An Inquiry Into Love and Death by Simone St. James

disappeared. In a few moments he returned with a roll of bandages and a pair of scissors. He had removed his hat, overcoat, and jacket, and without the extra layers, in only his shirtsleeves and trousers, he had a particular animal grace. He pulled a chair up to mine and rolled up his cuffs, revealing wrists with dark hair on them. He pulled my hand toward him without ceremony and inspected the bleeding thumb, his dark head bent low.
    I sat, crackling with impatience and some kind of wild, excited energy as he deftly wrapped the thumb in a bandage and tied it off. His fingertips on my skin sent jolts up my arm. He seemed not to notice. He smelled of soap and the autumn air he’d brought from outside. His shoulders, under the white shirt, looked impossibly strong.
    “You’ll live,” he said as he finished.
    “That’s a relief.” I bit my lip as he straightened. “So, who is going to go first? You or me?”
    “I will,” he said easily. “I’ve ordered some food to be brought, and some tea.”
    “Do I need food for this conversation?”
    “You may, yes.” He crossed his arms and slouched back in his chair. He took a leisurely moment to look at me, as I sat with my legs crossed, my spine straight, my hands in my lap. His gaze traveled me as if searching for an answer, and though his expression was carefully impersonal, I felt its warmth.
    “What is it?” I said.
    He frowned a little. “You look different with clothes on.”
    My blush was hot. “I had clothes on when we met!”
    “Not many.” He raised his eyes to mine and shrugged. “You puzzle me. When I met you yesterday, you looked like a bohemian type who had just gotten out of bed.”
    I could have protested that it had been nine o’clock in the morning, and I
had
just gotten out of bed—but some blessed remnant of common sense made me keep my mouth shut. I also didn’t argue that I had hardly been naked. My legs had been bare, but I’d been wearing my oversize men’s sweater. I kept quiet and let him go on.
    “However,” he continued, “when we spoke, I realized that wasn’t quite right. You may not quite be proper, but you aren’t lax in your morals.” He ignored my glare of outrage and continued. “A student, then. A buttoned-up intellectual type, perhaps. But you aren’t that either. You’re neither fish nor fowl.”
    “I see. And today?”
    “Today you are dressed much like any other young woman, albeit with a bit of money. And you almost pull it off.”
    I choked.
“Almost?”
    “It’s what I can’t put my finger on,” he admitted. “You wear the clothes of any other girl of your class, as if you’re off to an afternoon of teas and husband hunting. But with you, it’s quite obviously an act. You’re something very different underneath, and I don’t know exactly what that is.”
    “So you are simply attempting to put me into a pat little category.”
    “Most diligently, yes. And not succeeding.”
    “If that is the game, then I could categorize you as a womanizer.”
    “You wouldn’t be exactly wrong,” he said, “but you wouldn’t be exactly right, either.”
    The barmaid came in and set down a tray of tea and toast. When she had gone, the inspector leaned forward without another word and pulled a small square of newsprint from his pocket. He unfolded it to reveal a white cigarette butt, smoked most of the way to the end.
    “What is this?” I asked.
    “I found it on the top of the cliffs this morning,” he said. “And this one”—he pulled a second square from his pocket, and showed me an identical cigarette—“was found in the same spot by a local PC the day your uncle died. It was right at the top of the cliffs, where your uncle must have fallen.”
    I stared at the cigarette. My uncle had never smoked in any of my memories; I had seen no evidence of it in the house, not a cigarette or ashtray.
    “I can see you calculating it,” Drew said to me. “No, your uncle did not smoke. And if he had smoked the