Thomas & Charlotte Pitt 29 - Death On Blackheath (12 page)

Narraway, like himself, was one of the few people who owned a telephone in his own home. Since his forced retirement from the leadership of Special Branch, he had been elevated to the House of Lords, but that was more of a sop to his reputation than any opportunity to be of use. Previously he would not have been at home at this hour, but now there was a reasonable chance he would not have gone to the House of Lords, or to one of his clubs for luncheon. Such things grew stale quite quickly to a man of Narraway’s intelligence. Also, since he had no part in political affairs, he felt side-lined, no more of interest to those who used to hold him in awe. He had never said as much, but Pitt had heard it in his silences.

As it turned out, Pitt had to wait about half an hour for Narraway to return from a brief walk. Considering the weather, Pitt imagined he had gone at all only as a matter of discipline. Narraway had begun his career in the Indian Army, and the virtues of abstinence and hard, strict self-mastery had never entirely left him.

Narraway’s manservant offered Pitt a late luncheon, which he accepted gratefully, realising that he was actually quite hungry. He was just finishing an excellent slice of hot apple pie, served with cream, when he heard the sound of the front door closing, then Narraway’s voice in the hall.

Narraway came into the sitting room, having removed his overcoat. His thick hair was flattened a little where his hat had been, and his lean, dark face coloured by the cold.

He glanced at the plate where the apple pie had been, and which now held only Pitt’s folded spoon and fork.

‘You came for more than luncheon, I presume?’ he said with a slight lift of curiosity. He walked towards the fire, which was burning strongly where the manservant had added fresh coals. He stood in front of it from habit, holding his hands out to catch the heat.

‘Luncheon seemed like a good idea,’ Pitt replied with a tight smile. ‘Since I spent my own luncheon time being hauled over the coals in Downing Street by a rather officious man by the name of Talbot.’

Narraway straightened up, forgetting the fire. He stared at Pitt with interest. ‘I imagine you are at liberty to tell me what about, or you would not have come here? And it is both urgent and discreet, or you would have suggested luncheon at some restaurant. Please don’t disappoint me …’ He said it lightly, but Pitt caught the flash of emotion in it, the sincerity there, and then concealed again.

‘It seems a shame not to have you deduce what it’s about,’ Pitt said drily, in part to cover the fact that he had caught the moment’s vulnerability.

Narraway sat down in the chair opposite and crossed his legs elegantly, hitching the knee of his trousers not to spoil the line. ‘Have you got time to wait for that?’ he asked, his eyes bright with amusement.

Pitt smiled back. ‘No, I haven’t. Did you read about the young woman’s body found in the gravel pit on Shooters Hill?’

‘Of course. Why? Ah! I see.’ He sat forward again. ‘Is that what Somerset Carlisle was referring to in his questions to the House yesterday? I saw that headline on the sandwich boards as I passed. I admit I didn’t make the connection. Why the hell would Carlisle think a dead woman on Shooters Hill was anything to do with Kynaston, or might endanger him and his family? What danger? Who was the woman? What had she to do with him?’

‘Probably nothing,’ Pitt replied. ‘But his wife’s maid is missing, and she answers the description.’

‘Bit thin, isn’t it? Wouldn’t half the young women in Greenwich or Blackheath answer it?’ Narraway was looking at him steadily, waiting for the missing facts that made sense of it.

‘Taller than average, handsomely built and with thick auburn hair?’ Pitt asked. ‘Gone missing in the last three weeks? No, they wouldn’t. And the gravel pit is only a short walk from Kynaston’s house.’

Narraway nodded. It was so slight a movement it was barely visible. ‘I see. Are we supposing Kynaston was having an affair with this maid? Or that she learned something about either Mr or Mrs Kynaston so potentially damaging that Kynaston killed her? Seems a little drastic, and honestly pretty unlikely. But I suppose those are the ones that catch us out.’

‘Why does Carlisle care?’ Pitt countered. ‘Has he changed so much that he’d go after a man simply to make a point? What point could be worth that to him? And why Kynaston? We have far more vulnerable members of the Government than that! I could name half a dozen whose private lives would be open to question – if that were his purpose.’

Narraway’s mouth twisted in a wry smile, his black eyes bright. ‘Only half a dozen. For God’s sake, Pitt, where are your eyes?’

‘All right, a couple of dozen,’ Pitt conceded. ‘Why Kynaston?’

‘Opportunity,’ Narraway answered. ‘He was the one near whose house the corpse turned up?’ He pulled his mouth into a thin line. ‘I’m slipping. That isn’t a reason to raise the subject publicly. The real question is what for? What does he want?’ He thought in silence for a few moments before looking up at Pitt again. ‘Kynaston works for the War Office. But that’s extremely vague. I think we need to know a lot more precisely than that. If he’s open to blackmail because of some idiotic domestic affair, seemingly gone very badly wrong, then we should know about it. At least you should,’ he corrected himself. ‘And you need to know a lot more about Kynaston professionally.’

‘Don’t you know? I asked Talbot, and was told fairly tersely to mind my own business.’

‘Good,’ Narraway responded. ‘Then there’s something there. You’ll get the door shut in your face. I’ve got a few favours I can call in …’

‘Or threats you can hold over people,’ Pitt said a little bitterly. ‘I’m beginning to learn the power of this job.’

‘That’s the favour,’ Narraway answered. ‘I won’t carry out the threat. Lesson, Pitt – never carry out a threat unless you absolutely have to. Once it’s done, you’ve no more power with it.’

‘If I never do it, why would anyone believe that I would?’ Pitt asked reasonably.

‘Oh, you’ll have to, once or twice,’ Narraway assured him, a shadow passing over his eyes as if memory darkened them for a moment. ‘Just put it off as long as you can. I hated doing it – you’ll hate it even more.’

Pitt remembered a large party, a house full of laughter and music, and a scene where a man lay on a tiled floor, blood pooling out from the shot with which Pitt had killed him.

‘I know,’ he said almost under his breath.

Narraway looked at him with a moment’s intense compassion, then that too vanished.

‘I’ll see what I can find out about Dudley Kynaston,’ he promised. ‘Might take a couple of days. Keep on trying to identify your corpse. You might be lucky and find out it’s not your missing maid, but don’t count on it.’

Pitt stood up. ‘I’m not,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m preparing for the next round.’

It came exactly as Pitt had expected. Nothing further had been learned about the identity of the woman in the gravel pit, nor had Stoker been more fortunate in finding any trace of Kitty Ryder. Narraway telephoned Pitt and invited him to call by just after dark. He would have invited him to dinner, but he knew Pitt’s desire to be at home with his family. If he envied him that, he disguised it so well Pitt had seen no more than perhaps a glimpse of it.

He offered Pitt a brandy, something that Pitt very seldom accepted, though he did on this occasion. He was tired and cold. He needed the fire inside as well as burning in the hearth.

Narraway got to the point immediately.

‘Kynaston is cleverer than he looks, and – at least professionally – a lot more imaginative. He works on the design of submarines for the navy, and now particularly on submarine weapons, which is a field of its own: obviously different from weapons fired above the water.’

‘Submarines?’ Pitt realised the yawning gap in his knowledge. He frowned, not wanting to make a fool of himself. ‘You mean like in Jules Verne’s,
Twenty Thousand
Leagues under the Sea
?’

Narraway shrugged. ‘Not quite that clever yet, but definitely the naval warfare of the future, and not so far ahead either. The French were the first to launch a submarine not relying on human power for propulsion –
Plongeur
, back in ’63, then improved on in ’67. Fellow called Narcis Monturiol built a boat forty-six feet long, could dive down nearly a hundred feet and stay down for two hours.’

Pitt was fascinated.

‘The Peruvians, of all people, built a really good submarine during their war with Chile in ’79. Then the Poles had one about the same time.’

‘Didn’t we do anything?’ Pitt interrupted with chagrin.

‘I’m getting to it. Our clergyman and inventor George Garrett got together with a Swedish industrialist Thorsten Nordenfelt and made a whole series, one of which they sold to the Greeks. In ’87 they improved it and added torpedo tubes for firing underwater explosive missiles. That one, sold to the Ottoman Navy, was the first to fire a torpedo while submerged.’ He closed his eyes and for a moment his jaw tightened. ‘One can only begin to imagine the possibilities of that on an island like ours, whose survival depends on our navy guarding not only our trade routes but our shores themselves: in fact, our existence.’

Pitt’s imagination was already there, racing and yet cold with fear.

‘The Spanish are working on it too,’ Narraway went on. ‘And the French have an all-electrical-powered one. It will be only two or three years before they’re common.’

‘I see,’ Pitt said quietly. Indeed he did, all too terribly clearly. Britain was an island. Without their sea lanes the British could be starved to death in weeks. The importance of submarine weapons could hardly be exaggerated – which is why they had to value people like Dudley Kynaston, and be prepared to go to great lengths to protect him.

‘I can’t see why Talbot wouldn’t tell me that,’ Pitt said, both puzzled and angry.

‘Neither can I,’ Narraway agreed. ‘I can only suppose that he thought you had been told.’ Then he hesitated. ‘Except that I imagine if so you would have gone on to ask a lot more questions, and the answers to those might be rather more … delicate.’ Narraway was tense, sitting back in his chair as if casually, but Pitt saw the strain in the fabric of his jacket as his shoulders hunched very slightly.

Pitt could not leave it unasked. ‘Technically delicate, or personally?’

‘Personally, of course,’ Narraway said with a wry twist to his lips. ‘Technically is probably irrelevant, and would require a great deal more study than you have time for in order to understand. Are you aware that Dudley had a brother, Bennett, a couple or so years younger than he?’

‘Yes. There’s a picture of him in Kynaston’s study, behind his desk.’ Pitt could see it as clearly as if it were before him now, even the eyes, the contours of the face. ‘Odd place to put it, except that it’s the best wall space, and the best light,’ he added. ‘And he will see it every time he comes into the room. Strong resemblance to Dudley, but even better-looking. But he’s been dead for several years. What could he have to do with Kitty Ryder, or whoever this woman was?’

‘Probably nothing,’ Narraway agreed. ‘But there was a scandal concerning him several years ago. I haven’t been able to uncover it, which means they took very great care indeed to hide everything, or disguise it as something else. I haven’t even been able to learn if Dudley is aware of it himself. Apparently at least some elements of it happened abroad. Again, I don’t know where. The only thing I gathered from both sources I tried is that Bennett was not to blame for it. Of course that may, or may not be true.’

‘At the time of his death?’ Pitt asked.

‘No, some years before.’

‘Which would mean it was at least a decade ago, or longer,’ Pitt concluded. ‘Kitty Ryder would have been a child.’

‘Relevant only to Dudley Kynaston’s sensitivities,’ Narraway pointed out. ‘And therefore his immediate reaction to conceal things that perhaps other people would not, even if he were completely innocent. He and Bennett were very close, as you have deduced from the portrait in the study.’

Pitt thought about it for a few moments. It would account for Dudley Kynaston’s behaviour, the unease Pitt had sensed, even the tiny errors of omission in his diaries.

‘Yes,’ he said with a degree of relief. Perhaps Kitty Ryder was likeable, but unwise, and she had eloped with the young man the household staff so disapproved of, and the woman in the gravel pit could turn out to be unrelated to the Kynaston house.

Narraway saw the sudden ease in his face. ‘Protect Kynaston as long as you can,’ he said quietly. ‘We need a navy as strong as possible. There’s a hell of a lot of unrest in the world. Africa is stirring against us, especially in the south. The old order is changing. The century is almost worn out, and the Queen with it. She’s tired and lonely and growing weaker. In Europe they’re looking for change, reform. We may think we are isolated, but it’s a delusion we can’t afford. The English Channel is not very wide. A strong swimmer can make it, let alone a fleet of ships. We need to have the best navy in the world.’

Pitt stared at him. None of what Narraway had said was unknown to him but put together as he had just done, it was a darker picture than he had allowed himself to see.

He did not answer. Narraway knew he understood.

CHARLOTTE HAD not seen her sister Emily for several weeks, and not spent much time alone with her when they could talk to each other in more than formalities since before Christmas. She decided to write a letter to Emily asking if she would like to take luncheon and, if the weather permitted, to walk in Kew Gardens. Even if it were cold, the massive glasshouses filled with tropical plants would be warm, and a pleasant change from sitting inside.

Emily wrote back immediately, agreeing that it would be an excellent idea. She had married extremely well, just before Charlotte had married Pitt. Emily had gained a title and a very large fortune, if not a commensurate happiness. Tragically, George had been killed in circumstances to which they never referred. Emily found herself first a suspect in his death, then a very wealthy widow with a son, in whose name both the title and the inheritance were vested.