Page 41 of The Affair of the Mysterious Letter
“Which”—Ms. Haas grinned unrepentantly—“was still more interesting than anything else you could have planned for the evening.”
“Was the point of this excursion not to determine whether Mrs. Benamara was the source of the threatening letters that Miss Viola has been receiving? A criterion by which it must be judged to have failed spectacularly.”
“On the contrary, much as I predicted, it has succeeded perfectly well. Just not by the mechanism I originally intended.”
“But,” I protested, “we have come no closer to either eliminating or confirming Mrs. Benamara as a suspect.”
Ms. Haas cast me a mocking look out of the corner of her eye. “Well, of course we have. It couldn’t possibly have been her.”
To the best of my recollection, Ms. Haas and I had seen all of the same things, spoken to all of the same people, and heard all of the same comments, and I could not for the life of me think of anything that even a mind as remarkable as hers could have pieced together into an irrefutable case for either guilt or innocence. Unless, of course... “Was there something in the poems?”
“Well deduced, Mr. Wyndham. Yes, our dear Yasmine’s latest volume, which goes by the rather obvious title ofBitter Fruit, is a terribly emotional and, I am sure, adequately moving sequence of verses on the various passions, heartaches, tribulations, and disappointments that have characterised the last few years of Mrs. Benamara’s romantic life. The eponymous poem is quite explicitly about Eirene, as are several of the others.”
“That surely doesn’t mean anything by itself.”
She inhaled deeply from her pipe. “Not by itself. But several of the other verses speak quite eloquently of the long and difficult process by which she rebuilt her relationship with her husband. And it would seem odd to put such effort into repairing a marriage only to imperil it by stooping to so petty and provable a crime as blackmail, especially when one is married to a lawyer. On top of that, several of the poems that do concern Eirene reveal quite specific details of their relationship that, were I attempting to blackmail somebody, I would withhold specifically for use as a threat. It is, of course, possible that a blackmailer might also choose to publish some of her blackmail material in a widely circulated volume of popular verse, but it seems terribly, terribly improbable.”
“And also,” I added, “Mrs. Benamara seemed a very gentle andrespectable lady, and I find it hard to believe that she could possibly be involved in anything as sordid as this.”
Ms. Haas answered this very reasonable observation with a groan. “Oh, Wyndham. What are we to do with you?”
“Perhaps you could try getting me arrested again. You seem to consider that improving.”
“Well, without that little distraction, the evening would have been a complete wash.”
It was not becoming, but I saw here the opportunity to score at least a small victory over my companion. “You will admit, then,” I remarked, “that you were wrong to claim that nothing interesting would happen at the gathering we attended?”
She gave a throaty chuckle. “I own no such thing. We went to a tedious party, with tedious people, and were then arrested by a tedious man who put us in tedious cells and then you, on top of that, had the added tedium of being interrogated by a tedious woman from your tedious country. It was the dullest evening I’ve spent outside my own home in the past five years. And five years ago, I was stranded in a featureless desert.”
My interview with the Augur Extraordinary had been anything but tedious, but I resolved to put the experience out of mind and to move the conversation in another direction. “You just said”—my voice rose slightly—“our arrest provided a distraction that salvaged the evening.”
“Do stop being tiresome, Wyndham.”
Her chuckling became laughter and, with New Arcadia Yard already vanished into the night, I did my best to smile with her.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Manor at Quatreface,
Part the First
Despite the excitementof the previous evening we were actually able to arrive home at a comparatively sensible hour, and I was able to get in a good night’s sleep and respectable day’s work before Ms. Haas whisked me away on the next adventure.
I entered the sitting room to find her—I would say waiting but perhaps it would be better to say occupying the time of my absence—sprawled on the chaise, smoking and reading the latest edition of theTimes. She was dressed in a gentleman’s black evening suit of an extremely modern cut that highlighted her figure in a manner that, even accounting for my Eyan sensibilities, seemed to border on the indelicate.
“Ah, Wyndham.” She glanced up from the paper. “What do you make of this matter of the Emir of Bahl’s missing amulet?”
“A most perplexing crime. I understand that the Myrmidons are quite dumbfounded.”
“Of course they are. Because they, like you, have made the mistake of assuming that a crime has been committed. The item in question went missing from a room whose doors and windows were all locked and bolted while the emir was visiting the mistress of the Ubiquitous Company of Printers and Typesetters, Ms. Mia Toksvig,with whom he was negotiating the price of ink. If you will refer to that issue”—she pointed imperiously at a carefully discarded magazine—“of theLadies’ Aspirational Repository, you will note also that Ms. Toksvig recently journeyed to the Kingdom of Utu, from which she returned with a small, and poorly trained, pet monkey. That exact species of primate is renowned for its inquisitive nature and attraction to shiny objects. There were no means by which a human could have entered the room in which the theft took place, but I have been to the guild house of the Ubiquitous Company of Printers and Typesetters and I know for a fact that most of the rooms have small apertures built into the walls for the purposes of ventilation. Through such an opening, a small animal could crawl easily. I have no doubt that the monkey keeps a veritable hoard of stolen treasures in some out-of-the-way place, likely amongst the rafters of that, as I recall, rather old-fashioned building.”
“Good gracious,” I exclaimed. “If there is even the smallest chance of your conclusions being correct we must tell the authorities at once.”
She stretched theatrically and made a great show of stifling a yawn. “I’ve already penned a letter to Commander Pennyfeather. Assuming my summary of events is accurate, and I am certain it is, I will, once again, have demonstrated to him the advantages of my being kept at liberty. Undoubtedly, my intervention will irritate the likes of Second Augur Lawson, but that is very much their fault for being terrible at their jobs.”
I should reiterate that I reproduce Ms. Haas’s deprecating comments about the Myrmidons in the interests of maintaining an accurate record and do not intend for them to be interpreted as representative of my own opinions, or indeed a reflection on the fine employees of that institution, who I have always found to be excellent public servants.
Before I could reply she cast the paper aside and leapt to her feet with a cry of “Come, Wyndham. Our quarry awaits.”
