The Old Vengeful dda-12

by Anthony Price

  Then, dissolving the ghosts and the questions both, and startling Elizabeth out of her mind as they vanished, there wasn't quite silence any more: there was the sound of a discreet tap-tap on her door— discreet, but insistent.

  X

  "ELIZABETH—"

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  But whatever Dr Paul Mitchell, of the King's College, Oxford, whispered after that was lost to her as she scuttled back into bed, conscious more of Madame Hortense's taste in night-attire than of Dr Mitchell's post-midnight opening gambit.

  The door closed out the light from the passage, and darkness sprang back into the bedroom.

  "Christ, Elizabeth—I can't see a bloody thing!" Dr Mitchell blundered unromantically against the table by the door. "Put the light on, for heaven's sake!"

  Elizabeth drew the sheet up to her neck. "What d'you want, Paul?" The silly question asked itself before she could stifle it.

  "For God's sake—I want to talk to you!" hissed Paul. "What did you think I wanted?"

  Dust and ashes filled Elizabeth, turning to shame and then anger in quick succession. She let go of the sheet—what did it matter what he saw or didn't see?—and leaned across to switch on the bedside lamp.

  "What d'you want?" She glared at him in the knowledge that it hadn't been a silly question at all. "I was trying to get some sleep."

  "I'm sorry." He blinked at her in the light.

  "So am I." Disgust with herself hardened her voice. "Well, what is it?"

  His face set to match her tone. "First... as of now, when someone knocks on your door in the night, you don't just dummy3

  open up, like Juliet for Romeo. You ask who the hell it is—

  okay?"

  "Juliet for Romeo" was too close for comfort—too humiliatingly and pathetically close, thought Elizabeth miserably.

  "Second ... I am sorry to disturb you, Elizabeth. But I have some news for you."

  "News?" It was on the tip of her tongue to reject the offer until morning, but that would be merely petty, and she was awake now anyway. And there was also something in that voice which didn't match the set expression. "What news?"

  "I've been on the phone to England. I've spoken to David Audley . . . and to Del Andrew, Elizabeth."

  It was sympathy—the news must be bad news. But what bad news could either Dr Audley or Chief Inspector Andrew have for her, who had no next-of-kin, no hostages to fortune?

  "Yes?" She couldn't help him, he had to bite on his own bullet.

  He stared at her. "They think they know where—how—how your father got all that money."

  She had been wrong about not having hostages to fortune: she had a hundred thousand of them, and they were going to take them all away from her. She had been briefly rich, but now she was poor again.

  "In, fact, they're pretty damn certain. That Del Andrew—he's a fast worker. . ." He continued to stare at her, rolling the dummy3

  bullet around, unwilling to clench his teeth on it.

  So it was worse than that: they were going to send her to prison . . . or was it Father, who was beyond their reach, who had committed some disgraceful act—even some treasonable act—?

  No—not some treasonable act . . . not Father— never Father!

  But . . . disgraceful? Dishonest?

  "It wasn't his money?" Was that what the Vengeful had been carrying? The thought of some great treasure had been in the back of her mind all along, even though she had scorned the possibility of it—even though she knew that the Vengeful was a long-lost wreck, and that the survivors could hardly have got away with anything of value—

  Or could they?

  "It wasn't his, no."

  Or could they? But if they had . . . of what possible importance could it have been to the French, who had plundered most of Europe, from the horses of St Mark's to the hard cash in the treasuries of whole kingdoms? And . . .

  and even more—even if Colonel Suchet had coveted it... there was no conceivable way that it could interest Josef Ivanovitch Novikov of the KGB—

  "It was yours, Elizabeth," said Paul.

  She hadn't heard him properly. "What?"

  "It was yours." Paul sat down on the edge of the bed, and started to reach for her hand, but then thought better of it.

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  "He stole it from you."

  She had heard him properly, she just didn't understand what ne was saying. "From . . . me?"

  "Del Andrew took Ray Tuck—lifted him out of somewhere in the Essex marshes this morning, bright and early. And then made him sing by the simple expedient of letting him choose between singing and being turned loose on the street for Danny Kahn's boys to pick up ... So Ray Tuck sang like a canary."

  That was the authentic voice of Del Andrew, thought Elizabeth irrelevantly, while thinking at the same time from me?

  "The funny thing is ... Ray Tuck sang true, and yet it was all a pack of lies, the song he sang, Del Andrew thinks—Harry Lippman's lies. Or maybe your father's lies, but we can't check on that now."

  "What lies, Paul?" All Elizabeth could think was From me?

  How could Father have stolen from her, who had nothing to steal?

  "Oh ... a cock-and-bull story about hidden treasure from the old Vengeful—how your father was picking it up bit by bit from somewhere in France, and Lippy was fencing it for him.

  Which was a whole pack of lies, because there's no Vengeful treasure—or not this treasure, Elizabeth."

  She had to listen to what he was saying. "How do you—how does . . . Del. . . know that?"

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  "At first he didn't. But Ray Tuck gave him the name of one of the buyers—a dead-respectable jeweller who'd never handle

  'dodgy' goods . . . apart from the fact that Lippy wouldn't have sold any to one of his 'straight' clients, Del says, and the jeweller himself wouldn't have bought this jewellery anyway, without proper provenance for the record."

  "Jewellery? What jewellery? What . . . ?"

  "Provenance? 'Commander Hugh Loftus, VC—family heirlooms—item, one emerald-and-diamond necklace, with matching earrings, very fine—£12,000 . . . item, one diamond tiara set in gold, central stone umpteen carats, very fine—

  £15,000 . . . those are two we've been able to check. And also some small trinkets Lippy couldn't bear to part with, because he loved good antique jewellery, which he passed on to his daughter to wear on Saturday, down the market. . . having paid the full market price himself, of course."

  Listening was one thing, but grasping the sense of it was still another. "Why couldn't it have come from the Vengeful, Paul? How can you be so sure?" She grasped at the word

  'antique'. "If it was old—"

  "It was old, but not old enough." He gazed at her sadly.

  "About 150 years old to be exact—between 150 and 130, that is."

  Elizabeth made the subtraction dumbly, hopelessly.

  "Early Victorian. Made by a jeweller named Savage who opened up shop in Bond Street in 1832, which his son sold in dummy3

  1883—they made the necklace and the tiara, anyway: their work is apparently quite distinctive . . . Lippy's buyer recognised it straight off, because Savage pieces are highly regarded in the trade—real craftsman's work ... So naturally Lippy would have recognised it too, it was right up his street.

  Some of the rings and brooches he gave his daughter aren't Savage work—they're late Victorian and Edwardian, which is equally distinctive. So there's no possible doubt about it, Elizabeth." He paused. "And no doubt that it's yours, either."

  Elizabeth waited, oddly aware that her feet, which had been warm, were cold now.'

  "You see, Elizabeth, our Chief Inspector Andrew is an observant fellow, and he's done his time on the robbery squad, or whatever they call it. So when a certain Lebanese tycoon showed him a certain emerald-and-diamond necklace, with matching earrings, late yesterday afternoon ...

  he remembered that he'd seen it all before, in a picture on the wall of a house in Hampshire he'd searched tw
o days earlier ... as worn by Mary, Lady Varney, wife of Admiral Sir Alfred Collingwood Varney—necklace and earrings, and a lot of other jewellery, tiara and rings and suchlike. 'Got up like a Christmas tree', is how he remembered her . . . your great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth—or would she be great-great-great?"

  Great-great-grandmother, dripping with jewels, thought Elizabeth, the cold at her back now.

  "The way Del sees it, the jewels very often pass straight down dummy3

  the female line, mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter, great-aunt to great-niece, with no publicity.

  Even before death duties came into the picture they were passed as gifts on the quiet, with no fuss and bother. Which is how they must have come to your mother, Del thinks. But she died when you were a baby, so . . ." he trailed off diplomatically ". . . so that's how we think it was, Elizabeth."

  That was how they thought it had been. And that was how she thought it had been, too.

  Paul shrugged. "Del thinks . . . maybe Lippy tried to make it all sound difficult—or at least too difficult for a little wanker like Ray Tuck to try and get his hands on, anyway—"

  " 'Wanker'?" For a moment Del's vernacular flummoxed her.

  Paul waved one hand vaguely. "Small-timer. . . The idea of hiding it in France, and historical research, and all that... It never occurred to him that Ray would sell the whole idea to Danny Kahn—"

  "Who's got a lot of bottle?" She tried to hold on to the absurdity of the dialogue because she didn't want to think of Father quibbling about the house-keeping bills.

  " 'Bottle'? Oh . . . yes . . . Danny Kahn's a whole lot smarter, yes—" Paul rallied "—smarter and even greedier, unfortunately. Not that he matters now . . ."

  Not that anything mattered much—now, thought Elizabeth.

  It was an odd feeling, to be a rich woman again, so quickly, with Madame Hortense and M'sieur Pierre at her elbow to dummy3

  advise her, and yet to be so poor and lonely at the same time, in the traditional way in which unloved and unbeautiful rich women were supposed to be poor and lonely.

  "We'll never know which of them made up the story for Ray Tuck." Paul drew a deep breath. "But anyway . . . that's the size of it, Elizabeth. And I'm sorry for disturbing your rest, but I wasn't going to tell you all this in front of that—that fellow Aske—"

  "That 'wanker' Aske?" It was better to smile than to cry: that was the lesson she must learn from his charade, for the future. "He can't help being what he is, Paul."

  He stood up, carefully adjusting his dressing-gown. "Just leave me my irrational prejudices intact, Miss Loftus dear. I have problems enough without that."

  "What are you going to do about it?" The cold was in her voice

  —she could hear it.

  "Why—nothing, of course." He stared at her. "I mean, Del Andrew will put in his report to Jack Butler. But it isn't any of our business . . . and Jack Butler's not that sort of chap, I mean . . . And we had a deal, I seem to recall, eh?"

  Prize-money, remembered Elizabeth. Father had lived in the wrong century for that, just as he had missed out on the battle-squadrons of dreadnoughts. But he had managed the next best thing with the Varney jewellery which should have been hers.

  "You shouldn't think too badly of him, Elizabeth," said Paul.

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  "He may have spent a fair bit of it, but he also put plenty away for you—tax-free, remember."

  But Elizabeth was remembering other things—the penny-pinching on the laundry, and the unpaid secretarial work.

  And what had nearly happened to her—

  She sat up straighter in bed. "Why did he tell that story about the Vengeful?"

  "Maybe he didn't." Paul shook his head. "Maybe he just talked about the Vengeful research to Lippy, and Lippy spun the yarn on his own initiative."

  "Why should he do that?"

  "Well . . . Del Andrew thinks Ray Tuck's eyes—and ears—

  were bigger than his stomach. He could have heard something, or seen something—Lippy was getting sicker, so Ray Tuck was doing more of the leg-work around his place, and he could have heard something one day . . . And as Lippy didn't trust him he wouldn't have wanted him to believe that the Captain was sitting right on top of a lot of loot here in England... there in England—he made up this yarn about treasure to put him off the scent."

  Elizabeth almost smiled through her heart-ache: it was strange to hear Del Andrew speaking out of Paul's mouth, word for word.

  "Don't go, Paul!" She had tried to throw her bonnet over the windmill, only to have it blown back into her face. But now she was desperately awake—and even more desperately dummy3

  lonely. "Sit down, please— please!"

  He sat down unwillingly. "What can I do for you?"

  What indeed! The rich woman had to think—and that was another lesson, to be learnt as she went along.

  "You said . . . Danny Kahn doesn't matter—?"

  "Oh. . . Del Andrew will get Danny Kahn—don't you worry about him!"

  "So what does matter?" Desperation honed up her wits to a razor edge. "What—what on earth was there on board the Vengeful, that Colonel Suchet wanted so badly?"

  For a moment he didn't reply—he was staring fixedly at the low frills on Madame Hortense's nightie. Then he shook his head and concentrated on her.

  "Ah . . . well, that may not prove such an overwhelming mystery, Bertrand thinks—he was the first one I phoned after dinner." He smiled at her a little ruefully. "Contacts again, Elizabeth: it seems that Bertrand put his friend's colleague on his mettle—the one who knows all about Napoleon's times. Experts like demonstrating their expertise, I know the feeling all too well, it's quite irresistible . . . Apart from which, Bertrand shrewdly suspects, the mysterious Colonel Suchet sounds interesting in his own right— and I know that feeling, too."

  But if he knew it he wasn't demonstrating it now, as he had done at Coucy le Château, Elizabeth observed: if anything, he looked tired and rather worried, and somehow younger dummy3

  because of that, not older.

  "The long and short of which is that we have a name and an address in Paris—and an appointment for 11 o'clock: Professor Louis Belperron, of the Sorbonne, editor of the Annales historiques de l'Empire, and author of books too numerous to mention—not to add innumerable contributions to the Revue des études napoleoniénnes, and so on and so forth.''

  "Paul, that's wonderful—" Only his lugubrious expression cautioned her. "—isn't it?"

  "Yes. It's wonderful." Whatever it was, said his face, it wasn't wonderful.

  "Then . . . what's the matter?"

  "The matter, Elizabeth ... is that I spoke to David Audley last of all, after Bertrand and Del Andrew . . . that's the matter."

  Elizabeth frowned. "But why . . . ? Doesn't he want us to see ... Professor Belperron?" A spark of anger kindled suddenly on Paul's behalf. "Isn't he pleased with you—with us?"

  "Pleased? No, he's not pleased—he's bloody delighted!! He's so damn pleased he's busy galvanising his Professor Wilder on the Vengeful back in England . . . and probably half the research section as well, for all I know." He drew a deep breath. "He's so pleased that I've got to send Aske to Charles de Gaulle Airport tomorrow afternoon to collect him, so he can tell us in person how pleased he is ... among other dummy3

  things."

  "He's coming to France?"

  "And then we're all going on a jaunt to Lautenbourg—'Tell Aske to book rooms in a Michelin-recommended hotel—

  somewhere where the food's good' . . . sweet Jesus Christ!

  Where the food's good!"

  In any other circumstances the prospect of actually visiting the scene of the great escape would have overjoyed her, but Paul's misery was infectious. "That's bad, is it?"

  "Yes, it's bad." He fell silent for a moment. "You don't know David Audley as I do."

  He made the prospect of Audley daunting. And yet at the same time the memory of that big man, with his strange handsome
-ugly face and rough-gentle manner, excited her intensely: wherever Audley was, that would be the centre of things and the answers would be there.

  "I know he likes you, Paul." She tried to reassure him and to make amends for her treachery. "In fact, I think he's fond of you, even."

  For an instant he stared at her incredulously, and then his expression blanked out; and she knew, but too late, that she'd said exactly the wrong thing.

  "If I may say so, Elizabeth . . . that's a damn silly remark—"

  "I mean—I meant, he respects you—"

  "I don't care if he worships the ground I tread on." He bulldozed over her. "What I mean is what I said last night, dummy3

  only more so: I think the Russians are making a fool of him.

  The difference is that now I'm not just guessing. Because now the evidence points that way."

  "What evidence?"

  "What evidence . . ." He got up, and walked round the end of the bed towards the open window. And then stopped suddenly. "Put the light out, Elizabeth."

  She fumbled for the switch. "What is it, Paul?"

  "Nothing. Just a precaution." He waited, and she guessed that he was accustoming his eyes to the darkness. "In the field you take precautions, that's all. And this is the field, Elizabeth—'some foreign field' . . . but that's not what I intend it to be, for either of us . . . so, as of now, we take the proper precautions—okay? I should have done it before . . .

  I'm getting careless, like Novikov ... or maybe not like Novikov ..."

  "Yes, Paul." Excitement was only a thin skin on top of fear, she realised: "the field" was no more than an abbreviation of

  "the battlefield", where men died.

  "What evidence." He was a silhouette against a skyline faintly lightened by the illumination of the old city. "It was always on the cards that they'd stage a diversion of some kind. What I don't know is whether you were planned to be that diversion, or whether they're bright enough—and quick enough—to take advantage of you when you turned up out of the blue . . . I just don't know . . ."

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  He was speaking as much to himself as to her, and she didn't dare disturb his line of thought. Because this was something she'd never seen before—never heard, never even remotely imagined: this was a man struggling with a problem which involved not only his comfort, or his business—his job, his livelihood, his income . . . even the security of his country, which he was paid to safeguard—but his life—