“Please do. Are you suggesting that I came all the way from England to kill a field marshal I had never even heard of until this week?” I tried to give a carefree laugh that didn’t quite come off. One heard rumors of the way justice was conducted in foreign countries, and I would certainly be an easy scapegoat for him. “What possible motive could I have? It is my first time in this part of the world. I never met any of these people before.”

“As for motive, I could think of several. The young Bulgarian princes, they did not like this fellow, I have heard. You are their cousin, are you not? Perhaps you are in a conspiracy together to kill him for them.”

“In that case,” I said, “we could easily have labeled his death a heart attack and nobody would have challenged it. But why should I wish to get involved in Bulgarian politics, even if these are my cousins?”

“Money,” he said with a horrible grin. “As I told you earlier, money can make anyone do evil acts. And you have none, so your mother’s companion confided to me.”

“I may not have been brought up with money, but certainly with plenty of integrity,” I said haughtily. “If I were so desperate for money, I could have made a good marriage by now. Your heir to the throne here has already asked me.”

“I know this,” he said, waving a hand airily. “I make it my business to know everything.”

“So if I married him, I’d hardly want to start off my marriage with a war between Balkan countries, would I?”

“But I heard you rejected him,” Patrascue said. He turned to one of his men and said something under his breath in another language. The man took out a handkerchief, then leaned forward and removed the little bottle. He handed it, still in the handkerchief, to Patrascue.

“I assure you, you won’t find my fingerprints on it,” I said. “And you’ll probably discover that it is an ordinary medicine bottle containing someone’s headache mixture.”

Using the handkerchief, Patrascue removed the stopper, sniffed, then backed away hastily. “This did not contain a headache mixture,” he said. “And I do not expect to find fingerprints on it. A clever killer will have wiped them away.”

“Even a stupid killer would have hurled the bottle out of the window, where it would have sunk into snow that’s not going to melt for ages,” I said. “By which time the killer would be back in his or her own country.”

Patrascue stared at the window, digesting this, the wheels in his brain working slowly.