In which case, he thought, he was in big trouble, and his mind was filled with the nightmare image of him being pulled up in front of the captain for treating an eminent physician as if she were no more than a common washerwoman.
He cleared his throat. ‘Well, since we’re almost in New York, there’s not much more I can do for you on this trip, ma’am,’ he said.
‘Not much more?’ Ellie repeated quizzically. ‘Have you done anything at all for me?’
‘Well, no, ma’am,’ the steward admitted. ‘What with you attending to the sick and all, I haven’t really had the opportunity. But if there’s anything I can do before we land. .’
‘As a matter of the fact, there is,’ Ellie interrupted. ‘This lady next to me is Mrs Gruber. Would you like to say “hello” to her?’
The steward looked down at the woman. Her face was weather-beaten, and as he leaned closer to her his nostrils filled with the smell of boiled cabbage.
‘Hello, Mrs Gruber,’ he said, forcing himself to smile.
‘Hello,’ the woman replied, in a thick foreign accent.
‘Mrs Gruber’s been rather under the weather,’ Ellie Carr said, ‘which is why I’ve brought her up here from steerage for a breath of fresh air.’
‘I see,’ the steward said.
‘The fing is,’ Ellie continued, lapsing mockingly back into cockney, ‘it’s a bit of a strain for a bag o’ bones like me to keep ’olding her up, so I was wonderin’ if you wouldn’t mind walkin’ ’er around for a bit yerself.’
The steward swallowed. ‘I’d be delighted to,’ he said.
Ellie smiled. ‘Do you know,’ she replied, ‘I was almost certain you’d say that.’
With a poor attempt at graciousness, the steward offered the peasant woman his arm, and the two of them began to walk away along the deck.
Left alone, Ellie turned her gaze towards the skyscrapers, which were becoming commonplace in New York, but were still strangers to the London landscape.
‘Well, ’ooever would have thought it, Mum?’ she said softly to the woman who had been dead for ever ten years. ‘’Ooever would ’ave imagined that your little Ellie would end up travellin’ first class to America?’
She needed no ghost to respond, because she already knew the answer.
Nobody would have thought it. Nobody would ever have imagined that a snotty-nosed kid from the slums would end up not only being a doctor, but a doctor who the Yanks were eager to consult.
It was largely a matter of luck, she told herself. She was lucky she had been born with a good brain. She had been lucky that her own interest in forensic pathology had developed just before the science really started to get off the ground, and thus made her a pioneer almost by default.
‘But you’re right, Mum,’ she said into the wind. ‘It wasn’t just luck — I’ve worked damned hard for it as well.’
And paid the price, she thought — in all sorts of ways.
She was flattered the Americans had invited her to visit them. She was as excited as only a true evangelist — eager to impart her knowledge to the world — can be.
But she was nervous, too.
Not about defending her views and discoveries — she was on solid ground there.
Not about meeting new people and finding herself in new situations — you didn’t claw your way out of the East End unless you had the ability to take that kind of thing in your stride.
She was nervous because she knew that in New York was a man who she was desperate to see, and yet both afraid and embarrassed to meet; a man who sometimes seemed like the man her destiny had always intended for her, and at others seemed more like the instrument that fate had specifically designed to destroy the life she had worked so hard to build up.
‘Do you think we can we make it work this time, Sam?’ she asked.
Overhead, a seagull screeched loudly, then opened its bowels and deposited their load on the deck, only a few feet away from her.
She sighed. ‘You’re probably right, seagull,’ she said wistfully.
FIVE
George Holt’s study was on the first floor of the house, and its corner location meant that it had views of both the sea and the woods.
The room had a far less businesslike atmosphere than his father’s office, Blackstone thought, looking around him. True, it contained a large, impressive desk and several tall filing cabinets, but there were personal touches, too — stuffed animal heads mounted on the wall and a billiard table in the corner.
Blackstone and Meade stood facing the brothers, across George’s desk. They had not been invited to sit down, so, in this way at least, the new world seemed very much like the old.
‘You told me that you had some questions you wanted to ask us,’ George said crisply.
‘I did,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘Am I correct in assuming that your father has been living in his underground suite for seven years?’
‘You are.’
‘And that, until last night, he hadn’t left it — not even for an hour?’
‘Not even for a moment,’ George said.
‘So what happened to make him retreat to this place — to turn himself into a virtual prisoner?’
‘That’s an easy question to answer,’ said George, with a hint of contempt seeping into his voice. ‘He lost his nerve.’
‘What do you mean?’
George shook his head, wonderingly. ‘I’d have thought what I just said was straightforward enough for even a Limey to understand, but if you want me to repeat it, I will.’ He took a deeply theatrical breath, and then continued, ‘He. . lost. . his. . nerve.’
‘There was an attempt on his life,’ Harold said.
‘An attempt on his life!’ George repeated, with a snort of disgust. ‘Do you call what Edward Knox did an attempt on his life?’
‘He fired a gun at Father,’ Harold said. ‘He shot him.’
‘It was no more than a flesh wound,’ George said dismissively.
‘That was just a matter of luck,’ Harold persisted.
‘No, it wasn’t,’ George countered. ‘Knox would never have had the nerve to actually kill him. It’s my belief that the pathetic wretch only intended to fire into the wall, and the fact that he hit Father at all is principally down to his incompetence.’
‘Do you think we could start this particular story at the beginning?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Father had been involved in several business deals which had gone bad,’ Harold said. ‘Holt and Co managed to emerge with a decent profit, but several of our partners in those businesses — including Edward Knox — ended up in the bankruptcy court.’
‘Their own fault entirely,’ George said. ‘In the business world, you need to learn to be a strong swimmer pretty damn quickly, especially when the current keeps changing. Those men didn’t learn — and so they went under.’
‘Father received several anonymous death threats after the companies collapsed, and Inspector Manson said-’
‘Manson was our pet policeman,’ George interrupted. ‘We paid him a retainer of a thousand dollars a year — not that I could see he ever did anything to earn even a single cent of it!’
‘. . Inspector Manson said that as the threats seemed to have come from more than one source, Father might be wise to stay away from the office until everybody had cooled down a little.’
‘And your father agreed to do that?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Yes, he did, but Knox came to our house on Fifth Avenue, late one night. The doors were all locked, but he’d bribed Father’s secretary, Margaret Wilkins, to let him in.’
George laughed. ‘Father trusted her, you see, even if she was little more than a servant. Well, he’s never made that kind of mistake again!’
‘He was too rigid about how he reacted to the whole incident — at least in that way,’ Harold said.
‘Would you mind explaining that, sir?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Just because one person has let you down, that doesn’t mean everyone else will —
and by refusing to see anyone other than us and a couple of servants, he’s only been punishing himself.’
‘Anyway, as I said earlier,’ George continued, ‘it was a botched attempt at murder by a weedy little man who was in police custody half an hour later — but it was still enough to make Father lose his nerve.’
‘I don’t think that was when Father lost his nerve,’ Harold said firmly. ‘The experience unnerved him, certainly. It would have unnerved anyone. .’
‘Unnerved anyone,’ George echoed, contemptuously.
‘. . but I think it was what happened to Arthur Rudge which really frightened him.’
‘Who’s Arthur Rudge?’ Meade asked.
‘He was Father’s head bookkeeper,’ Harold replied darkly. ‘He was murdered a few days after Knox tried to kill Father.’
‘He wasn’t murdered,’ George said, again dismissively. He turned to Meade. ‘Rudge died in a fire at his apartment. It started in his bedroom, and, if you ask me, what caused it was one of those cheap cigars he was always smoking.’
‘The police never ruled out murder,’ Harold said.
‘Well, of course they didn’t!’ George replied exasperatedly. ‘Crime is their business — no crime, no jobs — so they’re always going to find suspicious circumstances, aren’t they?’
‘Father didn’t rule it out either,’ Harold said firmly. ‘He’s never openly admitted it, but I’m convinced he truly believes that Rudge was murdered — and that’s what tipped him over the edge.’
‘Tipped him over the edge!’ said his brother.
George seemed to believe that the best way to counter any statement was not to argue against it but to repeat it in an incredulous voice, Blackstone thought.
Well, perhaps he was right — it certainly seemed to work for a lot of politicians he had heard speak.
‘It had always been Father’s belief, up to that point, that everyone he did business with was absolutely terrified of him,’ Harold explained to Blackstone. ‘What Knox did shook his faith in that belief a little, but I think he convinced himself that it was no more than an aberration.’
‘A what?’ George asked.
‘But he couldn’t continue to convince himself of that once his bookkeeper was killed,’ Harold ploughed on. ‘If his enemies were brave enough to murder someone as important to the company as Rudge-’
‘He wasn’t important to the company!’ George interrupted. ‘Hell, we’ve managed well enough without him, haven’t we?’
‘We’ve certainly managed,’ Harold agreed cautiously. ‘But it wasn’t that easy at first. We made mistakes which cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars — mistakes which we’d never have made if we’d had Rudge to advise us.’
‘Poppycock!’
‘Do you see what I’m getting at, Inspector?’ Harold asked.
‘I think so,’ Blackstone said. ‘It wasn’t so much that Rudge was important in himself, as that he was important as a symbol of your father’s power. He was under your father’s protection — and if he was killed, then that protection didn’t seem to be worth much. In other words, if they dared kill Rudge, they’d find it just as easy to kill his boss.’
‘Hogwash!’ George said.
‘So you don’t think your father should have been worried, sir?’ Blackstone asked.
‘Of course he shouldn’t! The pathetic little men he ruined — and who he was hiding from — aren’t responsible for the kidnapping. That was the work of professional criminals.’
‘How can you say that Father was cowardly to take the precautions he did?’ Harold demanded angrily. ‘And that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it — calling him a coward?’
George’s expression softened. ‘I never used that word, little brother,’ he said, in a much gentler voice. ‘What he did was weak, rather than cowardly. But whatever you call it, he must take part of the responsibility for the events of last night — because if he hadn’t acted as he did, it would never have happened.’
‘You know nothing about him!’ Harold protested.
‘And you know nothing about hunting,’ George countered.
‘What are you talking about?’ Harold asked.
‘It’s almost unheard of for the leader of a wolf pack to be challenged,’ George said. ‘If other members of that pack start to find his leadership unbearable, they go off and form new packs of their own, and-’
‘So now you’re calling Father a wolf?’
‘Well, of course I am! Up until Arthur Rudge’s death, he was one of the biggest wolves on Wall Street — and you know it.’
‘But he. .’ Harold began.
And then he fell silent, as if he had realized that he had nothing with which to counter his brother’s argument.
‘Go on with your point, sir,’ Blackstone said.
‘As I said, challenges to the leader of the pack are rare. But if something happens to that leader — if his leg is damaged in a trap, or he’s wounded by a hunter — the other wolves will have no hesitation in killing him. And that’s what happened to Father — he showed himself to be weak in the eyes of the criminal fraternity — and now he’s paying the price.’
‘You’re being unspeakable!’ Harold said hotly.
‘I’m being realistic,’ George replied. ‘But what’s happened in the past is neither here nor there. Father has been kidnapped, and soon his kidnappers will contact us and demand a ransom.’ He turned to Meade again. ‘The New York Police Department will not try to stop us paying it, will they?’
‘No, sir, but we would request that you allow one of our men to deliver it,’ Meade said.
George nodded. ‘Of course. I’d be more than happy to leave it in the hands of the professionals. But there is something we must decide before we get the ransom demand, Harry,’ he continued, speaking to his brother, ‘and that is how much we’re prepared to pay.’
‘We’ll pay whatever they ask,’ Harold said.
George shook his head, pityingly. ‘And if they ask for a billion dollars? Do we agree to pay them that?’
‘Of course we don’t. We don’t have anything like a billion dollars. I doubt if anyone in the world is that rich, but-’
‘So we must discuss the price we can afford to pay.’
‘Whatever we have, we’ll give to them.’
‘You’d sell all the stock?’
‘Yes.’
‘And all the real estate?’
‘If necessary.’
‘In other words, you’re prepared to bankrupt us?’
‘If that’s what it takes.’
George shook his head again. ‘Father wouldn’t thank you for doing that,’ he said. ‘He’d rather be dead than poor — and you know it.’
‘It’s highly unlikely that the kidnappers will demand a bigger ransom than they think you can lay your hands on easily, sir,’ Blackstone said. ‘The longer they hold your father, the more risk they’re running, which is why they’ll want the whole business over with as quickly as possible.’
‘What are the chances they’ve already killed him?’ George asked Blackstone. Then he turned to his brother again, and said, ‘I have to ask, Harry.’
‘It’s unlikely they’ll kill him before they get their hands on the money,’ Blackstone told him.
‘And once we’ve paid them?’
They’ve already killed two men, so there’s no reason on earth why they should let their victim live, Blackstone thought.
‘It’s impossible to guess what they’ll do,’ he said aloud. ‘That’s why our best hope is to find him before the ransom is paid — and why I want you to delay paying it for as long as possible.’
‘I thought you said they’ll want it paid quickly,’ Harold said.
‘They will,’ Blackstone agreed. ‘But if the amount they’re demanding is large enough, they’ll probably already have accepted that they’ll have to wait two or three days.’
The phone on the desk rang. Both Harold and George grabbed for it, but George got there firs
t.
‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘No, I. . Now look here, my man, that’s a lot of money. . Yes, of course we can raise it — we’re not paupers, and you must already know that, or you’d never have kidnapped my father — but we can’t raise it in less than four days. . Why not? Because we don’t have that amount of cash around the house, you bloody idiot!’
It might have been better if Harold had reached the phone first, Blackstone thought. Then again, it might not have been.
‘Say you can raise it in three days,’ he mouthed at the older brother.
‘All right, we’ll try and get it together in three days,’ George said into the phone.
Harold had been writing something on a piece of paper, and now he slid it across to his brother. Looking at it upside down, Blackstone read, ‘SAY YOU WANT TO SPEAK TO HIM.’
‘I demand to speak to my father,’ George said. ‘Why? Why do you think, you imbecile? Because I need to be convinced he’s still alive.’
There was a pause, then George continued, ‘Listen, you bastard, if you don’t bring him to the phone, I’m hanging up.’
Another pause.
‘No, you won’t kill him — because if you do that, you’ll never get your hands on the money.’
A third pause.
‘Yes, I understand,’ George said. ‘I give you my word that I won’t ask where he is, or anything about you — but I will speak to him.’
George covered the mouthpiece with his hand. ‘He says they’re bringing him to the phone. He must be in another room.’
‘Keep him talking as long as you can,’ Blackstone said. ‘And try to remember everything he says.’
George removed his hand from the mouthpiece. ‘How are you, Father?’ he asked. ‘How are they treating you?. . You don’t sound like yourself. Are you sure you are my father?. . Then tell me this — what was the name of the dog I had when I was a boy?. . Yes, that’s right.’
He covered the mouthpiece again. ‘They’ve taken him away again. I. . I couldn’t stop them.’
‘You’re doing well,’ Blackstone told him.
And, after a shaky start, so he was.
‘Yes,’ George said, when the kidnapper came back on the line. ‘Yes. . I’ll get one of my people to deliver. . Why not?. . All right, in that case, I suppose it had better be me who. .’ A sudden look of horror came to his face. ‘You want what?’ he spluttered.
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