Ian never knew what went on behind people’s expressions. Everyone else instinctively knew the signs of rage and - fear, happiness or sadness in others. Ian had no idea why people burst into laughter or into tears. He had to watch, to learn to do as they did.
He seized Beth by the shoulders and shook her. “What are you thinking? Tell me. I don’t know.”
She looked up at him with wide blue eyes. “Oh, Ian.” Instead of fearing his strength, she rested her hands gently on his arms. “You think Hart did this, don’t you?” Ian shook his head. He closed his eyes and kept shaking his head, but he held on to Beth as though he’d be torn away if he didn’t. “No.” The word echoed through the room, and he said it again. And again. And again.
“Ian.”
With effort, Ian stopped, but he kept his eyes shut tight. “Why do you think so?” Beth’s voice wrapped around him like eiderdown. “Tell me.”
Ian opened his eyes, the anguish of five years trying to drown him. Sally had boasted that she knew secrets that would ruin Hart, cut him out of politics altogether. Hart loved politics, God knew why. In the middle of coitus with Sally, she’d enraged Ian so much, going on and on how she’d blackmail Hart, that Ian had withdrawn, snatched up his clothes, and left the room. He’d felt the rage coming on, knew he had to go.
He’d walked the house, searching for whiskey, searching for Hart and not finding him, trying to calm down. Once he could think coherently again, he’d returned to Sally’s room. “I opened the door and saw Hart in the bedroom. I saw him with Sally on the sofa at the end of the bed.” The images rose before Ian could stop them, every single one as coldly clear as it had been that day. Hart with Sally, her naked limbs wrapped around him. Her soft cry of joy turning to fear.
“Hart took a knife away from her—I don’t know why she had it. She swore at him. He tossed the knife away. Then he pressed her throat until she quieted, and she laughed. I don’t want you to know these things.”
“But. . .” Beth frowned. “Sally wasn’t strangled, too, was she? No one has mentioned bruises on her throat.” Ian shook his head. “Hart, he used to be . . . You wouldn’t understand the terms. He owned the house. Mrs. Palmer and her women belonged to him.”
“He can’t own women. This is England.”
For some reason, Ian wanted to laugh. “They obeyed him. They wanted to. He was everything to them, their lord and master.”
Beth frowned a little longer, and then her brow cleared.
“Oh.” The syllable was short, pregnant with meaning. “He did it before he married, then stopped. After his wife died he started again. He was very discreet, but we knew. He was grieving. He needed them.”“Goodness, most people make do with crepe and mourning brooches,” Beth said faintly. “But why would he try to strangle Sally Tate?”
Ian placed his hand at the base of Beth’s windpipe.
“When you cut off the air, the climax is deeper, more intense. That is why he had his hands on her throat.”
Beth’s eyes widened. “How very . .. interesting.”
“And dangerous.” Ian removed his hand from her neck.
“Hart knows how to do it, exactly when to stop.” “You saw that,” Beth said slowly. “But you didn’t actually see him kill her?”
“When I saw them together, I left them to it. I knew if anyone could talk Sally out of blackmail it would be Hart. I thought to go home, but I’d left my watch on her bedside table, and I wanted it. I found a decanter of whiskey in the parlor downstairs and helped myself while I waited. Later I heard Hart rush out the front door and saw him leap into his coach. I went back upstairs for the watch and found Sally. Dead.”
“Oh—“ Beth broke off and bit her lip. “What does Hart say happened?”
The fact that she was still standing in front of him, talking in her cool and puzzling way, was a miracle to Ian. Beth hadn’t left him in disgust, hadn’t fainted in shock at all he’d revealed. She remained, still the anchor in the vast, bewildering river that was his life.
“He told me that he’d left the room once he’d got Sally bent to his will again and had his valet help him clean up and dress in another room. When he returned, he found Sally dead and ran downstairs and out of the house. He didn’t see me in the parlor, he said, or he’d have insisted I come with him. He said he couldn’t risk being there when the police came, because of his career.” Ian shook his head. “I don’t believe him. Hart wouldn’t run away if he hadn’t killed her. He’d have taken the house apart until he found the culprit.”
“Possibly,” Beth said in her slow, sure voice. “If I hadn’t met Hart, I might believe he killed her and bolted. But I did meet him, and I’m confident that, if he had decided to kill her, he’d have made certain you were far away before he did the dreadful deed. He’d have avoided involving you, no matter what. Therefore, it couldn’t have been Hart who did it.”
“I know what I saw.”
“Yes.” Beth turned and walked away from him, but thinking, not hysterical. “And the police would believe as you did, and a jury, and a judge. But they don’t know Hart. He’d never put you in jeopardy of arrest or returning to the asylum. He never wants you locked away again.”
“Because he needs me and my bloody inconvenient memory.”