“Ah—I see.” Perkins’s tone suggested he saw something else entirely. “And you manage the newspaper?” Incredulity rang in his tone. He might as well have sneeredPull the other one.
“Iownthe paper, Constable.” A touch of steel had crept into her tone. Gray was relieved to see her emerald gaze sharpen on the hapless Perkins.
“So who manages the place?”
“I do.”
Perkins’s eyes narrowed to muddy shards. “So it was you hired the photographer chap?”
“I arranged for his services, yes.” She opened her lips to say more, then thought better of it. It seemed she’d taken Perkins’s measure and didn’t like what she saw any more than Gray did.
“His name?” Perkins demanded.
“He is—was—Mr. Horace Quimby.”
“And how long’s he been working for you?”
“For over two years.” She thought, then amended, “Nearly three.”
“Address?”
She frowned, then rubbed her forehead—another sign Gray remembered, indicating difficulty recalling something. “He has lodgings not far away…” Her face cleared. “Winchester Street in Pentonville. Number twelve.”
Perkins scribbled away. “And he was often here, in that room—the darkroom—at that hour of the evening?”
“He often came in about five o’clock, around the time the others leave. It was his habit to develop the negatives he’d exposed that day and hang them to dry overnight, then come in the next day and see what they looked like and print any he thought were good enough to satisfy me or his other clients.”
“Other clients?”
“I don’t know them all, but several other newspapers took photographs from Quimby. He was widely known.”
“And how did you feel about that, heh?”
Ignoring the suggestion in Perkins’s tone, she replied, “Our arrangement wasn’t exclusive. He was free to sell photographs to whomever he chose, as long asThe Crierhad the rights to publish the three photographs we include in each edition.”
Perkins didn’t bother writing that down. “Did you know he would be in today?”
“No, but that wasn’t unusual. He doesn’t—didn’t—come by the office. He had a key to the rear door and always came in that way and went straight to the darkroom, shut himself in, and got to work.” She blinked several times, as if using the past tense had brought Quimby’s passing home.
“So how did you and his lordship here come to go into the darkroom and find him?”
“As I said, when he came in late in the day, he developed his negatives and left them to dry. That normally took him about half an hour, and he would leave as he’d come in—via the rear door. But it was six o’clock when we”—she tipped her head Gray’s way—“started to leave, and I saw the darkroom sign still said Occupied. That meant Quimby was still in there. That seemed odd—he wouldn’t normally have been there so late—and I went to check if everything was all right.”
Silence fell as Perkins labored over his notes, then he raised his head and looked with open suspicion at Izzy before shifting his gaze to Gray. “When you arrived, your lordship, was Mr. Quimby already on the premises?”
“I don’t know. As I said, when I arrived, the lamp in the workshop was turned very low, and I didn’t know about the darkroom. I’m afraid I didn’t look that deeply into the shadows.”
Perkins’s gaze returned to Izzy, and he eyed her aggressively. “So, Mrs. Molyneaux”—Perkins continued having trouble wrapping his tongue around the name—“before his lordship arrived, you were here with Mr. Quimby.”
Izzy blinked. “I really can’t say, Constable. I have no idea when Mr. Quimby arrived. For all I know, it might have been after his lordship came in.”
“Ah, but it could have been before!” Perkins all but pounced. Leaning closer, with a certain relish, he declared, “Quimby could have been working away in that darkroom—just like you said—and you could have gone in and killed him. Stabbed him to death before coming back out to your office for your meeting with his lordship.”
“What?”Izzy looked at Perkins as if he were demented. “No! Why on earth would I kill Quimby? I need his photographs forThe Crier. We don’t have another photographer we can call on, and our readers expect their photographs.”
Straightening, Perkins bounced on his feet. “Maybe so, maybe so, but perhaps Quimby learned something about you. A widow owning and running a business like this, you have to have secrets. Or no! Wait! Perhaps Quimby was your lover and wanted a piece of the business, and you had to kill him to stop him. Yes, that could be it!”
From the fire flaring in Izzy’s eyes, Gray knew she teetered on the brink of losing her quite spectacular temper.
