An Inquiry Into Love and Death by Simone St. James Read Free Book Online Page A

Barnstaple,” the inspector said, “knows more about foxhunting and trout fishing than he knows about death. He likely made a ruling so he could go home to supper. I don’t particularly care what he wrote on that piece of paper. I don’t answer to the coroner.”
    I lowered myself into the chair opposite him. “I don’t think I can help. I don’t have any of the answers. To tell the truth, I barely knew my uncle.”
    “When was the last time you saw him?”
    “Eight years ago.”
    “Were you close before that?”
    I thought of the afternoons reading, of the day on the beach. “He was kind to me.”
    “Why hadn’t you seen him in so long?”
    I shook my head. “I can’t answer that. He had some kind of rift with my parents. I never knew what it was about. He just disappeared one day; that was all.”
    “And your parents are in Paris.”
    “Yes.”
    He looked away, calculating. He had a face of constant clear yet subtle expression, somber, inquisitive, suspicious. Already I was fascinated by it. In repose, he was handsome, but it was the play of thoughts behind his eyes that made him almost searing to look at.
    He turned back to me. For a long moment his gaze took me in, unmistakably assessing me, as if for that moment I were the only person in existence. The force of it was unsettling, but I kept my chin up and stared back.
Take hold of the situation, Jillian.
    He seemed to make a decision. “Your uncle,” he said without further preamble, “was found on the beach at the foot of the cliffs. A fisherman in a passing boat spotted him from the water. It’s an open spot, but hard to see from land. We’re lucky someone saw him when he did. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and your uncle had been dead for three to five hours.”
    I swallowed. The tea sat untouched between us on the table.
    “I ask myself the question,” he continued, “whether a healthy, sober man simply slipped off a cliff in daylight. Don’t you?”
    “Yes.” My voice was barely more than a whisper.
    “Did your uncle have any enemies?”
    I shook my head. Inspector Merriken, I realized, was taking advantage of my shock and pressing me. He was very skilled at it. “You forget that he may have killed himself.”
    He leaned forward again. “That’s why I’m here. You knew him. Do you think he killed himself?”
    I looked down at the table. I had set my hands flat, and I stared at the backs of them, at the spread of my fingers. “I don’t—I can’t picture—” I tried again. “He was alone; I do know that. He’d never married or had children. He was considered eccentric. He was estranged from my parents, who were his only family.” It felt traitorous even to be saying these things. “Still, the idea that he would . . . just
do
that—I don’t think I believe it.” I looked back up and watched the expressions on Inspector Merriken’s face—skepticism, disappointment perhaps. “I suppose the family members never believe it, do they?”
    “It’s an understandable reaction.”
    Anger rose in my throat again, surprising me. “There’s nothing understandable about this. Nothing.”
    He only nodded, and took a small notebook and pen from the breast pocket of his jacket. “Now you see why I’m here.”
    He bent to the notebook and wrote, obviously some kind of notes for himself. I waited during a moment of silence, the only sound the scratching pen. I looked at his handsome face and realized I was still angry at his calculated manipulation of me, at his effortless control, at my own attraction that tempted me to give in. I wanted to shake him.
    “Why not me?” I said at last.
    “Beg your pardon?”
    “Why not suspect me of murder? Perhaps I had a motive.”
    He did not look up. “Because you were in school at the time he died, in a tutorial with three other students and a professor named Martha Mackenzie. I’ve talked to the professor already.”
    I was speechless. He finished writing, closed the notebook with