Naughty In Nice (A Royal Spyness Mystery)

sorry. As you can imagine, I’m rather upset. However badly he behaved, he was my husband for over twenty years. I must have loved him once, I suppose. And I wouldn’t wish anybody to die like that, bleeding to death in his swimming pool.” She looked down at her gloved hands. “That pool was his pride and joy. Although a frightful extravagance, if you ask me. What irony that it should cause his death.”
    “I rather think the blow to the head caused his death,” I said. “The pool was just a convenient place to dump the body in the hopes that it would look like an accident. Which of course it didn’t. You can’t hit the back of your head and then pitch forward into a pool.”
    Again she looked at me with narrowed eyes, as if suspecting that I knew more than I was telling. I was glad that Claudette arrived just then with the cognac on a tray. Lady Groper accepted it and took a good swig.
    “So you only heard the news this morning,” Mummy said. “It must have come as a tremendous shock to you.”
    “Tremendous.” Lady Groper shuddered again. “I had been up to visit friends in the hills. I returned to the Negresco very late last night and saw the news when the boy brought in my morning paper. There it was, screaming from the headline: ‘English Lord Murdered.’ I couldn’t believe it.”
    “If you don’t mind my asking,” Chanel said in her delightfully French-accented English, “why were you staying at a hotel when you own such a lovely villa nearby? Had you and your husband had a falling-out?”
    Lady Groper flushed. “It’s really none of your business,” she said.
    “Ah, but it is. My little friend Georgiana is accused of a murder she did not commit. So I must wonder . . .”
    “How dare you!” Lady Groper put down the glass with a bang on the table. “Are you suggesting that I had anything to do with my husband’s murder?”
    Chanel looked not in the least put out. She shrugged. “I am only curious why a wife chooses to sleep apart from her husband.”
    “You know very well why.” Lady Groper almost spat out the words. “Because I assumed that creature would be in residence. How would you feel, knowing that he flaunted that floozie in public, having her to live with him at the villa? He blamed me—claimed that it was my fault because I refused to come to the Riviera with him every winter.” She looked up, as if asking for sympathy. “But I hate living abroad. I hate the lifestyle and the constant parties and the gambling and the—carrying-on, if you know what I mean. It’s all quite alien to what I stand for. Give me a good old British winter with hunting any day.”
    “So why did you come this time, Lady Groper?” I asked, already knowing the answer.
    She frowned at me. “Again it’s none of your business.”
    “But the police might suspect that you came over here with the express purpose of catching your husband with his mistress,” I said. “And being the French police, they would go on to surmise that you lost control and hit him with the nearest object.”
    She shot me a fleeting look of horror. “Surely no one would ever think such a thing. That’s ridiculous. I have known about his mistresses for years and turned a blind eye, because that’s what good wives do.” She sat even straighter and folded her hands in her lap. “If you must know, I had a small spot of business to attend to with my husband. When it was concluded, I decided to visit an old friend who has a villa in the hills. I was planning to return home by tonight’s train, only to hear the news about Toby.” She stood up abruptly. “I’ve taken too much of your time. I’d better go to the villa and check whether there are any possessions of mine there—or presents that I gave Toby. I rather suspect he gave that floozie some of my jewels, but I don’t suppose she keeps them at the villa.”
    “Mademoiselle Olga had left him,” Chanel said.
    “She had? When?”
    “Only a day or so ago. She stormed out in a rage.”
    Lady Groper beamed. “There you are, then. You have your killer. She was known to be a dramatic, violent sort of person. She came back to kill him. Presumably the police are looking for her?”
    “I expect they’ll eventually get around to it,” Vera said.
    Lady Groper started toward the front door, then turned back. “I wonder if I could ask a favor—if one of you would come with me to the villa. I don’t want to compromise myself in any way—you understand. I’d