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“I was wondering if we were perchance making the same mistake as the Scottish police,”
Trevor said.
“You mean we’re looking for one man when in reality there might be two?” Rayley asked.
“It seems at least worth considering,” Trevor said. “We have been assuming all this is the work
of a single man, and that there is thus a single line of logic to the killings. Yulian must have been
killed by an enemy of the Volya, and Cynthia Kirby must have been killed by the same person, who
realized she had discovered something – most likely through the photograph she and Ella took on the
morning after the crime. But it seems to me that there’s an inherent flaw in that thinking.”
“Wait…wait,” said Tom. “Give us a shot at it. It goes back to the question of why Yulian was
killed, does it not? Because if someone within the palace, either the private guard or the police or
just some concerned citizen, learned that he was affiliated with the Volya, they wouldn’t have had to
cut his throat in the dead of night and then taken some innocent girl along with him. They could
simply have exposed him and let the law do their dirty work for them.”
“Quite right,” Emma said. “We’ve all assumed the obvious – that Yulian was killed by an
enemy of the Volya. But the enemies of the Volya are the authorities and they would have arrested
him, not killed him. And they hardly would have, in turn, killed Katya and Mrs. Kirby. Poor Katya
was probably just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but looking beyond her, our other two
murders lie at opposite ends of the political spectrum. One victim was a loyal member of the
revolution and the other a loyal servant to the imperial family. Who would have had reason to wish
them both dead?”
“No one I can think of,” Trevor said. “Which is why the resolution of the case in Scotland so
intrigued me. Upon reflection, our quick assumption that whoever killed Yulian must have also killed
Cynthia is quite illogical since, just as Emma says, it implies a man who stands against both the
revolution and the established order. But perhaps we are not looking for one man with dual motives.
Perhaps we are looking for two men.”
“I must disagree,” said Rayley. They all turned toward him, Trevor nodding encouragement.
Disagreement, not runaway accord, was the purpose of these meetings.
“In this huge edifice, with more than a thousand rooms, both crimes were committed in the same
space, were they not?” Rayley said, pushing back his eyeglasses and clearing his throat. “Even more
significantly, they were both staged in precisely the same theatrical manner. Yulian and Katya posed
as tragic lovers, Mrs. Kirby as the king the gypsies. No, I feel both crimes had to have been