Royal Blood - By Rhys Bowen Page 0,74

dinner last night?”

“There were twelve,” Dragomir said. “But we would only be concerned with those who served the field marshal. Those who waited on the other side of the table would never have come near him.”

“Ah, I see.” Patrascue nodded jerkily. “And it would be impossible to lean across this table?”

“Any servant who leaned across a table would be instantly dismissed,” Dragomir said. “Our standards of etiquette are of the very highest.”

“I will speak with these men, one at a time,” Patrascue said. “I will swear them to secrecy. They know enough of my reputation to realize what would happen to them if they were rash enough to lie to me or to break their vow. And if one of them has accepted money to commit this heinous act, then I shall make him confess, I promise you.” He smiled unpleasantly. I noticed his teeth were unnaturally pointed.

“Of course we could have made a mistake all along,” Anton said in a different, breezy voice. “As you say, we are only amateurs. Perhaps we were misinterpreting what was only a simple heart attack after all. It was this lady who suggested that she smelled the odor of bitter almonds, and we know that ladies are inclined to be hysterical in the presence of a body.”

“I absolutely resent—” Lady Middlesex began. I kicked her hard, under the table. She looked at me in astonishment and shut up.

“As soon as the car bearing Field Marshal Pirin’s body reaches civilization we shall know the truth,” Anton went on smoothly. “Why don’t we wait until a competent physician has given his assessment of the situation? It would be a tragedy if false rumors leaked out to my country and a regional war began for nothing. It wouldn’t make you look good either, if you started a witch hunt for something that turned out to be a simple heart attack.”

Patrascue stared at him, trying to assess the implications of what he was saying. There was a pitcher of water on the table. He reached forward, poured himself a glass and drank from it.

“There is something in what you are saying,” he said. “I have no wish to destabilize this region or cause any unpleasantness with our neighbors at this moment of joy and celebration. We will await the doctor’s opinion. But in the meantime I will keep my eyes and ears open. Nobody will be above my scrutiny. Nobody!”

He put down his empty glass firmly on the table. The participants rose to their feet. Except for me. I was staring hard as if I were seeing a vision. I had just realized something that threw a whole new light onto this situation.

Chapter 23

I stood staring at the table until the others had left. In my mind’s eye I could visualize Field Marshal Pirin giving his drunken, rambling toast. He had reached for a glass, and he was holding it in his left hand. Hannelore had mentioned that his table manners were abysmal and he never used the correct fork. Apparently he didn’t use the correct glass either. It was not his glass at all he had grabbed for, but Prince Nicholas’s.

It took me a moment to grasp the implication of this. The intended murder victim was not Pirin at all, but Nicholas. And the reason Nicholas hadn’t drunk his own wine and died was that he had switched to champagne when the toasts started and had not touched his red wine after that. This would indicate that the glass had originally been free of cyanide during the main course when Nicky was drinking red wine with the wild boar. Somehow, someone had introduced the cyanide after that, unfortunately not realizing that Nicholas was going to call for champagne for his toasts. And if someone had introduced the cyanide, it had to be one of the servers or Dragomir.

Wait a minute, I thought. I was discounting the other diners at the table. Pirin obviously wouldn’t have put cyanide into a glass he was going to drink himself. On Nicholas’s other side was his bride and she was hardly likely to want to kill off her bridegroom. Opposite him was his brother, Anton, and as Dragomir had said, it was frightfully bad form to reach across the table. It would have been noticed instantly. And besides, the brothers seemed to be on good terms. Anton wouldn’t have wanted his brother dead. I paused, considering this. Anton had made jokes about not being the heir and having no purpose