With another low groan, Sir Robert Chiltern said, ‘To enlarge this accursed woman’s wealth I have betrayed my party and my constituents, and perjured away my good name. May God forgive me – but Gertrude, I am sure, never will.’
‘You do both yourself and Gertrude an injustice, Robert,’ Goring pointed out. ‘You did it for Mabel’s sake, not for Mrs Cheveley’s. Gertrude will understand that. And there is yet time to make it right. Politicians change their minds all the time; indeed, I believe that they are well known for it. When this is over you can simply say that new facts have come to light which lead you to support the government’s bill after all. You might even say that you were maliciously deceived before; that is very nearly true.’
‘I admit,’ said Holmes, ‘that I am surprised that Mrs Cheveley so readily delivered the evidence she promised. It would fit her established habits better to keep the threat hanging over you both, at least until Lady Goring’s trial.’
Lord Goring sighed. ‘Oh, the threat has not disappeared, Holmes. She may yet have the testimony withdrawn. I did not know that Mrs Teville was the witness in question, but I assume she could yet state that she has been acting under duress, presumably exerted by Robert and myself as influential members of the establishment, and contradict her previous statement. The police would at least need to reopen the investigation, and who knows what evidence the vile woman might concoct to draw poor Mabel back into it?’
Holmes said, ‘I assume that her conditions also included a stipulation that you call off my involvement in the case.’
‘That is nearly correct,’ said Lord Goring. ‘In fact, she presented me with two alternatives. I chose to warn you away. I could not risk you finding something out that would appear to call Mabel’s innocence into question once more. But also… I hoped that you might become suspicious. I hoped that you might investigate me.’
‘And thus come around, once more, to an awareness of the nefarious Mrs Cheveley and her villainies?’
‘That was the outcome I hoped for,’ the viscount agreed.
‘But,’ Holmes asked, ‘what was the other alternative which she presented to you?’
‘If I could not pay you off and stop you investigating, I should instead retain your services and keep a close watch upon you. In this case she wished me to cultivate your society, and to seek any chinks in your armour that she might use to her advantage. You will appreciate that I was not very hopeful of success in that eventuality.’
‘Yes, I see. Tell me something, though. It would seem that you have failed to discourage me from my investigation, so your part now is to find out everything you can to my disadvantage. If you were to succeed, how would you inform Mrs Cheveley of this?’
Lord Goring scowled. ‘I would place a message in a particular location, which she tells me is checked twice every day, in the morning and afternoon. There is a loose brick in the wall surrounding my neighbour’s garden. The location cannot easily be seen from anywhere where one is not oneself conspicuous.’
‘Capital!’ said Holmes. ‘Apparently our friend has been studying her spycraft. I imagine life among the Viennese demi-monde will have afforded her numerous opportunities to acquaint herself with members of the profession. I had hoped that Lane might be our conduit, via Broadwater, but how much more satisfying it is to pass our message through a channel that she has herself created.
‘So be it, then.’ Holmes beamed at us. ‘We must give Mrs Cheveley exactly what she has asked for.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
THE DISGRACE OF SHERLOCK HOLMES
When I had awakened that morning to greet Sherlock Holmes beside the remains of our long-dead fire, I had not anticipated that before the end of the day I would be sharing the bedroom of Langdale Pike’s Piccadilly flat with a Scotland Yard inspector and a peer of the realm. That was, however, where Gregson, Goring and I concealed ourselves that evening, in accordance with the plan hatched by Holmes to draw the attention of the elusive Mrs Cheveley.
‘Be haughty with her,’ Holmes had instructed Goring as he wrote his missive. ‘Lay down the law. Insist that she must consider this the full remittance of your debt to her, and that she shall have no further hold over you.’
‘We cannot trust her to comply with that,’ Sir Robert Chiltern had pointed out. ‘She might mouth words of agreement, but they will never bind her.’
Holmes sighed. ‘We do not need her bound, merely convinced. It is necessary that Lord Goring’s message be believed, and he would capitulate only out of desperation. He must make it sound as if it means everything to him. I assure you, if all goes well, after tonight Mrs Cheveley will pose no further threat to you or to anybody else of your acquaintance.’
The substance of Lord Goring’s message was that he had been making enquiries among Holmes’s friends, and that Langdale Pike could offer her the information that she sought concerning the detective’s guilty conscience. She was invited to visit Pike that evening, in his rooms near Piccadilly, and to come alone.
Such a suggestion would have scandalised any real lady, of course, but none of us expected that Mrs Cheveley would defer to such conventional scruples. Having sent Lord Goring to conceal the message in his neighbour’s wall, Holmes repaired directly to Bradley’s Club in St James’s Street to gain Pike’s belated assent to the scheme.
‘Langdale is by far the most plausible acquaintance of mine to be the originator of such an offer,’ Holmes explained to me. ‘Mycroft is out of the question, and however hopeful her approach, Mrs Cheveley would surely be suspicious of any betrayal by you. To those who know her character little enough, Mrs Hudson might seem a better source, but I would not wish to place her in any danger, nor any of the Irregulars.’
Holmes had a detachment of his street children watching Goring’s neighbour’s house in shifts, and although they had been unable to loiter near the exact spot where the letter had been placed, they had seen a man matching the description of Mr Broadwater duck around the corner of the wall and then leave again shortly afterwards.
Assuming that Mrs Cheveley would have the building where Pike had his rooms similarly watched, the inspector, the viscount and I arrived via the tradesmen’s entrance of a neighbouring building with an adjoining cellar. Pike met us and escorted us up to his apartment, which had an air of disinterested opulence entirely in keeping with that of the man himself.
A velvet divan stood partially atop a priceless Persian rug, and an exquisite rosewood table had acquired scuffmarks and the unmistakeable stain of a wine glass. The pictures on the walls were mostly of slender young men enacting scenes from classical myth or Christian martyrology, in what must have been a comfortably warm climate.
We had arrived some time before Pike’s appointment with Mrs Cheveley was due, and Holmes was to arrive later still. Lord Goring had left Sir Robert Chiltern waiting for news at his home with his wife and sister. Ostensibly, Holmes had refused to expose a man of Chiltern’s standing to such a compromising situation, but I suspected that he had doubts about the politician’s behaviour in a crisis.
I broke the awkward silence while we waited by asking Pike if he had learned any more of Mrs Teville.
‘A little more,’ he told me. ‘I believe that she is the same woman as a Mrs Erlynne, once of scandalous reputation, who enjoyed a short period of notoriety in London society some five years since. Her irregular relations with gentlemen meant that she was welcome only at the most daring or sordid fringes of society, but she redeemed herself by marrying a minor member of the nobility, evidently susceptible and now deceased. They moved abroad, of course, but the marriage salvaged a small measure of respectability for her nonetheless.’
‘Was his name Teville?’ Inspector Gregson asked.
‘No, it was Lorton, Lord Augustus Lorton. He died two years after their marriage, which came as no great surprise to anyone familiar with his habits. Mr Teville, if he existed, is nobody who has come to my attention, but if Mrs Erlynne met him abroad he might very well not have don
e. My knowledge largely pertains to England, and in particular our bustling capital.’
‘Have you learned any more of the identity of her supposed daughter?’ I asked, remembering my suspicions concerning the parentage of Mrs Cheveley.
Pike shook his head. ‘Disappointingly, no. I have found out what little more I can from my informant the maid, but she tells me only that the young lady is highly placed in society, and is ignorant of the actual nature of the connection between them. Apparently, she considers this Mrs Erlynne, or Teville, a friend and even a protector, rather than a relative of any kind. It may be that what Mrs Teville is most eager to protect is the young lady’s innocence on this matter, and that this is the threat Mrs Cheveley holds over her.’
‘Or perhaps just the fact that she is this Erlynne woman, if she was so disreputable before,’ Gregson suggested prosaically. ‘Mrs Teville seems to enjoy her place among the finest society. She would not want to lose it.’
For my own part, I suspected that the connection between the two women was a much more direct one. Indeed, I thought it eminently possible that Mrs Teville’s daughter was not only the erstwhile Mrs Cheveley, but someone whom I had actually met. Mrs Nepcote was a redhead of around the right age, and in her marriage to Major Nepcote had managed to combine social respectability with complete domestic impunity for any dubious behaviour. She had known Durrington, of course, as well as most of the other blackmail victims, and she had been by turns obstructive to Holmes’s investigations and inquisitive about his personal life and mine. She would have to be a consummate actress, of course, to maintain such a vivid outward character, but a woman of Mrs Cheveley’s felonious accomplishments would surely have skills of that nature to call upon.
The only real objection I could see was that it would require Lord Goring, who would know her under both identities, to have remained silent on the connection, but there might be various reasons for that. I was resolved to watch His Lordship carefully as the proceedings progressed.
As the appointed time approached, Pike hustled the three of us into his bedroom, where an indeterminate number of satin dressing gowns were strewn across a rumpled four-poster bed. He showed us the connecting door to the adjoining dressing room, which had its own separate entrance into the drawing room, and exhorted us not to open it upon any account. Then he left us to our own devices.
We sat awkwardly in a row on the wide foot of the bed, while the silence between us stretched. Lord Goring sprang up occasionally to pace back and forth, ignoring my pantomime of annoyance. Gregson, well used to waiting in his police work, remained as placid as a carven Buddha, glancing only occasionally at his watch.
Eventually, Mrs Cheveley arrived, half an hour after the appointed time. ‘You are alarmingly late,’ we heard Pike admonish her after the briefest of introductory greetings. ‘Holmes is due at any moment.’ He knew as I did that Holmes was waiting in a public house around the corner, and would be tipped off by an Irregular as soon as his quarry arrived, but his urgency lent verisimilitude to the affair. I assumed that Mrs Cheveley herself was late because she suspected a trap.
‘Mr Holmes is coming here?’ she asked coolly. ‘That was not part of our arrangement, Mr Pike. I might begin to imagine that you have been deceiving me.’ Her voice was cooler and calmer than that which I was used to hearing from Mrs Nepcote, although there was enough of the familiar about it to convince me that my theory was correct. ‘I have no patience for deception, at least when it is practised by others.’
‘It seemed easier to let you hear what Holmes had to say than to tell you,’ Pike explained, in a bored tone of voice. ‘Please, hide in my dressing room. No, I am afraid we have little time for badinage,’ he added, as Mrs Cheveley began to feign a giggle, ‘you must do as I ask. I promise you that what you learn tonight will be the undoing of Sherlock Holmes, should you decide to make it so. If you choose, it will give you a sway over him that will last for the rest of his career. You can be the new Napoleon of crime, a Moriarty with nothing to fear from any nemesis – or rather, from that particular one; I make no promises as to others. But this can only occur, I am afraid, if you will secrete yourself in that dressing room with all haste.’
‘One moment, Mr Pike,’ said Mrs Cheveley, although we heard light, feminine footsteps and her voice began to reach us through the dressing-room door rather than the one opening onto the drawing room. ‘Mr Holmes is a friend of yours, I understand. Well, so it may be; I set little store by friendship. But most men do, and I can hardly believe that you are betraying your friend with no reward in mind. What shall I owe you? You must know that I am an extremely wealthy woman, and I pay my debts, but I prefer to know what they are before incurring them.’
Indifferently, Pike said, ‘My own income is not negligible, nor are my needs wholly monetary. I hold a great deal of information that never reaches the popular presses, and I have the sources to provide me with a great deal more. I would be a valuable asset in your work, but I do not wish to be an asset. I would like to become a junior partner in your enterprise, and to enjoy a share – a modest share – of what will be very substantial proceeds.’ With an impression of venom so convincing that it shocked me, he added, ‘I shall also very much appreciate seeing Sherlock Holmes humiliated, but that is by the by. It is always trying, don’t you find, when one’s friends are better known than oneself, but refuse to acknowledge the assistance that one has given them? Well, perhaps you have not had that experience, in which case I envy you. Are we agreed?’
‘We can discuss terms afterwards,’ said Mrs Cheveley with an equal affectation of disinterest, ‘but I am quite amenable to such an arrangement as you propose.’
We heard the dressing-room door close quietly, and settled back silently to await the arrival of Sherlock Holmes.
My friend had done me an injustice when he suggested that I exercised no discretion in presenting his exploits to the world. I had, for instance, not yet mentioned Langdale Pike in my accounts of his adventures for publication, feeling that my friend’s occasional reliance upon a person of Pike’s profession was rather sordid and not greatly to his credit. Hearing the hatred, which I sincerely hoped had been feigned, in Pike’s voice, I had found myself wondering whether that had been a mistake. Holmes was trusting Pike with his reputation, and they had known each other a long time. How would it be if the sentiments Pike had just avowed were real? How would it be if the doyen of London’s gossipmongers was cognisant of some shameful secret of Holmes’s to which even I was not privy?
Holmes did not keep us waiting for very long. A minute or so later we heard an impatient rapping at Pike’s front door, and a clatter as it was opened.
‘Sherlock!’ Pike effused, with an unctuousness that was entirely the antithesis of his earlier scorn. ‘Always a pleasure to see you, my dear friend.’
‘Langdale.’ Holmes’s voice acknowledged him with a good deal less friendliness. ‘I shall not be staying very long. You know what I am here for.’
‘But of course, Sherlock, efficient and to the point as always. I have found the perfect fellow for your needs. A young boatman from a thoroughly respectable working family, personable and quite well-spoken, ideal for the purpose.’
My friend asked, ‘Will he do all that I have asked?’
‘Since he hopes to be paid, it would be idiotic of him not to.’
Holmes had not told us the details of the scenario he had concocted with Pike for Mrs Cheveley to overhear, and I wondered with some curiosity what variety of scandal they had in mind.
Pike continued, ‘He will give his oath that as a child on his grandfather’s boat he saw Lord Arthur Savile beneath a lamp post on the Embankment, in the very act of pitching Septimus Podgers into the Thames. His grandfather’s attention was elsewhere at the time, and the old man beat him for lying. The savage fury on the nobleman’s face, he will assure the court, has haunted his dreams for years, so he will have no difficulty in identifying him for the jury.’
‘Good,’ sa
id Holmes decisively. ‘The case against Savile is a little tenuous, and this will shore it up nicely. Now, about the Belgrave Square murder.’
Pike drawled, ‘I have spoken to a servant in Lord Illingworth’s household. It’s only just around the corner, after all. It is a little tricky, as the place has already been searched by the police, but it seems the suit His Lordship wore to the Moncrieffs’ ball was being cleaned at the time, and was not inspected. This girl can arrange for the item you mentioned to be found in a pocket. Do you have it with you?’
‘I do,’ Holmes’s voice confirmed smugly. ‘A photograph of Timothy Durrington’s father in uniform, presumably carried by the victim in order to demonstrate a resemblance to Ernest Moncrieff. Doubtless he passed it to Illingworth on the balcony, and His Lordship absent-mindedly pocketed it before pushing him to his death. It will demonstrate the earl’s guilt far more effectively than his half-hearted letter of confession.’
‘It will require some wear and tear to suggest that it has been through the laundry,’ Pike observed doubtfully. ‘But I dare say I can handle that.’
‘It must remain recognisable.’
‘Of course. When shall you need it discovered?’
‘As soon as possible,’ said Holmes. ‘It will cause Moncrieff some little embarrassment, and considerably more to Illingworth if he is still alive, but it will clear Mabel Goring’s name beyond any doubt, and that is all that matters to my client.’ Lord Goring was on his feet again, and bore an expression of intense distaste.
‘As usual, I shall ensure that the discovery is commented upon in the press,’ said Pike. ‘I presume that our customary fee applies?’
‘Naturally, Langdale,’ Holmes said coldly. ‘We may be friends, but our business affairs remain always on a professional footing.’
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