Death and the Dreadnought

by Robert Wilton

  5.

  Eaton Square always has me on edge. Some queasy combination of the Eden from which I have been cast out, and so many generations of ill-gotten and ill-inherited wealth staring down so smug from the elegant windows. It’s a couple of generations since Delameres stopped being acceptable in Belgravia; I’ve had better welcomes from Turkish bandits.

  I took a deep breath on the doorstep of Number 22. She had to be faced; although some yellow corner of my gut was hoping she wasn’t there.

  She was there.

  There as she always appears in my mind, standing by the mantelpiece when I’m shown in, long and elegant and the handsomest face in London.

  The handsomest face was considering me with something like fondness, which made me uncomfortable enough, and what might even have been a touch of pity, which was intolerable.

  ‘Why Henry, I’m disappointed. I’d hoped for prison rags, and perhaps a manacle or two.’

  ‘I spruced up to impress the Law.’ She nodded. ‘You shouldn’t have done it, Victoria. You had no–’

  ‘I thought champagne, to celebrate your liberty.’

  ‘I’m not stopping.’

  ‘It’s the ’98’ She was pouring it already.

  ‘You’ll have the money by nightfall.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Henry.’ She’d stopped in the middle of handing me the wine. She was glaring at me. ‘In the extremely unlikely eventuality that you can find it, it’s much better spent elsewhere.’ The wine finished its journey. She raised her glass near mine. ‘To liberty.’

  Another deep breath. I drank, and grunted ungraciously at her.

  She knows I’m a sucker for the ’98.

  ‘Victoria, you know my attitude to debt.’

  ‘And to gainful employment and marriage, and similarly impractical. If you’ve a penny you’ll want to spend it on finding out who killed poor David.’

  I was about to protest again, and stopped at her face. So damn’ certain. So damn’ wise about me.

  ‘You don’t think I killed him, then? The intelligent money’s agin you.’

  She looked rather austere. Inappropriate levity, I suspect. Victoria Carteret is in her way the most ruthless woman I’ve ever known – ruthless in her rationalities, her certainties – but the most truly sympathetic to creatures weaker than herself; which is most of us. She’d known David Sinclair; known him for a decent man.

  ‘You’re certainly capable of killing, Harry. Had it been a sword, I’d have thought it quite possibly you. Had he suffered some inexplicable accident I’d have known it for a certainty.’ She sipped at the champagne, tasted it, looked at me straight. ‘But a knife, as the newspaper said?’ She shook her head and tutted.

  The door opened behind me and a voice said ‘Victoria – oh. Didn’t realize–’

  ‘Daddy, look who’s here!’ There was just the hint of mischief in her voice.

  ‘Delamere!’ The old man spoke hoarse; appalled. One of the many comforting principles of Magnus, Lord Aysgarth – along with the British Constitution, the Gold Standard and the eternal timetable of the shooting season – is that I should not be in his drawing room. ‘Del– But wait: I thought you in prison. You’re arrested for murder!’

  ‘And guilty as all hell, sir. Victoria caught me hiding the knife in your box hedge.’ I didn’t make it sound like a joke, and he didn’t laugh. His face turned a funny colour, though.

  ‘Daddy, would you kindly excuse us? Henry is innocent, of course. He’s only here because I summoned him.’ She had too, in her way. ‘I wished to learn certain points about the matter, before Henry continues to assist the police in finding the real murderer.’

  Lord Aysgarth shook his head, and left. His late wife – a woman I’d truly respected and liked – had bequeathed to her eldest daughter the unique ability to deflate him, and he swallowed this latest atrocity and the door slammed enough to shake the lamps. Come the 1st of October, the pheasants would be suffering for this incident in their thousands.

  Victoria was gazing up at me. Inspecting. Considering. Eventually, she said:

  ‘I know you’ll refuse, but couldn’t you get to the Continent for a spell? Hide out until this blows over?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I know you’ll refuse, but I repeat that if you need–’

  ‘No.’

  ‘More wine?’

  ‘No. Thank you.’

  ‘You’re hunted. But – for David; and for your pride – you’re going to take on the police, and whoever is responsible. You’re going to find out who did this.’

  It hadn’t, I realized, been a question.

  I raised my glass to her, and then emptied it. ‘Yes.’

  6.

  The city roared around me, and I didn’t notice a thing. She’s a glorious old girl, London, and in the right mood I get a kick out of rambling through her streets. The buildings – the immensity of all that history, of all that it’s built on and all it has been and all it represents now. The grandest men in the world, mingling with some of the most wretched. And sometimes, just for a moment, the lives touch. And the energy of it all, the power: horses, carriages, omnibuses, motor cars, and a million pairs of boots. The high windows of Mayfair sneered down at me. Hyde Park Corner was a merry-go-round of the city: news-sheet hawkers and fruit-sellers and clerks having a gasper and nurses pushing perambulators and street gypsies careering between them. There was some sort of public meeting in the park, a fellow on a box roaring out his message to a silent watchful mob.

  It all became nothing: a hum and a blur around me.

  Could it have been mere thuggery, Sinclair’s death? A robbery gone wrong, a disgruntled worker scorned? Somehow it didn’t seem so. Sinclair’s concern, his insistence that we meet. Found in his yard, by his battleship. It was… consequent, somehow.

  And that explained the police, too. In the normal run of things they’d think twice before pinching someone of my relative status. The world’s not that far gone yet. But this, clearly, wasn’t the normal run of things. The police had decided immediately that this was something stranger, something that wore his collar stiff not soft. And they had pulled together my dossier in record time. What in hell was going on?

  Had the walk from Eaton Square to Piccadilly been a dozen times longer, perhaps I’d have reached some brilliant conclusion with my thinking. Probably not. As it was, in those twenty minutes I covered the mile and a half to my rooms briskly enough, but got nowhere mentally.

  I’d given Quinn a list of errands – things I’d need and things I wanted found out – so I had to let myself in. The dark familiar hall – sticks, coats, a few prints of places I’d been and places I’d rather be, the hatstand made from a buffalothorn branch I’d once spent the night on – seemed inadequate. I made for the sitting room, and brandy.

  There was no valet in the place, but there was a man with a brown Homburg hat, a loose-fitting suit, and a pistol pointing at my stomach.

  So, more than enough company.

  He was sitting in the armchair near the window. ‘One of us seems to be in the wrong place,’ I said.

  A smile grew wide on his face. ‘We are exactly as we should be,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Especially if you are doing nothing foolish.’

  The accent was foreign.

  ‘Force of habit,’ I said. ‘But I’ll try to restrain myself.’

  I don’t know what I was saying. It didn’t matter. I was concentrating on his face.

  Mad? Desperate? Familiar? All these things may tell whether the shot is imminent or susceptible of negotiation. That’s why you must fight the urge to look at the gun, and why you must read the face like your life depends on it. Which of course it does.

  This bird wasn’t mad, or desperate, or at all familiar. A fleshy, fortyish stranger, and very relaxed. As he could afford to be, being so perfectly in control of things.

  In my odd, wandering life I’ve had more than my share of men pointing guns at me. Gentlemen in various places unhappy abou
t some misunderstanding or other – whether political, sporting or female. The armed bandits that I seem to attract across south-eastern Europe. (I attract them in the Levant and Africa too, but there they only run to knives.) Thousands of grumpy Boers in the war. The great thing is to know why the chap’s pointing the gun, because then you know how much time you’ve got and what it’s going to take for the gun to point elsewhere.

  ‘What do you want?’ I said. The note of alarm came easily; he was so comfortable, so certain. ‘I’ll – I’ll give you anything you want! Money? I have money.’

  Hands up and open – no threat, stay comfortable as you like – I took a step towards him.

  ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I am given to understand that you do not.’ There’s something about a German accent that makes you look for the firing squad. Was it German? There was a lightness – he was relishing the words – that could have been Austrian, or Swiss. Or perhaps he was just enjoying himself. ‘It is of no consequence, as I want only to talk.’

  ‘Oh.’ I let my shoulders sag in apparent relief, as I took another step towards him. I glanced down at the pistol: I wasn’t getting anything from his face, beyond his certainty that he was in control. A cheap brown suit, with a white ribbon pinned one lapel. No clues from the pistol, either. It was a revolver, and a sturdy one; a Webley, surely. Probably the most common handgun in England; I had one myself. ‘Any chance we could exchange postcards instead?’ Still pointing steady at my belly, the pistol looked vast.

  I’d managed another step closer. The madness of the previous eighteen hours should have – what? Led me to assume this was linked? Left me too bewildered for assuming anything? Got me used to madness, at least.

  As I got closer, looking for my moment, the movements had to be more careful.

  He was watching me, and smiling pleasantly: the lips were wide in his face, and squeezed his eyes above the fleshy cheeks. ‘That is correct, Mr Delamere. Come closer.’

  It was all wrong.

  ‘In fact, do please sit down here, at the desk.’ He nodded at my desk, and then the barrel of the Webley gestured me that way too.

  Keen to keep up the pose of co-operation, I took another half-step forwards, nearer to him and nearer to the desk.

  The Daily Mail front page had been placed on the desk: ‘SHOCKING SOCIETY STABBING IN SHIPYARD’.

  ‘That is correct,’ said my guest. ‘Pick it up, why not?’

  Doing so covered my movement a few inches closer to him.

  And at last I understood, when it was almost too late.

  ‘Sit down, Mr Delamere!’

  I began to babble: ‘I – I’d rather – look, d’you mind? – nerves, you know.’ Obviously agitated, I began to move erratically away from him. ‘D’you mind if I smoke?’

  ‘Stop! Careful, Delamere…’ My hand’s movement towards my cigarette case couldn’t have been any slower, but he was taking no chances. Very carefully, exaggerated carefully, I put two fingers into my jacket pocket and pulled out the case. One hand still holding the melodramatic headline, I lit a cigarette clumsily.

  His arm was fully extended with the revolver. ‘Sit down, now, Mr Delamere…’ He was smiling again, all terribly pleasant, the most pleasant well-armed would-be-murderer one could hope to find in one’s sitting room. I made a half-move towards the desk.

  He wanted me sitting at my desk, the shameful headline in one hand, a bullet fired from very short range in my brain, and the pistol – standard issue for British officers in the Cape – artfully beneath me. He’d wipe it first, no doubt, and press it into my dead hand so there’d be no doubt about who’d last held it; if he was lucky, he might even get my dead fingers to clutch it. It takes the artistic touch, staging a suicide.

  ‘Actually, d’you mind? I badly need a drink first.’ I was stumbling across the room again, the Webley’s barrel following me, and this time my assassin stood with it.

  I made a fidgety mess of opening the decanter and trying to get some brandy into the glass. I turned towards him for a moment, so he could see how much of a fidgety mess I was making of it. Lord Northcliffe’s latest contribution to English literature was still clutched in the hand that also held the shaking glass.

  He glanced at the brandy, and I could see him calculating that it would enhance the effect. Artistic touch, as I say. ‘Sit down now, Mr Delamere.’ He was beckoning me back towards the desk. ‘This won’t take long, and then I will be leaving you in peace and joining my comrades outside.’

  ‘Comrades?’ I mumbled through my cigarette, decanter still rattling against glass and spilling more than it poured.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘A man planning to overturn London may hide very nicely among men planning to overturn the world.’

  I’d no idea what he was talking about. But I nodded agreeably, and turned away to finish pouring. With my back blocking his view, I stuffed the newspaper page into my glass, poured more brandy over it, and lifted the glass to my lips as if taking a first mouthful.

  The cigarette ignited it nicely, and as it flared I spun and tossed the blazing bundle at him and ducked to one side. He got off one instinctive shot somewhere between me and my burning missile, and as he was beating that lot aside I hurled the decanter after it. Another shot, over my head as I ducked to the floor, and he was stumbling back a step – as you do, when a brandy decanter flung by a very angry man fighting for his life gets you in the shoulder – and I launched myself at him. My first punch got him hard in the throat, and only then I went for the gun. A Japanese I once met in a fencing tournament in Singapore told me some frightfully clever unarmed manoeuvres you can use on this sort of occasion, but I can’t say I’ve ever been able to remember them in the heat of the moment. Somewhere beneath us, the brandy bomb was still burning. My hand was clamped over the hammer of the revolver – and that, now, is a clever manoeuvre – and I butted him in the nose with my forehead and while he thought about his choking and his watering eyes I got my other hand on the barrel of the revolver and twisted it round.

  The shot roared. From a distance of six inches I saw my assassin’s eyes go wide – damned surprised he looked, and no wonder. His lips gaped in one last ghastly grimace, and he dropped out of my arms.

  The air was thick with fumes from the brandy; my late guest had been doused in the stuff from the decanter, and fallen on the burning glass, and now a dull blue flame was creeping up his sleeve.

  There was a cough from behind me.

  ‘Is everything in order, sir?’

  7.

  Quinn considered the dead man, flames still tickling the coat. Then he saw the bits of the dead man’s grey matter spattered not-so-grey across the lace curtain. Then he saw the bullet hole in the ceiling. Then he noticed the broken glass beside him, and glanced up to where a bullet had smashed the portrait of the Princess Maria Teresa of Spain and her husband which I keep for sentimental reasons. My assassin’s first shot had plugged Prince Ferdinand of Bavaria perfectly in the centre of his forehead; unfairly, for he’s a nice enough chap for a hun. Presumably there was another bullet hole somewhere.

  ‘About normal for today, Quinn, I should say.’

  Quinn looked at me, at last.

  ‘The carpet seems to be on fire, sir.’

  ‘Yes, sorry about that. Is it ours or the Albany’s?’

  ‘You all right, sir?’

  I gripped his arm, and it helped. ‘I’m fair angry, Quinn.’

  ‘Mm. Not ideal for making decisions, sir, as you always say. Is the gentleman dead?’

  I glanced at my smouldering guest. ‘I hope so. Bit of a clean-up job, I’m afraid. I’m sorry about the carpet.’

  ‘Not at all, sir.’ He didn’t sound so cool about it. Quinn doesn’t care about the fittings themselves, but he’s a real puritan when it comes to minimising wear and tear.

  ‘There’s worse.’ He waited. And before I could say another word, there was a hammering at the front door. ‘Worse, as I say. It’s the duty of a gentleman, Quinn,
to stand up for what he’s done and face the music. But personally, I’ve unfinished business. It’s the back window for me. I’m leaving you in the lurch.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  The door thundered again, and then there was a shout: ‘Open up! In there!’

  ‘I’m cutting loose. Jo’burg rules. Don’t try to contact me at the club. Assume you and this place are watched.’

  ‘Of course, sir. By whom, sir?’

  ‘No idea.’ I nodded at the body. ‘But they’re going to be unhappy. Use Dobbs’s or The Pot for messages. Did you get any of what I asked?

  ‘Table on the hall. Cash too.’

  ‘The address?’

  ‘Bayswater Road; Number 77.’

  The muffled shouting again. ‘This is the police! Open up!’

  ‘Your pistol’s in the usual place, sir; cleaned this morning.’

  The door began to thump and strain; the police were breaking in now.

  ‘Right ho then.’ I nodded my thanks. As I left for the back window and the service stairs, my valet had picked up the soda syphon and was taking careful aim at the smouldering carpet.

  8.

  I came out between a pair of dustbins, glancing up and back and waiting for the sound of raised window and official shouts and whistles. I knew the pair of alleys that would get me out further along Piccadilly and hopefully clear of police interest, and set off at a trot. If it had only been the local constable who’d heard the shots and come to investigate, then my grumpy Cornishman and his soda syphon would give him plenty to be getting on with.

  I needed a new base of operations, and I needed answers. I had to reckon myself fully a fugitive now. Either I solved this bizarre mystery, or I’d be on the run forever. I turned into the second of my alleys.

  If, on the other hand, that wretched police inspector was for some reason lurking nearby and waiting for me to step out of line, then –

  I was out into the brighter light and fresher air of Piccadilly, and I blinked and slowed to a walk. And immediately a body thumped hard into me and I stumbled back, clutching vaguely at whoever it was.