"I know what the documents say, Colonel. But that's not really the issue, is it? The real question is whether we can place any credence in these documents. To put it a different way, why should we assume that documents which were oh-so-conveniently left for us to find by people who planned to murder us—did murder Her Majesty—should be taken at face value?"
It was clear from the expression on Forsberg's face that Ulrik was wasting his time.
Again.
But Forsberg didn't really matter, in the end. Kristina had been following Ulrik's logic since the day after the incident, when he'd recovered enough to start thinking. Her brain might be only eight years old, but it was a superior organ—considerably superior—to those taking up space in the skulls of most of Stockholm's officials.
"And why did they leave the documents at all?" she said. "Why not simply destroy them? They came here to kill me and Ulrik and Mama, not to found a library."
That made no dent in Forsberg's certain convictions either, of course.
Ulrik decided to try one last time, before he simply began acting peremptorily. He disliked doing that, since he'd found that imperiousness on the part of a prince invariably produced resentment, and some of those resentments could last for years and create trouble long after their initial cause was half-forgotten.
"And consider this, Colonel Forsberg. This should register because you were there yourself and personally witnessed the deed. What happened when you cornered two of the assassins on Utö island? The one with the limp and his companion?"
That had happened two days after the incident. All reconstructions of the plot, including Ulrik and Baldur's, were agreed that seven assassins had to have been involved. Possibly more, but a minimum of seven.
Four of them had been killed in the course of the attempt itself. Two by Ulrik; two by Baldur.
Two more had fled in a boat but had been eventually tracked to Utö island. Ulrik had recognized one of them after the bodies had been brought back to Stockholm. That had been the man who'd shot him. The other, the one whom the soldiers said had been limping and had a badly bruised knee, he didn't know. But since he'd been caught in the company of the man who shot Ulrik, it was reasonable to conclude that he'd been one of the six men who came directly for him and Kristina in Slottsbacken.
That left whoever had murdered the queen. That had been done with a rifle, not a pistol. Whoever the man was—he might have had an accomplice with him—he remained at large. All they had in the way of evidence was the badly bludgeoned corpse of the old tailor whose shop he'd used as a shooting stand. The tailor's wife had been no help, because she'd been visiting her sister halfway across the city.
Forsberg still hadn't answered Ulrik's question. From the look on his face, he was probably confused by its sheer simplicity.
"What happened, Colonel?" he repeated.
"Well, I don't exactly know what to say, Your Highness. We found them and caught them."
Kristina practically spit. "Didn't! You didn't catch them. They were already dead."
The colonel looked offended now. Was there any bottom to this pit?
"That's as may be, Your Highness," Forsberg said stiffly. "But they'd not have killed themselves if we hadn't had them trapped with no way to escape."
Ulrik threw up his hands. "Exactly! That's the whole point, Colonel. Once he saw there was no escape, the man with the limp shot his companion in the back of the head and then turned the pistol on himself. Do you think a professional spy in the employ of the French crown would have done such a thing?"
The colonel's face was blank.
Blank. Blank. Blank.
This was pointless. Ulrik might as well have been arguing with the Black Forest or the Harz Mountains.
"The point, Colonel, is that only a man with powerful ideological convictions would have behaved in such a manner. And the willingness of his companions to join him in such a daring assassination scheme—they had little chance of escaping, and they must have known it—speaks to the same point."
He retrieved some of the documents he'd scattered on the bed sheets, lifted them up, and then dropped them back. The gesture exuded disgust.
"Nothing about the idea that these men were Richelieu's makes any sense. Not their behavior, not the preposterous idea that supposedly professional assassins would scatter about enough documents to bury a moose, and perhaps most of all, the very logic of the documents themselves."
He pointed an accusing finger at one of those documents. Not because it deserved to be singled out for condemnation, but simply because it was the nearest. Ulrik had to economize even his finger-pointing. Any movement of his upper body was likely to trigger off a spasm of pain.