Stone's Fall (26 page)

I bought my two colleagues breakfast—a good breakfast, the best that Cowes could provide, with lashings of bacon, black pudding, eggs, fried bread, fried tomatoes, tea, toast and marmalade, the works, and then decided that, as Jackson was going on the press jaunt to the
Sandrart,
I would go with him. I now had nothing better to do. I was a free man, unemployed, my own master.

Oh, yes. The Tsar of all the Russias. Nicholas II. You would have thought, no doubt, that having such a grand gentleman in town would have caused a stir. It was not every day, after all, that the world’s greatest autocrat, the last true absolute monarch in Europe, dropped into a small town off the south coast. In fact, he hadn’t. He hadn’t even put a foot on shore. The only evidence of his presence was the shape of the imperial yacht, the
Sandrart,
about half a mile offshore, anchored a few hundred yards from the
Victoria and Albert
and with a collection of navy gunboats posted around doing guard duty. As a sop to the journalists, who wanted something to put in their daily bulletins, there was to be a tour of the yacht. I had expected that Gumble would come along as well, but he turned his nose up at the idea. “You don’t think that the Tsar is going to be on board with a lot of smelly journalists tramping all over the place, do you? Either the entire family will take refuge on the
V and A,
or they’ll come on shore. And I may have fallen low in the estimation of my editors, but I am damned if I am going to spend my time looking at imperial curtains. I am going to walk up to Osborne. If he’s on land, he’ll be there.”

So Jackson and I went; I merely curious, Jackson trying to pretend he wasn’t. The main thing I discovered from the morning was that I have a tendency to seasickness in
very
small boats—we were rowed out in the yacht’s cutter, which was fine until we were about a hundred yards offshore. Then it wasn’t; my only consolation was that half of the press corps—well, about four of us, out of ten or so—also began smiling bravely.

Nor was it worth it; Gumble was quite correct in thinking that the imperial family would make themselves scarce; not even an imperial nanny remained on board. All we had was a bunch of Russian sailors, whose outright hostility to His Majesty’s loyal press was palpable. We were escorted round the apartments at military speed; nothing was pointed out or explained, no questions were taken, no photographs allowed. All I got from the experience was a sense of wonder at how unnautical it all was—the state apartments were decorated like any house you might have found in Mayfair thirty years ago, with padded chairs, chandeliers and even a fireplace in the corner. Only the disconcerting rocking motion reminded you that you were on a boat—sorry, a yacht—at all.

And then we were put back into the cutter and rowed back to the shore. Not even a glass of vodka, but Jeremiah Hopkins did at least take his revenge by vomiting in the bottom of the boat just before we arrived back on land. “Compliments of the
Daily Mail,
” he muttered as he stepped over his donation to get off. “A messy business, the freedom of the press,” he added as he straightened up and walked unsteadily towards the nearest pub.

For my part, I didn’t think that was the best solution to the problem of my stomach; steady land and fresh air seemed a better idea, so I decided to walk to Osborne to find Gumble; he had been correct in his judgements so far; he might be right now. I walked to the ferry, crossed over and strolled up York Avenue to the main gate. I was not alone; clearly news of some event had got around.

“The royal family and the imperial family,” said one woman in tones of hushed awe when I found myself walking beside her. “They’ll be coming out when they’ve finished their visit. They’ll drive down to the Esplanade before going back on board their yachts. Isn’t that wonderful and thoughtful of them?”

We walked in step, this reverential matriarch and I, strolling together like two old friends in the warm sunshine of the early afternoon. She told me—how she had found out so much information from her kitchen I do not know, she should have been a reporter—that the two royal families had crossed to Osborne’s private landing stage by boat, but intended to show themselves to the town before returning. Two monarchs, two consorts and a bag of children would be on display; I could not really see the attraction of just watching people drive by, but I was clearly in a minority on that one; when we arrived there was already a crowd of a few hundred, mainly townspeople by the look of them, lining the wooded path which ran from the road to the grand entrance gate.

Gumble was there also, looking extremely displeased with the situation. His request to go inside had been flatly turned down, there would be no interview and he had to stand there like some common shop assist ant, with not the slightest chance of coming up with anything worth writing about at all.

I commiserated. “But there wasn’t much chance he would have said anything interesting anyway,” I concluded.

“Not the point. I wanted an interview. What he might have said was irrelevant,” he replied.

“You could always make it up,” I suggested.

“Well, in fact, that’s what got me in trouble in the first place,” he said reluctantly. “I quoted Habibullah Khan on the reforms he was introducing in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, he was out of the country at the time and had just reversed them all, so he complained…”

“Bad luck,” I said.

“Yes. So no making things up for a while. I do wish they’d get a move on. I want my lunch…”

I had stopped listening. I was staring over at the other line of spectators, a blur of expectant faces, all patiently waiting. Except for one, who came into sharp focus as I looked, then looked again. A poorly dressed woman, with a cheap hat pulled down over her face, clutching a handbag. I knew she had seen me. I could see that my face had registered, that she was hoping I had not seen her; she took a step back, and disappeared behind a burly man and a couple of squawking children who were waving little flags on sticks.

“Oh, my goodness,” I said, and looked up and down the row of people, to see if I could catch sight of her again. Nothing. But I did see PC Armstrong, my sceptical constable of the day before.

“Still hunting anarchists, are we sir?” he said cheerfully when I walked up to him—this was a long time ago; there were no barriers or controls on people then.

“Constable…”

“Is he here, then?”

“Not that I’ve seen, but…”

“Well, let me know and we’ll deal with him,” he said complacently.

“I’m certain he is, though.”

Armstrong looked sceptical but ever so slightly worried. “Why?”

“I’ve seen someone he knows.” I pointed, and he called over another policeman on duty. Both then strolled over and began walking up and down, looking out for anyone they considered suspicious.

They had seen nothing and found no one by the time the great gates swung open, and a murmur of expectation swept through the crowd. In the distance a line of three black automobiles, Rolls-Royces, came slowly down the driveway; the canvas tops were open, so they wouldn’t obscure the view. As they turned the bend, I could see that the leading car had two men in the back, resplendent in uniform; the second had two women. They were wearing hats, tied over their heads with scarves.

“Constable, stop the cars, for God’s sake!” I said as I ran up to him. “Close the gate!”

Armstrong panicked. He could control the crowds as long as all was well, but wasn’t capable of doing anything other than watch people, and tell himself that everything was fine. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Don’t worry, don’t worry…” and his lips kept moving even when he stopped speaking, as though he was reciting a prayer.

And it was too late, anyway. The big black machine was coming through the gate, slowing down so that the crowds could applaud, and see. And to allow the cars behind to catch up and make a proper procession of it. I was looking up and down the line of faces, desperate to see Elizabeth, convinced that something dreadful was about to happen. It was the way she was clutching her handbag which worried me most; all I could see in my mind was her hands, the knuckles white, as she held tightly onto that cheap canvas bag, held it up over her stomach, so she could put her hand into it…

The cars were now going at no more than two miles an hour, the flags were waving, the people were cheering. The King-Emperor of Great Britain and the Indias sat on the right, looking bored. The Tsar of all the Russias was by his side, gazing at the crowd with the air of someone who found all this populace slightly distasteful, and then I realised my mistake. I saw a man, a big burly man, wearing a suit like a bank clerk, step forward some ten yards away from me, his hand underneath his jacket. I shouted, and he turned to look at me, then dismissed me from his thoughts. I was ten yards from him, he was only ten yards from the car, but it was getting closer all the time, and I was just standing there, speechless and immobile.

But a man can run faster than a slow-moving car. Much faster, when he is terrified. I began to run, and the closer I got, the better I could see. I could see his hand pulling out from under his jacket, saw the black thing in it, got closer still and saw the barrel. And I saw it being lifted, and pointing just as I got close enough to leap, heard the explosion as I fell, then another one as I collapsed on the ground. And I felt the most incredible, unbelievable pain, which blotted out almost everything else, except for the one last image as I looked up from the dust and gravel, and saw Elizabeth standing over me, gun in her hand, a look of wildness in her eyes.

CHAPTER
29

I have read much nonsense over the years about being shot; the main things being firstly that it doesn’t hurt, and secondly that the noise sounds more like a faint popping, rather than a loud bang. Rubbish. Firstly, the noise of the gun going off sounded like the crack of doom; I was sure my eardrums had burst. Secondly it hurt like the very devil, and from the very moment that the bullet entered my shoulder. And then it hurt more, until I lost consciousness, and hurt still more when I woke up again in hospital. In my case, at least, it was also untrue that I could remember nothing, wondered where I was and what had happened. I remembered perfectly well, thank you very much. Then I went back to sleep.

It was morning, I guessed, when I woke up again, and I stared at the ceiling, gathering my thoughts, before showing any sign that I was conscious. But I got an unpleasant surprise when I turned my head to look around. Sitting beside me, reading a newspaper, was the small, almost dainty, figure of the man I knew to be Henry Cort, a cup of tea on a small table by his side.

“Mr. Braddock,” he said with the faintest of smiles. “And how are you?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Ah. Then let me tell you. You have been shot.”

“I know that.”

“I suppose you do. Not too seriously, I’m glad to say, although it made a nasty wound and you have lost a lot of blood. If it hadn’t been for your friend Mr. Gumble, who knows something about bullet wounds from his time in Afghanistan, you would have bled to death, probably. However, the doctors tell me you will recover perfectly well, in time.”

“She shot me.”

“Yes. Yes, so it seems.”

“What happened?”

“Why don’t you read this? It’s the dispatch penned by Mr. Gumble for
The Times,
and so we know it must be of the highest accuracy.”

He gave me the morning paper, then summoned a nurse to help me sit up enough to be able to read it. This took a very long time, but at least it gave me an opportunity to get back to my senses. The pain helped as well—it wasn’t that bad, but it reminded me I was still alive. I was given some water, and tucked into bed properly and fussed over quite charmingly. All of that took about half an hour, during which time Cort sat quite impassively, doing nothing and managing not to look bored. Then, when I was feeling tolerably human again, he once more handed me the newspaper.

“‘Feminist Outrage at Cowes,’” I read. I looked at him.

“Terrible, these women, eh?” he said.

I frowned, and read some more.

Cowes—An outrage was offered to our Royal Visitors today by a suffragist in what is regarded here as a childish and unseemly exhibition. An attempt to embarrass the people of this country by the parading of supposed grievances in front of visitors is considered another blow which women suffragists have dealt to their own cause. Miss Muriel Williamson let off firecrackers close to the Royal Party as they were leaving Osborne House, having paid their respects in the death Chamber of our late Queen, in a manner deliberately designed to alarm. The fact that it could well have been a much more serious matter gives considerable cause for concern. Miss Williamson, who we understand has only lately been released from an asylum…

“He should be ashamed of himself,” I said weakly.

“Oh, he is,” Cort said. “He really is. He took some persuading to write that.”

“And why did he?”

“Because I was able to convince him that a near assassination of the Tsar on English soil would not be good for our standing in the world. And, of course, the prospect of a foreign posting, on the strong recommendation of the Foreign Office…”

“Why did Elizabeth shoot me?”

“Another interesting question,” Cort said thoughtfully. “She says you got in the way. You hurled yourself heroically on the assassin, but not quickly enough to prevent him from bringing his gun to bear on his target. She decided it was too risky to be squeamish, so shot you both, just to be on the safe side. She killed Jan the Builder, so you may consider yourself fortunate. The question I have not yet managed to settle in my mind, though, is who is responsible for all this.”

“Don’t you know?” I was lying down again, staring at the ceiling, so heard his words without being able to see his face. It was curious; it was more like a conversation with myself. And as long as I talked to myself, as quietly as I liked, I found it easy enough to speak. Cort picked up his chair and moved closer to the bed.

“I was working on the assumption,” he said, “that Ravenscliff had organised it in order to make the need for his battleships a little more pressing. But if so, why did his wife stop it—and in such a dramatic fashion? And so we come to you.”

“Me? It has nothing to do with me at all.”

“Of course not! No. I was merely hoping you might be able to shed a little light on matters.”

“Why don’t you ask Lady Ravenscliff?”

“Well, as she has recently shot two people, I’m not sure her word is so very reliable. Even more difficult, of course, is the fact that she claims she has been acting under the belief that I was responsible for it all.”

“Why?”

“She has a long memory,” he said cryptically. “It is of no importance. But there you are, you see. She thinks I was responsible, I think she was. You, on the other hand—the victim, the innocent bystander, so to speak—may be considered objective. So am I right that John Stone really was behind it all and wanted the blame to fall on the Germans?”

“Why do you think that?”

Cort shrugged. “John Stone felt betrayed. He had been persuaded to launch a private venture building battleships and was facing severe difficulties because the Government would not place the orders he had been promised. He therefore decided to organise an international crisis which would generate the orders he needed.”

“Who persuaded him to build the ships?”

“A group of concerned citizens. Influential ones, I might say, who felt that the Government’s naval policy was disastrously misguided.”

“But the Government was elected… Oh, never mind.” It was true. I really didn’t care.

“As I was saying,” he continued, “I hoped you might provide some nugget of information which would allow me…”

That did it. A nugget. It was all anyone expected of me. Some fragment, the significance of which I did not even realise. Only someone like Cort would understand its importance. I was too dim-witted to grasp it myself.

“It was nothing to do with Ravenscliff,” I said, still quietly but deliberately so now, speaking softly to make him bend ever closer so he could hear me.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. It looks like it was, I know. The Tsar dies, the assassins are arrested or killed, their homes are raided by the police and—surprise surprise—they find documents indicating that they had been paid by the Bank of Hamburg. An outrageous plot by the Germans, just the sort of thing you would expect of such barbarians.

“The Russians would be outraged and would declare a war of revenge. The French would follow, and the British might join in. What ever the result, Ravenscliff would benefit. He owned shares in all the major armaments companies, and controlled many of them. He would also sell his battleships at a good price.

“But, if anyone had looked closer, they would have spotted Ravenscliff ’s hand behind it all. The Bank of Hamburg was his personal bank in Germany. The payments were authorised by the Beswick Shipyard. He would have come under heavy suspicion.

“Would it have made any difference? Could the Government possibly have admitted that one of their citizens had done such a thing? Or would they have buried the information?”

“Are you asking me?” Cort said. “Or is that rhetoric?”

“I’m asking.”

“Publicly I imagine it would have been covered over. I can’t imagine any government admitting something like that. Certainly, that would have been my recommendation. Privately, however, I think not.”

“Precisely. Ever so quietly, Ravenscliff would have been removed. What would it have been? Falling under a train? A heart attack?”

Cort shrugged.

I continued. “The trouble is that Ravenscliff died before this scheme took place, and he was not behaving like someone hatching a dastardly plot to embroil the Continent in war. Far from it; he was trying desperately to find out what was going on. He had learned that there was something strange taking place inside his company; honest young men were turning into thieves; payments were being made without authorisation. But that could not happen. Everything had to be authorised. Which meant that someone, someone fairly senior, must be authorising them. But he did not know who. All he knew was that it wasn’t him.”

I stopped here and tried to turn, but could not. Cort lifted my head, and helped me sip some water from a glass on the little table beside the bed. He did it surprisingly gently. It made me feel safe. A dangerous feeling.

“So, instead of the usual means a man like him had of dealing with such matters, he turned to the only person he knew he could trust absolutely: his wife. She tried to find out the truth, and did so, up to a point. She established that the money was going to Jan the Builder but until the very last moment, did not know why. It was a close-run thing.

“When Ravenscliff died, there was a battle for control of Rialto. On the one hand, Barings was buying up shares—was it you who organised this?”

He nodded.

“On the other, so was someone else. Theodore Xanthos tried to take advantage of his employer’s death, and was thwarted only by Barings and you. Then he tried to organise a shareholders’ revolt, but was blocked again, because the estate was in limbo. Ravenscliff had tangled up his will to buy time in case of his death—something which he must have foreseen, or at least considered as a possibility.

“Xanthos also tried to distract Ravenscliff by attacking the one thing he held more dear than his companies. He lit upon the witch-woman in Germany and brought her over to England. She, I think, was attempting to blackmail Lady Ravenscliff. She told me she had had affairs; the witch woman was the sort who would find out about them.”

Cort smiled appreciatively. At least, I think that’s what it was.

“Did you kill her?” I asked.

“Me?” Cort asked. “Why do you ask that?”

“You took all her papers. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“That’s true. I didn’t want anything to fall into the hands of someone like you by accident. But there was nothing of interest. You have a very odd notion about me, Mr. Braddock. I think you must have been listening to Lady Ravenscliff too much.”

“Nobody likes you very much.”

“I am wounded,” he said, and almost looked as though he meant it.

“Why did you threaten poor Mr. Seyd?”

He looked displeased. “Poor Mr. Seyd, as you call him, has been in the pay of Germany for years,” he said. “You don’t think he started investigating Rialto by chance, do you?”

I stared blankly at him.

“So who did kill her?”

He shrugged. “I have learned over the years to concentrate on essentials. I suggest you do the same.” He had a quiet, gentle voice, I thought. Entirely reasonable.

“But you did steal Ravenscliff ’s papers?”

“I have them.” He didn’t seem inclined to elaborate.

“Anyway,” I continued, trying to digest this, “in my opinion, this had nothing to do with Ravenscliff. He was arrogant enough not to doubt his own judgement. He could not believe any decision of his could go wrong. He was supremely confident that this gamble of his would work. There is no sign that he was worried on that score at all.

“But he was coming to grips with the one thing he feared more than anything. His companies had come alive; he had created a monster, and it was acting in its own interests, no longer taking orders. Its job was to maximise its profits; Xanthos saw a way to make them astronomically large and enrich himself at the same time. And when Ravenscliff threatened to stop it, I believe his own invention killed him. I doubt that Xanthos personally pushed him out of the window. But I am fairly certain that he was responsible for it; he threatened to kill me a few days ago. A man called Steptoe was killed by him a few days ago; another employee at Beswick died as well. I don’t know if he was acting in concert with other managers. Bartoli, Jenkins, Neuberger may all be part of it, or they may have been even less aware of what was taking place than Ravenscliff himself. I don’t really care. That’s your job.”

“And that is your understanding of what has taken place?”

“Yes. Ravenscliff was much too clever to channel money for an assassination through his own companies. He was a master of the art of hiding much larger sums. You were
meant
to trace the money. Heavens, even I managed it.”

“Interesting. I had assumed Xanthos was operating on Ravenscliff ’s instructions. Are you sure he was not?”

“He would hardly have had to spend so much time finding out what Xanthos was doing if he already knew. And Lady Ravenscliff would have been nowhere near Cowes yesterday. I mean, in the matter of assassinations, why not let the professionals get on with it?”

He thought this one over. “In that case I think I may owe Lady Ravenscliff an apology. She must think very poorly of me. Thank you, Mr. Braddock. You have been most informative. I wish I’d talked to you earlier. You must forgive me; I assumed that you must have had some hidden role. Certainly you did seem to go out of your way to draw attention to yourself.”

“I thought I was being discreet.”

“Yes, well. There we must differ.”

He stood up and folded his newspaper. “I do hope you recover properly, and with good speed. But I’m afraid I must leave; I have a great deal to do; giving Lady Ravenscliff her freedom, of course, being somewhere near the top of the list.”

And he quietly left me alone to my thoughts, which were in some turmoil after what I had just said. I beat the mattress with my fist in frustration, so hard that my shoulder opened up again and I had to be rebandaged by the nurses, who scolded me, then gave me some nasty-tasting medicine which made me drowsy once more.