Bath Belles by Joan Smith Page B

reproach. Pelty is almost too honest. Certainly he was too naive at the time to have engineered anything of the sort. I’m sorry he ever told Mrs. Mailer about the transaction, but she was hounding the daylights out of us, and to keep her quiet he told her my plan. I don’t want to offend you, but it struck me as odd that Mr. Sutton ever involved himself in the business. It had nothing to do with him.”
    “He was too honest, too, Mr. Maitland. Any dishonesty was anathema to him. He was a solicitor, you know, and he hoped to become a judge eventually. He would have done the thing out of principle. Don’t think he was criminally involved, for he was not. You don’t know my fiancéif you can think that for one minute.”
    He looked skeptical. “I didn’t know him; that’s true. I have been judging him by his cousin, Eliot Sutton.”
    I bristled in Eliot’s defense. “Surely you’re not suggesting Eliot Sutton is a thief!”I objected.
    “Not at all, but one has to wonder about a gentleman with no income who doesn’t work yet manages to live fairly high on the hog.”
    “Does he not have any income?”I asked. Graham had a couple of thousand a year outside of his work. Yootha was also rich, and I had assumed Eliot was similarly endowed.
    “I’m only going by gossip. He sold his little country place a few years ago to settle his debts. Perhaps he has enough to live and stave off his creditors till he marries some well-dowered lady.”
    “You may be sure he has a competence,”I said firmly.
    “In any case, Eliot Sutton has nothing to do with my affairs,’’Mr. Maitland continued in a voice that suggested he would be happy to change the topic. “As you have surprised me so agreeably by being an honest and reasonable lady, I want to impose further on your kind nature and ask you to help me find my blunt.”
    “How can I possibly help you, Mr. Maitland? You and your bloodhound have been through the house with a fine-tooth comb.”
    “I haven’t looked through your fiancé’s personal effects.”
    “A parcel containing ten thousand in banknotes isn’t sitting in a jacket pocket.”
    “Not likely, but there might be some clue in a jacket pocket. That is the sort of place I would like your permission to look. Duke mentioned some key, for instance, that turned up last night and seemed to cause a deal of bother.”
    “It didn’t bother me! It was probably for something at his workplace.”
    “He’d have an office key, of course. And there was just the one key unaccounted for, then?”
    “No, there were two,”I admitted.
    “Do you have them with you?”
    “They’re right here in my reticule. Why?”
    “Let’s run along to his office and see if either key fits it. You really should return the office key to whoever hired the place after Graham left.”
    “I’m not sure where his office was.”
    “It was on Jermyn Street, west of the Haymarket. A Mr. Sinclair has the office now. I met him at the time of my investigations into Mr. Sutton’s affairs. Would you mind if we go there?”
    I did mind, somehow, but it was such a reasonable request that I agreed. I didn’t go in, though. I gave Mr. Maitland the keys and I sat in the carriage looking at the modest, tidy little oaken doorway, now bearing the sign “Sinclair and Humes, Solicitors.”Graham had spent five years of his life behind that wall—how strange that I knew nothing of his business there. Whole sections of my fiancé’s life were unknown to me. I hardly knew him at all, really. Just as a tourist visiting Bath. In a moment Mr. Maitland was back.
    “One of the keys opens the door. Sinclair never saw one like this,”he said, and deposited the single brass key in my hand. It was taking on a morbid fascination for me. It was more than a key to a door; it was a key to Graham, to some side of him that I didn’t know.
    The carriage returned westward to the more polite part of town, and we sat in silence a moment, thinking. “You haven’t