Dreaming Spies (39 page)

The male person who re-joined us was considerably less oppressive.

“The local community believe that Thomas and Lady Darley are rather more intimate than one might expect of a young man and his stepmother,” he reported.

“But—they could scarcely bear to look at each other!” The moment the protest left my mouth I heard its absurdity: there can be more than one reason for two people to avoid one another’s gaze. “Oh,” I said.

“Indeed.”

“Well, that would certainly explain the weeds and the windows.”

Haruki spoke up. “Do you mean they are having an affair?”

“The Darley footman’s sister is married to the innkeeper’s younger brother,” Holmes said. “The footman likes to gossip, and country folk are happy to pass talk around.”

“Do you suppose …” Haruki’s voice trailed away.

“That they were involved while his father was alive?” I finished for her. “If not actively, they may have been considering it. They did take great care not to be seen together much.”

“I thought they simply did not get along.”

“Sons and second wives often do not,” I agreed.

“Shall we go?” Holmes asked.

“Look at this first,” I said. I gave him the sketch of the house and a torch to view it by.

“This is not your handwriting,” he noted.

“Miss Pidgeon went down to the Town Hall for me, and got lucky.”

“Ah,” he said. “Your Irregular.”

I laughed. “She would be secretly delighted at the title. Now, it’s possible that the Darleys keep the book, or even just the document, with them wherever they go, but that’s not likely. If it’s locked up in the London house, we’ll make other plans. But if it’s here, Haruki and I agree that it’s in a safe. And a safe is most likely either in the ground-floor room marked ‘office,’ or upstairs in his dressing room. If you’re right, that Tommy has taken over his father’s life along with his father’s wife, he’s probably moved into his rooms as well.” The two main bedrooms and their dressing rooms were next to each other, allowing free passage between them without risking the eyes of guests or servants.

Not that one can keep private activities from servants for long.

“Lady Darley may have a jewel safe as well,” Holmes pointed out.

Great: two safes to open. Maybe three. “Are your hands steady enough for safe-cracking?” I asked.

“They will be, yes.” I hoped that was so. I could open a combination mechanism, but I lacked his vast experience, and frankly, his cool nerves. Hunching over a dial while listening for servants was not my idea of entertainment.

As I drove, he and I discussed our plan of attack, occasionally tossing a question at Haruki. I found the access lane across from the house that we had spotted from horseback that morning, its surface chewed by the hooves of livestock and the tracks and tyres of farm machinery. Holmes jumped out to open its gate. I shot through into the field and behind the stand of trees, shutting off the headlamps. Black clamped down. The engine’s cooling noises seemed very noisy in the stillness, and Haruki and I moved quietly as we climbed from the motor, letting the doors click shut.

The moonlight was thin. We followed Holmes’ shielded torch across the rutted soil to the gate, working its latch shut lest some farmer’s herd take a stroll. In the silent night, we stumbled along uneven ground towards the road.

Rather, two of us stumbled. Haruki had eyes like a cat. She seemed to pay little attention to the torchlight, yet her feet met the uneven ground as if it was midday. She did not even seem much bothered by having one arm strapped to her side.

We lesser mortals made it to the metalled surface without planting our faces in the mud, then continued more quickly up the road and down the drive to the Darley house. Altogether, a walk that might have taken six or seven minutes in daylight had only taken twice that.

Country houses generally had substantial locks on the front door, designed for giving reassurance to the family, and more practical locks on those doors used for the comings and goings of servants throughout the day. We circled to the back, and were inside within minutes.

The lurid gleam from Holmes’ torch reassured us that no scullery maid slept before the fire. We moved on into the house. Miss Pidgeon’s work proved invaluable, allowing us to anticipate what we would find around each corner. We first established that the ground floor was unoccupied, then went through the gun room, which contained enough armament for a revolt—everything but an automatic pistol. We re-locked the gun-room door, explored the office enough to see that it had no safe, then left our small companion to search the remainder of the ground floor while Holmes and I headed upstairs.

At the foot of the formal stairway we paused. The hands of the grandfather clock showed two minutes to midnight; weeds and unwashed windows cautioned that no one would have rushed to repair a creak in the stairs. So we waited for the clock’s hands to click forward, then trotted up the stairs with its gong to hide any underfoot creaks.

The house was a squared U, its left-hand wing (here on the upper storey, the guest rooms) somewhat longer than the right, which housed the servants. The flat bottom of the U, downstairs a drawing room and the office, up here held the suites of the house’s master and mistress (appropriate
terms, here). These rooms faced the drive, while the guest and servants’ wings looked out onto garden and stableyard, respectively. A long corridor hugged the inner wall of the U, with paintings and doors on one side and windows to a formal courtyard garden on the other. A short length of side-corridor across from the stairway ended in the big arched window over the portico, making the U of hallway more of a squat Y. This truncated corridor separated the main bedrooms to our left from the guest rooms to the right.

We turned left.

Six rooms lay along this section of the house: two suites, each with bedroom, dressing room, and a bath and lavatory. Having established that they were empty, we then stuck our heads in all the other doors on the first floor, other than the baize marking the servants’ wing, but all the beds were empty.

Holmes started on Tommy’s quarters while I headed for Lady Darley’s perfumed bower, trying not to sneeze. Her bed was wide and soft, its coverlet a riot of embroidered Chinese flowers. The walls were covered in pale blue watered silk, with long curtains of a slightly darker shade. A glance behind the curtains showed a pair of French doors and their diminutive balcony.

Her jewel safe was in the dressing room. It was a steel monstrosity that Holmes could have stood in without having to stoop—probably designed to store the household plate when the family was away, rather than just tiaras and necklaces. I eyed the mechanism, and went in search of my husband.

Tommy’s safe was much smaller, and the mechanism simpler—Holmes had the door open already. I looked in over his shoulder, and realised that “Lord Darley’s safe” would have been a more accurate description.

“So Tommy did take over more than the title,” I murmured.

The steel box held the possessions that Darley the Younger would wish to keep from the eyes of servants every bit as much as his father had. I was prepared for the pornographic photographs, having been through Lord Darley’s rooms before, and there was little need to hold
the reels of film to the light to guess what was on them. But the files were the clincher: the Prince Regent of Japan had not been Darley’s only victim.

Many of the files were old, their letters and photographs so outdated as to be useless as a source of blackmail in these free-and-easy times: few would pay to be saved from a mild embarrassment. Holmes left those where he found them, although he did tuck two envelopes and a file into his shirt-front, their contents having political revelations whose stir would be further-reaching.

He also removed two letters in foreign writing, one of them in Arabic (which he read) and the other in Bulgarian (which he did not).

There was a gun here, as there had been beside Thomas Darley’s bed, but both were revolvers, not automatic pistols. No Bashō. No Hokusai. No Japanese books at all, other than a racy little thing featuring Samurai and geishas in unlikely positions that I was tempted to steal until I pictured Mrs Hudson’s reaction.

“Anything?” said a voice behind us, causing me to drop the book and Holmes to crack his head on the door.

“You’re supposed to be downstairs!” I hissed.

“There is nothing down there,” Haruki said. “I thought I could be of some use up here.”

“If we need to get out fast, you’ll never manage with that arm.”

“What, from one storey up? I could jump that far with
no
arms.” I frowned at her left arm, but having seen her on the ship’s wires, it was hard to argue. “What have you found?”

Nothing, was what we had found. Holmes rose. “That dial stood on nineteen,” he told me, and walked through to Lady Darley’s rooms. I arranged the files and erotica as they had been, closed the door, turned the dial to 19, and went to see how Holmes was getting on.

Haruki sat on her heels beside him, holding the torch while Holmes, eyes closed, focussed all his attention on the play of the dial beneath his fingers. Her face was serene, patient, as it had been that day in the Prince Regent’s garden. As her father’s face had been, three days before …

She was such an enigma. She looked like a child; she was far too trusting,
she had rushed unthinking into an unknown place, and paid the price. Yet where someone her age ought to be chewing her fingernails, here she was waiting for this relative stranger to do an unlikely job. I wished her father were there, to ask. I wished her father were there, to see her, trim and confident with one arm in a sling.

The steel behemoth gave a small sigh, and Holmes reached for the handle. Haruki rocked smoothly back and stood, thumbing the shield off her torch so we could look within.

We gaped in astonishment. The vast space was almost empty. A couple of leather and silver devices whose purpose I did not want to know; a dozen jeweller’s cases containing diamond necklaces, diamond tiaras, and a diamond bandeau; decorative boxes that held an assortment of rings, earrings, bracelets, and lesser necklaces, and that was all.

We examined every box, searching for false compartments. There were none. At the end, we shut the door and turned as one to look at the dim outlines of bed, settee, decorative table, and a pair of waist-high Chinese urns on either side of the curtains, with the French windows overlooking the Oxfordshire countryside.

We spread out to search. Holmes went over to the twin urns, Haruki began opening drawers, and I—I reluctantly turned my light to the bed, then its table. In its drawer lay a lace-trimmed handkerchief, a velvet eye mask with elastic band, a tube of lavender-scented hand crème, and a pair of cotton gloves that reeked of lavender. Next came a small silk bag with a decorative button which, when I opened it, contained pretty much what I had expected. Below that was a small Morocco-leather notebook with a tiny silver pen on a ribbon. This I picked up eagerly, only to find many of the pages torn away, and the remaining ones covered with housekeeping memoranda and notes for future shopping expeditions:
Stockings. Mrs T’s hat—feather? Send furs. Guest room linens?

Unless the countess used some diabolically clever code, these were just notes.

The little notebook had concealed another volume, this one an illustrated edition of the Burton
Kama Sutra
. Very thoroughly illustrated—but as I glanced through them, my amusement faded. I looked more
closely, turning one page, then another, mirth turning to something nearer shock. On the surface, they were simply randy pictures, fit companions to the hearty and cheerful coupling of Mr Burton’s text. Then the eye caught an unexpected shape, an odd expression, and the pictures turned … nasty. Graphic and brutal and more about pain than procreation, the images were appalling. They made me want to scrub my eyeballs.

I flipped shut the cover, taking an involuntary step back. Could Lady Darley …? Was it possible to look at those images and not see … what I saw? And if that was possible, if she was in fact innocent enough to see nothing but a nice, sexy, exotic romp, who could have been cruel enough to play that kind of a joke on her?

Gingerly, unwilling to pick that volume up again, I edged it aside with the tip of my finger, finding an ivory comb, a tiny tube of something called “Eye Rejuvenator,” and the decorative Bible I had seen in Japan.

Grateful that I had not been confronted by a stash of bed-toys (and wondering if I was being prudish), I closed the drawer and went to help Haruki check behind the other drawers.

At the end, we stood near the door and looked back at the room. “Do you want to move the furniture to look under the carpet?” I asked Holmes.

He shook his head. “It wouldn’t be in a place requiring more than one man to uncover. That bed would need four strong footmen. It must be somewhere else.”

“What about the room marked ‘library’? Close enough to the bedrooms to feel safe, but separate.”

Blackmailers had a tactile response to their key possessions: they liked their stolen diaries or photographs close to hand, for the same reason that girls hid love letters amongst their lingerie: to gloat and caress them. Practical reasons might separate an extortionist from the source of his power, but ideally, he—or she—wanted the physical reminder close at hand.

As we walked down the carpeted corridor, the clock at the foot of the stairs rang two.

The door to the room marked “library” opened not off the main corridor, but from its subsidiary leg. To our left were a pair of doors. The first was covered with light brown baize: a glance showed narrow, uncarpeted stairs descending to the kitchen realm. The second door was painted wood, behind which lay a shallow storage room packed to bursting with steamer trunks, hatboxes, valises, and the like.

Separated from these doors by the width of a corridor and the great arched window, a single, far grander wooden door opened into a booklined room. Physically it was the start of the guest room wing, but the placement of its door and the sumptuous fittings said that this was not a room for guests. Heavy curtains in a rich shade of orange hid the other set of French doors and their balcony. Logs and kindling lay in the marble fireplace, ready for a match. Bottles and glasses clustered on a sleek sideboard next to a gramophone. Three comfortable chairs and a wide settee were arranged on a modern orange and green carpet in front of the fire. The closest thing to library furniture was a spindle-legged gilt writing desk against one wall; most of its top was taken up by two small porcelain busts and a hideous little ormolu clock.