The Devereux Affair
"So, Mrs Devereux," the detective began. "Let's start off with the obvious question. Where were you at the time of your husband's death?"
"I don't know," the widow replied, meeting his gaze without flinching. There had been tears, earlier, but those had soon vanished into a lilac handkerchief. In the intervening hours there had been the household to manage, tomorrow's appointments to cancel, and now the police to entertain. Mr Devereux had been a busy man, and his wife had inherited that along with his estate. It hadn't left her time to mourn. "I don't believe you've told me when he died."
"Ah, very good," the detective smiled. "I see you're far too sharp for that old trick. The doctor ruled the time of death at six o'clock in the evening. He was asphyxiated, if I haven't mentioned that either."
"Your husband, not the doctor," the constable clarified. He was only here to take notes, and escort suspects in and out of the drawing room where they'd been stationed, but he couldn't help but add his own name to that script from time-to-time.
"It would have been a swift and largely painless death, if that brings any comfort."
"It does," she said, although she didn't return his smile. If anything, her forehead wore the faint impression of a frown. "Thank you for letting me know. In answer to your question, I would have been preparing for dinner. I am not sure of the exact timings, but I would have been in the dining room, talking to our cook."
"The cook being Madame de Courcy?"
"That's right. She will be able to vouch for me. I can vouch for her, if it comes to that. But there were a number of other individuals present in the house, any one of which might have had the opportunity."
"Yes, let's get on to them," the detective agreed. "Do you know your husband's schedule for the afternoon?"
"Of course," she said. "The housekeeper, Miss Mortimer, will have met with him after lunch to discuss household matters for the coming week. Then the new chamber maid, Miss Clifford, would have come to clean, and the laundry maid, Miss Warren, to replace his bedsheets and shirts. Oh, and he had a meeting with Miss Glanville, who works in the stables. He liked to enquire about the health of the horses."
"All women," the constable remarked.
"Women can kill as well as men," the detective reminded him, before turning back to Mrs Devereux. "Thank you for confirming our list of suspects. It matches what we have heard from your staff. We have also spoken to each of these ladies in turn."
"Well, naturally," she said. "May I ask how those conversations went? Were you able to unveil a motive?"
"Only for all four of them," he replied. "It is largely the same for each of them... but maybe you will not wish to hear?"
"If it is pertinent to my husband's murder, I am afraid I must insist upon hearing," she told him. "Whether it is pleasant to my ears or not."
"Very well," the detective agreed, with a gentle nod of his head. "Mrs Devereux, I regret to be the bearer of more bad news, but your husband was having an affair."
"Oh," she blinked. "With whom? Miss Mortimer?"
"With Miss Mortimer," he confirmed. "And with Miss Glanville and Miss Warren, at least historically. It seems that he broke the last of those off upon meeting Miss Mortimer, but I am unsure of the order. Oh, and Miss Clifford confessed that he had been making romantic overtures towards her in recent weeks."
"He was having affairs with all of them?"
"Largely one at a time," the constable clarified. "If that makes any difference. It seems your husband was a serial adulterer, rather than a particularly polygamous one."
"I am sorry," the detective said, apologising for his colleague as much for his own part in delivering the news. "Again, I regret to ask this, but had the two of you... grown apart, of late?"
She bristled at that. "Perhaps. I thought that he was just busy. Perhaps he was, but not in the sense I had thought. Well, it seems like you have plenty of motives to work with. A few old flames, turned into bitter ash. Or perhaps Miss Clifford has spurned his advances, and needed an escape."
"You have the same motive," he reminded her. "If he had moved on from each of them, he moved on from you first. On top of that, you are also in line to inherit from his death. They were due nothing."
"Only what I already enjoyed as his wife," Mrs Devereux replied. "I already had full access to the estate. All his death has done is deprive me of my husband, and left me with his duties to manage it all. Believe me, that is no inheritance."
"Onto the other suspects, then?" The detective made a show of flipping through his notes. "All said that he was hale and healthy when they left him. The room seems cleaned, the sheets fresh. Miss Glanville would have been the last to see him, so she would seem to vindicate those who came before her."
"And leave herself as the only suspect?"
"Not necessarily," he said, although she looked confused at that. "But let's dive in means and opportunity later. For now, we are discussing their motives. Constable?"
"We checked all of their bags," the constable chimed in. "They were stuffed with stolen silverware, heirlooms, that sort of thing. Every one of them was hoping to take home a souvenir from your husband's death. Miss Warren had even removed his cufflinks."
"Vultures," Mrs Devereux shuddered.
"Magpies," the detective corrected. "They all denied it at first, of course. Told us that they were gifts. I take it that you weren't aware of any decision to reward the household staff?"
"No."
"No. But then, you weren't aware of his relationship with these women." He sat back in his chair. "Still, if they were lying about this, any number of them could have been lying about seeing him alive. They might have found him slumped in that armchair and neglected to raise the alarm, taking the opportunity to fill their pockets and leaving that honour to the next visitor."
"Right," she said. "Sorry, you said at first. What changed?"
"Well, the prospect of their lies threw everything else into question. We suspected that, if they had lied about seeing him alive, separately or together, the time of death may have been far earlier. We asked for further tests, and do you know what the doctor found?"
"There is no need for games, detective," Mrs Devereux said coldly. "I am a widow in mourning. If you have some insight to share on the manner of my husband's death, I would prefer you simply tell me."
"Very well," the detective replied, those protests acknowledged with a deferential bow of his head. "The tests revealed that he was poisoned."
"Poisoned?" Now her brow creased, although the doubt in her eyes seemed, if anything, to clear. "I thought you said he was asphyxiated?"
"There are many ways to deprive a man of oxygen. In this case, he was suffocated from the inside. The doctor confirmed that he would have died in the early afternoon, towards the end of Miss Mortimer's visit."
"I see," she said. "That would make her the prime suspect, would it not? In place of Miss Glanville?"
"Her or Madame de Courcy," the detective corrected. "As we understand it, he died shortly after finishing his lunch. A cook has many opportunities to poison her master."
"Three a day," the constable added. "Perhaps more, if he was the peckish sort. Personally, I'm rather partial to a mid-morning snack."
"I have already spoken for Madame de Courcy," Mrs Devereux reminded the detective - ignoring his assistant, which was probably for the best.
"For her whereabouts," the detective noted. "Although I suppose that poison doesn't require presence. For a cook, it presents quite the French window of opportunity."
"I suppose it does." Mrs Devereux paused for a moment. "But if you suspect her of poisoning his meal at lunch-time, I would suggest that is unlikely to be the case. My husband and I ate soup from the same tureen before retiring to separate rooms, and I remain alive. But he drinks whiskey from a decanter in his study, and that could have been poisoned by any of the other staff who attend him throughout the day, including Miss Mortimer this afternoon."
"Let us return to the other staff," the detective agreed. "At first, I had said, as you were right to notice. Well, after we had uncovered their loot, and demonstrated that they had all seen your husband dead, they became more talkative."
"Of course they did. What did they have to say for themselves?"
"They admitted to the theft, those earlier lies washed away. But none admitted to the murder. If anything, they seemed equally surprised to learn of the poisoning. According to them, they thought he had collapsed of natural causes. That does not seem an unreasonable assumption, given that he was neither young nor in particularly robust health, and the doctor said the poison left no symptoms."
"Other than his death," the constable added.
"Yes."
"Mr Devereux's death, not the doctor's."
"Yes." The detective held back a sigh at the latest inane interruption from his subordinate - he often wondered where his colleagues found these people, and how on earth they came to hire them for such sensitive work. He would tell the young man to show more respect to the grieving widow, if he didn't already know what she had done. "Which explains why none of them summoned the police, and thought their pilfering of valuables would go unnoticed. On that topic, I understand that you are the one who alerted us to his death?"
"In a manner of speaking. When Henry didn't emerge for dinner, I sent one of the maids to look in on him, but he couldn’t be roused. We didn't know what else to do."
The detective nodded. It was all very reasonable. But where he would usually find it suspicious that the other women had kept quiet, covering up a murder being a classic behaviour of murderers, that was understandable where the death had been made to look like natural causes. In those cases, it was those who reported the death who were suspicious. Those who knew that foul play was afoot.
"With that revelation, the truth emerged. They had no taste for lies once they learnt they might be sheltering a murderer. Miss Mortimer confessed she had seen him die, suddenly collapsing in his chair, in what she told us seemed to be some sort of attack. She rushed to help him, but it was all over before she could react."
"Of course she did." Mrs Devereux's words were heavy with scorn. "Is this the truth, or just her latest version of events? Have you fallen for one lie after the last?"
He held up a hand to silence her. "Please, allow me to finish. All will be revealed in time."
"As you wish." She didn't look happy at that, but settled back down into her seat. Were she a bird, Mrs Devereux would have preened her ruffled feathers back into place. As it was, she made do with a cigarette, and a dismissive wave of her own hand. "Go on, then."
"Where was I?" He made another point of checking his notes, for her annoyance as much as anything else. "At first, Miss Mortimer hadn't known what to do. She was distraught, to hear her tell it: she had cared for him, and it would have been a shock even if she hadn't.
"But then her mind turned to her own life. Without him, she worried you would have no interest in keeping her on. Her post had come before the affair, and served as the starting point, but it was also how he looked after them, afterwards. Even those he had moved on from. Miss Mortimer was due to inherit nothing from her years of companionship, and so she decided to safeguard her own future.
"When Miss Clifford arrived, she found her colleague in distress. She was more relieved at your husband's death, having no attachment to the post and afraid of having to reject her employer, but that faded into empathy. She comforted Miss Mortimer in her grief, and chose to protect her lie. Together, they cleaned the room, and she took another token: simply to make her complicit. The price of ensuring her silence."
"One for sorrow, two for joy," the constable said. Whatever that meant.
"It was a similar story for the other two. Did you know your husband had sired illegitimate children with both of them, a girl and a boy?"
Mrs Devereux shook her head, motioning sarcastically that her lips were sealed. But not enough that she couldn't blow a cloud of smoke in his direction.
"As with Miss Mortimer, he had been funding their upbringing through these jobs, and so they sought to preserve his funding after his death. They also seemed afraid of what you might do. I suppose they suspected you knew, or would find out, about their true relationship.
"They found the other two, and told them - lest they report it and suspect them. They agreed to take part of a similar deal. It took a while for us to get the whole story, but eventually all recanted. They all saw him dead, and neglected to report it at the time. The doctor's verdict was correct."
"Is that it?" she asked. "May I speak now?"
"To your heart's content."
"It sounds like you found they were all in it together. Any one of those four women could be my husband's killer, or more than one could have conspired to commit the evil act together. It sounds like Miss Clifford in particular had a motive. The others may say they were afraid for their futures now that he was gone, but how can you trust a known liar? They each had their own reasons to hate him, and clearly had an alternative source of funding lined up."
"It does sound like that, doesn't it?" The detective turned to his colleague. "Do you want to tell her, or shall I?"
"I had the pleasure of interviewing Madame de Courcy," the constable said. "Unfortunately, she wasn't quite as sharp in the face of the same trick."
"What do you mean?"
"When I asked her where she was at the time of your husband's death, she told us that you were meeting after lunch. As if she knew he had passed earlier, when at this stage we were firmly under the impression it had not been until after Miss Glanville had left - swearing he was still alive, and that she had regaled him with stories of a new filly."
"She was more likely to have spoken of her son," the detective added. "We suspect that he kept these appointments to check in on the children as much as anything else."
"So Madame de Courcy was right, and you were wrong," Mrs Devereux said. "A peculiar cause for pride. Or do I misread your expression?"
"Satisfaction, perhaps," the detective conceded. "But it is unfortunate for you."
"And why would that be?"
"Because you no longer have an alibi."
"On the contrary," she said. "It seems that Madame de Courcy has accounted for my whereabouts up until the time of death, as I have done for hers."
"You said you had met just before dinner, well after the poison had taken hold."
"Did I?" She held that glassy stare. "Perhaps you are mistake. Perhaps I was. Either way, it is easily done. We met just after lunch, as Madame de Courcy says. She did not poison the soup, and she will have seen that I was equally innocent, and we remained in each other's company until after the body was found."
"Perhaps you really did meet after lunch," the detective continued. "Even if only to clear away the evidence, and rehearse your stories, safe in the knowledge you would vouch for each other. You say you ate from the same dish as your husband, and she says that she watched, but you would have had plenty of opportunity together. Perhaps he took pepper with his soup, and you did not. You would know better than us."
"It seems that there is little you do know. Only wild accusations."
"It's true that our profile of the crime is not complete," he confessed. "We are also not yet able to discern why Madame de Courcy abetted you. Perhaps you were also having an affair? That would bring a pleasing symmetry to the case: two groups of conspirators, each united by infidelity."
"As I said," Mrs Devereux stared him down. "Wild accusations, with a complete absence of proof."
"Proof lies in the absences," the detective told her. "The lacunae between the facts we are able to confirm, the gaps in the puzzle, the pieces that don't fit. You are unfortunate, in this case, in that every single suspect has lied to us. Particularly as the others were far better at co-ordinating.
"If their lie had been exposed first, and the earlier time of death was known, you and Madame de Courcy could have held your agreement to serve as one another's alibi. I imagine having arranged the murder together, it was a simple matter to agree on that. But where others have lied first, it can be devilishly tough to keep a story straight. Even the grains of truth may expose you, if we have swallowed a lie from elsewhere.
"Sadly for you and Madame de Courcy, they held the wool over our eyes just long enough for her own, accurate, knowledge to be revealed. In all my years in this role, this may be the first case I have solved by virtue of my ignorance. A suspect condemned, in a way, for telling the truth, simply because they were the only one to know it."
"You have solved nothing," Mrs Devereux maintained.
"No? If the two of you were working together, neither of you have any alibi, and you have the strongest opportunity to have administered the poison. It is a rather obvious method, looking back at it, for all your claims about a whisky after lunch. We found no evidence of that, by the way. Perhaps you should have left him a little more time.
"I can only imagine you must have hoped it looked like suffocation. In fact, I must confess that it did. Were it not for the confusion over times, and the web of lies woven by the other suspects, we would never have asked the doctor to dig deeper. In that case, we would have been forced to point the finger at Miss Mortimer, who lied about him being alive, and could just as easily have lied to young Miss Clifford when she found her.
"Or perhaps you had hoped Miss Clifford would be caught with the body, new and without allies, having received unwanted advances from the deceased, and not known what to do. Perhaps your husband just went particularly heavy on the pepper today. The time between their visits would also have cast them both as suspects. Meanwhile you had certainly strangled nobody, remaining downstairs with your fellow poisoner.
"How must you have felt when no cry was raised? Enough to send somebody to check on him ahead of dinner, knowing that his schedule for the day was exhausted, and if he was found dead in the evening you would have no protection? But Madame de Courcy knew that he was killed far earlier, despite what everybody else said, before even we knew. How else might she have known that?"
"She could have heard the others talking about seeing him dead, and assumed they would have reported the truth. Have you considered that, or are you part of their conspiracy as well? How much silver have you taken on your search of our home?"
"There is no need for games, Mrs Devereux." the detective said coldly, running out of patience. "I have heard it all before. I have worked many murders across a long career, and your husband's is the latest in a long line I have solved. If you have some insight to share on the manner of his death, I would prefer you simply tell me now."
That humbled her to some extent. Still she met his gaze, but the cigarette began to tremble in her fingers, dropping ash onto the carpet. "It was her idea. She poisoned him. I only agreed to protect her."
"I don't believe that for a second," he told her. "You are not an unimaginative liar, I will give you that, but you are sorely lacking in your delivery. I would limit myself to the rehearsed lines, if I were you."
"Fine," she said, that cold visage now breaking all at once, like a frozen river cracking in the spring. The icy stare gave way, exposing the dark water underneath. "What do you want me to say? I asked her to do it."
"That may be closer to the truth. We will see what Madame de Courcy has to say. It is as with the other serving staff: one lie might conceal the truth, but two lies, when competing, almost always expose it in the gaps they leave between them."
"It's ironic, really," the constable said. "If your husband had been better at lying, this whole mess could have been avoided. I imagine even the effort of some discretion might have helped. It must have burned, to see his affairs flaunted like this, kept on as your own staff, underneath your very nose."
"Yes," she said, and now the tears came in abundance. "It did."
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