He ran his fingertips along the leather spines, looking for something out of place, somewhere she might hide things.
Nothing jumped out at him, but he would pull them all out individually if need be. However, Lady Evelyn hadn’t seemed like someone who kept dark secrets. Also, this room fairly shouted safety and security. She probably wouldn’t feel the need to hide anything. She had no reason to believe someone would be looking through her things.
He wandered toward the desk, pleased to see a diary sitting right on top. He picked it up. “Do you mind if I look through this?”
Lady Aston bit her lip. “Go ahead. But don’t tell me what you read unless it’s relevant.”
He nodded and leafed through the most-recent pages of neat, beautifully penned entries until he got to the one from yesterday.
M wants me to meet him in the park. What could he possibly want after all this time? The whole thing is rather mysterious, and I’m still contemplating whether I should go.
“She was going to meet someone she calls ‘M’ in the park,” he said, lifting his gaze to Lady Aston’s concerned green eyes. “Do you have any idea who she was talking about?”
She shook her head. “M? I have no idea. Are you certain it’s a man?”
Instead of answering, he showed her the entry. She read it and then looked up at him with a puzzled frown. “It could be nearly anyone. I can think of a dozen men we’re acquainted with who have that initial in either their first or last names. And which park?”
“I would appreciate it if you’d make a list of everyone you can think of,” he told her, skimming through the entries from the last month. None of them mentioned anything about a man named ‘M.” Though she often referenced someone she was obviously in love with, someone she referred to as “A.” She also talked about her sister, “J,” and someone else, “O,” though it was all fairly inane. It was exactly what he’d expect to find in the diary of a bored socialite who dabbled in the women’s suffrage movement.
Finally, he placed the diary back down on the desk. “Is there any park, in particular, she liked to frequent? Where would be the first place you’d look if she told you she was going to the park?”
She bit her bottom lip, and he forced his gaze away from the lush sight, reminding himself once again to focus on the task at hand and not his lovely companion.
“She does like to go to Postman’s Park to read. It’s within walking distance, and she didn’t take one of our carriages, so either she walked, took a hired hack, or someone picked her up,” she said at last, having obviously thought about her answer.
He liked that. Too often, people answered him without truly thinking about it.
“Let’s go speak to whoever was working near the door and see if anyone saw her leave. They might be able to provide us with an answer to that. If we don’t find anything to point us in a different direction, we can walk to the park ourselves, talk to people along the way, and see if any of them saw anything.”
Relief washed across her lovely features. “Yes, that sounds like a good plan.”