(1982) The Almighty (48 page)

in the area of a terrorist attack. An American named James Ferguson had acquired a detailed map of Lourdes in Paris before what may have been an aborted kidnapping of the Pope, and she had recalled seeing the name James Ferguson in the register of a hotel in Nyon, Switzerland. Victoria went on and on, to the experience of witnessing the kidnapping of Carlos by strangers, reporting it to Mr. Armstead and not being allowed to follow through.

When she had talked herself out, she awaited Hannah’s reaction.

Throughout, Hannah had listened closely without a single comment or interruption. Her eyes held on Victoria, her lips working almost imperceptibly as if she were masticating, her veined hands folded motionless in her lap. Having heard Victoria’s every word, she looked off absently as if pondering.

She spoke finally, her voice barely above a whisper. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘the possibility of all this had occurred to me once or twice recendy. There could be no other explanation for Edward’s run of good fortune -‘

‘Except to conclude that he might be inventing the news?’

‘Inventing the news,’ Hannah repeated. ‘But I put it out of my mind as something inconceivable. Until yesterday, when my husband tried to poison me.’

Victoria was astounded. ‘Mr. Armstead tried to poison you - kill you?’

‘Yesterday morning he insisted upon personally making breakfast for me. A rare treat and a gesture of consideration, I assumed. He left for his office, and I ate my breakfast contentedly, and shortly afterward I was in agony. I was able to get to the telephone and call my doctor, and to unlock the penthouse door before I fell unconscious. I was saved in the nick of time.’ She paused. ‘No, Victoria, it was not ptomaine. Poison had been put in my food, accidentally or deliberately. I choose to think it was done deliberately - by my husband.’

‘But why would he do such thing? Of course, I don’t know your relationship -‘

‘We’d had an ugly quarrel the night before. I had let him know what I had suspected of his long absences, that he was involved in a love affair with Kim Nesbit.’

Victoria was surprised to hear Kim’s name from Hannah’s lips. ‘How did you find that out?’ she inquired.

‘By the most obvious means,’ said Hannah. ‘I hired a private detective agency and had Edward followed for several weeks.’

‘You told your husband you had him followed?’

‘Not exactly, but I implied it.’

Victoria considered this, and measured what she had to say next. ‘Hannah, he didn’t try to kill you because you had found out about his other woman. He tried to kill you because you were secretly having him followed.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘By having him followed, you could become a threat to the hidden activity in his life. You could have learned about a lot of people he might be seeing - criminals or terrorists - and found out wha’t he was really up to. He had to stop you before you learned the truth.’

‘I hadn’t thought of that,’ said Hannah slowly. She addressed Victoria straightforwardly. ‘At any rate, he tried to poison me. Of that I was sure. But I didn’t know what could be done about it, since I had no proof. I didn’t know where to turn. Then, this morning, reading and seeing the news of the killing in your apartment, the killing of Kim Nesbit, I was firmly convinced that Edward might be behind it. He was the common denominator for the one and one who made two in your apartment. Kim had been his mistress. You were his employee, suspicious enough of him to risk sending me a note. I don’t know if he meant to kill you or Kim - or why -‘

T don’t know for certain either,’ said Victoria, ‘but I think I know why. Somehow, your husband learned I was suspicious of him and trying to get evidence on him from Kim. He ordered someone to get me out of the way, and they got Kim instead. Perhaps I would have been killed, too, if it had been known I was in another room.’

‘Anyway,’ said Hannah, ‘the note from you, after my being poisoned, coincided with the tragedy in your apartment. I guessed you were onto something of utmost importance, as you had written me. In my interest in my own survival, I had to find out what you had in mind.’

‘Now you know,’ said Victoria.

‘I know.’ Hannah shook her head with conviction. ‘We can’t let him go on. You heard me characterize his behavior in

recent weeks as that of a madman, possibly that of a homicidal maniac’

‘And the leader of the most active of terrorist gangs.’

‘That you believe?’

‘Absolutely.’

Hannah stared at her visitor. ‘But you can’t prove it.’

‘No, I haven’t been able to prove it. My last hope was that you could help.’

Hannah did not speak immediately. She stared into space, as if trying to make up her mind about something. Finally she spoke. ‘I can help,’ she announced. T can help prove - or disprove - Edward’s involvement.’

‘You can?’ Victoria was on her feet, electrified, to learn what Hannah Armstead had in mind.

Hannah raised a hand and crooked a finger toward the corridor leading off the living room. ‘Follow me,’ Hannah said. She began rolling her wheelchair rapidly toward the corridor and into it, with Victoria right behind her.

At the doorway of the first bedroom, Hannah gestured for Victoria to wait. Victoria watched her roll herself up to the bedstand, fumble for a cane leaning against the headboard. Using the cane for leverage, Hannah pushed herself up and out of the wheelchair and onto her feet. Unsteadily, she crossed over to her dressing table. To the left of her mirror, she pulled out a lower drawer. She sought something difficult to find, apparently well hidden, and triumphantly found whatever she had been seeking. Victoria could not make out what she had found, but it appeared to be more than one object, possibly two, which she placed in a pocket of her dressing gown.

Hannah hobbled back to where Victoria was standing. ‘Come with me,’ she said. ‘If proof exists, I’m going to show you the only place we could find it.’

Leaning on her cane, Hannah led the way up the corridor, with a curious Victoria at her heels. They passed the second bedroom and came to a halt before a formidable oaken door with an impressive burnished brass doorknob and dead-bolt lock. ‘Mr. Armstead’s private study,’ said Hannah. ‘No one else is allowed inside without him there. I’ve never been in it with his permission. I’ve been in it once without his

permission. This will be my second time.’ She fumbled in her pocket for one of the objects she’d had hidden in her dressing table. In her hand she displayed a key. ‘Edward thinks he has the only key to the study. He would not allow a spare one to be made. But I had one made without his knowledge, and this is it.’ She inserted the key into the dead-bolt lock. It fit. ‘I had it made without telling him. Not because I was suspicious at the time or wanted to spy, but because I still worried about him. He was spending so much time in his sealed room, working such long hours, that I was concerned for his health. I worried that one night he might have a heart attack, and it would be impossible to get inside and reach him when he might need help. So, secretly, I called in a locksmith and had this second key fashioned for his study. It was meant for an emergency. This, I believe, constitutes an emergency.’

With a strong twist of her wrist she turned the key. There was a metallic sound. Hannah gripped the doorknob, put her shoulder against the massive door. Noiselessly the door swung inward.

‘Has this room always been his private study?’ asked Victoria.

‘Yes, but never before locked,’ said Hannah, ‘until a few weeks before the king of Spain was kidnapped in San Sebastian, when he installed the special lock and issued the no trespassing order.’

Hannah and Victoria exchanged looks and went inside.

Victoria took in her surroundings. A handsome room with exquisite light brown paneling with neoclassical detailing, a wall of leather-bound volumes on one side, an immense television screen on a stand in a corner, an oil portrait of Napoleon Bonaparte above the huge fireplace ahead, two pastel-covered armchairs behind an oak table, a wide couch draped with a velvet coverlet, a door to a private bathroom, finally a Victorian library-table desk with an electric typewriter on a stand beside it.

Hannah pointed to the straight chair resting between the typewriter and the desk. ‘He’s been coming in here almost every night, and he sits on that chair typing,’ she said. ‘I haven’t seen him, but I know he does it and has been doing it since several weeks after he inherited his father’s newspaper.’

A kind of awe rooted Victoria to the spot. Her eyes were on

the typewriter. ‘Do you suppose he’s writing those terrorist stories?’ she wondered.

‘You want to know if I suppose my husband is Mark Bradshaw?’ Hannah said. ‘Let’s find out.’

She turned around and lifted a forefinger to the wall across the study and behind the pastel armchairs. ‘See that?’

Victoria had missed it the first time around. It was a medium-sized painting, lightly framed, of a young boy, perhaps ten or eleven, attired in a military uniform and posing as a juvenile version of the Napoleon portrait hanging over the fireplace.

‘A memento of Edward’s childhood,’ Hannah explained. ‘The safe is in the wall behind it.’

Victoria glanced sharply at Hannah. ‘The safe?’ she mouthed.

‘The proof,’ said Hannah. ‘If it exists, it will be in that concealed safe.’ She pulled a shred of paper from her dressing-gown pocket. ‘Here’s the combination. I found it, and copied it, the only time I was inside this room before, the time with the locksmith. Take this chair. Climb and remove the painting. You’ll find the safe. I’ll call the combination out to you. If there’s proof, it’ll be inside. It is all the help I can offer you. I wish you - not luck - I wish you truth.’

Momentarily Victoria wavered. She remembered reading in high school of a New England schoolteacher who had been the first to theorize seriously that Shakespeare had not written his own plays and that final proof might be found in Shakespeare’s grave in the chancel of the Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon. When, after years of applying to open Shakespeare’s grave, the schoolteacher had been given the opportunity to do so, she was afraid to follow through. ‘A doubt stole into her mind,’ her friend Hawthorne had written, ‘whether she might not have mistaken the depository … she was afraid to hazard the shock of uplifting the stone and finding nothing.’ She had retreated and quit.

In these frozen seconds, Victoria was afraid to hazard the shock of finding nothing. Then the madness would be her own, not Armstead’s.

‘I - I don’t know,’ whispered Victoria.

‘It’ll be the last chance you’ll ever have,’ urged Hannah. ‘We both deserve to know the truth.’

Victoria bobbed her head. She dragged the straight chair across the study to a position behind the armchairs and under the youthful painting of the publisher. She climbed up on the chair, and with ease was able to lift the framed painting off its hook and hand it down.

A miniature silver combination-lock dial, set into a blue one-foot-square metal safe door, was revealed.

‘I’m ready,’ said Victoria to Hannah, who stood beneath her.

Hannah peered at the directions on the shred of paper. ‘Spin the dial three times around to the left, and the fourth time around stop at 56.’

Victoria spun the dial left past zero three times, and on the fourth time stopped at 56. ‘Okay.’

‘Spin it right two times, and the third time around stop at 26.’

Victoria did as she was told. ‘Okay.’

‘Now turn it left once, and the second time around stop at 74.’

Once more Victoria followed the instructions. ‘Done. Any more?’

‘Turn the dial right to zero. That should do it.’

Carefully, filled with doubt, Victoria moved the dial to zero.

Click. The bolt had retracted.

She pulled at the lever, and the wall safe was open.

She reached inside it, probing with her fingers, and felt a large manila envelope. She withdrew it. There was nothing else in the safe. She looked down at the brown envelope. It bore no identification, only a neat penciled date across it. Tomorrow’s date.

‘Only this,’ said Victoria, stepping down off the chair.

‘What’s in it?’ said Hannah. ‘What’s inside?’

Victoria pulled up the back clasp and lifted the flap of the envelope. There were three sheets inside. They were double-spaced and neatly typed.

There was a by-line.

By Mark Bradshaw.

There was a story.

Side by side, Victoria and Hannah scanned it together.

After the first page, the two women stared at each other aghast.

‘My God,’ whispered Victoria, ‘Hannah -‘

Hannah was trembling. ‘I can’t believe it-‘

‘You’d better!’ a voice rasped at them from across the room.

Both women looked up, horrified, petrified at the sight of Edward Armstead inside the open door. He wore a set smile upon his face as he started into the room.

‘It is not always, ladies, that you can read tomorrow’s news today.’

He stopped beside his desk, leaned over, and ripped the telephone cord out of the wall.

He resumed his slow advance across the room toward the two women huddled together.

Reaching them, his smile was almost benign. He raised one hand, and almost delicately removed the pages from Victoria’s hold.

‘I came back for this,’ he said. ‘Foolish to have overlooked it in my haste to leave.’ He folded the pages of the story with care and slipped them into his overcoat pocket. ‘Now, if you’ll excuse me - oh, yes, Hannah, the duplicate key, please -‘

Dumbly, his wife handed the key to him. As he turned to go, she suddenly came to life, clutching at him with both hands. ‘Edward, you can’t!’

With a shrug, Armstead shook free of her. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘everyone has to die sometime, doesn’t he? As for yourself and your friend, you won’t have to wait past morning.’

He walked back through the room into the corridor. He turned, and gave a courteous nod.

The door closed. The dead bolt sounded. The study was sealed.

Hannah awakened gradually, and when she was able to open her eyes, she was disoriented. It took seconds for her to realize that she was lying on the couch in her husband’s study. The events of the evening, the night, the long hours of imprisonment, surfaced. She was too exhausted to be horrified. She moved her head sideways and made out Victoria standing beside her, staring down at her.