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and two.’ January divided with her the piece of Hèlaine Passebon’s excellent peach tart that he’d picked up in the dining room and settled in the chair she’d brought out for him. ‘Patrick Derryhick, in addition to being extremely charming where wealthy old aunts were concerned, was apparently what the English call a complete bad hat. He drank and whored his way through Trinity College, Dublin, and then Oxford, gambled his modest patrimony to perdition, and – at least according to Uncle Diogenes – had the unpleasant trick of drawing others, less resilient than he, into his way of life. His “merry band”, as they called themselves, included the son of the eleventh Viscount Foxford, who drank himself to death on a bet in Paris at the age of thirty, leaving behind a much-relieved wife and a five-year-old son.’
    ‘The current twelfth Viscount.’
    ‘Germanicus Stuart.’
    ‘Who suddenly decides to go into the cotton-growing business with Derryhick and crosses the ocean in his company? A thing possible and yet improbable, as Aristotle says. How impossible would it have been for that young man to have murdered Derryhick and sneaked his body into someone else’s coffin?’
    ‘Not impossible at all.’ January edged his chair back from the gallery rail as the rain poured down in earnest. ‘Beauvais Quennell, his wife, and his mother all sleep in upstairs rooms looking over Rue Douane – not surprisingly, nobody wants to sleep over that back-parlor. With a large hotel behind them, they must be used to noises in the night. Any man of normal strength could have lowered Derryhick’s body on to the stable roof and thence to the ground, to be switched into the coffin, and from there it’s only a few hundred yards to the river, with poor Rameses in the handcart.’
    ‘The Swamp would be safer.’
    ‘If you were familiar with New Orleans you’d know that. I doubt a foreigner would even be sure exactly where it lies, though Uncle Diogenes at least appears to have heard of it. There’s a little more danger of being seen on the waterfront, but not a great deal at three in the morning at this time of year.’
    ‘Hmph.’ Her mouth took on the expression it did when one of her pupils was explaining that she hadn’t the slightest idea who might have taken another girl’s coral ring. ‘And where do Uncle Diogenes and M’sieu le Vicomte claim they were while all this was going on?’
    ‘Uncle Diogenes was gambling somewhere on Rue Royale – he says. You know how many gaming establishments there are within a two-minute walk of the Iberville. He returned to the hotel at three in the morning and found Droudge and Foxford both asleep. Foxford’s key was gone from the desk, as if he were in his room all evening, but one of the porters saw him come in through the side entrance at a little after two thirty. He claims he had gone out for a walk and forgot to turn it in.’
    ‘People do, of course.’
    ‘He claims he left the hotel at nine thirty – he had been out earlier with Derryhick – but no one saw him go. The man who cleans the patrons’ boots says that his were only barely splashed.’
    ‘And is M’sieu Quennell’s yard paved?’
    January grinned. Rose never missed a trick. ‘Bricked.’
    ‘Hmm. Like the banquettes of the French Town between Rue Douane and the levee.’
    ‘As you say. The sheets on his bed had been changed for fresh – only slept on for part of one night, by the look of them – and there were marks on the roof of Quennell’s stable beneath the windows of the Viscount’s room. Derryhick’s watch, with blood smeared on its case, was found beneath his bed.’
    Rose’s eyes narrowed behind her spectacle lenses; January could almost hear the clicking of her thoughts. ‘It would have been fobbed, surely? It’s not that easy for a watch to come out of a vest-pocket.’
    ‘He struggled with his killer.’
    ‘I suppose.’ She frowned into the distance, picturing it. ‘Was the