The Hansa Protocol (8 page)

‘“Can’t be specific”? You fill me with awe, Mr Mack. It’s like magic. You’re a shining ornament, if I may say so.’

A strangled noise from Mr Mack suggested that he was laughing. He was never unpleased if someone chose to praise his efforts.

‘It’s like wines, Mr Box. Some folk can tell a claret from the smell of the cork, or identify a brandy blindfold. Well, I can often sniff out explosives by the smell. Nitro-glycerine. Porous silica …. The bouquet, Mr Box.’

Mr Mack laughed again, and then began to cough, as there was a lot of pungent smoke in the shed. He stooped down, and with a poker opened the small iron door at the stove’s base. The air rushed in and presently there was a cheerful blaze, and a little shower of sparks shot out from the rim of the lid on top of the stove.

‘Oh, Lord, Mr Mack,’ said Box, ‘you must be inspired! Did you see those sparks? That stove. It’s like a little Belvedere. Open the door at the bottom and the fire rushes out at the top. Didn’t this McColl realize that? Or maybe—’

Inspector Box was silent for a moment. His mind was on the edge of a discovery, but its exact nature eluded him. If only he could think more clearly!

Mr Mack lumbered to his feet.

‘Well, Mr Box,’ he said, ‘I’ll leave all that to you, as is right and proper. Now, I’m not given to offering advice where it’s not my business to do so, but I’ve already had a quiet word with PC Kenwright here, and he agrees with what I’ve suggested. He and I have worked together before, as you know, which is why I took the liberty of speaking to him.’

‘And what have you suggested, Mr Mack?’

‘I suggest that you sift through every piece of dust and debris left in that Belvedere, and in these gardens, until you’ve found everything that might be of relevance to this crime – this murder, for murder it is. There’s bits of all sorts in there – fragments of paper, and leather, bits of china and clockwork. All kinds of shattered things. Let PC Kenwright here sift through the lot, and take his finds back to that drill hall of yours at King James’s Rents – if you’re agreeable, that is, Mr Box.’

‘I am, Mr Mack. PC Kenwright’s a giant of a man, but he’s got
sensitive
hands.’

‘Good. I’ll send a Home Office van down here late this afternoon, and you can beg some empty ammunition boxes from Chelsea Barracks, or the Duke of York’s. I’ll leave three of my men here to help. I’ll have to go now: I’m wanted back in Whitehall. Goodbye, Mr Box. I’ll send you a written report later today. Meanwhile, take my advice. Sift.’

Dr Seligmann’s study was at the front of the house, and had thus been largely unaffected by the previous night’s destruction. The long room, with an ancient window looking out on to Lavender Walk, seemed agreeably comfortable. An ample mahogany desk stood to the left of the fireplace, and near it was a small, baize-covered
card-table
, upon which a deck of playing-cards had been carelessly thrown down.

‘Mr Lodge,’ said Box to the elderly butler, ‘my sergeant and I will need to talk to those members of the family and household who were here last night. We need to see them now, you understand. The
secretary
– Mr Schneider, isn’t it? – can you send him along to see us straight away?’

‘I will ask Mr Schneider to come along at once, sir. Count Czerny has just expressed a desire to speak to you. He returned just over half an hour ago—’

‘Returned?’

‘Yes, sir. Count Czerny was not here last night. He fulfilled a dinner engagement at his club, and stayed the night there.’

‘Did he, now? Well, we’ll be happy to see Count Czerny when we’ve finished talking to Mr Schneider, and to the lady of the house. I take it that she’s still on the premises?’

‘Miss Ottilie is upstairs in her private sitting-room. I will inform her that you wish to see her.’

While Lodge was speaking, Inspector Box’s eyes had been drawn to a painted heraldic shield hanging above the fireplace. The shield depicted a black eagle on a white ground, edged with red. The eagle’s
head bore a royal crown, its wings were spread wide, and its talons grasped an orb and sceptre.

‘The arms of the old Kingdom of Prussia,’ said Box. ‘Presumably it reminded Dr Seligmann of happier days. I must confess, Sergeant Knollys, that I don’t much care for that particular bird, or for its offspring. And over there, in that alcove, there’s a framed photograph of the German emperor, William II – the Kaiser, as he calls himself. There’s not much to choose between the two of them, in my book. That eagle’s on the lookout for prey, and so is that mad fellow on the wall.’

Box withdrew his glance from the offending heraldry and examined the mantelpiece, which held an array of well-thumbed books kept upright between two ebony book-ends. The titles seemed to be in German, though some of them, Box saw, were in English. He was suddenly overwhelmed with the same conviction that had come to him earlier in the frozen garden – a feeling that he had overlooked some obvious anomaly, and that, ever since his arrival at Chelsea, he had been fed with misleading morsels of information by a source which he could not identify.

Voices in the passage announced the arrival of the secretary. Box sat down behind Dr Seligmann’s desk, and motioned to Sergeant Knollys to station himself in an armchair near the window. The door of the study opened rather cautiously, and Dr Seligmann’s secretary came into the room.

Inspector Box looked at the elderly man who stood stiffly in front of the desk. He was very formally dressed, in tightly buttoned black frock coat and pin-striped trousers, but behind the man’s formal mask of respectful attention Box could discern a suggestion of unquenchable defiance. Schneider’s bearing reminded him strongly of his own
attitude
when confronted by Superintendent Mackharness.

‘You are Mr Schneider?’ asked Box.

‘Fritz Schneider, sir. I had the honour to be Dr Seligmann’s personal secretary.’

Box watched as the German secretary glanced briefly at Knollys, and then sat down unbidden in a chair placed in front of the desk. He fixed his eyes not on Box, but on the leather blotter, the wooden calendar with its little knobs for changing the date, the crystal ink wells, the ivory pen and the little brass clock arranged on the desk. They were
familiar, everyday things which had suddenly become memorials of his vanished master.

‘I’ve only a couple of things to ask you, Mr Schneider. It would seem that the last person to see Dr Seligmann alive was a man called Fenlake. Lieutenant Fenlake. I’d like you to tell me about him, if you will.’

When Schneider spoke, it was clear that his mind was only partly on what Box had asked him.

‘Fenlake … yes, that was his name. But he was not the assassin of my poor master. This room, Herr Box, was Dr Seligmann’s study – his bureau for public affairs. He was a great philologist, but his academic library was housed in the Belvedere, and so perished with him. This study, secure at the front of the house, was where he wrote and strove and struggled for peace. Here are the year-books, the political
commentaries
, the minutes of meetings – all the desiderata of a political crusade—’

‘And a man called Lieutenant Fenlake was the last person to see Dr Seligmann alive. You say he was not the assassin—’

Herr Schneider sat upright in his chair and looked haughtily at Box.

‘And you disagree? Then I am wrong. I apologize. Evidently you think differently. The police, of course, are very clever. So, yes, he was the last person to see Dr Seligmann alive, and I will tell you about him. The Herr Doktor apprised me earlier in the day that a young gentleman called Lieutenant Arthur Fenlake would be visiting him. He instructed me to conduct Mr Fenlake to the Belvedere as soon as he arrived.’

For a fleeting moment, Arnold Box recalled the blonde girl with the cornflower-blue eyes who had accompanied Miss Whittaker and himself to the Savoy Theatre on New Year’s Eve. Her absent beau and Dr Seligmann’s visitor were surely one and the same person – the young officer in the 107th Field Battery of the Royal Artillery who had been warned off from Mr Gordon’s gaming hell in Eagle Street, Holborn. Or perhaps not. A man bent on mischief could call himself any name he liked ….

‘What was he like? This Lieutenant Fenlake, I mean.’

‘Well, Herr Inspector, he was much like the usual run of young gentlemen of that sort – well dressed for his generation, smart, of soldierly bearing. I am surprised to hear that he was an assassin. He said nothing to me, either at that time, or later, when I conducted him to the
front door. What is the English expression? A man of few words.’

‘I don’t suppose you know why he came to see Dr Seligmann?’

‘No, sir, I do not. The Herr Doktor received many people of all ranks and stations. He was renowned throughout the world – he conferred with the legislatures of the nations. Though he has perished at the assassin’s hand, his name will endure for ever!’

Box sighed. He looked at the secretary, and experienced a curious sensation of affinity with the man mingled with a rapidly growing impatience with his flowery sentiments. He thought: he’s doing it on purpose, to annoy me. He was a lively enough man, despite his prim exterior, but he was in imminent danger of turning himself into a bore on the subject of his late master’s virtues.

‘Are you in charge of the daily arrangements in this study, Mr Schneider?’ asked Box. ‘Looking after the blotters, trimming the pens, and so forth?’

‘What? Yes, so I am. To you, no doubt, these things are trivial: the labours of a servant. But the Herr Doktor was a man of great affairs. It was not for him to busy himself with the minutiae of study and office—’

‘Oh, quite, Mr Schneider,’ said Box. ‘So why doesn’t the calendar show today’s date? Today is the 4th January. This calendar reckons it’s Wednesday, the 25th.’

He turned the wooden calendar round for the secretary to read.

‘But there’s no need to answer that question, Mr Schneider. Instead, you can tell me about the other visitor. The man who came into the house carrying a briefcase. Was he, too, expected?’

Schneider seemed not to hear. He was looking in puzzlement at the calendar.

‘That calendar – I have not been in here since yesterday …. Someone has been tampering with it. I will speak to Mrs Poniatowski. Everything in this room is sacred …. The man with the briefcase, you ask? Yes, he was expected. There was no secret about Mr Colin McColl. He came from Mr Quaritch’s bookshop in Piccadilly with some rare pages of manuscript for Dr Seligmann to examine. Those pages – ah! They, too, will have been incinerated. But I digress. Our butler, Lodge, admitted Mr McColl to the house, and I heard him talking to the Herr Doctor in the hall passage.’

‘Can you recall any of their conversation?’

‘Dr Seligmann told him how much he regretted having to be involved in politics. He spoke of his duty to Germany.’

‘And what did Mr Colin McColl say?’

‘He made some technical remarks about philology.’

‘About philology. And did you understand, Mr Schneider, what those technical remarks meant?’

‘I did, sir.’

The German secretary closed his lips in a sort of tight smirk. Box glanced across at Sergeant Knollys, who smiled and shook his head. Inspector Box leaned forward across Dr Seligmann’s desk, joined his fingers together in a delicate cradle, and treated Schneider to a rather wolfish smile.

‘Your English is excellent, Mr Schneider,’ he said. ‘So maybe you know the English expression “like getting blood out of a stone”. I’d be unwilling to think of you as a stone. So will you please tell me exactly, or as well as you can remember, what Mr Colin McColl actually said? Perhaps you think I’m too dense to understand clever matters, but in fact that isn’t the point.’

‘Sir, I stand corrected,’ said Schneider, blushing, either through embarrassment or vexation. ‘My apologies. I was not aware that you were a specialist in languages. Dr Seligmann asked the young man whether he was acquainted with his scholarly work.’

‘Did he, now? And what did Mr McColl have to say to that?’

‘Mr McColl replied: “Yes, indeed. We have all heard of Seligmann’s Law of Unaccented Syllables. And who does not still consult your honoured
Specimens
of
Anglo-Saxon
Verse
?”
As far as I can recollect, those were his very words.’

‘So you think he was a genuine scholar?’

‘But yes, of course. And then, later – what heroism! Such men as he are rare. At the height of the hideous blaze he rushed into the garden, seized a plank, and ran full tilt at the Belvedere door. He burst the door off its hinges – too late, alas! to save the Herr Doktor from the flames. What selflessness! What—’

‘At last!’ cried Box. ‘A little light’s showing through the gloom. A few straightforward words have emerged from the jungle of verbiage! He seized a plank, did he?’

Box stood up, and looked down on the startled German. His voice was stern, and almost comically menacing.

‘Why should he seize a plank?’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’ quavered Herr Schneider.

‘Because, Mr Schneider, in the best regulated households, one doesn’t have planks to seize. Planks – planks are thick, brutal lengths of wood, invariably caked with dried cement. They don’t form part of the decoration of a gentleman’s establishment. Why was this heroic Mr McColl able to find a plank so easily?’

The little self-satisfied smirk returned to the secretary’s face. He sat upright in his chair. He was determined that this chirpy Cockney policeman was not going to get the upper hand.

‘Mr McColl was able to find a plank, Herr Inspector, because yesterday morning two workmen arrived to point an area of brickwork over the rear dining-room window. They left the plank, and a few other implements of their trade, on the grass.’

‘Well, thank you, Mr Schneider, you’ve been a great help – a fund of information, so to speak. In a few minutes’ time I hope to have a word with Count Czerny. Perhaps you’d tell me what kind of count he is? We don’t have counts in England, you know, though I believe France is snowed under with them. He’s not a Frenchman, is he?’

‘No, sir. And he’s not a Prussian count, either. He’s an Austrian nobleman, sir – what in our language we call a count of the
Roman-German
Empire. I expect you are looking forward to having the honour of conversing with His Excellency.’

The secretary bowed, but could not resist giving the ghost of a smirk as he left the room. Box glanced at the playing-cards thrown down on the little baize-covered table, and smiled, almost in spite of himself. Was Mr Schneider the joker in this particular pack? Perhaps. For all his German formality, there had been an irreverent air about the secretary that Box had found appealing. The joker ….

Box picked up the wooden calendar, and turned the knobs until the correct day and date showed in the windows: Wednesday, 4 January 1893.

‘Sergeant Knollys,’ said Box, ‘when we’ve finished in here, we’ll go outside, and get one of those men working on the repairs to look at that wall. The one that Schneider says needed to be pointed. I don’t believe it. It’s a plant. It’s the same trick that Smiler Carmichael used in the Hartwell sweet-shop murder in ’86. That plank was left there for this McColl to use. He knew it was there. And so he was able to burst the door in. It’s a plant—’

The butler, Lodge, appeared at the door.

‘Sir,’ he said, ‘Miss Seligmann is here to speak to you.’

Arnold Box banished all thoughts of secretaries and planks as Miss Seligmann came into the room, and stood hesitating by the chair near the desk. How charming she looked! Surely she was no more than twenty, or perhaps twenty-two? She was wearing a very becoming black silk dress relieved by white lace at the neck and cuffs – not quite mourning attire, but certainly the next best thing.

‘Pray sit down, Miss Seligmann,’ said Box, gently. ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’

‘I’m sure there isn’t, Inspector. And I can assure you that I’m not afraid of
you
!’

Her voice was clear and firm, very pleasant in tone, and with a slight foreign intonation. Before Box could frame a reply, the German girl launched into speech.

‘My name is Ottilie Seligmann. I am the daughter of the late Ernst Seligmann of Mecklenburg – from Rostock, which is a city there. You have heard of it, no? And so I am the niece of the late Dr Otto Seligmann. I have lived with my uncle since my father died sixth months ago. I am twenty-two years old.’

Knollys stirred in his chair near the window. Glancing in his
direction
, Box was disconcerted to see the look of frozen hostility on his sergeant’s face. Perhaps he was one of those men who were easily offended by pertness of Miss Ottilie’s kind.