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England. But it is bad luck that she is female and thus her adult name is probably no longer Sloane.”<br />
“Even if we found her,” Trevor said, “the odds are that she would not remember anything<br />
that would help us.”<br />
Rayley glanced up. “You think not? I’m torn on the issue. I remember a few things from<br />
the time I was five, with certain impressions which I believe may have originated even earlier. And<br />
something as traumatic as what that poor little girl must have witnessed - Ah, Welles, look, see here.”<br />
He handed Trevor the notebook, which was turned to a page where Benson had drawn a<br />
small chart, some business with numbers and percentages that Trevor found impossible to<br />
understand. But at the bottom of the page two notes jumped out immediately.<br />
TOO MUCH FOR EIGHT STONE. FOURTEEN?<br />
LAUDANUM?<br />
***<br />
The Byculla Club<br />
2:49 PM<br />
And, a bit further down…<br />
Tom had been crouched on the floor of the Byculla Club dining room for the better part<br />
of an hour, painstakingly working his way through the tangle of wires which connected the lamps<br />
which had been set beneath the table the evening before.<br />
The trouble, he thought, rocking so far back on his heels that he actually rolled back with<br />
a plop to his bum, wasn’t that he couldn’t find a fray in the cords. The problem was that he had found<br />
a dozen. Either the electrocution of Jonathan Benson and Amy Morrow had been accidental –<br />
prompted by nothing more than their unfortunate placement at the table – or the plan to kill them had<br />
been so fiendishly intricate that he didn’t have a notion of where to start. Emma had told him about<br />
the order of precedence and Trevor had commented on it too…apparently the Byculla Club set a great<br />
store around the sequence in which certain members entered and left a room. Which in theory<br />
suggested that someone might have known where Amy and Benson had been sitting…<br />
But no. It seemed unlikely. Had anyone even known either of them would be there, that<br />
Michael Everlee would drag along an attaché or that Mrs. Morrow’s granddaughter would be visiting<br />
from the districts?<br />
Besides, Tom’s mind kept drifting back to the difference between poison and<br />
electrocution as a murder method and they seemed to be the fruits of very different sorts of minds.<br />
Poisoning someone seemed to be so…well, there was no other way to say it. Poisoning was so<br />
primal, and thus so native, while electrocution was so very modern, and thus so British. India was<br />
full of toxins, and if local legend was to be believed, the locals used them with regularity to dispatch<br />
both themselves and their enemies. But it would have to be a rare Englishman, one with significant<br />
experience of the flora and fauna of the subcontinent, to understand the particulars of this ‘suicide<br />
tree’ and how its fruit should be administered.<br />
And the electricity….even fewer people would be able to calculate the workings of<br />
that. Someone last night, during that endless cocktail hour before dinner, had laughed and said that the<br />
servants at the Club would have nothing to do with the electrical lights and refused to turn them on
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