Ominous Explosion

Beatrice, Duchess of Kesgrave, is not inclined to see a murder behind every corpse in London, a city large enough to hold plenty of ordinary deaths. When the inventor Peter Huzza died in a steam engine accident, his own machine tearing him apart, the tragedy was grim but hardly a shock, since high-pressure steam is perilous to handle.

Still, the scene leaves her uneasy. The destruction seems somehow less than it ought to be, yet the idea is hard to defend. A hundred onlookers watched the same event and noticed nothing wrong, so how could Bea have seen what they missed? The notion that the inventor was killed in plain view is, by any sensible measure, improbable.

Whether an unlikely theory deserves pursuit is another matter, and Beatrice Hyde-Clare has never been one to drop a notion simply because others would dismiss it.