Assassin

Chapter Thirty-Two

The Cotswolds

A FIRE WAS BLAZING IN THE MASSIVE HEARTH AT THE FAR end of the dining hall. The three men sat at one end of the long mahogany table. Down the length of the table stood a row of gleaming silver candelabra and Pelham had lit every candle.

It was a fine, richly paneled room, with a vaulted Adam ceiling picked out in blue and white. A massive Victorian chandelier hung from the center, modeled after a nineteenth-century hot air balloon. Alex himself had purchased it, upon learning that the huge glass balloon had been originally designed to contain live goldfish. He’d intended to try it himself, but had never quite gotten round to it.

After the wine had been poured, Pelham withdrew from the room and returned to the kitchen to ensure the first course was ready.

“Tell us about it, Tex,” Alex said, as gently as he could manage. It was obvious that the aging Texas Ranger was suffering deeply.

“That message,” Patterson said, “the one came down here by courier from London. It was from my station chief in Madrid. I knew what it was before I even opened the thing. Heck, I knew this was comin’, sooner or later.”

“What happened, Tex?” Alex asked.

“The father of those two wonderful little kids up in Dark Harbor,” Patterson said, choking the words out. “The husband of the beautiful Deirdre. Evan Slade was his name. As fine a gentleman, father, and husband as ever I met. A great American.”

“The bastards got him too, Tex?” Hawke said, leaning forward, lacing his fingers under his chin.

“Naw, it wasn’t like that, Alex. Evan was sitting at his desk at the embassy over there this morning. Had the al-Jazeera network on the TV. All of a sudden they showed the—the pictures—the goddamn movies of Dierdre and the children, Alex! The whole thing. He put a. 45-caliber gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. He just wasn’t—strong enough—to see that, Alex. To see his kids—in their beds—”

Hawke stood up and went around to where Patterson sat, slumped forward. He put his hand on the man’s shoulder. “Tex,” Alex said, looking down at Patterson’s shattered expression. “None of us would be strong enough to see that. None of us. You know that.”

“Dreadful business,” Congreve said. “Horrific.”

And then everyone was silent while Pelham served the first course. It was some kind of creamed soup, served hot. Leeks or celery or something like that. Hawke could care less. He’d lost his appetite.

Each man picked up his spoon. Hawke, a bit unsure about what to do with the sprig of rosemary that lay atop the soup, put down his spoon, plucked the sprig of rosemary from the soup bowl and held it to his nose.

“Don’t touch that soup!” he barked at his two companions who were in the midst of lifting their spoons to their open mouths. “Drop the spoons!”

Patterson and Congreve looked up at him in shock, lowering their soupspoons.

“What on earth, Alex?” Congreve said.

“I intend to find out,” Hawke said, pressing the button mounted under the table that would summon Pelham from the butler’s pantry. A moment later, he was at Hawke’s side.

“Something wrong with the soup, m’lord?”

“Pelham, do we have any new staff in the kitchen? Any recent hires, I mean?”

“Well, there is the one, sir, joined us the month before you arrived home from America. Excellent qualifications. She was sous-chef at l’Hôtel de Paris and—”

“Would you kindly ask her to join us?” Hawke said, and Pelham, a look of distress on his face, rushed from the dining room.

“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’, Alex?” Tex said gravely.

“We’ll know in a moment,” Hawke said, and sniffed the soup once more.

Pelham ushered in a pretty, dark-eyed young woman, mid-twenties, wearing a white apron with a toque blanche atop her black curls. She wore an expression of calm despite the unusual summons. Pelham looked stricken. Something clearly was amiss.

“Good evening, I’m Alex Hawke. You’re new here, I understand.”

“Oui, Monsieur Hawke. One month since I arrive from Paris.”

“Bienvenue, mademoiselle. I wonder. Why would a pretty young woman want to leave Paris and move to the dreary English countryside? Seems a bit odd.”

“To learn some English. And, because of my boyfriend, he have a job at the Lygon Arms in town.”

“Did you prepare this soup?”

“Mais oui, monsieur. I hope you are enjoying it. C’est bon? Encore un peu?”

“Quite delicious. Has an odd, nutty aroma I can’t quite identify.”

“C’est un pâté de noix moulues, monsieur, a paste of ground walnuts. Peut-être cela—perhaps that is—”

“Eh bien. No. That’s not it,” Hawke said, dipping his spoon into the soup. “Here, you taste it and tell me what you think it is.” He handed her the spoon but she simply stared at it.

“Is there a problem?” said Hawke.

“Non, monsieur.”

“Then taste it.”

“I cannot, monsieur. It is not proper.”

“Did you put something in this soup that should not be there, mademoiselle?”

“What are you saying, monsieur?”

“I am saying that if you don’t taste that bloody soup in the next two seconds I’m going to have my friend Chief Inspector Congreve over there arrest you.”

“Of what charge, monsieur?”

“Attempted murder should do it.”

The girl’s eyes flared angrily and she flung the spoon to the floor. Before Alex could react, she bent forward and grabbed his soup bowl from the table and raised it to her lips.

“I would sooner eat all of it!” she shouted defiantly and tilted the bowl toward her open mouth, wolfing down the contents in one long, single swallow. She stood then, looking down at them, eyes blazing, yellow soup smeared on her chin and down the front of her apron.

She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, eyeing all of them insolently.

“Porcs infidels! Je vais au paradis sachant que mon valeureux successeur réussira là où j’ai échoué!” she said, smiling at them.

A second later, she made a small noise and collapsed to the floor.

Congreve shoved back his chair and went to her, kneeling at her side. He placed two fingers at the carotid artery just beneath her ear, paused a moment, then shook his head.

“Unconscious?” Alex Hawke asked.

“Dead,” Ambrose said. “What was it, Alex, in the soup?”

“Aflatoxin, most probably. Derivative of the extremely toxic mold produced by peanuts when they go bad. Brilliantly disguised, I almost missed it. She was very good at her trade, this one. She’d most likely have gotten away with it.”

“Alex is right,” Tex said, holding the soup bowl under his nose. “Aflatoxin’s a tough one to catch. Our postmortems would show only damage to the liver. Shucks, after all the port wine we’ve had today, nobody would—” He put the bowl down.

“What was her name?” Alex asked Pelham.

“She called herself Rose-Marie, sir,” a very shaken Pelham said, gazing down at the lifeless figure. “I must say I’m thoroughly mortified, your lordship. Someone should have—”

“Rose-Marie…Rosemary…” Congreve said, more to himself than anyone in the room. He placed the sprig of herb on his linen serviette and doubled it over.

“Now, you listen here, old thing,” Alex said, putting an arm around Pelham’s frail and trembling shoulders, “There’s no way anyone in this household is to blame. You’re shaking. I want you to go into the library, pour yourself a largish whiskey, and put the whole matter behind you. We’ll join you in a moment. It’s quite over as far as I’m concerned.”

“I’ll just go ring the constabulary, your lordship,” Pelham said, and disappeared as if in a daze.

Alex eyed the fragrant twig in his fingers. “Rosemary. It appears you’re quite right, Ambrose. First Iris in Maine, then Lily in Paris, and now I find this little sprig of rosemary right here under my own nose.”

“You’re forgetting one, Alex,” Patterson said. “Rose.”

“Rose?”

“When we pulled Simon Stanfield out of the Grand Canal, he was wearing a single rosebud in his lapel. According to his wife, he hated flowers, especially roses.”

“This Dog calls all of his sharp teeth by the names of flowers, or, in this case, he takes a wee license with an aromatic shrub,” Hawke said. “Quite the romantic, our homicidal assassin. Please tell me, Ambrose, the late unlamented, what were her final words?”

“She addressed us as ‘infidel swine,’ ” Ambrose said, staring down at the dead assassin, and shaking his head. “And then informed us that ‘I go to Paradise knowing my worthy successor will succeed where I have failed.’ ”

“Let’s keep a weather eye out for her successor, shall we, Ambrose?” Hawke said.

“The supply would seem endless,” Congreve said, and sipped his wine.