I forced the issue as the dozen guests were in the midst of their sponge cake. I knew my mother would not be taking sponge cake. Particularly before performing. I rose, notebook drawn, and I crept toward her table. She was listening to one of the three Brits I’d passed in the Great Hall. He was bloviating about the French trying to run the show on the Western Front. She listened with her elbow on the table, her chin on her fist, declining to play the absolute lady, even in her role as Stockman’s hostess. She knew her business. Stockman must have liked her this way. Stockman was also focused on the man, and I crept some more, letting my notebook show in my hand.
I drew near enough and she was bored enough that the movement drew her eyes. I stopped. She turned to Stockman and leaned to him and whispered a few words, in the midst of which he glanced my way. He nodded assent to her—making a pucker-mouthed, veiled-eye show of how of course it was all right—and she rose and came to me.
“Mr. Hunter,” she said.
“Madam Cobb,” I said.
“I’m sorry to have neglected you this evening,” she said. “You could use some impressions for your story.”
“Just a few,” I said. “Before you perform tonight.”
We said all this in our best stage whisper. Stockman heard it, though he was looking at the still-rambling speaker.
Isabel took me by the arm and guided me away, out of earshot of both the tables and the line of Gray Suits. We turned our bodies, however, toward Stockman. Nothing to hide.
I would take notes during every word she spoke. Scribble.
I said, “I have a pretty good hunch where to look in the house.”
“He’s nervous about something,” she said. “He and his cohorts.”
“About us?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think so. He doesn’t try to hide it. The demeanor of it.”
“The public?”
“He talks offhandedly about them. No. The public’s been here before. This he doesn’t talk about. Not around me.”
“Be that as it may . . .” I began.
“Do what you have to do,” she said.
She was right about my gist. “. . . Tonight is likely my only chance,” I finished.
“Where?”
“The tower.”
“Doesn’t surprise me.”
“You see it?”
“Only the staircase,” she said. “I didn’t climb it, but I had a chance to look up and down.”
“A guard?”
“Not that I saw. I think our man’s comfortable in the house.”
“Keep the show going tonight for as long as you can,” I said.
“You know me when I sing,” she said. “Keep applauding, I’ll keep encoring.”
“Keep encoring even if they don’t applaud,” I said.
She did a stagey spine stiffening. “You just do your job. I’ll do mine,” she said.
11
Night came without a moon and without stars as well, a high cloud cover sweeping in from the North Sea. The grounds fell dark. Stockman ordered standing torches lit, and he worked the spectators as this went on, sensing a trepidation in each newly lit set of faces and then encouraging them loudly. “These infernal machines will not darken our land!” he cried. He spoke to their fear of the Zeppelins, their hesitation to violate the local blackout. “Let us defy them tonight!” he cried. He repeated this appeal again and again, up close to them, to those who watched each torch flare into defiance. He was the British hero standing up to the Huns. He was with them, palpable in their midst. Whoever was within earshot of one of Stockman’s miniature outbursts of patriotic oratory listened, rapt, and then cheered. And the word was circulated, as well, that a special surprise entertainment was imminent in the central marquee. His constituents, who’d dispersed for high tea, began to coalesce into a crowd and move toward the music tent to turn into an audience for Isabel Cobb.
I used this movement of many bodies from all parts of the ground to casually make my own way toward the eastern side of the house, where news of the entertainment had recently arrived. The lawn here was mostly empty now, only a few young couples left, tearing themselves away from the cliff edge to go to the show.
I drifted toward the house and stood for a time in the grass, watching the last of the lovers disappear around the corner. I looked all around now, peering hard into the darkness, seeing no one. And so I was also invisible.
I moved to the casement in the library bay window. I pressed at the sash. It opened. I climbed inside, pulled the sash closed, and stepped at once into the deeper darkness before me.
I stopped. I stood still for a moment to listen. In this room it was quiet enough for the silence to buzz faintly in my ears. My eyes were adjusting. A vague mitigation of the blackness came from outside, from the seepage of starlight through the clouds, from the nearby outglow of torchlight on the other side of the house. I could discern the door to the library. It was closed.
I moved to the door and opened it gently. I looked out. The Great Hall was empty and it was dim, lit only by the glow of the lanterns through the high west windows and by electric light spilling from the kitchen wing through the screens passage. I approached the wall beneath the music gallery, put my back to it, and eased along to the edge of the archway. I peeked into the courtyard entrance hall.
It was empty. The only person in sight had his back to me ten yards or so into the courtyard, beyond the open front doors. One of the Gray Suits. From his stature it could have been Martin.
The crowd outside cheered and clapped and fell silent.
No music yet.
I imagined Stockman making a little speech. He’d probably just mentioned the great Isabel Cobb.
I passed silently and quickly through the hall.
I drew my pistol and my flashlight and started up the wide, stone staircase, making myself take the steps one at a time with a soft, careful stride, holding back my impulse to rush, flashing my light onto each floor at the last moment of approach, pistol ready.
But there were no guards. Not at the second floor, not the third, not the fourth. Each floor was the same: immediately before me a carved oak door with a warded lock, a long corridor to the right along the wing, a blank wall a room’s length to my left.
Now I was at the foot of the staircase to the fifth floor—the top of the house proper—and then I reached its landing. If my suspicion was correct about the tower, Stockman’s office could very well be at the top of these last few steps, where it could easily wire up to the antenna. If a Gray Suit remained in the house, he’d be here.
I took the turn, and I could see nothing but pitch darkness at the top. I crept up, holding pistol and flashlight at the ready.
Distant now as if it were a memory, I heard another upswell of applause and hurrahing as the salon orchestra struck up the introductory bars of “Keep the Home Fires Burning.” Mother was about to sing.
A clock started ticking in my head. I had to be back in the midst of the crowd before she took her last bow.
With the next step and now one more, I was ready for the light and I switched it on and shined it straight in front of me as I rushed the last few steps.
There was no guard.
And this time, no doorway before me either.
I scanned the light to the left.
There was the door, a couple of paces down the way.
This was the room directly beneath the tower. Before I moved to it, I shined the light way off to my right, down the long, empty corridor, and then back very near me, expecting the staircase to continue into the tower.
It did not.
Instead, where the staircase had turned on the floors below, here a stag’s head hung on a wall over a vase sitting on a pedestal. There was no staircase going up.
So this door to my left was very likely Stockman’s office. Which provided my best chance to learn something useful in this vast house with my limited time.
I moved down the hall and confronted the door. Li
ke the ones below, it was oak. But it was not carved. A new door. A good sign. And it held a modern lock. Pin and tumbler. My favorite.
I holstered my Mauser, put myself before the lock, switched off the flashlight, and took out my packet of tools. A torque wrench and a pick. Though strictly speaking I no longer picked most locks. I raked them. I located the keyhole in the dark and bent to it and I slipped in the wrench, turned it gently to the right, worked the pick in all the way to the rear of the keyway. I levered the inner tip. Up went the back pin. And then I raked carefully but quickly along the other pins, pushing them into their columns. I felt most of them yield on the first pass. It was all feel now. No thinking. All about the fingertips. I delicately increased the wrench pressure and raked again. And the lock yielded. The door opened.
I pushed in, closed the door, put my tools away. The room was large. The footprint of the tower, I figured. The mullioned casement windows faced east and south, mostly filling those two walls, and were dim with the moonless night. I had to be careful about my flashlight.
But I did need it.
I let my eyes adjust, let them prepare to use what little outside glow there was. I could see the form of a massive desk set parallel to the wall that held the door to the room.
I moved to its opposite side, faced it, putting my back to the southern windows. The guards were more likely arrayed in that direction, with the south facade holding a major entrance to the castle. I was standing well away from any possible sight line from the ground. With my body blocking the beam, I switched the flashlight on.
From its top, the desk certainly seemed to be a working desk. Neatly kept, but it was in use. There was an electric table lamp; a crystal ink well with a dip-pen holder; a large, leather-edged desk pad with a blotter surface and the intense hieroglyphs of backward, superimposed, blotted words. In a wire basket sat a dozen pieces of mail addressed to Stockman, some of them by way of the House of Parliament, most of them to Stockman House or simply to his name and Margate. Or Broadstairs. Or Kent. One was stamped but addressed only to Sir Albert Stockman. A hodgepodge of hands, some elegant, some seeming barely literate. There was a comparable, empty basket. One for incoming mail and one for outgoing.
I circled the desk. I sat in the massive, polished oak rotary chair. I shined my light on the desk drawers, opening them one at time. They were filled with everyday things. Pen nibs. A staple fastener. A stash of mailing envelopes, unused. I looked in each, though from the first pull I knew I’d find nothing of importance: the drawers were all unlocked.
I rose. I stood away from the desk.
Of course this wouldn’t be easy.
This was the MP’s desk. His constituent desk.
His serious stuff could still be hidden elsewhere in the office. He saw this as a secure room, on a secure floor, in a secure house with a private army. I shined my light toward the western wall. Half a dozen four-drawer filing cabinets. Wooden. Clearly also unlocked. He had a file on everybody in his constituency. He had files on his other MPs. Whatever else. And a set of files in there somewhere, perhaps, revealing his unholy ties to Germany but hiding in plain sight. It could take all night to find them.
Applause and cheers wafted faintly into the room from far away.
And the music again. Some damn music hall ditty. Mother would play that one to the hilt.
I turned my light to the wall behind the desk. I’d noted vaguely that it was full of books. My light went to these high shelves, to the top, at the far left, and I began quickly to scan, my hand doing this almost on its own, disappointed from the library downstairs. Codes still in my head, I supposed.
More sets. Sets and sets. Law books here. And then some other sets. Kentish matters no doubt. Sets on agriculture. Sets about hops and cherries and cattle and fish and whatever else.
I was scanning down the center section now, directly behind the desk. Sets. Sets. I needed to look elsewhere.
And then the books abruptly changed.
Not sets. Odd volumes, a whole row of them, directly behind and slightly above the desk chair.
I circled the desk again.
I looked at titles.
The British Almanac and Family Cyclopaedia.
Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia.
The Dictionary of English History.
The New International Year Book for 1913.
I had not seen a set of The New International Encyclopaedia. Even if there was one somewhere, its yearbook was separated. These were all books that made finding words easy. They all went from A to Z. Code books for telegraph messages.
My flashlight moved on. Quickly. Past several volumes. I knew what I was looking for. And there it was.
The Nuttall Encyclopaedia of Universal Information.
The books were set in here as they were downstairs. And on that quarter of an inch of exposed shelf in front of Nuttall was a thin layer of dust.
Since I last knew it to be the book of the week or month or whatever the interval of use was, the Huns had moved on from this Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge edited meticulously by the good Rev. James Wood. It was my first German code book and I felt a little nostalgic for it. How sad for its dusty lip.
I went back and wrote all these titles in my notebook. The German library of telegraphic code books. This was a good night’s work in itself.
The second time through, something finally registered on me that I’d rushed past looking specifically for Nuttall. An empty space.
After recording all the titles, I returned to it. By the width of one volume, the shelf was wiped clean all the way through the outer lip.
A recent withdrawal.
One code book wasn’t here.
And now the obvious thought, delayed by my focus on documents, finally struck me: the wireless set wasn’t here either.
Its antenna was directly above me.
I looked up into the dark.
There had to be a room above this office.
The question was how to get there.
And something else struck me at last. I turned my light back to the western wall and the line of filing cabinets. I’d assumed the entrance door to this office was farther east than the entrance doors on lower floors because this room was larger. It wasn’t. That wall my white light was drilling into was too close. This room was not a footprint of the tower. It was too small.
I rose. I moved to the end filing cabinet. It was set six inches or so from the wall, as were all these cabinets. I shined my light behind them. Solid wall.
I moved to the door. But before I opened it, I looked back to the western wall. I put the heel of my foot at the edge of the doorjamb and did a yard-stride to the corner. Five paces. About fifteen feet.
I went back to the door. I put my hand to the knob.
I turned stupid. I opened the door and stepped out and immediately before me the shadows had bulked up into the form of a man.
Before I could even twitch I felt the barrel of a pistol press into the dead center of my gut.
Outside, the crowd cheered.
12
“This is just to keep you from being stupid,” a cigarette-blasted British voice said, pushing a little on the pistol.
“Too late,” I said.
“Very well,” he said. “From carrying on being stupid.”
“That’s big of you,” I said.
“Very slowly upend that light of yours and have a look at me,” he said.
I did. The beam came at a sharp angle from below, turning him into a chiaroscuro: a wide, central, corpse-white stripe of a face surrounded by a night-black skull.
It was the lug from the Duke of York’s.
“Mr. Catwalk,” I said.
“Mr. Front Row,” he said.
“You prowl for your boss, I take it,” I said.
“And who do you fancy my boss to be?” he said.
“Stockman.”
“You are mistaken, Mr. Cobb,” he said, his voice pitched down and sounding co
nvincing.
I tried to place this guy in the class system. He sounded, at turns, cultured and working class, never quite either, which meant he was the latter with extended exposure to the former.
It struck me. “You’re Buffington’s man.”
“Lord Buffington,” he corrected.
“You’re the guy in the vicinity.”
“Very near,” he said. “Thanks to the baronet’s need for a bit of outside assistance.”
“At the theater then, you were what?”
“Watching over Isabel Cobb. You and I are on the same side, sir.”
“I’d be more inclined to believe you,” I said, “if you’d take the pistol off the center of my gut.”
“I’m terribly sorry,” he said, and the barrel end vanished at once in a twisting of his body and a ruffling of his suit coat.
“You seem to be doing well,” he said.
“Did you know about the tower?”
“No sir. I just followed you through the window.”
“Bloody hell,” I said. “If you don’t mind my borrowing a phrase.”
“Please,” he said.
“Another case of stupid. I wasn’t even aware,” I said.
“Not at all. I had the advantage of knowing exactly who you are and what you’re up to.”
“Which I need to resume,” I said.
“Of course. But I had to let you know who I am and that I’m at your service.”
“And who are you?”
“Sorry,” he said. “Jeremy.”
“Kit,” I said and we shook hands.
“Unless you have a specific task for me,” Jeremy said, “I think I’d do better to linger downstairs. If someone is to get caught at this, it should be me. You need to keep your identity intact.”
“But no getting caught,” I said.
“I’ll do my best.”
Jeremy half turned to go and then had a thought. He stopped and squared around to me again. “I am obliged to stress, however. If things do get rough, you are to take the opportunity to endeavor a quiet retreat. On no account intervene on my behalf.”
The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller Page 8
