Malice at the Palace (The Royal Spyness Series Book 9)
By: Rhys Bowen
Countess Irmtraut. I added her to my list of suspects. And now that I thought about it, she seemed the most likely. Perhaps she had opened the front door to find Bobo there. Bobo had been drinking. We knew there was a goodly amount of alcohol in her system. She told the countess things she didn’t want to hear, threatened to expose the prince, to harm Marina. So Irmtraut had given her a drink laced with Veronal. And when the drink didn’t kill her, Irmtraut had smothered her and dumped her body outside.
It seemed a little far-fetched but possible. Irmtraut was a big, beefy woman. Certainly strong enough to overpower a delicate, fine-boned specimen like Bobo, already rather tipsy. The one problem was that there were servants at the palace. Even if Countess Irmtraut had opened the front door herself, a servant would have surely seen, surely heard Irmtraut talking to someone. Then I remembered what had happened when I arrived at Kensington. Nobody had answered the front door. Nobody had seen me cross the foyer. In fact the person who had first encountered me was none other than Irmtraut.
And she did have the temperament, I decided. She was emotional, jealous, high-strung. And she adored Marina. Now I’d have to find a way into tricking her to reveal a morsel of the truth. As I came back to apartment 1 I let myself in through the front door. No servant appeared and I was able to cross the full length of the foyer unseen. So it might have been possible that Bobo let herself in, or was admitted by the countess. But if she had been killed here, someone would have had to drag or carry her out to the archway beneath the clock tower. That would take strength, and such an undertaking would have had to leave a trace. I remembered Bobo’s sparkly gown, the beads around her neck. Wouldn’t sequins have come off, beads have snapped if she had been dragged along the cobbles?
I went back outside and retraced my steps along the side of the building and around to the archway. I didn’t notice a single bead or sequin lying along the path. There was another difficulty with my theory: Bobo’s white dress would have been covered in mud. And it wasn’t. Which brought up another problem—what happened to her overcoat? It had been a beastly night earlier on. She wouldn’t have walked across the park to Kensington Palace with no coat on. So where was it? Hanging in someone’s wardrobe at the palace right now? Or in the boot of somebody’s car, or already dumped into the Thames? I went back inside. I could hear Irmtraut and the princess still conversing in the sitting room.
Without hesitating I tiptoed up the stairs. Irmtraut’s room was on the same floor as mine, but overlooking the front door, where our car had picked us up last night. Outside her door I hesitated. I didn’t know whether she had brought a maid with her from whatever country she lived in. I hadn’t seen one, but good servants are trained to be invisible, as I had told Queenie. And I suspected Irmtraut would insist on well-trained servants. I gave a tentative knock. No answer. I glanced down the hallway, then turned the handle. The room was unoccupied and I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped inside and closed the door behind me.
I looked around. A meticulously neat room, as one might have suspected. A prayer book on the table beside the bed. A silver-backed hairbrush, small box of hairpins and powder compact on the dressing table. But no clothing draped over the backs of chairs. No shoes left beside the bed. On the table by the window was a pad and envelopes, a half-written letter and what looked like a scrapbook. I glanced at the letter. It was in what was probably Russian and I couldn’t read that language, although I could make out the word “Mama.” A letter to her mother, then. And the scrapbook contained newspaper cuttings pertaining to her cousin’s wedding, some cut from that morning’s papers.
On one wall was a huge carved oak wardrobe. I opened it, and my nose wrinkled at the smell of mothballs and stale scent. She had almost as few items of clothing as I did. Either she had not brought many garments with her or she was the proverbial poor relative, as I was. One couldn’t help feeling sorry for her and I suspected that coming to England to be part of her cousin’s wedding was a very important happening in a dull life.