Iris knocked on his door. They waited. She knocked again, an impatient clamour in the quiet hall. Did he think they would just go away?
“We know you’re in there!” Iris said. “Open the door.”
Maybe Iris knew he was in there. But Rebecca thought he’d probably skipped town, once he realized she suspected him. And she didn’t want Iris to break down the door. Then she noticed it was not firmly set in, the way it would be if it were locked. She tried the handle and it turned easily.
She pushed the door open. “Teodor?”
The apartment was dark inside, as if the curtains were still drawn from the night. A musty basement odour escaped into the hall.
They stepped into the front entranceway and both gasped together. In the centre of the living room, a body hung suspended from a rope around its neck. The other end was attached to a light fixture. Rebecca found the light switch. Iris looked away. It was Teodor. His eyes were bulging, his neck a mottled purple. His skin had the waxy appearance of someone who’d been dead for a while.
Iris stayed rooted to the spot. Rebecca approached gingerly, looking around. She touched one of his hands. It was ice cold and a bit stiff. Rigor mortis had come and gone. He had probably been dead all night. An overturned stool lay beneath him.
She found a phone in the kitchen and called the police. Iris retreated back into the hall to wait for the cops to arrive. Rebecca avoided looking at the body hanging in the middle of the room while she prowled around with great care, being sure not to touch anything. On a desk near the window lay an orderly sheaf of papers. She stood beside it and read the top sheet. She recognized the type, the uneven pressure of some of the letters, the slight break in the letter “o” —it was the same as Michael’s manuscript:
My life is unbearable. I cannot go on. I’m sorry about Count Oginski, I shouldn’t have done it. But he took away my future. He made history into popular culture, debasing it into a cheap novel. Everything I worked so hard for, it all seemed so senseless. I thought if I could use some of his research — but it is impossible. My thesis is a shambles and will never be accepted. My failure is too much to endure.
The initials, “T.Z.” were written by hand at the bottom.
She read it over again. I’m sorry about Count Oginski. I shouldn’t have done it. There it was. He had killed Michael. Why, she wasn’t quite sure. He blamed Michael for ruining his thesis. Hauer had said he had trouble keeping up with the work, that he was desperate. Michael had been a scapegoat for an unstable mind. Following in his father’s footsteps. He seemed paranoid about Hauer; maybe he had been living in some delusional system that she never got the opportunity to observe.
A bell went off in her head. She stared at the pile of paper beneath the suicide note. It wasn’t thick enough to be the rest of the manuscript, but it was something.
She didn’t want to touch the note so she bent over and blew it gently until it moved partly away. Peeking from beneath, the page read, “The Stolen Princess, February 1759.” So there it was.
Constable Woolrich arrived first, a lean, fair-haired young man who assumed a business-like manner while speaking to Rebecca and Iris but who seemed shaken by the corpse in the living room. Standing in the hall, his back turned to the open door, he dutifully wrote down in his notebook the story Rebecca told him of Michael’s death and how it seemed connected to Teodor. She mentioned the suicide note.
“A detective will be by shortly,” said the constable. “He’ll sort out all of that.”
Within the hour, Detective Frohman arrived, followed by forensic people in white coveralls. Still in the hallway, she repeated everything to the detective, a portly, middle-aged man with brush-cut hair who smelled vaguely of stale cigarette smoke.
When she mentioned the letter, he stuck his head in the doorway.
“Hey Phil,” he called to one of the forensic guys, “dust the letter on the desk, will ya?”
“You’ve been a big help, Doctor.” He turned to Iris. “Ma’am. Now if you’ve given the constable your addresses and phone numbers, you’re free to go.”
Rebecca remembered the small pile of papers beneath the letter.
“Would I be able to… I mean, would it be all right if I took the pages sitting there on the desk? Once you’ve finished your investigation. They’re part of a manuscript that Teodor took from Mr. Oginski and I’d like to give them back to his son.” After she had photocopied and read them.
“You’ll have to wait till forensics is finished, Doctor. That’ll still be a while. Do you know who his next of kin is?”
“No, I hardly knew him. But you could ask his supervisor. Anton Hauer. I have his office number.”
He copied the number down from the card she retrieved from her wallet.
The forensic team worked quietly in the shadow of the body suspended from the ceiling. After the coroner arrived and had a chance to examine the body in situ, Teodor was at last cut down and laid out on the floor. As a physician she had seen death in many forms, but violent death was rare in her practice and never failed to shock her. Iris was uncharacteristically quiet. Her hair still swept up from her face, though her features had fallen.
Once outside, Rebecca breathed in great gulps of fresh air. Iris looked like a deer caught in the headlights.
Rebecca felt guilty for asking her to come. She walked Iris to her car. “How about dinner tonight? We’ll go out for Chinese.”
Iris gave her a baleful look. “For a change I have no appetite.”
Rebecca tried to smile, gazed numbly at the leafy linden trees. “It’ll come back by tonight. Think of it this way: Teodor felt guilty for killing Michael and chose to end his own life. It doesn’t make things any more palatable, but it does put them into perspective.” She put her hand gently on Iris’s arm. “Meet me at the office at seven o’clock and we’ll stroll over to Spadina Gardens.” Iris’s favourite restaurant.
“I’ll drive you to your car,” Iris said, without expression.
“No, that’s all right. It’s just a few blocks. I’d like to walk.”
She watched Iris, looking dazed, step into her Pontiac and drive off.
Rebecca turned south. The afternoon sun warmed the Victorian stone houses of Beverley Street, just like yesterday. As if nothing had changed. As if Teodor was too small to count in the scheme of things.
Her empty office seemed curiously peaceful in light of the afternoon’s events. Suddenly her head became too heavy for her neck. She eased into the leather chair behind her desk and put her head down to rest on her arms.
An hour and a half later she startled awake. She blinked at her watch: 3:30.
In the bathroom she splashed cold water on her face, catching herself in the mirror. Her dark hair lay in unruly waves around her face, a pale, unwholesome apparition. She had missed lunch and began to feel the gnawing of an empty stomach.
In the drawer of her desk she found an old Three Musketeers bar and took a few bites. Some roasted almonds kept it company until she chewed them up. After downing a glass of water, she set out for Teodor’s apartment again.
When she arrived, a few people were leaving the building and let her in the front door. There was yellow police tape across the apartment door but no constable guarding, which, she assumed, meant they had finished their preliminary investigation. She kicked herself for falling asleep. They had probably locked the door. Well, they had probably tried, but it didn’t quite fit into the doorframe. She turned the handle, and to her surprise, it gave way.
Ducking under the tape, she stepped into the apartment. The body was gone, but an unsavoury odour lingered. From the distance she could see the pages on the desk. They had been left behind. Lucky her.
She should probably get permission from the cops, but that would take time. She picked up the pile of paper reverently and estimated the number of pages: only about ten. A chapter. It was titled “Escape and Rescue.” Where was the rest of the manuscript? If Teodor had killed Michael, the manuscript had to
be here.
She began pulling open the drawers of the desk. There was a manuscript, a thick one in a binder, but it was Teodor’s thesis, titled, “The Disappearance of Poland: Life during Partition.” It was riddled with red editorial markings, entire pages dismissed with jagged, irritated lines, presumably made by Hauer. The middle drawer held file folders filled with copious notes in Teodor’s hand. In the bottom drawer she found a handwritten letter:
Dear Count Oginski,
I wanted to let you know how much I enjoyed reading your manuscript. It is a masterpiece! You made history come alive, writing about the real people who created events. We historians start with events and try to discover why they happened and only incidentally talk about the people. I wanted to tell you how much your book has influenced my work and come to make me view “history” in a different way. Do not be concerned about the scholarly approach of some academics who —
How two-faced he was! Or just conflicted. He hated Michael’s book. He loved Michael’s book. Very unstable. A fragile personality.
Then a shock came over her. It was her phone call that had pushed him over the edge! Her wanting to talk to him about Michael. He realized she knew. And he couldn’t face the consequences. He was fastening the noose around his neck while she was having a pleasant dinner at her parents’ house. If she hadn’t called him…
She distracted herself by continuing to search for the manuscript. It was a bachelor apartment with a pull-out couch where he must have slept. The closet and the dresser in the corner contained only his drab, simple clothes, corduroy trousers and washed-out shirts.
She couldn’t think straight. Her stomach was growling and she needed to pay attention to it. Maybe some Chinese takeout. The thought of food nauseated her in the middle of this pathetic apartment, the chaos of a life lost, the possibility that the life had been lost with her help.
Picking up the chapter of The Stolen Princess, she tiptoed out of the apartment.
chapter twenty-seven
Escape and Rescue
February 1759
I stare at the paper with the official seal, but my eyes blur before me. No, it’s the words that blur. An elegant hand tracing watery insects across the page. Damn my head! I give it a good shake. No, that is worse. The words run together into a pool as if the ink they had been printed with suddenly became liquid again and drowned all meaning.
“Young Tom,” I say, “be so kind as to read this to me.”
Tom is the son of a trusted servant at Coldbrook, my house in Wales. I have watched him grow into a kind, if dull, young man whose duty it has become to tend to me. He takes his responsibilities seriously and at times I must remind him who is master.
“Why, Sir Charles,” he says astonished, “it’s from the King!
“Yes, of course!” I say impatiently. “He’s in danger and needs saving. I have offered to sacrifice myself. I will return to my post in Russia where the Pretender is planning his next strike.”
“Bonnie Prince Charlie?” he says, cocking his head at me with half-witted incredulity.
“When does he say I might go?” I ask, trying not to be rude, but the truth is I am losing patience.
Tom turns back to the letter. His brows shift together like little sparrows. I warrant there is as much understanding behind them as well.
He continues to read. “I’m afraid, Sir Charles, he says you may not.” Tom looks up. I grimace. “He says you have served him gallantly in the past. But now others must carry on and you are to attend to your health.”
I shake my head. He has got it wrong.
“But when can I go?” I say quite beside myself. “Look more closely and find the date.”
Tom is thick as a post, it is true. An attribute rampant among servants. A good soul, but thick, and as I cannot read the letter myself, I must gather its meaning between the lines, so to speak. The King does not wish it to get out that his old foe, the Pretender, has new plans afoot to strike at the Kingdom. The letter is written in code and I must decipher it.
“Read me precisely what it says,” I say.
Tom scowls at me. He is a tall stripling, and his scowl might strike fear into one who did not know him. But my own Fanny helped teach him to read as a boy, and his gratitude extends to her father.
He clears his throat and begins.
Sir Charles,
You have served us brilliantly during your sojourn in Russia, going above and beyond the call of duty on behalf of King and Country. We yet have friends in that court on account of your prodigious work. Now after all your stalwart efforts, it is time to allow others to carry on the burden of a posting in a country with whom we are in a difficult war.
We are told of your illness and advise that you turn all of your attention toward it. With fervent wishes for your return to good health,
George II Rex
Tom looks up, eyes popping with wonder. “The King’s gratitude! He is full of praise for you, Sir Charles. I am very proud to know you.” He bends his knee and bows down.
“Up, boy! Up!” I shake my head at his dullness. “We must put our heads together, Tom, for this letter is written in code. When he says we yet have friends in Russia, he means me to go back and use them to our advantage.”
Tom shakes his head slowly. “But sir, I don’t think…”
“And when he says for others to carry on the burden of a posting, he means that I should be left free of that burden and go not as an envoy but as — as a friend of the court. A spy. I would be more useful that way. It is obvious.”
Tom turns back to the letter. “I’m not sure of…”
“You are blind, Tom! When he writes ‘a difficult war’ it means we are losing. King Frederick is on the run from the French, the Austrians, and the Russians, and Frederick is our ally. That is my job — to sue for peace with the Empress. The longer the war continues, the more chance there is that France will help Prince Charles Edward Stuart invade England. That is the real danger. The Jacobites, led by the avaricious Pretender.”
Tom screws up his eyes, holding the paper closer.
“Do not bother searching the letter for more, young Tom, for you have not deciphered code as I have. You must trust me in this. The king sends me to Russia and I choose you to accompany me.” I beam at him, pleased with myself for offering him this opportunity.
Tom’s eyes grow round. “But… but I have never left England. There’s my mother…”
“Your mother will burst with pride!” I smile with indulgence, and then memory. “I have seen such things as you cannot imagine. You will never have such occasion again. Say nothing to your family, for this is a secret mission.”
Tom appears uncertain, yet animated. “Perhaps you forget, Sir Charles, I am bidden to see that you do not leave this house. The doctor says you are not yourself.”
I purse my lips and aim at him my most compelling face. “I am more myself now than I have been for months. The rest and exercise the good doctor prescribed have cured me. You are a witness that I do not jabber on like before; my thoughts are perfectly lucid. How can you chance the future of England? If I am right, you will be a hero. If I am wrong, you will return a wiser man filled with adventures.”
His eyes dart with excitement. I have hooked him! “If we are to go,” he says, “I must notify Dr. Batty.”
“Under no circumstances!” I cry. “No one is to know. Our King’s life depends upon it! What would your family say if your carelessness were responsible for the death of the King?”
Tom stares at me, horror in his eyes. He shakes his head with much vehemence. “I’ll say nothing,” he murmurs.
“If someone is curious about our packing of bags, we shall say we are off to Bath for the waters.”
“Yes, but…”
“You must arrange our transport, Tom, for I will be suspect, but I will tell you all. You need only follow my instructions. It is a devilish long way and we must prepare. First, you will need to hire a coach that will take us to Yarmouth
. There we will embark on a ship bound for Hamburg.” I stop at the anxiety written on his face. “Do not gape at me so! Are you a patriotic Englishman?”
Tom stares at me, befuddled, but tenders a nod.
“Capital!” I cry. “Do you love your King?”
A heartier nod.
“Excellent! Now, we must be very circumspect and keep our own counsel. Not a word to anyone, else the mission will fail. Understood?”
Tom blinks. “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Where was I? Oh, yes. After Hamburg, we will be at the mercy of the weather. If there is not too much ice we might perchance set sail through the Baltic Sea. Otherwise we must hire a coach for the remainder of the journey. It will be quite an ordeal. I assure you I will be ill for weeks during the voyage, but when the King calls upon one, well, there’s nothing else for it. Now, young Tom, have you any money?”
Tom’s face darkens.
“No, of course you don’t. Forgive my asking. I shall collect expenses afterwards from a grateful government. In the mean time I have some money hidden here, which I have told no one about. But it will require a great deal more. You will take me to the bank, where I shall draw upon my account…”
One day along the long road of our journey I glance out the window of our coach and see him whom I most fear. Tom notes my distress and peers out at the bleak countryside where I am turned.
“What is it, Sir Charles?”
“Do you not see him?” I ask astonished. “He rides a tremendous white horse. A great handsome fellow, wide of shoulder, his own yellow hair beneath the tricorn.”
“Where, Sir Charles? I see but snow upon a hill.”
“The Pretender’s regimentals, blue trimmed with red. A cutlass at his side.” Not to alarm the boy, I refrain from adding, at the ready for our slaying.
Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle Page 54