An Unexpected Peril (Veronica Speedwell #6) -Deanna Raybourn Page 0,27

robust and engaging a woman should have had her life cut short so brutally, so tragically. I peered at the funeral photograph, putting down my toast and reaching slowly for my magnifying glass. After a long moment, I sat back, smiling.

“I can hear you thinking, Veronica,” Stoker said from behind his newspaper. “What is it?”

Wordlessly, I produced the cutting and handed it over, using the magnifying glass to point out the detail in the photograph that had captured my attention.

After a long moment, Stoker slumped in his chair. “Bloody bollocking hell,” he managed. I smiled, a purely feline expression of contentment, and he immediately bristled.

“See here, Veronica—”

I held up a hand to forestall his objections. “No. Let us have it plainly with no brangling. Alice Baker-Greene was laid to her eternal rest wearing a climbing costume and the enameled badge of the Alpenwalder Kletterverein Gipfelabzeichen.”

“Your German pronunciation is execrable,” he put in.

“Do not sulk. It is unbecoming in a man of your age,” I replied calmly. “Now, this badge is not the plain badge worn by every mountaineer who climbs on the Teufelstreppe. It is the particular and very special badge awarded to those who achieve the summit. So, Miss Baker-Greene is buried in her mountaineering garb with an accolade from the society, a very special society marking her accomplishment. Why, then, I am forced to ask, did we find that exact badge amongst her personal possessions at the club? And furthermore, why was Alice Baker-Greene’s climbing badge stolen from the exhibition on the night before last?”

Stoker’s response was pointed. “You cannot possibly know the answers to those questions.”

“I am a scientist,” I told him ruthlessly. “I do not require perfect knowledge in order to form a working hypothesis, only possibilities. Alice Baker-Greene was buried with an Alpenwalder summit badge. This we know from the photograph,” I said, jabbing a finger towards the newspaper in his hand. “Yet an identical—or nearly identical—badge was sent with her personal possessions from Hochstadt. Since an item cannot occupy two places at once, we may safely deduce that there are two badges.” I paused and he gave a grudging nod.

“I suppose so.”

“Now, the badge we saw at the Curiosity Club was packed with Alice’s personal possessions from her lodgings and conveyed directly here. It is, I happen to know, Alice’s own badge.”

“How can you know that?” he demanded.

I described the nick at the edge of the medal. “Alice showed me herself. She said it got bashed about when she wore it climbing once and she intended never to wear it climbing again.”

I paused again and he made a restless gesture. “Get on with it,” he growled.

“The badge at the club is undoubtedly Alice’s own,” I repeated. “But the badge she was buried with was not pinned to her clothing because it was not hers.”

Stoker waved the newspaper at me. “It is most definitely pinned to her clothing in this photograph.”

“But that is not where it was found,” I pointed out. “Read the article carefully, and you will be struck by one curious fact—the badge was found with her lifeless body on the Teufelstreppe, but clutched in her hand. This is the badge, the undamaged badge, that was pinned to her garments as she lay in her coffin. And I propose that this badge belonged to her murderer,” I finished triumphantly. “And was wrenched from his shirt as Alice Baker-Greene reached out for the last time whilst she struggled for her life on that mountain.”

He gave a deep groan. “Veronica, of all the melodramatic codswallop—”

“It is not codswallop. What is more logical than that Alice, whose rope was clearly cut in an act of sabotage, might have struggled with her attacker and ripped a badge from his clothing, carrying down the mountain a clue to his identity? Furthermore, you thought the same yourself, otherwise you would not have had so strenuous a reaction to the realization. ‘Bloody bollocking hell’ were your words, I believe.”

“I admit, I may have thought something along those lines at first, but almost at once I saw that there might be a dozen other perfectly logical explanations for the presence of a second badge amongst her things.”

“I would settle for one,” I told him sweetly.

“It might be a memento,” he said, shoving the newspaper back at me. “Surely she had a love affair or a friendship of some sort—one she mightn’t have wanted made public. So the badge was a sentimental keepsake.”

“Possible, but weak,” I told him. “Two marks out of