Murder in The Smokehouse: (Auguste Didier Mystery 7) by Amy Myers Read Free Book Online Page A

door to an oil-lit room, quite sure there would be nothing there save the artistic ladies guarding their beat.
    He was wrong. On the floor was an undoubtedly dead body. A gentleman in full evening dress lay sprawled on his face, a pistol at his side and the reddish-brown stain of drying blood on the carpet.

Chapter Three
    Auguste stood up, bracing himself for what was to come. He had done all he could without touching the body, but that was little. A thousand terrors raced through his mind, fear hammered somewhere at the pit of his stomach. He looked at Tatiana and Alexander, who had remained at the doorway as if distancing themselves from responsibility now Auguste was there.
    ‘Did either of you move him?’ he asked more sharply than he had intended.
    ‘No,’ answered Alexander evenly.
    ‘So you don’t know who it is?’
    ‘No,’ replied Tatiana, perhaps a little too quickly, or was his imagination over active, reason blurred by the unreality of night?
    A man in a dress suit, middle-aged by his substantial build, the hint of a dark beard – Auguste instructed the panic that was still rolling in waves inside him to be still. The general impression of the body was not that of
him
, was it? He could not be sure.
    ‘You think it is His Majesty, Auguste? Surely his Special Branch bodyguards would be here by now?’ Tatiana said practically.
    The man in him wanted such reassurance, the detective in him knew better. ‘Alexander, please fetch Lord Tabor and send for the police.’ As her cousin’s footsteps first walked, then pounded along the path, Tatiana was the first to speak.
    ‘Is it suicide?’
    ‘I do not know.’ Auguste forced himself to look again at the sprawled body and the gun at its side just beyond the outstretched hand. One saw such pictures in the
Strand Magazine
so often it was hard to believe it could have actually happened like that. Soon the police would arrive, the King’s two bodyguards also perhaps, and his own part would be over. Only his worry about Tatiana stood in the way of the relief this thought brought.
    ‘Tatiana, what were you really doing here? The police will discover and I must know first.’
    ‘I have told you.’ Her indignant face was pale in the shadows cast by the oil lamps. It seemed to him her voice was strained, or was that too the effect of night? ‘I wanted a smoke.’
    ‘It was
three o’clock
.’
    ‘We Russians keep late hours. Alexander and I had much to say to one another.’ Her voice rose. ‘Do you think I shot him? Or Alexander?’
    Tatiana had put voice to his fear: murder. Suppose the police thought so too?
    ‘Of course not,’ he shouted.
    ‘Then why these questions?’
    ‘Because they will be asked by others.’
    Memories surged into his mind of the murders at Plums, Stockbery Towers, and the Galaxy. Was he supersensitive to witnesses who were not telling all they knew? And was one of them now his own wife?
    It took twenty minutes of strained silence before there came the sound of footsteps, and Tatiana opened the door to Lord Tabor, accompanied by, Auguste was depressed to see, Priscilla. She wasted no time, he noted, in idle curiosity over the artistic attractions of the smokehouse, but went immediately to the corpse.
    ‘Who is it?’ she demanded.
    ‘I do not know, your Ladyship,’ Auguste replied steadily. ‘We cannot touch the body until the police arrive, and at the moment—’ He broke off, gesturing towards all that could be seen of the bloodied ruin of a face.
    ‘Suicide,’ said George disgustedly. ‘What a time to choose, eh?’
    Auguste did not answer, if answer were required. Did his host refer merely to the lateness of the hour or the inconvenience of such an event during a royal visit? And still he could not be sure that the corpse was not that of the King. Perhaps the same fear consumed Priscilla, for she said to him peremptorily:
    ‘Turn it over.’
    Taken aback, Auguste told her firmly: ‘Impossible.’
    ‘Turn