Chapter One
Treachery, thy name is Nina!
I was relieved to find that I had not spoken those words aloud. In fact, for once in my death, I had been struck speechless.
One could have heard the proverbial pin drop in the room after Nina’s words of greeting to That Woman. Then came a collective intake of breath before gabbling broke out all over the room. I was almost dizzy from the assault of words coming from all around me.
Nina had severely damaged my credibility. Lady Hermione now eyed me as if I were something just retrieved from the nearest rubbish tip. How on earth was I to respond to this, other than by outing myself as the real Dorinda Darlington? If I did, who would believe me now that Nina had spoken?
I made two quick decisions. The first was that I would find myself a new agent forthwith. Hitting Nina in the pocket book was the only kind of threat she’d understand. Fortunately for me, I had nothing new under contract via Nina, so I was free to shop around for agents.
The second decision was that I would go along with Nina for the moment. She was playing some sort of deep game. I doubted it would be to my advantage, one way or another, but I’d hold my tongue and see how this played out.
“Dr. Kirby-Jones!”
Lady Hermione rattled the rafters, as usual.
“Have you been playing some sort of game with us and baiting this poor young woman?” Lady Hermione’s expression boded nothing but ill for yours truly.
“No, Hermione, he has not!”
Isabella Veryan’s sudden defense of me was quite a surprise. I turned to look at her in astonishment.
Lady Hermione appeared just as startled as I. “Belle! What do you mean? What do you know about this?”
Isabella came to stand beside me, placing a reassuring hand on my arm. “I’ve not known Simon all that long, Hermione, but I’m an excellent judge of character, and if he says that woman is an impostor, then I believe him.” She tossed her head in the direction of Nina and Dorinda. “Moreover, that viper would swear the sun was shining in the midst of a torrential downpour if it suited her purposes.”
Oh ho, I thought. Bad blood between Isabella and Nina. Who would have thought it?
“Dear Isabella, so forthright as always.” Nina’s voice slid lazily forth, like the hiss of the viper Isabella had called her. “I had forgotten how dearly you love to hold onto a grudge, no matter how misguided.”
“That’s doing it up a bit brown, Nina.” George Austen-Hare had entered the fray. Now I had him on one side of me and Dame Isabella on the other. “We all know what you did to Isabella over the rights to her backlist when she changed publishers. Nothing short of criminal, that was. No wonder she left you. Bloody piracy, that’s what it was!”
I had had no idea Isabella was no longer a client of Nina’s. Nina certainly hadn’t advertised that fact; it must be a fairly recent development.
Nina’s eyes narrowed at George’s barb, and I thought for a moment she would come off the sofa and attack poor George with her bare hands. Instead she settled for something deadlier.
“Ah, George, George,” she cooed. “I truly am delighted that you’re still able to peddle your male sex fantasies under the guise of romantic suspense. I didn’t mind the money, frankly, but your feeble attempts at getting me in bed were more than I could bear. I hear you don’t have that problem with your current agent.” Her mouth twisted in a moue of distaste. “The poor dear must be truly desperate for clients to have to stoop so low.”
I could feel the sheer rage boiling within poor Austen-Hare. I couldn’t blame him. I had seen Nina nasty before, but nothing to compare with this. She was begging to be murdered, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone obliged at the rate she was going.
I had also had no idea that George Austen-Hare had defected, along with Isabella Veryan. No wonder Nina was so thrilled to have Ashford Dunn signed up now.
“Oh, come on, man,” Dexter Harbaugh spoke up. “Slap the silly bitch, and be done with it.” He knocked back the rest of his drink, set his glass down upon a table, and ambled over to stand in front of George, Isabella, and me, facing Nina. “She just needs a little knocking around. Show her who’s boss. She works for us, after all. Where would she be without writers?”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Dexter,” George snapped. “I’ve never struck a woman, not even one who tries to provoke me in such a vulgar manner.”
“Yes, Dexter, don’t be ridiculous,” Nina said, her voice hard. “If you had the balls to actually strike a woman, you wouldn’t write about it so lovingly in your books. Talk about living vicariously!” She began laughing uproariously.
Dexter Harbaugh’s back went rigid. Like George moments before, he simmered with rage. Taking a step forward, he picked up Nina’s cup of tea from the table and dashed its contents into her face. Nina stopped laughing and started yowling.
Dorinda screamed and jumped up from the couch. “You animal! You could have blinded her!” Before anyone realized what she was doing, she stepped around the table and laid into Dexter Harbaugh with one slap after another. Harbaugh was too dazed at first to respond. Then his fists started flailing back at her. It took Giles and me several moments to get the two of them separated. I hadn’t noticed Giles coming into the room, but I was glad of his presence now.
“Enough!” Lady Hermione bellowed, and I’d swear that all of Kinsale House shook like it had been hit by an earthquake.
“This is an utter disgrace!” Thankfully Lady Hermione dropped her decibel level considerably. “I am appalled, utterly and entirely appalled, by your behavior. All of you!” She paused. She was so angry her chest was heaving with the exertion of breathing.
“Dr. Kirby-Jones, Nina, I want the two of you to stay. The rest of you are dismissed, for the moment. Go to your rooms, and consider what you’ve said and done here. I will speak to each one of you, after I have decided whether to continue with this week’s conference.”
The whole roomful of people had frozen into place.
“Dismissed!” Lady Hermione barked again. Mary Monkley cowered behind her. Patty Anne Putney took Dexter Harbaugh by the arm, murmuring in his ear, soothingly no doubt, while Mr. Murbles remained his imperturbable self. They led him out of the room. Isabella Veryan and George Austen-Hare strode arm in arm behind them, with Norah Tattersall trailing in their wake. Ashford Dunn, who had hovered silently near Nina during the foregoing fracas, lingered at the doorway, gazing back and forth from Nina to the fake Dorinda.
“I think perhaps I should be here, too, Lady Hermione,” That Woman said, her voice quavering.
“I think not,” Lady Hermione said.
“Come on,” Ashford Dunn said, grabbing at Dorinda’s arm. “Idiot!” he hissed at her in an undertone. I could hear him, but I doubted either Nina or Lady Hermione could. “You’ll ruin everything. Come on!” Dorinda stood, wavering, but Ashford Dunn took hold of her and pulled her from the room.
Now only Nina and I were left in the room with our irate hostess.
Nina had wiped the tea from her eyes and face, though her eyes continued to stream with tears.
“Dr. Kirby-Jones,” Lady Hermione addressed me in a calmer tone. “Do you have any amendment to your accusation?”
I shook my head. “No, Lady Hermione. I still maintain that the woman claiming to be Dorinda Darlington is an impostor. I am prepared, if necessary to prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt.”
“Nina, do you have anything you would like to say?”
“No, Hermione dear, I have nothing to add.” Nina affected nonchalance, but I knew she was doing a masterful job of concealing her anger.
“I will get to the bottom of this,” Lady Hermione vowed, “and whichever of you is lying to me will regret it. Have no doubt of that.” She drew a deep breath. “Now, if you will be so kind as to leave me.” She turned to her secretary. “Brandy, Mary, if you please.”
As Mary Monkley scurried to fulfill her employer’s bidding, Lady Hermione leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes. Her face had turned ashen, and I wondered whether calling a doctor might be in order. Now, however, would not be the moment to suggest that, I decided. I left her to the tender mercies of Mary Monkley.
Neither Nina nor I said a word as we left the room. Once I had closed the door behind us, however, I caught Nina’s arm and spun her around to face me.
“What the hell was all that about, Nina? What’s going on here?”
Ashford Dunn chose that moment to erupt from somewhere nearby. “Take your hands off her! ”
“Call off your boytoy, Nina and answer my question.” I stared at the two of them. Dunn had wrapped an arm protectively around Nina’s padded shoulders, while Nina smirked at me.
“You don’t have to pay any attention to him, Nina.” Dunn glared daggers at me.
My own knight errant made his entrance upon that cue. “Oh, come off it, barrow boy.” The withering contempt in Giles’s voice made Dunn blanch, even though he probably hadn’t a clue as to what Giles meant by that derogatory term. ‘The woman obviously has bigger balls than you do. I doubt she really needs some jumped-up johnny from the cornfields of Iowa to fight her battles for her.”
“Now it’s your boytoy to the rescue, Simon.” Nina laughed. “And here I thought he was just good for fetching tea, eh, Giles?”
That’s Sir Giles to you and your little guttersnipe.” Normally Giles eschews his lord-of-the-manor status— after all, he’s a mere baronet—but when he wants to, he can sound intolerably upper crust.
“Oh, my,” Nina said, unimpressed. “Sir Boytoy. Lad-di-da.”
Giles wasn’t fazed. “You’re so good at sticking knives in other peoples backs, it’s a pity someone hasn’t performed the same service for you.”
Nina laughed. “Dear me, it has teeth. And it can bite. Oh, I’m terrified.”
All this time Dunn had been fuming silently. “I ought to thrash you, you upperclass poof!” I wonder how long it had taken him to come up with something that breathtakingly trite.
“Save your energy for Nina’s bedroom.” Giles refused to be drawn.
“Enough!” I said, though I had actually been rather amused by their little catfight—amused enough that my own temper had cooled a bit. “I’m still waiting for an explanation, Nina. What’s going on here?”
“Now, Simon, that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” Nina batted her eyes flirtatiously at me, and I could feel Giles tensing beside me. “You’ll just have to trust me, won’t you?”
“Unfortunately, I don’t think I can.”
“You really have no choice.” Nina dropped the casual manner. She shook off Ashford Dunn’s arm, startling him. “I’m going out on the terrace for a smoke, since Hermione has the fits if anyone smokes inside Kinsale House. I’ll talk to you later, Simon.” She turned to Dunn for a moment. “Ash, dear, we’ll talk about your new contract later. Now why don’t you go upstairs and get some work done on your new book. That deadline is coming up, and we wouldn’t want to miss it, now would we?”
“Yes, Nina,” Dunn said docilely. No doubt about who held the reins there. He headed for the stairs, pausing long enough to direct a baleful stare in Giles’s direction. Nina, without a backward glance, walked down the hallway and through a door. I hadn’t yet seen the terrace at Kinsale House, but presumably Nina knew how to find it. I noted the door through which she had gone; I’d go after her in a few minutes.
“What are you going to do, Simon? What the hell is she playing at, do you think?” Giles turned to me, his handsome brow furrowed in irritation.
“I’m not sure what’s going on, Giles,” I said, “but you can bet I’m going to get to the bottom of it. Nina’s devious, which it didn’t take me long to discover. That’s probably a good quality for an agent to have, especially one as high-powered as Nina. But I hadn’t expected this level of duplicity.”
“She’s a nasty piece of work.”
“Yes, and I’m beginning to see just how nasty she can be.” I frowned. “Maybe this is some kind of publicity stunt on her part, but I can’t figure out what the point is, if it’s intended for publicity’s sake.”
“She has obviously treated some of the other writers here rather shabbily.”
“Yes, she’s made several enemies, that much is evident I wouldn’t be alone, dancing on her grave.”
Giles laughed at that. “No, I’m sure there’d be quite a party.”
“Would you mind, Giles,” I asked him, “running up to fetch my sunglasses and a hat for me? I’m going to track Nina down on that terrace and try to force her to talk to me.”
“No need, Simon,” Giles said, “though you know I’d not mind in the least.” His eyes slid away from mine for a moment. “I was just out for a brief walk. The sky is quite dark. If it hasn’t started raining yet, it won’t be long, by the looks of things.” I’ve told him I have a slight allergy to sunlight, which is true, of course, but he doesn’t know quite why I’m allergic.
“Then I’d better try to track Nina down before we both get wet,” I said. “Any progress with your inquiries?”
“I’m compiling quite a lot of information,” Giles said. “I’ll have plenty for you to dig through by this evening.”
“Good,” I said. “Keep at it.” I strode off down the hall, toward the door through which Nina had disappeared.
I found myself in yet another sitting room, this one furnished in true Pukka Sahib. The large chamber bulged with various artifacts, most of them in questionable taste, from the Indian subcontinent. What is it with the British and elephants’ feet? I shuddered and averted my eyes as I approached French doors on the other side of the room.
One of the doors stood slightly ajar, and I pulled it open and stepped out onto the terrace. As Giles had said, the sky was dark and gray. Though it was not yet raining, I doubted it would be long before it poured.
The terrace was a broad expanse of worn and aged stone, probably twenty-five feet by twenty, I estimated. Midway there, I espied Nina, sitting at a small table and smoking.
I hastened toward her, anxious to question her further. “Nina! I want to talk to you!”
Nina looked toward me and tilted her head to one side. She took a long drag from her cigarette and expelled smoke as she stood up. She walked away from me, toward the balustrade and the steps that led down to a broad expanse of lawn. As she reached the balustrade she leaned over to pitch her fag end onto the lawn.
I was by this time only a few feet from her, and her shrill screams stopped me in my tracks.
“Nina! What on earth is it?”
The cigarette butt still smoldering in her fingers, Nina turned to face me, all color drained from her face. “My God!” she said. “They’ve bloody well killed her!”
***