by K. T. Tomb
“Ah, Chyna. I’m doing well, thank you,” he replied cordially. “When Marcus and Tony told me you had taken a spur-of-the-moment trip into Winchester, I thought I might be hearing from you soon.”
“We found it, Angus, and what a beautiful story it is,” Chyna said. “I can’t believe that she led such a tumultuous, exciting, successful life. Popular culture has done no favors to her image at all.”
“It’s why I encouraged you to read it for yourself, Chyna. She is best known for her time as Henry’s queen in England, but it all extended much farther than that. In the movies, you often see her as a ruler over barbaric people living in a barbaric time and she automatically becomes a barbarian too; but Eleanor was a woman of culture and aristocracy and grace.”
“Indeed, Angus.”
“So, how can I be of assistance today, Chyna?”
“Well, it’s becoming more and more obvious that there’s a lot of work to be done if we’re going to find this ‘Eagle’ armor. I wanted to talk with you regarding the suggestions you gave me about whom we should interview. Also, are there any other archives we might find helpful, especially in London? You know, before we drive the hour and a half back to Dordogne.”
“That was a good idea because I actually do have a few suggestions for you.”
“That’s great, let me get a notepad,” Chyna said. “Okay, Angus, I’m ready, you can go ahead.”
“Since you’re in Winchester, you may want to start by talking to the Spencers. I had mentioned them before, I believe. They’re living in Reading now, in a quiet little community called Timberley and that’s quite close to where you are. I have their address right here as well; it’s 24 Cockatiel Road.”
“That’s perfect, thank you for that. Do you have any others?”
“Absolutely. You’re already headed that way, so why don’t you visit Sir Robert’s offices in London? They would have a detailed copy of all the police reports which would include the transcripts of the interrogations, eyewitness reports and such. It might prove helpful when you get around to talking to the Bristol City Police Department. A chat with Sir Robert’s uncle, Evan Montgomery, might be helpful as well.”
“Really? Why would you say that?”
“Well, you see, remember I mentioned that his company did all the work at Dordogne that year? Sir William realized that with the economy in such a downturn at the time, there wouldn’t be much of the usual baronial revenues coming in for the next few years so he had to come up with a plan to keep some money coming in to run the estate and fund the family’s coffers. That’s why he decided to turn Dordogne into the working estate it is today. Remember I told you he had to keep things viable to support everyone, including Evan.
“Evan didn’t like the idea of strangers strolling through the place all season long, but he didn’t have a say in the decision either. It ate him up to see the place turned into a tourist attraction, but in my mind, Sir William was only doing the same thing that many larger and much more prominent landowners had done years prior. For quite a while now, places like Chatsworth House and Buckingham Palace had opened parts of the buildings and gardens to the paying public.”
“Who was there when the work was being done?”
“It was only meant to be me and Marion Wainwright here… that’s the current Mrs. Spencer. But ultimately, only Marion stayed the entire time.”
“Why was that?”
“Well, in a bid to express his gratitude for the work, Evan offered to do up the caretaker’s cottage and the stables at the last minute. He put me up for the season at his house in Bristol, Dordogne Place.”
“Rather convenient, wasn’t it?” Chyna commented.
“I don’t follow you,” Angus said, sounding puzzled.
“Never mind, Angus. We’ll be on our way to Reading in the morning, then on to London. I promise we’ll keep you posted on our progress.”
“Thank you, Chyna. Will I see you when you get back?”
“Of course. Oscar, and I will be sure to stop in for a cup of tea... and maybe a cigarette?”
Angus laughed at her remark.
“You’ve been a great help, Angus,” Chyna said.
“It’s my pleasure, lass. You have a safe trip.”
“Goodbye.”
***
As Chyna launched the Jaguar down the M3 roadway, she had several questions going through her mind about the case.
Normally, she would have stewed them over silently as she drove, but having Oscar with her meant that she needed to augment his education as an investigator. After expressing to him her relief at finally being involved in a case that didn’t seem to need the assistance of special forces or military operatives, she spent the next hour discussing her concerns with him.
There were a lot of obvious issues and they were consistently boring holes in the various arguments either of them could come up with to lead them in the right direction to figuring out what happened to the suit of armor. It was obvious that it had been taken when the furnishings were removed from the bunker after the renovations were complete.
But then the questions were; by whom? When? And of course, How?
Almost instantly, Oscar realized that the first wave of questions had a habit of breeding the second; which tended to be more in number than the first wave and much deeper as well.
Next, Chyna had them wondering; who had access to the property? What was security like on the estate during the renovations? Why was Angus moved out? Who had done the actual moving?
It took them forty-five minutes to get to Timberley and maybe five minutes to find the cozy-looking duplex on Cockatiel Road. Every one of the houses on the street looked exactly the same, so Oscar had to check the house numbers which, luckily for them, were prominently written on each mailbox. Chyna parked the car across the street from the house and they walked up and rang the doorbell.
Marion Spencer answered the door with a big smile on her face.
“Chyna Stone?” she asked confidently, as if they had met before.
“Yes and this is my colleague, Oscar Cunningham. We’d like to ask you a few questions about Dordogne Estate, particularly about what happened during the renovations in 1978.”
“Yes, Angus told me to expect you. Please come in. I just put the kettle on.”
“Thank you.”
Chyna and Oscar stepped into the house.
It was warm and just as cozy inside as it had seemed from the outside. Marion led them into a living room, or the front room as she called it, and invited them to sit. She disappeared into what Chyna assumed was the kitchen and soon reappeared with a lovely silver tray piled with all her tea things. Marion poured tea for each and invited them to help themselves to the milk and sugar as well as the sandwiches and biscuits she had brought out with it.
The marvels of modern technology, Chyna thought. Because of a simple telephone call from Angus, Marion had had the better part of an hour to prepare a lovely repast for them while they had been driving toward her house.
“Angus says that Sir Robert has hired you to find out what happened to Eleanor of Aquitaine’s armor and possibly find it.”
“Indeed, Mrs. Spencer,” Chyna confirmed. “That is true.”
“Well, I can tell you straight away what happened to it,” she said matter-of-factly. “It was stolen, right from under our very noses in the dead of night and without a single one of us knowing, to boot.”
“We get the gist of that, Mrs. Spencer. We really want to recover it for Sir Robert. At the very least, we think he deserves to know where it went and maybe even who took it.”
“Well, if you can do what the police couldn’t, I know it will give him some peace.”
“If you would, we hoped you could tell us what you remember from that year.”
“Of course,” she said, sitting back in her chair as if she was settling in for a long story. “Well, the house was closing up for the season. The Montgomerys always spent the winter at the estate and when summer came a
round, they would quit the manor and go to London. The social season officially got started on May Day and Mrs. Montgomery never missed that.
“By the end of April that year, everything had been sent ahead of them; everything that they planned to take, that is. The rest was being moved into the outbuildings because Sir William had arranged for a lot of work to be done on the house. The staff had all been given their holidays—or their reassignments, as the case may have been—and things were grinding to a halt at Dordogne. I was staying behind for the summer and, if I remember well, the only other person staying was Angus McKinley.”
“Why were you two staying behind if everyone else was given new assignments?” Oscar asked curiously.
“At the time, I was the head maid at the estate, but every one of the Montgomery houses has its own head maid. If you were just at Châtellerault, you would have met Rebecca. She is head maid there. The London house similarly has one as well, so I stayed behind in my place. I grew up in an orphanage, Mr. Cunningham, and went into service at sixteen years old, so I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”
“I see,” he replied, abashed.
Marion continued her story.
“I oversaw the covering, removal and storage of the furniture, the precious objects, the rugs and the drapes. Sir William saw to the removal of the house’s antiques and art himself. I know they were in the raid bunker, but that was all, and I assumed that Sir William took the keys with him. I was in the house, in the downstairs, when the house was broken into. I don’t remember hearing a thing, not a sound that night.
“I know that the house was locked up properly because Angus and I had run the usual check of all the windows and doors that evening, just as we always did. We had tea in the staff dining room downstairs and he left through the service exit out back. The next morning when I went upstairs to draw the curtains like I always did it was gone.”
“Marion…” Chyna started. “May I call you Marion?”
“Of course, my dear,” she replied.
“Marion, at that point, were there any construction workers left on the site?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “By that time, everything had already been completed and all the workers had been gone for weeks. In fact, Sir William had already come in with his designer and had new drapes hung and the carpets, rugs, furniture and antiques put back into place.”
“Really?” Oscar commented. “What else was the designer supposed to do? Was it someone you knew?”
“Actually, no, I had never seen her before. I can’t even recall her name right now. She was Asian, that much I remember; Chinese, Japanese, I’m not sure. Maybe Sir Robert would have more information about that. She made a register of every single item in Sir William’s collection, then the two of them decided which items would be put back in the house as well as where each piece would be displayed and how.
“I remember that the day of the break in, Mr. Montgomery—Evan, that is—came back with the woman. I assumed it was to confirm that the placement of the items had been done to her specifications; that everything had been displayed properly and the place had that look and feel the family wanted to create for their future visitors. It was supposed to feel like a home that was also a museum, you see.”
“That wouldn’t be unexpected,” Oscar commented.
“But that’s just it, because it was rather odd. I had never seen her with Evan before and no one had told me they would be coming that day, either.”
“What about after you realized the armor was gone?” Chyna asked.
“I called Sir William and Angus first. Angus was the one who called the police. Can you believe it took them an hour and a half to get out there from downtown Bristol? It was a disgrace.” She shook her head as if she were remembering something that deeply hurt her. “There was a huge investigation; purely the result of Sir William’s insistence with the police chief at the time. Absolutely nothing came out of it, though.”
“Why do you think that was, Mrs. Spencer?” Oscar chimed in.
“It was the late seventies, Mr. Cunningham,” she said, matter-of-factly. “No one cared very much for the problems of the aristocracy. There was simply too much going on in the country at the time. There was an oil and energy crisis crippling the industrial sector, The Bretton Woods financial crisis was threatening to shut down the world economy and there were council and labor strikes going on as well. It was all that confusion that got Margaret Thatcher into office.”
“Okay,” Chyna said after a long silence. “I don’t think we have any more questions at the moment, Marion.”
“I hope I’ve helped, even a little.”
“You certainly have,” Chyna assured her, as they stood to leave. “If we think of anything else, may we give you a call?”
“Absolutely.”
“Thank you, Marion,” Chyna said as she stood outside the door again. “Whatever we find, I’ll be sure to let you know how it turns out.”
“Thank you, dear. I would appreciate that very much.”
When they were back in the car, Chyna said, “Now I’m intrigued. There’s something sinister lying just beneath the surface here and I feel like we need to uncover it before it pops up to bite us.”
“You’re actually scaring me a little, boss. What are you sensing?”
“Well, Marion said Sir William’s designer was an Asian woman.”
“So?”
“I don’t know if it has anything to do with anything, but I’m beginning to feel like I’ve seen and heard about more Asian women in the last week than I have in my whole life.”
“Coincidence, perhaps?”
“Perhaps, but I don’t think so. Let’s get to London.”
***
An hour later, they were pulling up in front of Evan Montgomery’s swanky Notting Hill office. He was the head of an exclusive interior design, restoration and renovation company, Poitiers Design, named for his illustrious ancestor’s family.
Surprisingly, Evan was rather accommodating to Chyna and Oscar, giving them as much detail as he could remember about what transpired before, during and after the renovation work at Dordogne. Apparently, the job had gone well; staying on schedule and coming in under budget.
“How was that possible?” Chyna asked.
“I used a lot of local tradesmen on the site, even some of the estate staff when they came off their vacation and had nothing to do. A lot of those stable hands were pretty good blacksmiths and a few of the footmen and yard boys turned out to have woodworking skills. I could utilize them under the supervision of the more experienced workers at a lower labor cost. They were happy to have the work and I was happy to have the help.”
He showed them into a large room which contained rows and rows of fireproof filing cabinets and looked for the ones marked ‘D’. Pulling open a drawer, he flipped through the files until he found the one he was looking for. The tab had a typewritten label on it that said ‘Dordogne - 1978’. Evan pulled it out and handed it to Oscar.
“That will have all the names of the companies and people who worked on the project,” Evan said.
“Thanks, Evan,” Chyna replied. “Is there anything in there about the contents of the house at the time? What went into storage and what came out?”
“No. None of that involved me. You would have to check William’s old files for that type of information.”
“Any idea where we would find those?” Oscar asked.
“As a matter of fact, yes. They would be in Robert’s London office. Do you have the address?”
Chyna had never had a problem taking a hint and it was now plain that Evan felt that he had given them all the time he was willing to give, but she had a more crucial question to ask.
“Yes, we do,” she replied curtly. “Mr. McKinley told us that after Sir William had struck the deal with you to do the work on the manor house, you offered to include the work on the carriage house and the caretaker’s cottage gratis. Why was that?”
Evan smiled and
shook his head before he answered her. Chyna wondered if he was stalling in order to give her the politically correct response.
“You have to understand what the economy was like at the time, Miss Stone.”
It was going to be the politically correct answer.
“My livelihood was most certainly in jeopardy and so was my pension from the estate. Even though I was against William’s idea to open up the house, the antique collection and the gardens to the viewing public, it would mean that Dordogne would have a steady income coming in which would help to support the entire family.
“Outside of my genuine gratitude to William for the work, I felt that if he was going to go ahead with his plan, then the renovation might as well be well done the first time. God forbid the rabble would be traipsing through the garden to be met with the sight of the dilapidated outbuildings.”
Evan’s remark rubbed Chyna the wrong way; it was a touch too elitist for her liking. In the same breath, she understood his concerns. It was comparable to checking into a four-star hotel where the lobby was first class, but the beds had cheap sheets on them and the towels were thin and scratchy.
“Will that be all?” he pressed.
“I think we have everything we need for now, Mr. Montgomery,” Chyna replied. “I do have one more question, though.”
“Certainly.”
“What about the curator? Sir William had someone come in to catalog the collection and design the displays of the items. Do you know where we could find the records of the work she did?”
His expression changed in an instant from one of bored accommodation to surprise and irritation. He cast questioning looks from Chyna to Oscar and then back again. But then, just as quickly, he collected himself and responded to her question.
“I don’t have a clue, Miss Stone. My brother hired his quacks and his supposed experts all the time, as if the knowledge that he was in possession of a priceless collection of antiques wasn’t enough for him; he had to have constant confirmation of it. As for a catalog, I’ve never come across anything like that before. Perhaps you will have better luck at the Angevin Foundation.”