be a favor to me. It would give me someone to think of other than myself.”
A warmth of gratitude filled her face, and also a very genuine admiration. Narraway was sure that Quixwood had seen it, and it must indeed have given him some small comfort.
THE FOLLOWING DAY NARRAWAY called early at the club where Quixwood was still living. He had to wait until the man rose and came into the dining room for breakfast, then joined him without asking permission, because he had no intention of accepting a refusal.
Quixwood looked startled, but he made no objection. He regarded the older man with some curiosity.
Narraway smiled as he finished requesting poached kippers and brown toast from the steward. As soon as the servant left, he answered Quixwood’s unspoken question.
“I hear several different accounts of Catherine,” he said, watching Quixwood’s eyes. “I assume that you loved her, and also that you knew her better than anyone else. Nothing need come out in court that puts that in doubt, and still less in the newspapers, but I think it is time we discussed her without the glittering veil of compassion that usually shrouds the dead.”
Quixwood sighed, but there was no resistance in him. He leaned back a little and his dark eyes met Narraway’s. “Do you not think it was Alban Hythe who killed her?” he said anxiously. “It will bring terrible grief to poor Maris if it is, of course. She still believes in him.”
Narraway did not answer the question directly.
“If they were lovers, Catherine and Hythe, why on earth would he suddenly turn on her like that?” he said instead. It was a reasonable question.
“Does it matter now?” Quixwood wrinkled his brow.
“If we are going to convict the man and hang him, it has to make sense,” Narraway said bluntly.
Quixwood winced. “Yes, of course, you are right,” he conceded. He began to speak in a very low voice. His eyes were downcast, as if he was ashamed of being forced into making such admissions.
“Catherine was a very emotional woman, and she was beautiful. You never saw her alive, or you’d understand. She hated going to the sort of functions where you and I might meet. And to tell you the truth, I didn’t press her. It wasn’t only out of kindness to her, but also because she was so charming, so very alive, that she attracted attention she was not able to understand for what it was, or deal with.”
Narraway was puzzled, but he did not interrupt.
“She loved attention,” Quixwood continued, a warmth lighting his face, probably for the first time since the night of Catherine’s death. “She responded to it like a flower to the sun. But she also was easily bored. When someone did not live up to her expectations, or have the imaginative enthusiasm she did, she would drop their acquaintance. It could cause, at the very least, a degree of embarrassment.”
At last he looked up and met Narraway’s eyes. “I loved her, but I also learned not to take her sudden passions too seriously. She lived a good deal of her life in a world of her own creation: mercurial, entertaining, but quite unreal.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I fear young Alban Hythe would have had no idea how changeable she was, how … fickle.”
He made a slight gesture of dismissal. “She would mean no cruelty, but she had no concept of how deeply an idealistic, rather naïve young man might fall in love with her, and—when she rejected him—feel utterly betrayed.”
He blinked and looked away. “If they were lovers, or he thought she had implied they would be, and then without warning she felt he had not lived up to what she expected of him, he surely would have felt utterly cheated. He might have damaged irreparably his relationship with a wife who was devoted to him in favor of a woman who seemed incapable of loyalty to anyone—who had built a castle in the air out of his dreams and then destroyed it in front of him. Do you see?”
Narraway did. It was a persuasive image. And yet he did not quite believe it.
“But what about taking the laudanum to end her life?” Narraway asked, his voice sounding harsher than he had meant it to.
“Perhaps she realized what she had done,” Quixwood said with a small, helpless gesture of his hands, barely a movement at all. “She was passionate, but she was not strong. If she had been, she would have lived in the