Free A Suspicious Affair by Bárbara Metzger Page B

Jeremiah Dimm, who was wearing out his shoe leather again, trying to dig up more evidence.
    “But you can’t just make facts. They is like rocks; you can find them, you can uncover them, but only time and nature can make one of the confounded things.”
    He went back over his notes. He retraced the paths on that fatal day of the brother, the neighbor, the wife’s brother. He carefully checked the background of all Denning’s associates, and he talked to the servants again at the duke’s house. Her Grace’s maid was staying with her mother, he learned, and the valet, Purvis, was helping to pack His Grace’s belongings between visits to the employment agencies.
    Dimm saw for himself all the reports that said no one had come to Lord Armbruster’s love nest, not in a week of round-the-clock surveillance, so he went next door to Armbruster House, which was also draped in black, with its knocker off the door.
    Lord Armbruster was still up north delivering his wife’s body to her people in Cumberland, where he might convince some prelate she’d taken an accidental overdose of laudanum. There had been no reason to hold him in London any more than there’d been reason to detain the duchess or any of the others, despite the scandal sheets crying leniency for the aristocracy. Blast, you’d think this were France or something, Dimm considered, crossing that bit of roadway between the houses where Denning had met his Maker. Or unmaker. Deuce take it, the crime happened in the middle of the afternoon. Someone should have seen something! Or heard the shot.
    “Oh no,” Armbruster’s butler contradicted him. “Our walls are very thick. His lordship would not want to hear the sounds of traffic or street vendors, don’t you know. And then there was Lady Armbruster screaming. Of course that might have been after, but if before, we wouldn’t have heard the shot, during. No, no one here knows anything.”
    But someone did. Lady Armbruster’s maid was just finishing packing all of the dead woman’s clothing into boxes when Dimm found her.
    “You didn’t happen to come by any suicide note, did you?” he asked for the eighth or ninth time, having searched for one himself before traveling to Berkshire. He had found enough writing in Lady Armbruster’s hand to know she hadn’t sent the message to the duchess, unless she disguised her writing, of course, but a farewell note would have been Christmas and a promotion and lobster patties, all rolled into one. Especially if the lady had confessed to killing her lover before taking her own life.
    “No, she were too sleepy to do any writing,” the maid told him. “Right from the first. I didn’t see her when she got up to take the rest of the bottle, but she couldn’t of been thinking right, now could she? And just look at this mess.” The maid waved her arms around the room. “And my lord intends to give it all to the poorhouse; he doesn’t want to see any of it again.”
    “You mean he’s not letting you have her clothes?”
    Dimm interpreted her petulance aright, for the maid replied, “No, the bastard blames me for leaving the bottle with her. As if that’s any of my job. And he’s not even going to give me a good reference, he says. So what am I supposed to do now, I ask you?” She crammed a satin gown into a glove-sized space in the box. “I don’t suppose you’re on terms with Her Grace next door to put in a good word for me, are you? I heard Tyson didn’t want to go to the country.”
    “The duchess already hired a new maid when I saw her in Berkshire.” He didn’t say it was his own daughter. “But maybe they won’t suit. You never know.”
    “Well, here,” she said, handing him a brightly colored shawl. “You take this, in case you hear of anything.”
    “I’m not sure…” he began.
    “Oh, go on, his lordship owes me something, he does. I mean, I did try to stop Lady Armbruster from taking that first dose, I did. I told her right off that it