Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #3: Books 9-12 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [reading in the dark TXT] 📗

“Play around with love and sex. It’s not a game. Sooner or later, all that passion just turns…” Her eyes looked past me at the obscenity on the bed, and she said simply, “Ugly.”

I nodded. “If only more people understood that, Bee. Come on.” I stood, pulled her gently to her feet and guided her to the door. There she stood a moment, looking at Sally. Next thing, Sally was crossing the corridor with an ugly, twisted, crying face and her arms held out, and the two women were holding each other and sobbing into each other’s shoulders.

Dehan put a hand on my shoulder. “We need to get a grip on this situation, Sensei. Where is everybody?”

I nodded. “More to the point, where was everybody?” I moved to the door up one and across the passage from Gordon’s bedroom and tried it. It was locked. I called, “Brown!”

I heard the scuffle of feet and the butler came hurrying around the corner. “Dr. Cameron will be with you in a moment, sir!”

I pointed at the door. “Can you unlock this, please? And let’s get everybody assembled in there.”

Dehan grabbed Bee and Sally and gently propelled them toward the spare bedroom while Brown fished out his keys, opened the door and switched on the light. I went around the dogleg and found Armstrong and the two maids leaning on the doorjamb and Cameron pushing his way between them. He caught sight of me and said, “What the hell is it now?”

I pointed at Armstrong. “You, in that room with Bee and Sally, now.” He drew breath. “Give me any more of your attitude and I’ll throw you in there myself.”

He sighed noisily and pushed past me muttering something about fuckin’ Yankees. He went in the room with Bee and Sally and I called Brown over.

“Lock Mrs. Gordon in her room and give Dr. Cameron the key. Put one of your girls on the door, the other on the spare bedroom, tell them to raise merry hell if anybody tries to get in or out. Nobody, and I do mean nobody, goes in there but him or me and my wife. Understood?”

He nodded vigorously. “Of course, sir.”

He went away to lock the door. I turned to the doctor. “Come with me. You need to write out another death certificate.”

He didn’t say anything until we got to the room. Then he stood on the threshold, staring at the body.

“Dear God, what happened here?”

“He was hanged. He has his own dressing gown cord tied around his neck in some kind of a slip knot.” I pointed at the frame of the bed. “You can see where it was tied. We cut him down, but he was already dead.”

He turned and looked at me bitterly. “I have to say, Detective Stone, you’re doin’ a great job of solving this crime. You know who it is and how they did it, but you’re going to leave them to run around killing the rest of us till mornin’? Tha’s a great plan!”

I fought down the irritation I felt and said, “I need two things from you, Doctor, and one of them is not any more of your attitude. I need a death certificate and I need to know if there is any bruising premortem or perimortem.”

He muttered something obscene in some ancient, primal Celtic language and opened his bag. Dehan came in and stood staring at me. With her hair disheveled, the strained expression on her face, the scarlet dress and her long, tanned leg showing through the slash, the only word to describe her was ravishing. She shook her head and said, “When I bought this dress, this isn’t exactly what I had in mind.”

I smiled at her, but it wasn’t a happy smile. “You want to go and change? I got this.”

She shook her head. “Let’s try and work out what happened here. Time of death…” She took a deep breath and blew noisily. “Anytime after he left the drawing room and came upstairs…”

I turned to Cameron. “You didn’t sedate Bee…”

He was carefully removing the rope from Gordon’s neck and spoke without looking at me. “I gave her a mild sedative, but it apparently had no effect.” Then he added, “I hope you’re no seriously suggesting that she is capable of…”

“Can it!” I turned back to Dehan. “Who else was not in the room?”

She shook her head. “Only Brown and the maids.”

“So, at this stage, once everybody got upstairs and went into their rooms, it could have been anyone except Pam. So we’ll need to see who can alibi whom.”

She nodded. “But it does mean that whoever it was was not waiting for him in the room. They came afterwards. He was already changed, but he had his dressing gown on, so either he hadn’t gone to bed or, most likely, whoever it was knocked, he put on his gown and came to the door.”

I nodded. “Then one of two things happened: either his killer overpowered him and strung him up, which seems very unlikely given Gordon’s weight and strength, and…” I looked around. “The absence of any sign of a struggle; or they had a weapon and threatened him with it. They forced him to tie the rope, put it around his neck and gave him a shove.”

Cameron stood. “There’s a third possibility yer no considering, Stone, an’ that’s that his conscience got too much for him. He saw what he had done to the people around him, an’ how all the fuckin’ wickedness of his way of life had come back on him, an’ he took his own life. Bear in mind, in one single night, he lost his son and the woman he thought loved him. No many men could get over that.”

I heard him out, then said, “It’s an obvious and