Think of England (5 page)

“What blackmail?” Curtis was hopelessly confused now. “I don’t know what you mean. I don’t know anything about any blackmail and I don’t suppose my uncle has any idea I’m here.”

Da Silva’s dark eyes were on his face, reading it. He said, slowly, “If you aren’t here about that… You were wounded at Jacobsdal. Lafayette’s business collapsed because of what happened there, and Armstrong made a fortune. Is that it? Something to do with Jacobsdal?”

Curtis took a stride forward, fist clenching. “If you know anything about that—”

“Nothing whatsoever. I’m here about something else.”

“Then why did you say our interests might coincide?”

Da Silva shrugged with some irritation. “I was wrong. It was one o’clock in the morning. Forgive me for not divining your purpose on the spot.”

Curtis glowered at him. “Well, what’s
your
purpose? What’s this about blackmail?”

Da Silva didn’t answer that. He was watching Curtis, weighing something up. When he spoke, it was with care, but little trace of the mannered drawl. “Mr. Curtis, I need, probably more urgently than you, to get into the private rooms and papers here. It is of some importance that you do not get in my way or arouse suspicion. Two of us playing the same game will double the risks for us both. Could I persuade you to enlighten me on dealing with the alarm, and then leave this business to me?”

“No.”

“I can look for information as well as you can, and probably with rather more subtlety. Suppose you tell me what you’re after, and I pass you whatever I find—”

“What do you know about armaments, or sabotage?” The banked rage that never stopped smouldering leapt into life. “What do you know about war?”

Da Silva pressed his lips tight. “Granted, I’m not a military man—”

“I lost friends at Jacobsdal. Good men. If Armstrong was responsible for sabotaging British guns for British troops—”

“Then he committed murder and treason,” da Silva interrupted. “For which the penalty is a short drop and a lengthened neck. This may be a matter of life and death, Mr. Curtis. You will need to proceed with great caution.”

“The only thing I’ve to be cautious about is you. What do you know, and what the devil are you up to? And what’s this about blackmail? Someone’s blackmailing you?”

“Oddly enough, no.” Da Silva paused, considering, then spoke with sardonic precision. “There was another victim. A man with, ah, unusual tastes. He was bled dry with the threat of arrest and exposure, and when he had nothing more to give, he took the only way out left to him.” Da Silva’s lip curled. “He was not the sort of man to say publish and be damned, but nor was he altogether weak. He told me about the blackmail before he jumped from Beachy Head.”

Curtis blinked. “Why you?”

“He was a…friend.” Curtis thought he could guess what that meant. “And he told me that the compromising situation that ruined him occurred at Peakholme. What he did in this house was used to destroy him. He mentioned other names too, other guests, amongst whom there has been at least one other suicide. Two dead men, and they may only be the tip of a very sordid iceberg.”

“But how would that happen? People are indiscreet at country houses all the time.” He knew of houses where a bell was rung to give guests ten minutes to return to their own marital beds before morning tea was brought in. That wasn’t his idea of entertainment, but it suited a great many people, and it was generally accepted, but never mentioned.

“There are different levels of indiscretion, of course.”

“I suppose you mean queers.” Curtis didn’t like this sly, allusive way of speaking, mostly because he wasn’t sure he could follow it. “You still can’t blackmail a man to his death with gossip.”

Da Silva gave him a curling smile. “Did you inspect your room closely?”

“How do you mean?”

“Anything strike you as odd about it, at all?”

“No. Why should it?” Curtis found Da Silva’s tilted eyebrow an irritant.

“Not the layout?”

Curtis opened his mouth to respond, and stopped. It seemed absurd to complain about the rather awkward arrangement of the rooms, set in pairs and widely spaced along a long corridor. It was a modern house; they did things in modern ways. He was not going to argue about any such trivialities, anyway. “What are you getting at?”

“In your bedroom, there’s a large mirror, hanging on the wall opposite the bed. The wall which backs onto a service area.”

“And? Just a moment. Have you been in my bedroom?”

“My room is on the other side of the corridor from you. A mirror image of yours. Should you care to visit me, you’ll observe that the large mirror in my room is also opposite the bed, also backing onto a service area.” He gave Curtis a meaningful look.

Curtis said, with dawning incredulity, “Are you suggesting that’s a two-way mirror?”

“There’s one in every guest room, I suspect. If you lift the mirror in my room off the wall, first removing the screws that keep it in place, you can see a good-sized aperture through to a narrow dead-end passage that connects to the service corridor at the far end.”

“You are bloody joking.”

“No. If you can think of a reason to knock a hole in the wall and then put a mirror over it, except to put a camera behind the mirror, I’ll be fascinated. Come to that, I can’t imagine what else those hidden corridors were built for in the first place.”

“Well…electricity—something to do with the heating…”

“It’s possible. The most charitable interpretation is that they were adapted once our host realised the potential for blackmail, rather than built with it in mind. Either way, Armstrong is in this to the neck. Armstrong and his delightful house, so far from London, with such well-chosen guests and, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, some very attractive and attentive servants. The young blond who showed me to my room was particularly charming.”

Curtis struggled for words. “Orchestrated, planned extortion?”

“Quite.”

“Why?”

“Money.” Da Silva spoke as though it were obvious.

“But Armstrong’s rich!”

“Have you any idea how much this place cost to build? The folly, the redwood trees imported from Canada, the electrical wiring, the heating devices? The glass bulbs in the light fittings are especially manufactured for this house, in vast quantity. They have their own custom telephone exchange, and an electrical generator that runs off water, all built for Peakholme. It takes a king’s ransom to keep it running, and talking of costing a fortune, Lady Armstrong and the egregious James are extravagant to a fault. Her patronage of the arts—she’s delightfully kind to struggling poets—and her dresses. His horses and gambling, and he’s bone idle, lives off his father and doesn’t lift a finger. Armstrong’s business is sound enough, but he’s spending to the top of his bent. He needs another war; short of that, he needs money.”

Curtis frowned. “How do you know all this? How sure are you?”

“About his financial worries? I’ve heard plenty of whispers. About the blackmail—well, I’ll be certain when I find where he keeps the photographic evidence. Until then it’s hearsay, guesswork and deduction. But I should scarcely have come to the countryside, in October of all times, for anything less than profound concern. Those are my cards on the table, Mr. Curtis. I believe that Armstrong is engaged in a cruel and deliberate scheme of entrapment and blackmail that has driven men to their deaths. What do you believe?”

It was Curtis’s turn to examine the other man’s face now. Could he trust da Silva? He seemed sincere, as far as Curtis could tell. And God knew, he needed help.

He took a deep breath. “Lafayette came to my uncle’s house about a month ago.”

“Which uncle?”

“Sir Henry. He’d been to see Sir Maurice already, at his office. Sir Maurice sent him packing, so he came to appeal to Sir Henry. Because of this, I suppose.” He lifted his damaged hand. “He hoped Sir Henry might speak to Sir Maurice.”

“Do you always address your uncles as Sir What-have-you?” da Silva put in curiously.

“Yes, why not?” Sir Henry Curtis and Sir Maurice Vaizey, his father’s and mother’s brothers, had been responsible for Curtis’s rearing. Sir Henry had remained unmarried through Curtis’s childhood; Sir Maurice had been a widower for decades. Curtis had never doubted their affection, but his upbringing hadn’t been sentimental.

Da Silva shrugged. “Why not indeed. Of course. Carry on.”

Curtis bristled, sensing an implied criticism without quite knowing what it was. But da Silva was twitching a finger as if to hurry him on. He got back to the point. “Sir Henry’s in Africa, though, and I was there, so Lafayette talked to me instead. He’d broken down, he was half-starved and raving, for all I know it was pure madness. Sir Maurice certainly thought so. But he, Lafayette, said that Armstrong had sabotaged his factory. That Armstrong had engineered the flaws in the new guns to destroy Lafayette’s business and take his share.”

“What made his claim credible?”

“I don’t know if it is. He believed that two of his most trusted men, a foreman and a clerk, had been suborned by Armstrong to sabotage him. He said they’d both vanished. I checked that, they’ve both been reported missing by their families.”

“What do you think happened to them?”

“I’ve no idea. Lafayette suspected foul play, but he didn’t know for sure. They might just as well have taken a bribe and left the country. If any of this happened at all.”

“If I suborned men to commit an act of high treason, I should probably silence them afterwards,” said da Silva thoughtfully. “But then, if I committed high treason, I should leave the country sharpish, so who can say. What happened to Lafayette? Did someone say he died?”

“About a fortnight after I spoke to him. A couple of weeks ago now. He was found in the Thames. It seems he hit his head and fell into the river.”

“Hit his head,” da Silva repeated.

“Yes.”

“Did anyone wonder if someone hit his head for him?”

Curtis had wondered that since reading the inquest report. He felt a rush of warmth for da Silva, sheer relief at sharing his thoughts. “Impossible to tell. The body was in the river for a couple of days before it was found. The coroner called it an accident.”

“He’d started to talk and then he was found in the river with a smashed head.” Da Silva made a face. “So you are here to establish if there’s any truth in what may have been the ranting of a disturbed man, or the discoveries of a wronged and perhaps murdered one. Well, now we know where we stand. Do we make common cause?”

That wasn’t, on the face of it, an attractive prospect. But Curtis stood no chance at all of finding anything out alone, whereas da Silva seemed to have a fair idea what he was about, and could at least pick locks. And Curtis needed those doors opened, needed to know if he had lost his friends, his career, his purpose in life to treason rather than malignant fate. Come to that, he needed to know if da Silva was right about mirrors in the rooms and men driven to their deaths, because if that was the case, whatever else he was or was not guilty of, Armstrong deserved horsewhipping and Curtis would damned well make sure he got it.

Subterfuge did not come easily to Curtis. Just now, he could use a man like da Silva. And, while he’d already realised that da Silva’s effeminate mannerisms concealed sharp eyes and a sharper mind, it seemed that he had courage, too, and even a sense of decency. Curtis had an uncomfortable feeling that he might have judged him rather ungenerously.

“Very well. Common cause.”

He held out his right hand without thinking. Da Silva took it, with no obvious repugnance at the mutilation. His grip was light on Curtis’s scars, but decidedly less flaccid than when they’d first shaken.

“Well, then, let us move on,” da Silva said. “What do you need to deal with that alarm in the library?”

“Clips and wires. There are supplies in the house, Armstrong showed me the workroom yesterday. I’ll see to it.”

“Then I shall meet you at, shall we say, one a.m. in the library? I look forward to our assignation.”

Chapter Four

It felt bizarre to return to the party after that. At luncheon, Mrs. Lambdon and Mrs. Grayling wanted to know all about his uncle; as ever, the legend of the tall, handsome explorer cast a glamour over his family. Curtis fielded the familiar questions, mind elsewhere.

The conversation in the folly seemed unreal now, especially with da Silva every sinuous inch the effete aesthete once more, making dramatic, fluttery remarks that set the women giggling and the men rolling their eyes in disdain. Had he really shaken hands with him on a deal to burgle their host?

And could da Silva be right? Who the devil was being blackmailed here? Surely not the Lambdons, they were Lady Armstrong’s family. The Graylings? They were wealthy, and he had thought Mrs. Grayling had a wandering eye. Miss Carruth? It couldn’t be. Had Armstrong hoped to blackmail
him
? With what?

After luncheon, he took refuge in the unoccupied library to avoid James Armstrong’s offers of sporting activity and Mrs. Grayling’s sly over-friendliness. The selection of yellow-back novels included a wide range of mysteries and romps by Edgar Wallace and E. Phillips Oppenheim, all packed with gentleman spies, mysterious foreigners and sultry seductresses. Curtis enjoyed that sort of thing, but he couldn’t make himself fancy the idea today. The actual life of a gentleman spy, it seemed to him, consisted of sneaking about, breaking the rules of hospitality and generally being anything but a gentleman, and the only mysterious foreigner around was da Silva. He was probably the closest thing Peakholme had to offer to a sultry seductress, come to that.