She took a final bite of her cake, licked her fork—curling her tongue in what would have been a seductive gesture had any men been present—and went to join the other ladies, who were setting up a bridge table. I helped myself to coffee and cake and sat alone on a sofa, feeling uneasy. So Nicholas had gone out hunting again, had he? I had seen from experience how easy it was to shoot at the wrong target, and hadn’t Darcy suggested exactly the same way to kill someone conveniently? But I could hardly go after Nicholas at this stage. I’d just have to wait until he returned. Dragomir had warned me against amateur sleuthing, but I was apparently the only one in the castle, apart from the killer, who knew the truth. I had to warn Nicholas as soon as he came back.

The cake looked absolutely delicious—layers of chocolate and cream and nuts. I took a slice but I found it hard to swallow. If I couldn’t come up with a good answer for the first question—who wanted to kill Prince Nicholas?—then perhaps I should examine the next logical one: why? I understood that murder is committed for several reasons: fear, gain, revenge, with fear being the most compelling motive of the three. Who in this castle had something to fear from the prince, something so terrible that he had to be silenced forever? I couldn’t answer that one. I knew so little about everyone here. So who had something to gain from his death? The obvious answer to that was Anton. He’d be next in line to the throne if his brother died. And he had the means—a knowledge of chemistry—and he had stood to clink glasses with his brother. No—that theory didn’t work since the poison was put into the red wine when Nicholas had already switched to champagne and Anton would have observed that.

Of the other people within reach at the table, Matty wouldn’t want to finish off her bridegroom right before the wedding. I was sitting opposite, so was Siegfried, and neither of us did it. So we were back to Dragomir or an unnamed server, bribed by a large sum of money to do the unthinkable. And if not these, a political assassination. That, I supposed, made the most sense, because an anarchist or communist wouldn’t care about the murder taking place in such a public place—would actually prefer it to be visible and spectacular, like the assassination of the archduke in Sarajevo that had started the Great War.