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Calvin, caught off his guard, shot an enquiring look at his father, as if wondering if he should say or stay quiet.

“I want the truth, Calvin. About everything,” Hugh advised. “Right now, your subterfuge makes you appear damned guilty. A man, sneaking around for over a month, deceiving people about his whereabouts? Your fiancée, found murdered in your carriage house after she has been unfaithful to you with your good friend? You have motive. You have means. And you have unreliable alibis, all of whom have been lying on your behalf for weeks now. Do not try my patience with more deceit.”

Thornton, who had taken a seat and crossed an ankle on his opposite knee, let out a low whistle. “Take his advice, young man. I rarely see him this angry.”

Hugh shot his friend a quelling look. Thornton held up a palm of surrender.

“The truth is, I set out for France in September with a few mates,” Calvin began. “I wasn’t going to go. I was worried we wouldn’t be able to afford the expense.”

The expense? Hugh tucked his chin. “You ran out of funds?”

“If you had been frugal,” Victor interjected, glaring at his son. “If you had not wasted your money on gambling, drink, and French whores⁠—”

“That is not how it was, Father,” Calvin argued. “You have no notion how difficult it was to pretend to be flush. It would have been obvious to my friends if I’d been miserly.”

Victor Messinger’s coloring remained stained a deep red. He would not meet Hugh’s eye.

“You wouldn’t have approved of Calvin’s courtship of Penelope Harwood not only because of the baron’s dire finances, but because of your own as well,” Hugh said. “You needed Calvin to marry into money.”

That was the true reason why Calvin had been seeing Penelope in secret.

“But you did bleed the coffers dry on the Continent,” Thornton said from where he was, lounging on the sofa. “I’m going to guess it was by the time you reached Rome. After you’d purchased a few souvenirs from the markets.”

The young man looked surprised that Thornton, a stranger, would have guessed correctly. Hugh took the old ring from his pocket and held it up to view.

“Did you purchase this?”

“Yes. In Rome, as his lordship said. I gave it to Penelope when I returned.” He closed his eyes. “When I asked her to marry me. She accepted, though she didn’t dare wear the ring. It would draw attention. But she promised to keep it with her, always.”

Presumably in her pocket. But then, recalling Audrey’s description of her vision when she’d held the ring, Hugh frowned. It didn’t line up. Audrey had seen a terrified Penelope running in the glasshouse through the eyes of her killer. Meaning that the killer had been in possession of the ring at that point, not Penelope.

Perhaps someone had planted it underneath the body to implicate Calvin. Someone who would have known Penelope had received it as a betrothal ring. Hugh let that notion spin at the back of his mind, while turning to his next question.

“When did you decide to come home? And how is it your mates traveling with you didn’t write to friends and family with the news?”

Had they done so, whispers of Calvin Messinger’s return would have fired across London.

Bashfully, he explained, “I told them I was returning to Paris, where I planned to spend time with a woman I’d met there. I asked them to carry on without me and not to say a word to anyone, because I didn’t want Penelope to know.”

It was a believable excuse, and one Calvin’s friends would not question.

“But the woman in Paris didn’t exist,” the young man insisted. “There were no other women, even though there were many, many opportunities. I loved Penelope. Honestly, I was happy to be coming home to her.”

“Why hide out in your house, then?” Thornton asked.

“Pride,” Hugh said, guessing at the answer. “If anyone found out you’d needed to cut your travels short due to lack of money, it would be bloody embarrassing, wouldn’t it? You have a name and a reputation to protect.”

When neither Victor nor Calvin responded, Hugh knew his presumption was correct.

“Tell me why your valet turned up at Freddie Cheevers’s soiree last month looking for Miss Harwood,” he said.

Calvin’s shoulders dropped, and he looked bashful once again. Even though he’d vowed to stand while being questioned, he sought out a chair and lowered himself into it.

“I’d arrived home the previous week. It was arranged so that I’d arrive at night. No one would see me. After several days of being confined to the upper floors, mostly to my room, with Father barking at me to keep the curtains drawn, I was restless. I wanted to see Penelope.”

The neighbor’s housekeeper had seen Mr. Messinger escorting a man into his home via the back door. She’d presumed it was romantic in nature, but it must have been Calvin sneaking home.

“How did you know she would be at Cheevers’s soiree?” Thornton asked.