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M rs. Lloyd jumped up, whirling away from gawping eyes so quickly that her skirts swayed like waves at sea. “I told him,” she whispered. “I told him I took your key to Clarke’s house from you.”

The silence was appalled.

Audrey said, “I had another. I had two cut because I am so forgetful.”

Everyone stared with varying degrees of incomprehension from Audrey’s calm figure to Christine’s back.

Except Ben Devine, who rose to his feet. “I really don’t see why I have been brought here to intrude on what is clearly a family matter, so with your permission, I shall take my leave.”

“No,” said Solomon. “You were brought here to eliminate certain possibilities. Just about everyone here had a motive to steal the treasure back from Clarke, and shoot him either in punishment for the theft or for daring to raise his eyes to Miss Lloyd. The only question is who knew Clarke lived in that house, and who could have been there around midnight on the night he died.”

“Miss Lloyd knew,” Constance said. “And apparently Mrs. Lloyd knew. Mr. Lloyd knew because his wife told him. Captain Tybalt did not know.”

“Neither did the children,” Audrey said quickly. “Christine would never have told them such a shameful thing.”

Mrs. Lloyd turned very slowly back to face the room, but her gaze avoided everyone.

“Very well,” Solomon said, though his brain still seemed to be running ahead like a series of photographs, examining and discarding images as he went. “Then let us consider who was out and about and who has an alibi for the time concerned. Mr. Lloyd, where were you at midnight last night?”

Lloyd’s gaze locked with his wife’s. Something was being conveyed, communicated…

But he turned quite suddenly on Solomon, his nostrils flaring with contempt. “You cannot seriously ask me that and expect an answer! You work for me!”

“Not anymore,” Solomon said mildly. “We were engaged to find your treasure—which we did—and then your sister, which we also did. Our agreement never extended to covering murder.”

“Your wife has just told us that you knew where Clarke lived,” Constance added. “So where were you last night around midnight?”

“In bed!”

“In my bed,” Mrs. Lloyd said hoarsely.

“Oh, for the love of…” Rachel began, bouncing to her feet. “Does no one tell the truth in this house, ever? He was not in your room! I and half the servants heard him snoring his head off in his own room!”

“And are you telling the truth?” Solomon asked. “Or covering for your parents?”

“Neither of them went out that night. I was awake and watching from my window. Papa came home before eleven and then went to bed. Mama did not go out at all.”

“Who did, Rachel?” Solomon asked quietly.

“We know Sydney did,” Constance said. “As did Mr. Devine.”

“Mr. Devine came to see me !” Jemimah piped up with defiance.

Lloyd started angrily toward Devine and was yanked back by Syndey’s unexpectedly strong hand on his shoulder.

“Not helping,” Sydney said.

“Not at midnight, he didn’t,” Constant said firmly. “We know exactly where he was then and in what kind of state, so don’t muddy the waters with yet more lies.”

“You can’t speak to her like that!” Devine exclaimed furiously before he swung around on Lloyd.

“And as for you, sir, it’s time you knew exactly who it is you are employing!

” He pointed dramatically at Constance. “That woman is no more than a common prostitute with a brothel only three streets away from here.”

Sydney cast his eyes to heaven, muttering, “Imbecile.” Everyone else was staring at Constance in horror. Only Constance herself appeared to be quite unmoved, although Solomon knew otherwise.

Her smile was too bright, her eyes too hard in their glitter. “Oh, there is nothing common about me, sir. I own that establishment.”

Devine almost choked.

“Mrs. Silver,” Solomon said, deliberately attracting all attention to himself, “is the owner of the largest charitable institution in London catering for fallen and abused women. As you would know had you been granted entry and not turned away at the door for the kind of drunken abuse her establishment mitigates against. To more important matters.”

Everyone was still staring at him, but it was the wonder in Constance’s eyes that almost broke his heart.

Just because he had stood up for her. Just because he had told the truth of the way things were, not as they were perceived.

Perhaps he erred a little on the side of charity, but not by much.

The women were protected from men like Sydney and Devine.

There was more that he could do, but that was for later.

“What?” Sydney asked sulkily. He must have known he was in for a massive dressing-down from his father—providing Lloyd was not arrested for murder.

“You, Devine, and your other friend left that establishment just before midnight,” Solomon said. “Where did you go?”

Sydney scratched his head. “Dashed if I can remember, old man. Ben?”

Devine frowned. “White’s? Might have been White’s. Actually, it was ! Rawleigh’s idea. You were against it, though, and you were quite right because I only lost.”

Sydney nodded wisely.

Solomon’s heart beat like a drum. “Did you lose, too, Sydney?”

“Must have.” Sydney smiled ruefully, pulling out the linings of his pockets to show their emptiness.

“Not at White’s, you didn’t,” Devine said. “You must have gone to some other hell, because there was only Rawleigh and me at White’s. I’m sure that’s why I lost… What?” He stopped, swallowing nervously as he glanced from Sydney’s fixed smile to Solomon and Harris.

Got you, Solomon thought.

“No,” Rachel said. “Whatever you’re thinking, Sydney came home at midnight. I saw him. He left Ben and came home.”

Of course he did. He needed his pistol and the cushions to muffle its report. “And then he left again, didn’t he?” Solomon said gently. “With a bag or a roll under his arm?”

The scared look in Rachel’s eyes, the awful understanding that would forever ruin her innocence, tugged at his heart. He was sorry, but he could not go back.

“Inspector, I think you might like to search Mr. Sydney Lloyd’s rooms for the murder weapon.”

“No! I will not have it!” Barnabas Lloyd exploded. “I forbid you! My son never touched that man. I killed Clarke, because of Audrey and the treasure. My wife told me where he lived and I went there and I shot him.”

“But it wasn’t you she told, was it?” Constance said.

“It wasn’t you to whom she gave the key she had taken from Audrey.

That’s why you looked so surprised when she said it and why you’re taking the blame now.

Because it was Sydney she told, and Sydney is the one person you will protect.

The apple, as they say, never falls far from the tree.

He thought it was his right to kill Clarke for the treasure. ”

“Only you couldn’t find it, could you?” Solomon said to Sydney.

“And I expect you took fright, with all that blood. So you ran until you talked yourself into going back. Fortunately, your father sent you to me that morning, because of your aunt’s disappearance, so you were able to nip back to Clarke’s house on the way—only to discover Constance there.

So you hit her and came to me. No wonder her name was almost the first thing you said to me.

She was on your mind more than your aunt.

You thought you might have committed murder twice. ”

Sydney smiled, walking toward him. “Only a jumped-up carpenter and a whore,” he said deliberately. “Or so I thought.”

He moved quite suddenly, snatching Solomon by one arm, and Solomon felt the cold, sickening metal at his throat. The barrel of a pistol.

“You see,” Sydney said apologetically, “the murder weapon is not in my room.”

*

“Christine would never have told them such a shameful thing.”

For some reason, Audrey’s words in defense of her brother’s children kept echoing around Constance’s mind. Not because the words were necessarily wrong, but because the intonation was.

Audrey was not sure. She was trying to convince herself because she had got used to thinking of her brother as the author of all her ills. He had become a convenient villain for her, and rightly so in many things, but not necessarily in all.

Sydney, whom none of them could read or understand, the darling of both his parents, who had exchanged such a long, intense look—Christine silently begging, and Barnabas just as wordlessly agreeing, to take the blame for their son.

Solomon must have been thinking along parallel lines, briefly distracted by his need to defend Constance. Though there was no need in her eyes, it felt curiously sweet and warming, because he understood.

And yet that softness had made them slow at just the wrong moment.

As Sydney had edged toward the table with the treasure, right by Solomon and the policemen, she realized suddenly that the culprit was about to run—with at least some of the treasure.

She even jumped to her feet, but then he held a pistol to Solomon’s neck and anguish seemed to shriek in her ears.

For a horrible moment, she thought she would faint. Certainly, her head pounded like a drum in a marching band. But she could not allow it.

As if from very far away, Sydney said, “You see, the murder weapon is not in my room.”

His smugness barely registered with her. Her every instinct was to hurl herself bodily between Sydney and Solomon, but the gun was already pressing into his neck, right over the artery. Any sudden movement, any twitch of Sydney’s finger, and Solomon would die.

The hugeness of that threatened to overwhelm her. She had never felt so helpless in her life. But she would never go back to the belief that nothing good ever happened. Solomon had already happened. Love had already happened.