A Pretty Deceit

by Anna Lee Huber

  “You must know already that he was home on leave last autumn, and while he was repairing the bridge between the west park and the airfield he met Lord Ryde. The late one, anyway.” She paused. “I heard you on the telephone.”

  “I know,” I replied.

  She licked her lips again and I began to worry about her blood loss.

  “He took Frank into his confidence, telling him how critical it was that he hide something for a time, lest it fall into the wrong hands. So Frank helped him bury it in the west park.”

  “Do you know what that something is?”

  “No, he refused to tell me. Wouldn’t even reveal where he’d buried it. Or where he hid it after he dug it up. But . . . I gathered it was something terrible. This look would come over his face whenever he talked about it. It almost made me frightened to ask.”

  Sidney’s gaze lifted to meet mine, wondering as I was what we were dealing with if a hardened veteran of the worst war the world had ever fought was daunted by it.

  “Whatever it was,” she continued. “I think he tried to forget about it for a time. At least, he didn’t speak of it to me. Not until this summer, when he began to give up hope he would ever find a hospital that could help Tilly. Then he told me he had done a favor for Lord Ryde, that if he wrote to him, maybe he would help.” Her brow furrowed. “He waited for weeks for a response. And then one morning I saw him in the garden and he was furious. He said he’d discovered that someone was digging holes in the west park. He assumed whoever was doing it was connected with Lord Ryde because of that letter. But when his temper had cooled, he began to recognize that made little sense. That the letter he’d posted might have been intercepted and inadvertently revealed the secret Lord Ryde had worked so hard to conceal. Once he learned the late Lord Ryde was dead, he became certain of this.” She broke off, searching my face. “You’re working with his son, aren’t you? I heard Mr. Kent say his name.”

  “Yes,” I replied simply, the truth being so much harder to explain.

  “Then I wish I knew where Frank hid it. But he never confided it in me. Perhaps he knew I was too weak to keep his secret.”

  I was not about to be diverted into a discussion of Miss Musselwhite’s trustworthiness, or lack thereof. Particularly when I suspected she would have readily given up what others had sacrificed so much to conceal to save her own hide. “So he dug it up and hid it elsewhere to keep it safe,” I summarized. “And let me guess, he also found another Roman coin?”

  Her eyes closed momentarily in a flicker of pain. “He decided that would be their saving grace.”

  “Why didn’t he take the coins from the box Minnie had stolen?” I asked. “They must have been a sore temptation.”

  “They were. But he didn’t know if they were documented. If the police might come looking for him after he sold them. He decided it was better not to take the chance they could be traced. Instead, he watched Captain Willoughby and Lieutenant Smith probe their holes, and then went in after them to search for more coins. I’m not sure he found many. But he was patient. I know he was trying to decide what to do, who to tell.” Her eyes drifted from the sky overhead to Sidney’s face. “He . . . he seemed hopeful after your arrival. Asked a lot of questions about you.”

  A tendril of dark hair had flopped over his forehead above his eyes, which were stark with resignation, realizing what she was hinting around. Mr. Green had decided to confide in Sidney, but he’d been killed before he could do so.

  However, I was not going to allow her to pass any of the blame for his death on to my husband, not when he already shouldered so much unwarranted guilt for the deaths of others. Not when she was the person who poisoned him.

  “Why did you kill him?” I asked baldly, giving her no room to hide.

  She blanched and then inhaled a shaky breath, as if steeling herself. “I didn’t want to,” she murmured in a soft voice. “I thought we were great friends, you know. Allies. We confided in each other, relied on each other.” She swallowed. “But something changed after Minnie was killed. He looked at me differently. And then . . . one night he tried to kiss me. I . . . I told him no. That I couldn’t do that. Not to my sister. He grew angry. Really, really angry. I’ve never seen him like that. And then cold and cruel. He froze me out for several days. Until he told me that if I didn’t return his affection, he would tell everyone what happened with Minnie and prevent me from seeing my sister.” Tears streamed from her eyes, freely flowing down her cheeks. “I was so shocked and hurt. I didn’t know what to do. I’d trusted him.”

  I glanced behind me, seeing a vehicle in the distance driving up the road, dust billowing from beneath its tires.

  “I couldn’t, I just couldn’t do that to my sister.” Her words suddenly grew flat and almost distant. I could tell she was growing tired, but this was more than that. It was almost as if she couldn’t accept the truth of what she was saying, so she’d closed herself off from it emotionally. “And then I remembered the curare in Dr. Maslen’s office. He showed it to me once. He’d brought it back from his trips to South America. Even experimented with it. He’d told me how it worked. So I made an excuse to visit Dr. Razey, and while he was distracted, took the bottle from the cabinet. It was exactly where Dr. Maslen had left it. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. I took one of Lady Popham’s syringes, and I told Frank to meet me in the west park that night.” Her eyes hardened. “I knew he would come. Despite my sister begging him not to. He nearly mauled me when I appeared. And when . . .” She began to falter. “When he was distracted, I plunged it into his neck. At first, it didn’t seem to work, and he was furious. I worried I’d done it wrong. But then slowly, slowly it began to take effect.” Her voice began to tremble. “At first in his face, and then his neck, and then the rest of his body. Eventually he couldn’t move or draw breath, but I could see he was aware, that he was watching me. I left before the end.”

  I was utterly horrified by what she’d revealed, and much of my empathy was quashed by the fact that her main motivation had been self-preservation. She might profess she did it out of loyalty to her sister, but the truth was she could have revealed what she’d done to Minnie herself, removed the source of Mr. Green’s blackmail. The proof lay in the fact that when her sister was accused of the very crime she had committed supposedly out of loyalty to her, she never seemed to have considered confessing to it to save her.

  The vehicles were drawing close now, and yet there was one piece still missing from the puzzle, so I began to speak quickly. “You chose to meet Mr. Green in the west park because of the airmen, didn’t you? You hoped the blame would fall on them?”

  She opened her eyes. “Yes, but they saw me, or they simply knew.”

  It was likely Willoughby or Smith who had taken the lantern and whatever implements Mr. Green had brought with him. And it was they who Opal had seen in the distance, if she’d seen anyone at all.

  “They told me if I didn’t bring them the item Frank had taken from the earth before they could find it that they would tell everyone. But I never knew what it was or where it was buried.”

  So the very extortion she’d thought she’d escaped had come back around to her, merely in a different form.

  I shook my head in disgust, turning to address the men hastening forward.

  CHAPTER 29

  It took several hours of talking to an irate Chief Inspector Thoreau, but he eventually cleared us of any wrongdoing. It took another hour to convince him to leave all mention of the buried package and Scott’s particular vendetta against me from his report. Not that I was truly worried. I knew Thoreau understood far more about my secretive work than he wished to, and was far more willing to comply with the necessity to conceal such things than he wanted to believe. But all the same I was grateful, particularly knowing that his superior, the head of CID, was Sir Basil Thomson, who was also the newly appointed Director of Intelligence, and friends with Ardmore.

  However, Thoreau proved to be not so compliant when it ca
me to believing this package we spoke of was lost. As I said, he understood me too well. So later that evening I happened to lead a party of six through Littlemote House rather than four.

  “Where are we going, Ver?” Sidney asked me as we climbed the stairs. “To the attics?”

  “No, somewhere much less austere. It’s been sitting under our noses from the very beginning.”

  I turned a corner and then stepped forward to push open a door—one that swung open with the greatest of ease. Sidney and the others stared over my shoulder in incomprehension, and then realization dawned in my husband’s eyes. “The master bedchambers.”

  “Yes,” I said, turning to enter the lavish lady’s chamber with its rose silk wallpaper and gilded picture frames. “You’ll recall it was Mr. Green who claimed that the sticking door was an indication of the structure’s warped wood and water damage. Whether there is actually damage or he simply made it up, I’m not qualified to say. But I do believe he chose to use the chambers’ vacancy to his own advantage.”

  “Yes, but he told your aunt to hire an expert to better assess the structure,” Sidney countered as he and the others spread out through the room.

  “Something he knew my aunt could not afford and so would not do. And with Reg being blind, it was unlikely he would contradict them.” I pushed open the door to the dressing room and then strolled on through to the master chamber, having already decided this was the room where the item was most likely stored.

  A quick survey of the forest-green walls showed no water stains or other obvious signs of concern, but once again, I was not well-versed in such things. Ornate walnut furnishings filled the space, just as in the lady’s chamber, and a thick Aubusson carpet stretched from wall to wall.

  “What precisely are we looking for?” Thoreau asked gruffly.

  “I’m not exactly certain. But something out of place. It may even be hidden.”

  “Something like this.”

  I turned at the sound of Alec’s voice as he lifted aside a merlot cloth covering a wooden cask about two feet high—wide and squat. My heart leapt at this proof that I had been right. “Yes, remove the cloth.”

  He whisked it aside and we all stared down at the barrel.

  “Opium?” Thoreau stated perplexedly, for that was what it was labeled.

  But I was suspicious. “How do we open it?”

  Sergeant Crosswire seemed to have some experience with this, for he stepped forward to handle the task as we all looked on. Once the top was removed, he stepped back to allow the rest of us to peer inside. What met our eyes made the blood drain from my face.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “Yes,” Sidney replied hollowly.

  It was Max who had enough presence of mind to reach inside and lift one of the metal cylinders from the barrel’s depths. Three of them had been nestled side by side and padded with hay, each about twenty inches in length and eight inches in diameter. When he turned it face up, we could see the telltale white star marking and read the horrifying word, Phosgene.

  For a moment, none of us seemed able to speak, too alarming was the discovery. How many of the casks the Zebrina had picked up on the Isle of Wight had been opium, and how many had hidden these more sinister contents? And that crate the men on Wight had mentioned, was it a Livens Projector used to hurl these at enemy lines? Had all the cargo the Zebrina had smuggled out been poison gas, not opium?

  It was no wonder Max’s father had felt tormented about what he’d done. But what on earth had he intended the phosgene to be used for in the first place? To gas the Irish rebels? The thought was sickening.

  And look what had come of it. Though we suspected the gas cylinders had been intercepted by men in the employ of Ardmore, who then killed most of the Zebrina crew, we still had no proof of it. I’d expected papers of some kind, a trail of evidence leading straight to Ardmore’s door, but all the late Lord Ryde had left us was an even more disturbing puzzle.

  Where were the rest of these phosgene cylinders now? And what were they intended for? I briefly considered the possibility that they’d already been utilized, except I’d heard nothing about any gas attacks since the end of the war, and none on British soil.

  My gaze lifted to Max’s face first, my heart squeezing at the confusion and anguish I saw stamped across his features. Discovering what his father had really been mixed up in could not be easy. Even more so, the realization of what his father had been willing to do. Max had been at the front. He had likely seen what phosgene did to a man—drowning him in the liquid discharged from his own lungs. I’d never witnessed it myself, but I’d read the reports. It was a ghastly way to die.

  I turned to Sidney next, seeing the anger flashing in his eyes as he tried to push aside his shock. Easier to be furious than give in to the memories of his time in the trenches. After the first gas attack at Ypres in April 1915, he and his men had faced every day knowing they might be smothered by the enemy with poisonous gas. “Put it back carefully,” he told Max unnecessarily, but someone had to break the tense silence.

  I studied Alec, whose expression I could not read. “Did you have any suspicions about this?”

  He shook his head. “No, if there were ever missing cylinders of phosgene, I was never told about it.”

  Given the fact that they would have disappeared during the autumn of 1917, in the midst of a brutal war, as smuggled cargo for the Zebrina’s doomed voyage, I suspected the fact had been hushed up or brushed aside as faulty accounting.

  “Forget that. What in blazes do you intend to do with them?” Thoreau demanded, clearly more unsettled than he wished to appear. I began to wonder how he’d spent his war serving.

  * * *

  After the trouble he’d given us over the incident with Scott and my failure to confide in him earlier, I expected Chief Inspector Thoreau to put up a fight about the disposition of the gas cylinders. I wasn’t sure if his ready capitulation was an indication of his trust in me, or an acknowledgment that the matter had taken on a complexity that surpassed his means and would draw the unwanted attention of his glory-hound superior—Sir Basil Thomson. Whatever the case, he gamely allowed us to take the cylinders back with us to London. Where I passed them into Alec’s care, relying on him to deliver them to C without incident and explain the matter to him.

  Given the alarming nature of our report, I’d hoped C might arrange to meet with me in person, despite the complications that could arise should the discovery of our direct communication be revealed. But it was Alec who I once again met in St. James’s Park four days later. The afternoon was blustery and threatened rain, so we and a few other brave souls had the paths all to ourselves.

  “C offers his compliments,” Alec began as we strolled side by side, hands tucked in our pockets, around the lake speckled with the leaves from the trees ringing it.

  I made a noise somewhere between a grunt and a rumble of ascent. The truth was, I was growing distinctly annoyed with C, with all of the Secret Service, even though I had known this was the way it would be. After all, I had been the one to contact C for his unofficial help some three months past.

  “Major Scott’s men are refusing to talk, of course,” Alec said, debriefing me on the dramatis personae from the incident at Littlemote. “And they’ve secured a rather influential barrister. One who is decidedly beyond their means.”

  “Hmm, yes. I wonder who is footing the bill,” I remarked dryly.

  “No trail, of course,” Alec added. “Ardmore’s too clever for that. But all indications are Scott’s men shall get off with little more than a slap to the wrist. Particularly as we were unable to press charges for their more serious crimes without revealing secrets the state would rather we not.”

  I huddled deeper into my coat. “And let me guess, Captain Willoughby and Lieutenant Smith have both been reassigned. Posts unknown.”

  “No, one better.” His voice was deep with reluctant admiration. “The records show they were never posted to Froxfield at all.”
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  I turned to him in shock. “How on earth . . . ?” I broke off, frustration simmering in my veins. “Aliases?” I guessed.

  “Maybe. Though they may not have been necessary.”

  “Because we never actually saw them at the airfield.” It was always in adjacent properties that could have been accessed by other means, or the sky. “But I saw Captain Willoughby flying one of the light bombers.”

  He shrugged. “Maybe it took off from an adjacent property.”

  I closed my eyes briefly, unable to believe the deception that had played out right under our noses.

  “Though I was able to find out that, as you expected, Lieutenant Smith was never assigned to the RAF. He was a Fusilier. A sniper.”

  I supposed that explained his ability to shoot Major Scott through the heart at such a distance, even through the body of another human. I scowled. And perhaps that strange intuition of danger Sidney and I had both experienced in the west park the morning we first met Captain Willoughby. Had Lieutenant Smith been perched in one of the trees? Would he have shot us? I guessed we might never know.

  I exhaled, rolling my head to relieve some of the tension in my neck. “Then we have nothing but a suspicion that Ardmore possesses an unknown quantity of phosgene he intends to use in some unspecified manner at some unidentified location, and yet no way to prove it,” I snapped beneath my breath.

  “Yes, but it could be worse. At least we know.”

  I glared at Alec, finding the fact that he was trying to cheer me both decidedly unhelpful and annoying. “Yes, and he knows we know. I received a note from him just yesterday expressing his appreciation for finding the gas cylinders, and conveying how fortunate it was they didn’t fall into the wrong hands.”

  He shook his head in astonishment. “That man certainly enjoys goading you.” Alec grinned. “But then again, so do I.”

  I cast him a black look, one that, absurdly, I knew would only please him.