Not a Creature Was Stirring(94)

Women.

Gregor shut it out of his mind. Now was not the time. He had to figure out where he’d gone wrong, in this place, with these people. His fundamental discovery was not a mistake. He was convinced of that. Too much—the evidence of the money, the evidence of the notes, the evidence of the book in Emma Hannaford’s room—pointed in that direction. But somewhere along the line, he had made an error. If he hadn’t, Myra Hannaford’s face wouldn’t have been smashed. There would have been nothing about the death that pointed to murder.

The whole thing was making him distinctly jumpy. The only way he could make sense of this particular murder was to assume there was going to be another. That was bad enough, that was god-awful, but he kept getting stuck on the why. He knew what had happened. He even had a guess—and only a guess—as to who had made it happen. But a motive for this mess was beyond him.

Now he stood in the foyer, watching John Henry Newman Jackman getting out of an unmarked car in front of Engine House. Gregor hadn’t thought about it before, but he found Jackman’s personal response to this case very odd. He’d known cops who were intense, and cops who were scared, and cops who didn’t give a damn. Jackman was none of those things. He seemed to be operating on another plane altogether. Gregor had seen him exasperated, puzzled, annoyed, and impatient. He had never seen him angry, shocked, or appalled. Maybe Jack-man found it hard to accept people like the Hannafords as real. Gregor had had that problem himself the first time he’d been forced to deal with someone who didn’t have to work for a living.

Outside, the snow was falling with all the force of hurricane rain. They were in for a world-class blizzard. Even moving swiftly, Jackman couldn’t avoid snow piling up on his shoulders and coating his chest. Every once in a while it hit him in the face, and he blanched.

Gregor moved away from the foyer windows and opened the front doors. He’d had as much of servants as he could take in one day. Every time he turned around there was someone there, in uniform, looking studiously blank. And then there was Anne Marie. She drifted through the house, an omnipresent spirit. He didn’t like it. Lida Arkmanian knew everything there was to know about her cleaning lady: name, age, marital status, and medical history. Gregor Demarkian thought Anne Marie Hannaford knew no more about her maids than what she had to pay them.

The wind was blowing straight at his face, getting snow all over his suit and the foyer floor, so he stood back a little. Jackman came across the terrace to him, shivering.

“Christ,” Jackman said, “can’t these people ever have a murder in good weather?”

Gregor raised his eyebrows, but Jackman didn’t see him do it. He was too busy looking at the chandelier.

“I read a murder mystery once where someone got killed with one of those,” Jackman said. “It was held up with a chain and the chain had been cut through, and just at the right moment—”

“Do you think that’s really possible?” Gregor said.

“Hell, no. But things don’t have to be possible, in murder mysteries. They just have to be weird.”

The terrace was electrically heated, but the snow was coming down so fast it didn’t matter much. The uniforms and lab men coming up behind Jackman were plowing through minor drifts. Jackman stepped aside to give them room to enter. They stopped, each and every one of them, to wipe their feet on the mat.

“I think you ought to give me a minute,” Jackman said to a tall man in an overcoat so outsize it would have made him look like a Skid Row bum if it hadn’t been so new. “I want to get a look at the scene before you guys mess it up.”

The tall man shrugged. “Anything you say. You take long enough, we’ll be stuck here for the night. Or maybe the week.”

Jackman turned back to Gregor. “This is what it’s like out here. They worry about the weather. They worry about their clothes. They don’t worry about anything important. Which one was it?”

Gregor hadn’t been able to get through to Jackman directly when he called, but he had left a very detailed message. He found it hard to believe Jackman hadn’t gotten it in full.

He said, “It’s Mrs. Van Damm. Myra Hannaford Van Damm. And it’s more like the first one than the second one.”

“What do you mean, more like the first one?”

“Debris,” Gregor said. “Stage sets. Props. A lot of nonsense strewn all over the landscape.”

“To make it look like murder?” Jackman was interested.

“I think at this point, whoever it is knows we’re going to know it’s murder,” Gregor said. “The impression I got was that there was a lot of care being taken to give us clues about motive, say, and suspects. You’ll have to see the body, John.”