‘Burglary isn’t enough,’ Mary said vehemently. ‘Let’s burn his house down.’
‘Oh, we’ll find a way of injuring him, never fear,’ Irene told her, laughing gently. ‘Perhaps, though, in a more subtle way. Even if he is not your criminal, he is certainly guilty of a great many crimes.’
We all three stood in the dark, in a lane by the river, close to Sir George’s house in Twickenham. The river lapped up against the bank, creating a peaceful, soothing atmosphere, completely at odds with what we were planning to do. I don’t know about the others, but I felt sick with nerves. But no, I did not once think we should go back.
Larch and chestnut trees arched above us, rustling gently in the wind. Animals darted, unseen, in the undergrowth, and occasionally, an owl hooted. There was only a thin sliver of moon, and the entire world was cast in grey and black shadow. On a night like this, in a place like this, it was all too easy to believe in the old gods, in Pan himself, whispering behind us, blowing gently on our cheeks. We were only a few miles away from Baker Street, yet it felt like a different world entirely.
Before us stood a high red-brick wall, with a small wooden door set into it. Wiggins had found the perfect entrance. The door had no key hole, and Irene oiled the hinges from a small bottle and simply pushed it open. We were lucky – it should have been bolted on the inside, but the servants were careless and the bolts were rusted open. Beyond the door lay a smooth lawn, almost black now in the night; beyond that, the three-storey square red-brick home lay silent and dark.
Though we knew there was no one in the house to see us, we still crept round the edge of the lawn, shrinking into the shadows of the trees and bushes.
Irene had met us here, in Twickenham, dressed like a man, in battered brown trousers and a loose jacket, a cap pulled down over her face. Mary had wanted to dress like a man too, but she had not been trained as an actress as Irene had, and doubted she could carry it off. Irene walked and carried herself like a man; Mary would have been all too obviously a woman in trousers. Besides, the only male clothes she had access to were John’s and she would have been swamped in them. So instead, she wore her bottle-green walking habit, which had shorter skirts than her usual dresses, and no petticoats to get caught. Irene had warned us not to wear black, as it did not fade into shadows like grey and brown and green did, so I wore an old dress, black once, which had turned grey and lost all lustre.
You have never seen such an odd collection of housebreakers.
We went up to the large French windows on the ground floor that opened out onto the lawn. Irene studied the lock, as Mary kept watch. I kept out of the way.
‘Can you do it?’ Mary whispered.
‘A very simple lock,’ Irene said. ‘You’d think he’d have better security arrangements.’
‘Can you see it, in this light?’ I asked.
‘Just about. It’s easier to pick locks by feel than sight anyway,’ she told me as she pulled a thin wire and what looked like a nail file (which I’d read about in some ladies’ magazine, but not seen for myself ) out of her pocket and began to manipulate the lock.
‘He probably keeps anything incriminating locked away in his study. That’ll have better locks – and a safe too,’ Mary said. I looked along the line of the house. There was just enough light to see, and I have always had good vision.
‘Look,’ Mary said, pointing upwards to the first floor, the second window along from where we stood. I looked up. The white moonlight shone directly onto the windows, casting sharp shadows and highlighting flaws that would not have been noticeable by day. I scrutinized the window Mary had pointed to. All the other windows had white painted frames, but the paint was old and blistered and was heavily worn where the sashes were pushed up and down. The paint on this window was pristine.
‘Sealed, I bet,’ Mary whispered.
‘That must be his study,’ I agreed.
The lock clicked open, and Irene led us into the dining room.
The curtains were half drawn inside the room, and we walked slowly, trying not to bump into anything. We could not see much, but what we could see was opulent and substantial. The table was large, mahogany, with chairs set around it. At one end of the room was a dumb waiter – Sir George clearly didn’t want his meals interrupted by servants. Curtains shielded all kinds of alcoves around the edges of the room, and couches were scattered here and there. There was a trace of a thick perfume and the room felt airless, which I could imagine would cause a tightly laced woman to faint after a while. It looked like something out of one of the Gothic novels I secretly read on stormy winter evenings.
‘A seducer’s paradise,’ Irene remarked.
‘Wouldn’t work on me,’ I remarked, with more than a touch of asperity. Well, it wouldn’t, not now. But when I had been young and impressionable . . . Irene smiled at me, as if secretly reading my thoughts.
Nor me, but neither of us is a romantic fifteen-year-old,’ she replied.
‘Fifteen?’ Mary exclaimed, pushing back the curtains over the alcoves, either trying to find the door or being unashamedly nosy.
‘His favourite age,’ Irene replied grimly.
‘I still say we burn his house down,’ Mary said, darkly angry, as she found the door and opened it. We had not been whispering; we knew no one could hear us. The house had that waiting, echoing feeling that buildings do when they are empty. Behind me, I could hear Mary and Irene chatting with each other.
‘Does your husband know you have such a pyromania?’ Irene asked. Mary giggled.
‘Oh yes!’ she replied happily.
I knew the joking was just to cover nerves. I imagined they were like me, inwardly quaking, jumping at every single noise, nervous to touch anything, in case we left a trace, no matter how invisible. The hallway was opulent too, full of rich colours and glittering fittings, with doors leading off all over the place. The house felt not just lifeless, but joyless – as if the acts of pleasure that took place here were just a matter of a mechanical act rather than a matter of love.
The stairs rose above us, and we climbed up them to the first floor, counting along to what we thought would be the room with the sealed window. There was a heavy mahogany door to the room with a large lock, but when Irene turned the door knob, it swung open.
‘He’s an idiot,’ Irene remarked.
‘Or very clever,’ Mary mused thoughtfully. She was frowning as Irene went into the darkened room, and motioned for us to wait outside. She peered round, and then waved us in. We were silent now. It was beginning to feel serious.
There was a candle and matches on the desk. Irene placed the candle on the floor by the desk and lit it. Shielded by the wall, it cast a dim light, whilst not being visible from outside. We looked around.
The study was, like everything else in the house, stupefyingly dull. There was a thick green carpet, with thick green velvet curtains looped at the window. A large, heavy mahogany desk (the man must have destroyed an entire mahogany forest furnishing this house) was by the window, with a row of locked drawers and a green leather blotter – but no blotting or writing paper. One wall was lined with books, and the other walls were hung with hunting prints on panelling. In the centre was a large table with ornate legs, the top covered in scattered maps and timetables. Obviously he had been planning his country weekend carefully. Sir George Burnwell might be an accomplished seducer, but judging by his study, he was a deeply boring man.
That was when I started to think we were wrong.
In the far corner, by the window, sat a massive bronze-green safe. Irene and Mary stood in front of it, assessing it. It was three feet by three feet, and stood on four legs designed to look like lions’ feet, which were clamped to the floor. There was no manufacturer’s name, but I could see where the plaque had been before it was removed. Of course, if someone knew who made the safe, they could also find the original plans. The door of the safe not only had two large bronze key holes, but a combination lock too. It looked impenetrable.
/> ‘Can you . . .’ Mary asked.
‘I doubt it,’ Irene said, staring at the safe, but not touching it. Mary reached out to it, but I grasped her arm and stopped her.
‘Look,’ I said, pointing. A thin wire led from the back of the safe and into the wall. It looked like a telegraph wire.
‘Electric wire,’ Irene told me. ‘Either it will give anyone who touches the safe an electric shock, or it will send a signal to someone. I’m sorry, Martha, I have no idea how to crack this safe.’
It all felt like such an anticlimax, but I admit, there was a hint of relief in my sigh.
‘We’d better leave then, whilst we can,’ I said. I bent down to blow out the candle, but noticed Mary standing in front of the safe, smiling slightly.
‘Mary?’ I asked.
‘An easily opened back door,’ she murmured. ‘An unlocked study door – and then an impregnable safe? That doesn’t make sense.’
‘No, it doesn’t,’ Irene agreed.
‘It feels like . . . it feels like we were led here,’ Mary continued, still staring at the safe, still smiling that strange smile. ‘As if everything was designed to pull us towards this safe, which we cannot open, and so there we stop.’
‘Mary?’ I asked.
‘Clever man,’ she murmured. ‘Leading us here, and then sending us away.’
‘Mary, can you explain?’ Irene demanded. Mary turned round to face us, grinning widely.
‘Do you know what I would do if I had something very precious to keep safe? Pictures, jewels, papers, that sort of thing? Something that must never be found?’ she asked. ‘I’d buy the biggest safe I could find. I’d put it where everyone can see it. I’d make it easy to get to. And then . . . I’d make it impossible to crack. I’d make it the kind of safe that someone would spend hours trying to get into, and then fail, or just give up and walk away. The kind of safe that looks like it’d keep all the secrets, so no one would look anywhere else. And then I’d put all my secret papers in a shabby old cardboard box in plain sight.’
Oh my. What a clever plan. Why would you search anywhere else except that challenging safe? And even if you did crack it open and find no secrets, you’d assume there was an even more formidable safe somewhere – you’d never think to look elsewhere. Hiding in plain sight!
Mary’s deduction was worthy of Sherlock Holmes himself.
‘Mary, you are a devious woman, and I hope John Watson appreciates that,’ Irene said, laughing.
‘He does, he likes it,’ Mary told her. ‘Now, let’s search the rest of the room for some sort of shabby old box.’
‘It might not be here,’ I objected. It seemed like such a clever plan for a man like Sir George.
‘No, it’s here,’ Mary asserted. ‘The rest of his house is for seduction. Anyone could stumble across it.’
‘I agree,’ Irene added. ‘This is his room alone, the one he can be sure no one would want to enter – or is allowed to. I bet even the servants don’t come in when he’s not here to keep an eye on them.’
‘John doesn’t allow the servants into his study either,’ Mary said. ‘Men don’t, as a rule. I’m certain the papers are here.’
We all looked around the room. There were a few boxes scattered on the floor and the bookshelves – gun boxes, I guessed. They were wooden and polished and locked. Mary checked the bookcases, pulling the books out to make sure nothing was behind them. Most seemed never to have been opened. Irene went through the drawers in the desk.
‘I found his bank book,’ Irene said. ‘He’s not rich, certainly not rich enough to keep up a home like this.’
‘Then how does he pay for it? And his lifestyle?’ Mary asked.
‘Credit, for now, probably,’ Irene said. ‘But sooner or later he’s going to need to pay the bills.’
So the man needed money. Then I noticed, behind the candle, between the bookshelf and the desk, an old travelling case. It was battered brown leather, about two feet square. The monogram on top had nearly worn away. It looked as if it had been thrown there after a journey and never put away. It looked unimportant.
I moved the candle to one side, knelt down, and pulled the case out onto the floor. I pulled off the dusty lid and peered inside.
On top was a tray full of glass bottles. Whatever was in the bottles had long dried away to a sticky residue. The tray fitted tightly, and I had to pull at it hard to remove it. Underneath that should have been more fixtures and fittings – but they had gone. It was full of letters. Dozens of them. All kinds of letters, from plain white ones covered with sharp black ink to scented violet letters with palest purple feminine writing. From the case rose a mixture of perfumes – rose, jasmine, and more musky scents I could not identify. It was an entire case of love letters – and down one side of it was a heavy black ledger.
‘This is it!’ I hissed. Mary and Irene came over to join me. I pulled out the ledger and they pulled out handfuls of letters.
The ledger consisted of a record of his conquests. Each page was given over to one woman, with her name at the top, a place and a time, and a note of the technique he had used to charm her into bed. There were a few little odd facts here and there – the placement of a mole, a liking for Turkish delight. One or two of the names had amounts of money written next to them, but not as much as I would have expected from a blackmailer – the odd hundred, here and there. I was surprised by how many names I recognized, but these were names from the papers and court circulars, not from my case. There was no mention of the Whitechapel Lady or Laura Shirley.
I felt uneasy. The idea of keeping the ledger here was clever, I admit, but the actual book showed little sign of intelligence. Oh, Sir George was devious and cunning as a snake, but he seemed to have little of the insight into human nature that would create the trick with the safe. No, someone had told him that, someone cleverer than he. There was someone there, in the background – far in the background, watching him, guiding him . . . oh.
Oh.
Not him. He was a seducer, and blackmailer and abuser of women, but he was the weapon, not the perpetrator. Perhaps he was being used to destroy these women, prise secrets from them, then hand those secrets over to whoever controlled him. Maybe he didn’t even know he was being controlled. Perhaps he had taken the suggestion of the safe and easily picked door locks as a damned clever idea, never realizing that meant whoever had suggested it now knew they could sneak in any time they pleased and read these letters and the ledger.
Not him. Sir George Burnwell could be crossed off my list. I sat back on my heels, and in my head, I swore a little. I swore a lot.
‘These are very foolish letters,’ Mary said, reading through them, not noticing my sudden distraction.
‘Love letters generally are,’ Irene said dryly. ‘Why do we insist on immortalizing our feelings so? Engraved jewellery, letters . . .’
‘Photographs,’ Mary interjected.
‘Photographs,’ Irene agreed, amused. ‘I’ve been as foolish as any of these woman, I know.’
‘Good grief, what language!’ Mary gasped, peering at an ivory-white letter covered in florid handwriting. ‘I’m surprised the page doesn’t blush. And this one – no, wait, that’s a solicitor’s letter. And that’s a boot-maker’s bill. It’s all mixed in together.’
‘No sense of order at all. Not what I expected from our blackmailer,’ Irene said, puzzled. ‘Surely he’d be more organized?’
I looked up. I could see she was beginning to come to the same conclusion I had.
‘Have you noticed,’ Mary said, ‘none of these letters make any mention of blackmail? Though several refer to lending Sir George money.’
‘Lending?’ I asked, standing up again and peering over Irene’s shoulder at her letter. It was on pink paper, very thick, and quoted Byron. Judging by the handwriting, this girl was barely out of the schoolroom.
‘To pay his tailor’s bill, his hotel bill, various debts of honour,’ Mary explained, flipping through several letters. ‘
But looking at what they’ve written, they are giving him the money through a twisted sense of love, not blackmail.’
Mary was beginning to realize it too.
‘I’ve looked through this ledger,’ I said, holding it up. ‘Of the names I recognize, all are still alive and prospering.’
‘He’s not our man, is he?’ Mary said to me, understanding. Irene shook her head.
‘No, he isn’t,’ I agreed. ‘He is foul and disgusting and should be stopped, but he is not the one destroying these women’s lives. We were wrong. Someone else is behind this.’
We all three stood in Sir George Burnwell’s study looking at each other. We felt oddly deflated, disappointed and scared now. Not only were we wrong, we were no closer to discovering the truth than before. ‘His tailor charges a prodigious amount of money,’ Irene replied inconsequentially, staring at a letter. ‘Far more than I imagine his clothes are actually worth.’
‘So does his solicitor,’ Mary added lightly. I knew what they were trying to do, they were trying to cheer me up, but I felt only a great weight upon me.
‘According to this, he has been named as co-respondent in five divorce cases!’ Mary added.
‘Only five?’ Irene replied dryly. ‘There’s evidence for at least eleven in my hands right here . . . oh, that’s what we’ll do!’ she cried, suddenly excited. ‘We’ll take the lot with us! The letters, the ledger, everything!’
‘Why?’ I asked warily.
‘Why?’ Irene demanded. ‘Do you know what damage Sir George could do if he published these letters? Do you know what these letters represent?’
‘Some of these women have stolen items for him,’ Mary said, waving a letter at me. ‘He’s corrupting them, and this is his proof!’
‘Proof of his guilt!’ Irene added. ‘We know someone who could use that!’
‘And besides, it means the secrets don’t fall into his hands. You know, the man we’re trying to catch,’ Mary told me. ‘Because I think even if Sir George is not our man, I bet he has some connection to him, he sells his secrets to him.’
The House at Baker Street Page 12
