Lady Constance Ashworth had been the last person to see Lord Fenwick alive, by her own account, and Director Pell had arranged the interview in Fenwick's own drawing room — a choice Irene found tactically sound and emotionally calculated, the familiar surroundings designed to either comfort a grieving acquaintance into openness or unsettle a guilty one into error.

She sat in the corner of the room, by prior arrangement, positioned to observe without participating directly. This was the role Gavin had assigned her for formal interviews of the capital nobility — visible enough to be present as the Consultant of record, peripheral enough not to trigger the social friction that would come from a woman of contested identity asking direct questions of the city's oldest families.

She understood the logic. She did not entirely enjoy the position, but she understood the logic.

Gavin conducted the interview from a chair positioned across from Lady Ashworth, with the particular formal courtesy he extended to witnesses of standing — a different register from the flat procedural tone he used with suspects, warmer at the surface while remaining, beneath it, exactly as precise.

"You dined with Lord Fenwick on the evening of his death," he said.

"We did. A small gathering — myself, Lord and Lady Whitmore, and our host." Lady Ashworth's composure was excellent, the trained stillness of someone who had spent decades in rooms where emotional display was a social liability. "He seemed entirely himself. I cannot account for what happened after we departed."

Irene watched Gavin's jaw.

She had learned, across eleven days, the specific vocabulary of his face — not the obvious tells that an untrained observer might catch, but the subtler grammar beneath them. The compression at the left corner of his jaw when a witness said something that registered, fractionally, as inconsistent. The particular stillness that overtook his shoulders when his Blackthorn sense engaged at low intensity rather than full scan.

She was not, technically, supposed to be taking notes on his behavioral patterns. She was supposed to be taking notes on the witness testimony.

She found herself doing both, the two activities running in parallel without conflict, her pen recording Lady Ashworth's account of the evening while some other part of her attention — the part she was increasingly reluctant to examine too closely — tracked the precise timing of his reactions, the moments his attention sharpened, the rhythm of a man whose stillness she had begun to find more legible than most people's animation.

"What time did you depart?" Gavin asked.

"Shortly after the tenth bell. Lord Whitmore had an early appointment the following morning."

The jaw. A fractional compression, there and gone.

Irene wrote, in her own notes, in the small careful hand she used for observations that were not meant for the official record: *He caught something. The bell time, or the appointment.*

Gavin's voice did not change. "And Lord Fenwick's mood as you departed?"

"Entirely cheerful. He walked us to the door himself."

The jaw, again. More pronounced this time.

Irene's pen moved without her fully directing it: *Definitely the departure. Something about how she's describing it.*

The interview continued for another twenty minutes, Gavin's questions moving through the expected territory — the guest list, the conversation topics, any indication of distress or unusual behavior — with the patient thoroughness of a man building a complete record before drawing any conclusion. Lady Ashworth answered everything with the same composed fluency, and Irene watched the small accumulating evidence of his attention sharpening at specific, consistent points.

When the interview concluded and Lady Ashworth had been escorted out by Director Pell with the appropriate courtesies, Gavin remained in his chair for a moment, looking at the door she had exited through.

"She's lying about something," Irene said, from her corner.

"Yes."

"Twice, specifically. The departure time and the mood as you left. Possibly connected."

He looked at her with an expression of mild surprise — the particular quality he wore when she confirmed something he had observed through entirely different means. "How did you identify the same two points?"

She considered how much to reveal of her method. "I wasn't watching her," she said. "I was watching you."

A pause. "Explain."

"Your jaw compresses when something registers as inconsistent. It happened twice during this interview, both times correlated with her statements about the departure. I don't know what your eyes detected specifically — I assume something about deception markers I can't perceive directly. But I can read your reaction to it with reasonable reliability at this point."

He was quiet for a long moment, and she watched something shift in his expression — not discomfort, exactly, but the particular recalibration of a man realizing he had been more visible than he intended to be, for longer than he had realized.

"You've been observing my reactions," he said. "Throughout the investigation."

"I observe everything," she said. "It's the work."

"This isn't the work," he said. "This is — " He stopped.

She held his gaze and did not finish the sentence for him, because finishing it would require naming something she had been carefully not naming, and she suspected he was discovering the same reluctance from his own side of the conversation.

"What did Lady Ashworth lie about, specifically?" she said instead, redirecting them both back toward solid ground.

He took the redirection with visible relief. "The departure time, almost certainly. She said shortly after the tenth bell, but her account of the evening's activities — the dinner courses, the conversation she described — would have taken considerably longer than the timeframe she's allowing. Either they left later than she's claiming, or something happened in the gap she's trying to compress out of her account."

"And the mood?"

"She said he was entirely cheerful. The marker registered on 'entirely.'" Gavin's expression sharpened with the particular focus of a man assembling a conclusion. "Which suggests he wasn't entirely cheerful. Something was off, and she's choosing not to mention it."

"Why would she protect that detail?"

"That," Gavin said, "is what we need Director Pell to find out, through more conventional channels than I can use directly with a witness of her social standing."

Irene made a final note and closed her notebook.

"For what it's worth," she said, standing, "you're remarkably consistent. Eleven days of observation and I haven't found an exception to the jaw pattern yet."

Something moved across his face — not quite a smile, but its quiet, suppressed cousin. "I will try to be less legible."

"Please don't," she said, before she had fully decided to say it. "It's useful."

He looked at her for a long moment, and the room held a particular quality of silence that she had begun to associate specifically with him — not the absence of conversation, but the presence of something neither of them was naming, occupying the space where words would otherwise go.

"Director Pell," he said finally, breaking it. "We need the Whitmores' independent account before tomorrow."

She nodded, and they returned to the work, and she filed the entire exchange in a category that had stopped pretending to be purely professional several days ago.