’s little fit at dinner, especially after Hannah returned and insisted on talking the whole thing out over and over again. Everybody had been minimally polite for the least amount of time they could be. Then they had all drifted off to their rooms or to other parts of the house. Only Hannah Graham had remained in the living room, drinking mineral water on ice and getting sourer and more hostile by the minute.

That’s a woman who would be much happier if she’d let herself drink something serious, Kelly Pratt told himself, watching Gregor Demarkian go into the library and begin to look over the things spread out on the tables. Lydia Acken had gone to bed and Bennis Hannaford had disappeared, so Demarkian was on his own for the first time in the evening. Kelly Pratt went to the library door. Demarkian stopped for a long time in front of the table with Lilith Brayne’s things on it. He picked up shoes and fans and necklaces and put them down again. He picked up a vase and read what was written on the bottom of it.

Kelly Pratt couldn’t help himself. “Is there something wrong?” he blurted out. “Is there something there that should be there?”

Gregor Demarkian looked around in astonishment. “I don’t know. I was just wasting time.”

Kelly Pratt blushed. “I thought you might be detecting something. You looked so intent. You almost looked angry.”

Demarkian turned back to the table. “I was just trying to figure out why it is people buy things like these. They had so much stuff. Beads. Fans. Shoes. Handbags. It goes on and on and on. And what for?”

“I don’t know,” Kelly said.

“It’s interesting to look at the differences in their taste, too,” Demarkian said. “They were sisters. From what I understand, before the royal mess over Cavender Marsh, they were even fairly close. But they didn’t begin to like the same things.”

“They liked Cavender Marsh,” Kelly pointed out.

Demarkian laughed. “That’s true enough. And they both liked him too much, if you ask me. I don’t understand the things people do for what they call love.”

“I don’t either,” Kelly Pratt said. He was feeling much better now. There was something about the way Gregor Demarkian had laughed that had taken the sting out of him. In fact, Kelly couldn’t remember now why he had thought that Gregor Demarkian was such a formidable and dangerous man. He really didn’t look like much, once you got close to him. Tall. Broad. Running to fat. The face was a horror story. Big-nosed and almost painfully ethnic, it was the kind of face that any man with real ambition would have worked on these days. If Kelly Pratt had had that face, he would have signed himself into a clinic in Switzerland as soon as he was able to afford it.

Kelly walked over to the table of Lilith Brayne’s things. Lilith Brayne seemed to have favored lilac and old rose in her personal life. The things on Tasheba Kent’s table were much more of a piece: all black, all vampy and fussed up with beads and jet.

“So,” Kelly Pratt said. “Tell me. Do you have any idea what really happened to Lilith Brayne?”

Gregor Demarkian sighed. “Don’t tell me. You think I’m out here to investigate that, too.”

“Well, you must be out here to investigate something. That’s what you do.”

“I also take vacations sometimes. I also take time off and read books. Sometimes I even write articles for law enforcement journals.”

“You wouldn’t want to take a vacation here. And you could read books anywhere. This place has terrible light.”

“As far as I know, there isn’t even any reason to question how Lilith Brayne died,” Gregor Demarkian said. “We’re talking about an investigation by a perfectly qualified police force that took place in 1938. It’s not as if new evidence had leapt into public view that we now have to take account of. It’s not as if we could go back and look at the evidence they had then, either. It’s all finished and done with. There’s no point in going on with it.”

Kelly Pratt went over to the table with Cavender Marsh’s things on it and looked at that for a minute.

“Tell me something,” he said. “If somebody did have new evidence, or if they knew something nobody had noticed at the time, what would you tell them to do?”

“It would depend,” Gregor Demarkian said.

“On what?”

“On what he wanted to use the new evidence for. You have to understand, right away, what you couldn’t do with such evidence. Even if you were able to prove now, conclusively and without loopholes, what the police tried and failed to prove then—meaning that Cavender Marsh murdered his wife—you still wouldn’t be able to do anything about Cavender Marsh. The man is almost eighty years old. Even if you could convince the French government to retry him, you couldn’t convince the United States government to extradite him. And my guess is that it would be a billion-to-one against getting the French government to retry him, especially since the French government that tried him in the first place was the one that existed before the Nazi invasion, which is related only in theory to the one that exists now.”