A Conspiracy in Belgravia

by Sherry Thomas

  “You’ll first allow me to apologize, of course, for this unpleasantness. The Vigenère cipher, as well as the other riddles that had been repurposed for your leisure, came from an archive of cases deemed to have been thoroughly investigated—of no further interest whatsoever to the crown.

  “Now, obviously I’m grateful to you—I much prefer knowing that something nefarious is going on under my nose, if this is what it is, and not a coincidence. But I would be lying if I didn’t acknowledge that I am also mortified and more than a little miffed that my courtship present has led to a dead body, of all things.”

  “No harm done. I would much rather that my efforts shed some light on this man’s death than that they only resulted in solving a code someone had already deciphered ten years ago.”

  “That’s how Ash thought you would feel, but still, it’s good to hear it directly from you. Now to answer your question. The Vigenère cipher began life as a cable about ten years ago, before my time. It originated in Cairo, though it’s also possible that Cairo had served as a relay station and the actual telegram had been sent from a smaller locale in the region.”

  Charlotte would not be surprised if Bancroft had agents in telegraph relay stations all over the empire.

  An operator in a relay station listened to the telegraph sounder and wrote down the Morse code as it clicked and beeped, before sending the message further along the line. When a message had been relayed, the operator would have a copy in hand, which made it easy to hand off.

  “The sender is named Baxter, the recipient, a C. F. de Lacy residing at a small hotel in Belgravia. According to the notes in the original dossier, it was decided by those responsible at the time that the telegram must have been communication between overly mistrustful archaeologists—or men who call themselves archaeologists but are simply modern-day grave robbers.”

  “So no one was sent to the hotel to check the register?”

  “We have limited funds and therefore limited manpower—in fact, much of my work involves trying to obtain more funds. I imagine the hapless men who worked on the cipher were crestfallen that it turned out to involve no foreign state secret or dastardly plot against the throne. They recommended that an eye be kept on the papers for any big archaeological discovery. But as far as I can tell, no one bothered to follow through with that.”

  She had always thought Lord Bancroft recruited his little brother to have at hand someone he could trust absolutely. But now she wondered if there hadn’t been budgetary reasons: Lord Ingram, as a gentleman, would not expect to be paid—or even reimbursed—for his troubles.

  “So now, ten years later, we have trouble unearthing anything. The hotel where de Lacy stayed? The hotel keeper died eight years ago. The premises were sold and made into a block of flats. The records of the old hotel were disposed of, so there is no means of tracking this Mr. de Lacy, even if that had been his real name. About Baxter we know even less. My subordinates are checking to see whether we have other records of them, but they are not hopeful.”

  “When Lord Ingram and I arrived on the scene, there was already a policeman guarding the property—and the C.I.D. had become involved. How did that happen?”

  The determined ordinariness of this house—or any of its neighbors—should not have inspired a bobby to peek behind the curtains.

  “It’s curious how that came about. This morning, the nearest police station received an anonymous note, concerning nefarious activities that have taken place at this address, which the note alleged to have involved a number of innocent and helpless children.”

  Charlotte’s ears perked up. It was not very long ago that the city had been gripped by just such a case. “The constables jumped to, I imagine.”

  “Indeed,” said Lord Bancroft, “a contingent from the station flew out to investigate the premises. When no one answered the door, they forced open the entrance at the back. There were no children, nor any sign any had ever been in the house—but a dead body isn’t the worst consolation prize.”

  Charlotte supposed not, if one had been seeking evidence of villainy.

  “The police looked about and decided to hand the matter over to the C.I.D. Inspector Treadles arrived on the scene. You and my brother arrived on the scene. And the rest you already know.”

  “Not all of it. Was Inspector Treadles asked to leave?”

  “Of course not. Inspector Treadles is fully involved with the case. He believes that the body will be transported to the coroner’s. And it will be. But first you have a look, Miss Holmes.”

  “Certainly. But before we proceed, can you tell me whether Simmons is still serving Lady Ingram?”

  “My mother’s old maid Simmons? Yes, she’s still there. She came into some money last year. We thought it was time to buy her a retirement gift but she decided to stay on, in the end. Said she wouldn’t know what to do with herself if she retired.”

  “I see.”

  Lord Bancroft cocked his head. “Any reason you remembered Simmons all of a sudden?”

  Charlotte shook her head. “No, no reason at all.”

  He raised a brow but only said, “Then, shall we?”

  When Charlotte was five, her grandfather, an old man with jolly demeanor and sad eyes, visited the Holmes household. He arrived a hearty man, if one who liked to complain of arthritic joints. A week later he was laid out on the dining table, dead.

  Late at night Charlotte had stolen down to the dining room to study the cold and stiff body of the man who had slipped her an orange bonbon after every meal. It would be years before she realized that the constricted sensation in her chest was nothing more—or less—than sadness. But she did understand right away, in the light of a guttering candle, that she did not fear the dead.

  The man who now lay underneath a dust sheet had not had the good fortune to pass away in old age, surrounded by family, on a comfortable feather mattress. Instead, he had been strangled, his still-young face grotesque with desperation, as if even at the very end he still couldn’t believe that he had met such an unkind fate.

  She pulled out her magnifying glass.

  “May I take a look at it?” asked Lord Bancroft.

  She handed it to him. The magnifying glass was solid silver mounted with an openwork design of foliage and scrolls. But hidden among the leafy swirls, if one looked closely, were tiny silver cakes, muffins, and molded jellies.

  “I thought I’d seen a drawing of such a magnifying glass in my brother’s expedition notebook a few years ago,” said Lord Bancroft. “Did he give this to you?”

  “It was a birthday present.”

  Lord Bancroft turned the magnifying glass over a few times. “What is this?” he asked, pointing to a rather unimpressive bit of light green glass at the tip of the handle.

  “To me it looks to be a tessera from a mosaic. Perhaps something Lord Ingram has dug up.”

  “It could be very old—he once excavated a minor Roman site,” said Lord Bancroft, a speculative gleam in his eyes as he handed the magnifying glass back to her.

  “It could very well be from that site—I’ve never asked him,” answered Charlotte, being at once perfectly truthful and completely evasive.

  She had recognized, upon first glance, that this small piece of cloudy glass, polished and rounded for the mounting, had come from the remains of a Roman villa, where it had been, long ago, part of a floor mosaic in the atrium.

  The site of her first kiss.

  The magnifying glass had been delivered via the post, rather than in person or via courier. The accompanying note wished her many happy returns and made absolutely no reference to the glass tessera. Her return note had been equally brief and equally quiet on the matter.

  And yet it had been the beginning of those charged silences that had come to characterize all subsequent interactions between Lord Ingram and herself.

  She knelt down and
examined the dead man from top to bottom, paying special attention to his hands and the soles of his shoes. Mr. Underwood helpfully turned him over, so she could inspect his dorsal side.

  “I’d like to see this man unclothed.”

  Mr. Underwood wheezed a little and glanced toward Lord Bancroft, who said, with no appearance of surprise or consternation, “Will you oblige Miss Holmes, Mr. Underwood?”

  “Yes, my lord.”

  “We’ve looked for tailor’s labels but found none,” said Lord Bancroft to Charlotte, as Mr. Underwood divested the dead man of his garments.

  After a few more minutes, Charlotte rose and said, “I don’t know that I can tell you much more than you already know, my lord.”

  “And what is it that I already know, pray tell, Miss Holmes?”

  “You know that he wasn’t killed on the premises—or at least not inside this house. There was a struggle—he has blood and skin under his nails and dirt and grass embedded in the treads of his soles.”

  “I have indeed deduced as much.”

  “His clothes are of inferior material, indifferently tailored and too large for him. But you are certain they do not indicate his place in the world because his hands are white and soft and these rough garments do not reek as you would expect them to.

  “You would have confirmed your suspicion by looking at his underlinens, which happen to be of merino wool: hygienic, comfortable, and completely at odds with the rough image his outer garments conveyed—or sought to convey. Same goes for the shoes, which, though not bespoke, are of an excellent quality and workmanship.”

  “Indeed. Now, you said that you can’t tell me much more than I already know. So what do I not know yet?”

  “This suit was bought at a secondhand shop—probably in an effort to conceal himself from those who did not mean him well. And not a secondhand shop in Kensington that a lady’s maid who has been given castoffs might take her wares to, but the kind you find in Seven Dials and other such districts.”

  When she had been low on funds and looking for some clothes that would not appear out of place on a secretary, she had frequented a few resale shops. The problem had been that the halfway decent garments still cost too much and the cheaper stuff looked like dishrags.

  “I’ve had occasion to browse in some of the less . . . prestigious of these establishments. This suit has been through the resale shops a few times. Inside the left sleeve, there are five stitch marks done in brown yarn. Inside the right sleeve, three similar marks in blue yarn. Different shops use yarn of different colors to mark items that come through—it helps them track how popular an item might prove to be.

  “And what makes this particular item so popular that it went through such places eight times? One would think that it could scarcely be worn eight times before the seams came apart.”

  “Under certain circumstances the use of a garment does not add much to the wear and tear. The front of the suit is made of serge, not the best I’ve seen, but presentable enough and durable enough. The back, however . . . if it isn’t shoddy that has been ground up and rewoven, I would be very surprised.”

  “A suit with only a front side presentable. Are you telling me this is funeral attire for the poor?”

  “It’s what I would conclude.”

  “Did our corpse rob a grave then?”

  “Judging by how many times this suit has circulated, I would say no. It’s quite possible that the family of the deceased removes the suit and sells it back to the shop, to save some money. Or the grave diggers might have. In either case, I would guess that our man had no idea that he’d donned a funeral suit.”

  Only to have it become prophetic.

  “What else can you tell me, Miss Holmes?”

  “That depends, my lord. What did you do with his pocketbook and his watch?”

  “He had no wallet on his person. I do have his watch in my possession.”

  The watch had been made by Messrs. Patek, Philippe, and Co. Monsieur Patek had invented the stem-winding mechanism that did away with winding keys. The company had been a well-known name ever since the queen had bought two of their watches for herself and Prince Albert at a London horological exhibition thirty-five years ago. And their dedication to quality had not waned since: If Charlotte’s memory served, their watches were awarded the special prize at a recent competition held at the Geneva Observatory.

  This watch had been beautifully cared for and appeared new at first glance. Only on close study with her magnifying glass could she see the minor dents and scratches that came with the simple passage of time, inevitable for any item used on a regular basis. She opened the back, and then the cuvette, the inner lid that protected the precise and complex arrangement of gears and springs that moved the dials. Neither the back nor the cuvette bore any inscriptions.

  “Our man was an orphan.”

  “The watch can tell you that?”

  “How did you come by your first fine watch, my lord?”

  “A gift from my late father.”

  “With an inscription inside, I imagine?”

  “An exhortation to the dutiful life.”

  “This is easily an eighty-guinea watch. And our man, who looks to be only twenty-eight or so, would have barely come of age when this watch was made. To be that young and acquire a watch that bears no inscriptions? It suggests to me that he purchased it himself, rather than that it was a gift from an elder.”

  “And if it had been his own choice, then it might also explain the care he took—it was his first significant purchase as a man, something he meant to carry with him for a lifetime,” mused Lord Bancroft. “But why then didn’t he put his own initials on it?”

  “I thought that odd, too, and I can’t offer you a reason.”

  “Anything else you can tell me from the watch?”

  She shook her head.

  He looked a little disappointed.

  “At the moment, the watch relays nothing else helpful. But I can tell you that he tried to leave a message about his fate.”

  “How?”

  “Does Mr. Underwood carry the necessary implement to remove the lining of the jacket?”

  Mr. Underwood did—a pair of small, sharp scissors that gleamed in the light. The cheap lining was removed to show nothing in particular. But Charlotte ran her hand over the rough black shoddy of the back and said, “Ah, I think I know what this is. It’s rice that had been doused in ink—then the individual grains were applied to the fabric.”

  Cooked rice, when in contact with any kind of surface, stuck to it with an enormous tenacity as it dried. And dried grains of cooked rice were hard as pebbles and almost as indestructible.

  “Is it possible to make a rubbing of the jacket?” asked Charlotte. “I believe we are dealing with braille.”

  Mr. Underwood performed the task, his motions quick yet delicate. Charlotte examined the resultant sheet of paper and wrote down the message.

  MY KILLER IS DE LACY ON BAXTERS ORDER

  De Lacy and Baxter, the two names that had been associated with the coded telegram that had brought Charlotte to the vicinity of the house in the first place.

  Lord Bancroft exhaled. “Miss Holmes, you have given me much work to do.”

  Then he looked at her and said, “Thank you.”

  Lord Ingram had always treated Charlotte as an equal. But theirs was a complicated bond, constricted by circumstances and abraded by a number of disagreements over the years.

  Now Lord Bancroft, too, treated her as an equal. He and Charlotte shared no long-standing friendship, but they were also free of any burdens of the past.

  It was . . . most certainly interesting.

  She smiled at him. “I wish you luck in your endeavor, my lord. Now if you will kindly arrange for a carriage to take me to the train station—I promised Mrs. Watson I’d be home by tea.”
<
br />   Nine

  “There you are,” cried Mrs. Watson, bolting up from her chair, when Miss Holmes stepped into the afternoon parlor. “Where have you been?”

  She hadn’t meant to ask that question—certainly not in that tone. Miss Holmes was a grown woman and she was neither Mrs. Watson’s child nor her employee.

  But her abrupt departure this morning from the park, her terse note that said only Headed out. Will be back for tea, and the fact that she, a woman who was never late for cake and sandwiches, was a whopping three quarters of an hour late to said tea—

  “I was five minutes away from running to the nearest telephone, to let Lord Ingram know that you are missing.”

  Miss Holmes could have been hit by a carriage or robbed of her cab money. But the possibility that had truly frightened Mrs. Watson was that she might have been taken by her own family, stuffed into a railcar, and shunted to the country, never to be heard from again.

  Such abductions had happened when Mrs. Watson was young. They still happened. And what could anyone do, when it was the family who acted as judge, jury, and jailer?

  Miss Holmes stood very still, her skirts wrinkled, her ringlets droopy from humidity. She looked at Mrs. Watson unblinkingly, and Mrs. Watson found that she couldn’t read the younger woman’s face at all.

  Uncertainty gnawed at Mrs. Watson. Had she been too shrill? Had she given offense? Had she overstepped the bounds of friendship?

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” said Miss Holmes softly. “I didn’t mean to be so late.”

  Relief washed over Mrs. Watson, relief and a measure of mortification that she hadn’t put a stronger leash on her anxiety. “No, I should apologize. Do please excuse me for acting like the old worrywart that I am.”

  Miss Holmes shook her head. “I was on my own for a short while—I have not forgotten what that was like. The life I lead now is a luxury. You make that life possible, ma’am. I’m sorry that I made you worry, but I’m not sorry that I have someone who worries for me.”