as the Royal Theater of Varieties (and badly damaged by a bomb in 1941). At the west corner of Kingsway, the Holborn restaurant welcomed them; in the last century it was the largest dance hall in London. Now it was a largely male bastion of dark luxuriant wood and waiters who spoiled Sir Bernard with special dishes despite wartime rationing. Agatha doubtedSir Bernard—whose egalitarian treatment of these waiters over the years had no doubt inspired this uninvited loyalty—was at all aware of this favoritism.
The steak-and-kidney pie luncheon was as wordless as it was delicious, and—as they both took coffee afterward—Agatha said, “You must be on a case. You seem terribly preoccupied.”
“Yes. Nasty bit of business.”
“We’ve never discussed any of your cases.”
“No. I suppose we haven’t.”
“Some people might find that… odd.”
“Really, Agatha. And why is that?”
She cocked her head, raised an eyebrow. “You are, after all, the foremost forensics expert in Great Britain.”
He just looked at her; no false modesty prompted any need to comment.
“And I,” she said, and trailed off.
But he said nothing.
She sighed. “And I am the foremost author of crime novels in Great Britain.”
“I should say the world,” he said casually.
This caught her off-guard. “You would? You really would?”
“I believe,” he said, sipping his coffee through the parted lips of the faintest smile, “I just did.”
A warm glow coursed through her, though she was a little ashamed that it had.
“At any rate,” she said, “we have never discussed crime, have we? Or murder, or mystery.”
“We have not. What did you call it? Busman’s holiday?”
“Are you aware that I frequently use poison for my murders?”
His eyes opened wide. “Fictional murders, I trust.”
“Fictional murders, yes. And you are one of the world’s most renowned experts on poison as used in murder cases.”
“One of… ?”
She laughed gently. “ The most renowned…. There’s a wonderful story about you. I wonder if it’s true.”
“You might ask.”
“I have heard,” she said, “that at the time of the Croydon poisonings, you arrived at the graveside dressed in your typically immaculate manner—right down to a top hat.”
“That does sound like me.”
“And when the coffin was raised, you leaned in, ran your nose along the side of the box, stood up straight, and said, ‘Arsenic, gentlemen.’ ”
She had hoped for a smile or another light remark, but instead a melancholy cast came over his features.
“Bernard—is something wrong?”
His voice was soft; almost faint—she had to work to hear it, over the clatter of dishes and table chatter.
“When was it… twenty years ago? I was working on a particularly unpleasant exhumation case…. Is this bothering you? We did just eat, after all, and I—”
“I have never been prone to squeamishness, Bernard.”
“… Well, there he was, all laid out, ready for examination. And the young C.I.D. officer on the case, standing beside me, possibly nervous at his first autopsy, fired up a cigarette! I turned to him sharply and said, ‘Young man, you mustn’t smoke. I won’t be able to smell the smells I want to smell.’ ”
“And then,” Agatha said gaily, “you bent down over the corpse and sniffed away… as if the deceased were a rose garden…. I’ve heard that story, too.”
His face was blank and yet the distress was evident. “My sense of smell… it’s almost gone.”
She sat forward. “Oh, Bernard… how simply dreadful.”
He shrugged, slightly. “And what I insist upon calling lumbago… but which we all know is severe arthritis… has settled in the low of my back, most cozily.”
Her response was a flinch of a smile, followed by: “That’s the penalty of age—but these things happen, Bernard, and must be endured. As I get older, the gift of life seems stronger, more vital….”
“Even in time of war?”
She chose her
Gregory Maguire, Chris L. Demarest