Murder. It’s one of those words, isn’t it, that sounds as dreadful as the deed itself. Certainly it shocks me to say it out loud like that, though I have lived and breathed this thing for months now, though the terrible end of Sir Harry Oakes haunts me now as it did the first day I learned of it. And you would think that a statement like that—There was a murder—might pierce the composure of anybody, even Miss Thorpe. But maybe I forget that the rest of the world knows all about poor Oakes. Even in the middle of war, people will pay attention to the killing (there’s another dreadful word) of a man so wealthy and famous as Sir Harry, in a location so exotic as the Bahamas, in a manner so gruesome as—well, as it was. So perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that Miss Thorpe’s expression remains cool and ageless, that she doesn’t so much as lift her eyebrows.

“The Oakes murder? What’s that got to do with Benedict?”

“You’ve heard about it?”

“Heard about it? It was all over the newspapers. Such as they are, with paper rationed.” She twitches the cigarette with her thumb. A strand of hair has come loose from the knot at her neck. She pushes it back over her ear. “Didn’t they arrest somebody? Some French chap, I believe. There was a trial. A sensational trial.”

“Not French,” I say. “Mauritian.”

“Oh, of course.”

“Yes. The evidence was fabricated. It was all a giant cover-up. Not to cover up who committed the murder, mind you. Everybody in Nassau knows who killed Harry Oakes. Who had him killed, anyway.”

“Then what were they trying to cover up?”

“Why,” I tell her. “Why he was murdered.”

“Oh, naturally. The why is always more complicated than the who or the how. More interesting and especially more dangerous.”

“In this case, especially.”

“And did Benedict know why?”

“Yes.”

Tuxedo, having softened up my legs to his satisfaction, now settles in the center of my lap and purrs like a motorcycle. I stroke the fur behind his ears, beneath his chin. He seems to be smiling, though his eyes are shut. Margaret smokes her cigarette and stares at the photographs on the mantel, the images of which I can’t make out.

“I should have known, I suppose,” she says. “He told me he was just going to look after the duke, a sort of liaison officer. I should have known it was something more.”

“Oh, I think you knew. Didn’t you?”