Cecily hadn’t invited him. Keegan is so tiresome. Simply refuses to be sociable. He made this trip lately, to the lake of Lugano, but he won’t tell a thing about it. I bet he considers it too frivolous. His mind is always on some legal thing, you know. Always contemplating some new change to the law he wants to get through parliament. Can’t talk about plays or operas or the latest work in the galleries.’
Alkmene studied the brooding figure, concluding it had probably been him who had watched her arrival from the library window. His tight back screamed that he wanted to be left alone.
‘If he’s not exactly sociable,’ she said to Denise, ‘I wonder why he came here in the first place. He could have made up some excuse to decline your stepmother’s invitation.’
Denise smiled. ‘He’s still in love with me.’
She met Alkmene’s startled look with a grin. ‘Oh yes, he asked Papa if he could court me. I think he felt he should ask because his firm works for my father and it would be awkward if we’d stepped out together and Papa had not approved. Indeed, he did not. Papa had the same idea about it as I do. Keegan is the last person in the world I could ever like, let alone love. But he sticks to this foolish notion that we’re meant to be together. He’s here to pine for me from a distance.’
‘I doubt,’ Alkmene said, ‘that someone with the dry legal mind you just described to me would spend one moment on such romantic notions of unrequited love.’
Denise’s eyes sparked. ‘You probably think he will like you, because you’re so smart and can discuss the law with him on his own level. But let me assure you, he still cares for me and won’t even dance with you once. I will make sure he doesn’t.’
Alkmene shrank under the spiteful tone. She knew Denise could flare in an instant when she felt denied or snubbed. She wanted to clarify that she didn’t have any interest in discussing the law with the taciturn lawyer or indeed in dancing with him tonight, but before she could do so, a shadow fell over them.
It was the psychiatrist with the diabolical beard.
He studied them with a knowing smile. ‘Ah, girls who are close friends, the inevitable and eternal struggle, first for the affection of the mother, then for the attention of men. It often leads to complexes. To very deep, twisted emotions that can lead to… irreparable damage.’
Irreparable damage to the night of masked fun, Alkmene wondered, if she stepped on Denise’s petite foot to get even with her for these spiteful remarks? What did Zeilovsky expect them to do? They were not four any longer, and retaliation had no place in polite social discourse. Alkmene smiled at Zeilovsky. ‘An interesting theory.’
Zeilovsky’s blue eyes lit. ‘I can tell you much more about it over dinner. It seems our hostess decided I’m to be seated beside you.’
Alkmene kept a tight rein on her facial expression. ‘Really? How thoughtful of her. She knows how I enjoy psychology.’ She doubted Mrs Hargrove did know as much, but she had to say something to explain her hostess’s decision. Perhaps Mrs Hargrove had simply wanted to make sure Zeilovsky wouldn’t be engaging her with talk of twisted theories and dark experiments?
He reminded her of her father’s many friends from the fields of zoology and botany who could spend hours expounding on their favourite topics, be it rabies or mould, to the despair of their hostesses, who saw their dinner parties invariably ruined.
Alkmene wondered if Zeilovsky would be a man of theory only, or also of practice, having a clinic abroad where he tested his solutions for mental disturbances on his unsuspecting patients. His accent sounded Slavic, which covered quite a lot of ground for him to hide away a country house full of test subjects. The idea of experiments with adults who were considered insane wasn’t very palatable, but it might be even worse if those recent publications that described experiments with children – babies even – were to be believed.
The idea of a dungeon far away, where Zeilovsky was free to test whatever weird theory he had developed, and on babies, too, gave Alkmene goosebumps.
But perhaps she was getting carried away by rumours she’d heard about the darker side of the growing insight into the workings of the human mind. Zeilovsky might be a man who hid in his study digging through books and writing up his own theories from thought experiments, never having seen a single patient up close.
‘Shall we?’ With a smile, Zeilovsky offered Alkmene his arm to lead her into the dining room, explaining how sibling strife went all the way back to Cain and Abel. Alkmene was aware of Jake Dubois’ expression. He looked innocent enough, but knowing him well she could guess how hard he was laughing inside.
The masked ball she had been looking forward to as a night of innocent amusement was rapidly declining into a social nightmare.
‘A tragic case,’ Zeilovsky said.
He had engaged Alkmene all during dinner with his talk of warring siblings, going from biblical examples, via English history, to the present-day case of Vera Steeplechase, who had murdered her sister, Mary, so as to be able to marry her brother-in-law, the man she had wanted for herself from their first meeting ten years earlier. Vera had almost got away with it as Mary’s death had been deemed natural at first.
Only two days before Vera’s wedding to the widower, an anonymous letter to the police had caused Mary’s body to be dug up, and a postmortem had shown traces of poison. Instead of going down the aisle in her sumptuous bridal gown – purchased in the presence of her unsuspecting mother, who’d had no idea her one daughter had killed the other – Vera had been taken into custody, to be tried and perhaps eventually hanged.
‘I do wonder,’ Alkmene said, putting her fork down, ‘who wrote the anonymous letter.’
Opposite her, Aunt Felicia knocked over her glass of wine. There was little liquid left in it, and her husband could quickly dab at the stain with a napkin. The woman’s face was on fire as she glanced down into her lap.
Alkmene continued to Zeilovsky. ‘Was it just a spiteful person who wanted to ruin Vera’s wedding, her day of happiness, and who got more than he or she bargained for? I find it hard to accept the writer knew for sure Vera had poisoned her sister. If he or she had known, they should have shared that knowledge with the police at the time of Mary’s death.’
‘Perhaps the person wasn’t sure at the time,’ Mrs Zeilovsky said, speaking past her husband. ‘Perhaps he or she had seen Vera near some bottle with a potion Mary took on occasion to calm her stomach or her nerves. Perhaps only later, when Vera announced she was going to marry her brother-in-law, did that person realize she might have tampered with the contents of the bottle in question to kill her sister and take Mary’s husband for her own. The human mind doesn’t always jump to conclusions straight away. Sometimes we lack information that can make us see the connection.’
Alkmene nodded slowly. That did make sense.
‘In Vera Steeplechase’s case the information that was first lacking was the motive.’ Zeilovsky picked up his wife’s reasoning as if the couple had agreed on it beforehand. ‘The person who saw her near Mary’s bottles before Mary’s untimely death would never have guessed Vera wanted to kill her own sister. It would be such a heinous thing to do. You don’t expect it of siblings.’
‘No? But you’ve just regaled me with stories of countless murderous siblings,’ Alkmene said with an innocent smile.
Ignoring the flaw in his reasoning, Zeilovsky went on, ‘The mind can even refuse to make a connection because it doesn’t want to. The writer of the anonymous letter might have cared very much for Vera and initially have refused to conclude she was guilty of something as terrible as murder. Only after time had gone by, and Vera’s true intentions revealed themselves in the announcement of the marriage to her brother-in-law, did the person dare write the letter.’
Alkmene leaned back. ‘We won’t