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Chapter Nine
The Byculla Club Bar
6:40 PM
“Was she Indian?”
“No, Sir, she didn’t look it,” Davy said, nervously swirling his cocktail. To travel posh
was one thing, but the Byculla Club was quite beyond him. “She wore that wrappy sort of robe the
local women wear, but her coloring indicated she was English.”
“They call it a sari,” Trevor said, swirling his own cocktail as well and making
peripheral note that the ice shards within must have come at great effort. “A British woman in Indian
clothes. Most strange. And she wouldn’t answer your question for why she was there?”
“It was more a shout than a question, Sir,” Davy admitted, moving aside on the divan to
accommodate the arrival of Rayley. “She startled me and I apparently startled her. I asked ‘Who are
you?’ but that’s when she ran.”
“Show Rayley what she dropped.”
Davy pulled one of the crime kit envelopes from the interior pocket of his ill-fitting linen
coat. His outfit for the evening was a contribution from a closet of Mrs. Tucker’s which had
evidently once belonged to her late and only somewhat lamented husband. And then he carefully
extracted an eyedropper, using care to touch only the tube and not the plunger.
“So our mystery woman dropped a dropper,” Rayley drawled, settling back on the
settee. “That is certainly convenient.”
“A little too convenient,” Trevor said. “Apparently she was there to plant evidence.”
“Or take the real evidence away,” Rayley said as Davy reverently replaced the dropper
into its envelope and then his pocket. “Those gadgets retract fluid as well as release it, do they not?”
“I dusted this for fingerprints,” Davy said. “But that’s as far as I got.” He recounted his
observations about the Weaver house to Rayley and Trevor as the three men sat in their little corner of
the great room, each of them periodically making his own unspoken observations of the scene before
them as they conversed.
“Save the dropper for Tom,” Trevor said when Davy’s story drew to its close. “As well
as the clippings from that strange plant you noted. And you can return to the house and finish your
work on the morrow.”
“It seems a waste of time to even be here,” Davy said fretfully. “With the house standing
unguarded and the lab work unfinished.”
“Oh, not a waste of time,” Trevor said, gazing out at the people mingling around the
room. They were elaborately dressed considering that the Byculla Club was a place they visited
daily and that they would be dining among people they had known for years. But even his untrained
eye could see that the women’s appearance was too fussy, with their clothes somehow out of date.
Emma, whose gown was without a bustle but rather featured a severe sort of drape to the side,
seemed to be attracting a good deal of envious attention from the other ladies.
They try to stay current with fashion from London, Trevor thought, but they have every
disadvantage, do they not? Everything must be brought in by ship at great expense and if they try to
reproduce British designs using the local materials and craftspeople, it always falls flat. Looks fake
and out of place, neither convincingly British nor truly Indian either.