“I just don’t see any way around it. He’s simply got to be done away with . . . cannot bear his boastful, overbearing nastiness any longer.”

Good heavens. Had the exchange she’d overheard this morning from outside the church window actually been about killing Alastair Whittlesby, and not some fictional character?

She continued climbing, her hand on the railing and her eyes unfocused whilst her mind went back to this morning, trying to remember exactly what she’d overheard.

“I just don’t see any way around it. He’s simply got to be done away with . . . cannot bear his boastful, overbearing nastiness any longer.”

“Right. The problem is . . . how to do it.”

“Poison . . . Coffee. Or a drink . . . ?”

This morning she’d overheard someone plotting to poison someone’s drink, and tonight someone had died from a poisoned cocktail. Surely it wasn’t a coincidence.

“Poison . . . Coffee. Or a drink?”

“There is . . . that . . . new car, eh?”

New car, eh?

She nearly stumbled on the steps, gasping as the realization swept her.

“New car, eh?” she said aloud, turning the syllables over in her mind as she spoke them with different inflections. “New car-eh . . . Vieux Carré . . .”

Good heavens. Had she overheard the murderer—no, murderers; there’d been two of them!—plotting to kill Mr. Whittlesby?

Drat. Now what was she going to do?

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 7

Saturday

THE NEXT MORNING, PHYLLIDA WAS IN HER SITTING ROOM REVIEWING bills and writing drafts to pay them when she heard the sounds of people descending on the main stairs. It was rather difficult to not hear the six-foot-four, twenty-one stone Mr. Chesterton making his way down the steps, a fact she had counted on to alert her to his—and the others’—arrival to breakfast.

Phyllida closed up the accounting book and pushed back from the desk, apologizing to Stilton and Rye for having to leave them again. She would find something to occupy herself in the dining room—or nearby—for a while so she could listen in on what the writers were saying. The Mallowans and their guests had already gone to bed last night by the time she returned, so she’d been unable to hear any exchanges about the events at the cocktail party.

Instead, she’d tossed and turned in her bed—which normally invited deep slumber—unable to dismiss the conversation she’d overheard that morning. Over and over she replayed it in her mind, like a record going on and on and on, but she was able to extract no further clues from her memory other than a wispy thought that she might have heard something that could identify the speakers. But though she racked her brain, nothing surfaced.

If only she’d gone to look out the window at St. Wendreda’s to see who might have been plotting below the window at half past nine yesterday morning.

But she hadn’t.