‘You would like it back? Well, you’re too late. You don’t think I would keep such scurrilous stuff?’ He regarded her with loathing. ‘It’s long been consigned to the flames. I can’t be blackmailed as you tried to do with Lydia – your best friend.’
‘A fact that did not prevent her having an affair with my husband. Which you were willing to condone … because we all know, don’t we, that Paul is the driving force in the firm? Without him, there would be no firm.’
‘Well, Lydia is no longer here to threaten, and since I already know everything, your threats mean nothing. Now, go.’
She settled herself more comfortably and crossed her dainty ankles. A small smile played around her lips. ‘I’ve never before thought you obtuse, Louis, but you’re not being very perceptive now, are you? What I know puts you in an even worse position than before. If I go to the police.’
The image of the fashionably dressed, agreeably smiling woman had vanished. He thought she looked like a small, desiccated crow in her black garments, her eyes predatory and her hands, as they tightened on the arms of her chair, like claws.
‘It doesn’t matter what you do,’ he said. ‘My life is over anyway, now that she’s gone.’
‘The letter, sir?’ Gaines prompted. Louis seemed to have forgotten where he was.
He blinked. Yes. Yes, of course. It had arrived some time ago, and he fancied it had upset his wife when she’d opened it at breakfast though she’d said it was nothing important. Later when he’d caught her reading it again, she’d tried to conceal it in her handbag, so he’d later searched for the bag and found it still there. ‘I’d no compunction in reading something which had upset her so much, especially when I found the sender was Fanny Estrabon’s sister. I’d never met that young woman, but the apple never falls far from the tree, does it? And Fanny … she was always a bad influence on Lydia and now I knew she’d been spying on her, too. It was she who’d passed on the slanderous details to her sister.’
‘Go on, sir.’
‘It was a blackmail letter, demanding funds for those suffragettes. Otherwise she threatened to make public an affair my wife had supposedly had with my partner, Paul Estrabon, Fanny’s husband. I did not believe that and yet – God forgive me – I confronted Lydia and demanded to know if there was any truth in it. I should never have done that, never doubted her.’ His voice shook. Lydia, he went on when he was able, had admitted she had perhaps flirted with Paul, they’d carried on a little dalliance, maybe not entirely platonic. She had been unwise, it had given rise to gossip. But there was nothing more to it.
Had he believed it? Had he shut his eyes to that as to so much else about his wife? ‘Do you have the letter?’
‘It’s long since been consigned to the flames – my precise words to Fanny Estrabon when she tried to use the letter and switch the pressure on to me. Money for herself, of course – the suffragette’s cause is the last thing to appeal to Fanny. Lydia could no longer be blackmailed over the affair, but it gave me a motive, don’t you see, for shooting my wife. Or so she said.’
A silence fell while they digested this. ‘I’ve been frank with you, Inspector, but I hope you’ll not let this go any further. I do not want my daughter to know of this.’
‘As you wish – if it doesn’t interfere with the enquiry, I must add,’ Gaines said. After a moment or two, he went on, ‘In her letter Miss Drax states that Mrs Challoner gave the icon to Alexander Lukin but he swears not. Have you any idea what might have happened to it, sir? Such as where it might have been sold?’
‘I’ve told you, I’m a Philistine in these matters.’
Of course, it was Estrabon who had been Lydia’s unofficial adviser – but who could mention Paul Estrabon’s name now?
Gaines stood up to leave. He had spent enough time here and had another plan now. It was sometimes necessary to sup with the devil.
It was after they’d parted company that Inskip, left more or less to his own devices, saw this as a chance to follow through a train of thought started by those few minutes with Bridget Devenish.
The young woman Jon Devenish called Nolly wasn’t the sort you forgot easily, and when she’d served him coffee in the offices of the Voice it hadn’t taken him long to remember where he’d seen her before, but he hadn’t thought any more about it until now. Bridget Devenish, in that brief encounter, hadn’t given much away but Miss Brent-Paxton might be easier.
He hadn’t expected to find her alone, and had been thinking up excuses as to how this might be accomplished, but Jon Devenish was in fact not there when he reached the Britannia offices. This seemed like a hopeful sign.
‘I’ve been remembering where we met before, Miss,’ were his opening words.
She lost colour but didn’t pretend not to understand. ‘Yes, well. I hope you’re not going to tell Jon – Mr Devenish. He knows what I do, but only that I help behind the scenes, a sort of dogsbody. He knows I’m not one of the brave ones.’
Wasn’t it brave to have been prepared to throw a brick through the windows of Leman Street police station at the time he was still working there? Foolhardy, more like. Misguided from the first. She’d been one of three women brought up before the magistrates for the misdemeanour, but since they’d been intercepted before she’d had a chance to throw hers – though not before she’d had the presence of mind to drop it – she’d been let off with a caution, while the other two had each received a six-week prison sentence.
‘I’ve never done anything like that before or since.’
He was inclined to believe her but that wasn’t going to let her off the hook, so he merely got on with what he’d come here for. ‘I’m interested in anything you can tell me about the demonstration in Hyde Park on the day Mrs Challoner was killed.’
If anything, she went a little paler. ‘I don’t know anything about that … and Jon’s due back at three, so …’
It had only been a guess that she would know – there were dozens if not more of these women’s groups all over London, after all, and who knew which one had planned that particular demonstration? ‘Does the name Rina Collingwood mean anything to you?’
He saw it did, the way her eyes flickered, but her chin went up. She might consider herself only a dosgbody but she had the same stubbornness as the rest. They didn’t give in easily, these women. ‘Look, we know—’ know was stretching the truth but he went on ‘—we know she was involved in that disturbance in Hyde Park the day Mrs Challoner was killed. Were you there?’
After a moment, she said, ‘It was only a little demonstration.’
‘Not so little that it didn’t confuse the scene and stop the killer being apprehended.’
She said, glancing nervously at the clock, ‘Jon will be back any time.’ But it was nowhere near three o’clock yet. The unreliable timepiece was at least forty-five minutes fast.
‘Then perhaps you’d better tell me where I can find Rina Collingwood before he gets here.’
She gazed directly at him. Those eyes – you couldn’t blame Jon Devenish. ‘I thought you punished blackmailers. I didn’t think you did blackmail yourself, but it’s no good. I don’t know, I really don’t know anything about her private life. No one seems to, and nobody’s seen her for weeks.’
This time, he believed her, but he gave it one last try. ‘Have you any knowledge of any dealings she might have had with Mr Lukin – your boss?’
‘Certainly not!’ But she frowned and looked puzzled. It didn’t seem as if Devenish had told her much, if anything, about that raid on the upstairs room.
‘I need Lukin’s address.’
The way she coloured up he saw there was no love lost there. ‘I believe he lodges with a family somewhere just around the corner,’ she said with a shrug.
‘But I won’t find him there, will I?’
Her glance sharpened. ‘Sometimes he sleeps upstairs. I think – I think he might have slept there last night.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Paul Estrabon. ‘Your assumptio
ns are correct, Inspector. Lydia did indeed bring the icon to me, to sell for her.’
He and Gaines were sitting in the smoking room of Estrabon’s club. Glasses of brandy on the table, coffee, and a fat cigar between Estrabon’s elegant fingers breathing rich smoke. Leather chairs, masculine, deeply comfortable.
Estrabon swirled the brandy round in his glass and sipped, but Gaines’ brandy remained untouched, save for the first small sip. He hadn’t yet had his own lunch and drinking on an empty stomach was never a good idea. Plus a conviction he had that you needed to keep a clear head when dealing with Paul Estrabon. He stayed with the coffee.
‘So it’s true what Lukin said, that she changed her mind and didn’t send it to him after all. He must have been furious.’
‘Possibly, but not because he didn’t receive it.’ Estrabon stretched out his long legs and smiled. ‘I packed it up myself and had it sent around by special messenger.’
In the far corner two men, expansive after lunch, uproariously shared a joke, a momentary aberration quickly silenced by the overall hallowed hush of the room and the presence of several post-prandial sleepers.
‘Did you know Lukin claims to have been her brother?’
‘Lydia always believed what she wanted to believe.’ He shrugged. ‘But who knows?’
Not at ease in these gentleman’s club surroundings, and certainly not with a man he didn’t trust, Gaines didn’t want to go into that. The sooner this was over, the better. ‘So why should Lukin lie about not receiving the icon?’
‘Because I suspect he never has received it.’ A small smile played around the edges of his mouth. He flicked ash from his cigar and inhaled deeply on it. ‘Or not the one he was expecting … you don’t look too surprised.’
Gaines, thinking fast, found he wasn’t, or not too much. ‘I’ve always asked myself why Lydia Challoner was willing to give away something that meant so much to her. The one in her bedroom isn’t the copy, is it? It’s the original.’
‘I should be extremely surprised if it was not. I myself had it copied for her by someone who knew the correct way to age it and so on, but it wouldn’t deceive anyone who knows – and there are many who do. There’s a market out there, not only Orthodox believers, but those who collect examples of traditional art and culture, and are willing to pay for it.’
Gaines thought about it while he finished his coffee.
‘Your wife has a sister, Rina Collingwood,’ he said suddenly at last, and had the satisfaction of seeing the smiling mask slip, the face harden. ‘Is there any chance you might know where I can find her?’
‘Hardly. The less I know about my sister-in-law and her activities, the better.’ He didn’t ask why the police should want to know – for the obvious reason that he knew of her suffragette activities, Gaines assumed. He wondered whether to stir the pot by mentioning Fanny and the letter but there was no point to it now. He stood up.
‘One last word, Mr Estrabon.’ One parting shot. ‘Did you kill Lydia Challoner?’
‘No.’
‘Did you arrange to have her killed?’
‘No!’ The raw syllable matched the raw pain on his face. And Gaines saw that for all his faults it seemed entirely possible that he had loved Lydia Challoner. But within a few seconds, the mask had been assumed again. ‘Is there anything else I can get you before you go, Inspector?’
‘No thank you, Mr Estrabon. I think I know where we are going with this now.’
Twenty-Six
From the street they saw the office and Jon Devenish’s living room were in darkness, but a light was burning in that upstairs room. Gaines led the way quietly up the stairs. He held his hand on the knob, turning it silently, and pushed. The door gave inwards and Gaines found himself looking down the barrel of a gun. There was complete silence while he and Lukin stared eye to eye.
‘Put the gun down, Lukin,’ Gaines said. ‘We’re only here to question you. Put it down.’
And he did. At least he lowered his hand, though he left the gun dangling from it. A Mauser ‘broomhandle’. The two policemen moved forward and Lukin’s hand tightened its grip as he backed away and threw himself on to a chair. They stood facing him across the heavy table which still bore the remnants of a meal. ‘I did not believe British police burst into a room when they only have questions. Why don’t you sit down?’
‘Depends what the questions are, Lukin,’ said Inskip. They remained standing.
He was in shirtsleeves and braces, unshaven and his hair in mad disarray. A rumpled, grey blanket had been thrown on to the bare mattress, another served as a pillow as if he’d been sprawled on it minutes before, but it hadn’t prevented a lightning reaction to reach for his gun and a swift move to the door. ‘Sleeping rough?’ Inskip asked, his eye on the weapon.
‘For now. I am leaving London, leaving England. The Voice is closing.’
He spoke carefully, enunciating each word; his eyes glittered – though if the bottle standing on the floor beside the bed was the first he’d broached, he hadn’t drunk much.
‘What have you done with the icon?’ Gaines asked.
‘The icon I did not receive?’ He laughed.
‘No, the copy that was sent to you – a facsimile of the real thing, but not worthless, by any means.’
Lukin’s expression underwent a change. He must have known it was useless to protest but his face became ugly with a sudden rage. ‘It was a fake!’ He added something in Russian that sounded like a curse. ‘That icon – the genuine one – was an heirloom of my family. It belonged to me by rights.’ It was an echo of Lydia’s words, but she had not, in the end, entrusted it to him. ‘It was the only thing I was ever likely to have from my family, to treasure until I die.’
‘Oh dear me, no. Fine words, Lukin, but you wanted it to sell, to send funds to Russia.’ Gaines shifted, and the pistol was raised a fraction. ‘Fine words, from someone so concerned about his family heirloom. Why did you kill Lydia Challoner? She was your sister.’
His face was expressionless, his eyes, those curious light eyes, were empty. ‘What is a sister? Someone you have grown up with, shared a mother and father with, not a stranger who had lived a pampered life in a foreign land, never known want.’ He was wrong there, thought Gaines. Lydia’s early years with her father could scarcely have been a picnic. ‘She was nothing to me. Nothing. I was too late to kill my father, God rot his soul – he left my mother to die of starvation, in poverty and misery such as you cannot begin to imagine here in your safe little world – and he should have paid for it—’
‘So Lydia paid the price instead.’
‘If she had not tried to cheat me she would still be alive.’
Inskip drew in a breath and Gaines ventured a warning glance at him. Tread softly. Lukin was not releasing his grip on the gun. ‘It was risky, shooting her in a public place like that,’ he said carefully. ‘You were lucky those women chose to demonstrate at that particular time and divert attention from you.’
His head came up at the suggestion that luck, rather than his own cunning had anything to do with it. ‘I chose that time. I chose it because it was ideal – those women causing a disturbance just when Lydia would be riding there with that – that young puppy who followed her around.’
‘And how did you know what those women planned?’
He laughed, without humour. ‘There is not much that goes on in that office downstairs – with either of them – that I do not know about. The walls and floors are thin. And that one – the office girl – is not so discreet when she is having conversations, even when I am there. It was not difficult to put two and two together.’
Such a statement would be impossible to prove – and perhaps it was even true. The cracks in the floorboards up here were big enough to drive a horse and cart through.
Afterwards, Inskip blamed himself for what happened, but it was all done so quickly there was in fact no chance to stop it. He had merely shifted his feet but without warning, Lukin had stood up, grasp
ing the edges of the heavy table and tipping it forward so that it fell full against both men and sent them staggering amidst dirty plates and glasses. They saw his arm raised, there was the crack of a pistol shot, the smell of cordite filling the room, blood flying. And Lukin’s body slumped to the ground, dead.
After that, it was all over quickly. Within ten minutes of the removal of the body, the copy icon was found under the straw mattress, along with another pistol and ammunition. He had been an expert marksman who, according to a later statement by the woman in whose house he had lodged, practised by shooting rats in her back yard. Forensic examination proved that the bullet which had killed Lydia had come from the same pistol he had used to kill himself. Gaines hadn’t expected that. But it turned out he had a history of violence and was wanted by the Russian secret police. Expecting nothing less of the British police than to act in the same way as the Ochrana did, he would think himself better off dead, Inskip said, and probably was. Several years ago, he had escaped from them and lain low, and since then lived on the Continent, where he was supposed to have met his benefactor. There was every possibility that this Maxim Dimitrov was a fiction, but if so, how Lukin had obtained funds to finance the paper would remain a mystery, though not why: he had used the Voice to recruit Jon Devenish, and through him get to know Lydia.
‘Why did Devenish lie about Lukin being with him that Sunday?’ Gaines asked. ‘Because he was careful of his position as editor, I suppose.’
‘No,’ said Inskip. ‘It was that office clock, about as useful as a bent screwdriver. It gains ten minutes a day, minimum, and Devenish never so much as notices. If it was as fast as when I saw it last, Lukin could have left him an hour before he said.’
Epilogue
London still wilted in the heat – would it hold out for the coronation? – but before that came a special coronation procession staged by the suffragettes. About forty thousand women were expected to take part. Special excursion trains had been put on to bring people to the capital for the event and Ursula had managed to get seats on the stands that were already in place for the coronation.
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