‘What about the… the contraption, sir?’
‘What about it?’
‘It could be some new weapon of unspeakable power, sir. It has to be researched.’
‘And it will be, I assure you, Commander Killigrew,’ Graham said blithely. ‘We’ll get our top men working on it right away.’
Killigrew did not look satisfied. ‘Who?’ he insisted.
Graham glared at him, and replied with slow deliberation: ‘Top men.’
Chapter 2
Death in Paddington
Killigrew watched Graham’s carriage disappear into the falling snow and sighed, feeling suddenly weary. Jurgaitis had always thought of himself as a Briton, whatever his ancestry. He had given his life for his country, and his country did not even care. The commander turned the collar of his frock-coat up against the falling snow and hunched his shoulders, walking through St James’s until he came to Piccadilly, where he was able to flag down a passing hansom and head for home, stopping en route to purchase some groceries.
For the past four years – of which he had spent two and a half at sea – ‘home’ had been a set of rooms in a house off Praed Street, where rents had dropped alarmingly when it was announced that the Great Western Railway would be extending their main line deeper into the city, terminating at – you guessed it – Praed Street, where the new terminus had just been opened. The landlady lived on the ground floor and did not approve of her tenants entertaining guests of the opposite sex, but Killigrew had soon discovered she depended upon the creaking fifth step to enforce this rule, as well as to catch tenants whose rent was in arrears. He had paid up until the end of the previous year, thinking that he would return with the fleet by Christmas; so it had come as a pleasant surprise when he returned a few weeks later than expected to find she had not thrown his stuff out into the street and relet the rooms.
He avoided the fifth step now, since he would not be able to pay his rent until he had reported on board HMS Ramillies to collect his own arrears. As he had learned from a clerk at the Admiralty the Ramillies was at Sheerness for a refit, that would have to wait until later in the week.
The suite of rooms was modest: he had to be able to afford it even when he was on half-pay, and besides, he spent so little of his time there it was not worth renting anything more than a kitchen, bedroom and parlour. The threadbare furniture and mismatched furnishings betrayed the fact it was rented accommodation, and there were few personal touches – shelves of books ranging from the Aeneid to the latest Dumas père, and souvenirs of his travels: doilies of Maltese lace upon the table; a jewelled dagger from the Levant (useful as a letter opener); a Chinese puzzle box; an amulet made from polar bear’s teeth; and a carved wooden West African fertility totem pressed into service as a bookend.
The rooms were cold and musty after being uninhabited for so long. His sea-chest had been delivered from the station while he had been at the Admiralty, and there was a pile of mail just inside the door, thrust under by the landlady at some point: invitations to Christmas balls he had missed, final demands from money brokers who had bought up his debts from various tradesmen, and begging letters. Who wrote the last of these and what made them think he could help them would always be a mystery. Most of them were from lunatics who had come up with hare-brained schemes to explore the Poles, and thought he was just the man to lead their expedition. When Killigrew had asked Sir John Ross about what he could expect when he went to the Arctic three years ago, that venerable explorer had forgotten to mention the letters from crackpots. He could not help thinking he could have used them the first (and definitely the last) time he had gone to the Arctic: they made good firelighters. Once he had a fire burning in the hearth, he poured himself a glass of whisky and sat down in one of the threadbare easy chairs to enjoy a cheroot.
He had just got comfortable when, inevitably, there was a knock at the door. He pushed himself to his feet and was about to answer the knock when a thought occurred to him. He was not expecting anyone, and after his encounter on the train earlier he could not be too careful. If it was Russian spies come to stop him from delivering the plans to the Admiralty, they were too late: but they might not realise that.
He fetched a revolver from his sea-chest, tiptoed to the door and threw it open sharply, grabbing the man standing on the other side and dragging him inside, throwing him into a chair and pointing the pistol at him. He did it so quickly and efficiently, he did not realise that ‘he’ was a ‘she’ until he looked and saw the Honourable Miss Araminta Maltravers glaring up at him.
‘Well! That’s a fine way to greet your fiancée!’
Closing the door behind her, he quickly lowered the revolver. ‘Sorry. Being attacked on a train by a pastor does rather put one on edge.’
‘A pastor?’ she exclaimed, and smiled. Nearly thirty now, she was a tall woman with light brown hair and a strong-jawed face, long lashes framing her cool grey eyes and a hint of freckles dusted across the sides of her nose. ‘It must have been one of Mr Kingsley’s muscular Christians.’
‘Very droll.’ He smiled. ‘Minty. You know one of the things that makes you different from other women? Other women are never quite as beautiful as you remember them to be. Why is it you always seem to be more beautiful than I remember?’
She rose to her feet. ‘Oh, you remembered me, did you?’
He spread his arms to embrace her. ‘Couldn’t keep you out of my mind.’
She moved towards him, but instead of entering his arms, she gave him a stinging slap across the cheek.
‘Minty! What was that for?’
‘You know jolly well! It’s a month since the Ramillies returned to Portsmouth. You didn’t think to get in touch before now?’
‘What do you mean, get in touch? I only got back today. I swear it. I had to stay behind in the Åland Islands for a few weeks. Look!’ He pointed to his sea-chest. ‘I haven’t even unpacked it yet.’
She regarded the chest with suspicion. For a moment she looked tempted to take his word for it, but she knew him too well for that, and crossed to lift the lid. ‘And you couldn’t write to me?’
‘Not really. I was on a secret mission. Ask Sir Charles Napier: he’ll tell you.’
She looked alarmed. ‘Nothing too dangerous, I hope?’
‘No more dangerous than coming home to the woman I love,’ he said, raising a hand to his cheek. He knew that if he looked in the mirror he would see the crimson imprint of her hand there. ‘Anyhow, it’s not as if you’d replied to any of the letters I’d sent you before then, so I was starting to wonder what the point was.’
‘What letters?’
Killigrew stared at her. ‘I must have written three dozen letters to you after you went back to England. Don’t tell me you didn’t receive one of them?’
She stared at him, open-mouthed. ‘Not one. Are you sure you sent them to the correct address?’
‘The Honourable Miss Araminta Maltravers, Bullivant House, Grosvenor Square.’
She clenched her jaw and her fists, nodding. ‘Papa must’ve intercepted them. That… why, I’ll… when I catch up with him… ooh!’ She was speechless with rage.
Killigrew almost felt sorry for the viscount. When he had first met the Bullivants, his lordship had lorded it over his wife and daughter just as much as he did over his tenants on his estates in Rutland, but during their adventures together in the Gulf of Finland the previous summer, Killigrew had seen a change come over the viscountess and her daughter. Lord Bullivant’s attitude had been less than helpful throughout the brief but perilous ordeal, and it had been as if something inside the two women had snapped, and they had tacitly decided they were not going to take any nonsense from him any more. By the time the dispatch boat had come to take them off the Ramillies, Bullivant had had the look of a broken and thoroughly hen-pecked man.
Araminta ran into Killigrew’s arms. ‘Oh, Kit! I’m sorry I ever doubted you.’
‘I’m sure you can think of some way you can make it up
to me.’
She kissed him: not a formal peck on the cheek, but the passionate kiss of a man and a woman who had been lovers in the past, and would be again in the future. In the very near future, Killigrew hoped.
‘Hungry?’ he asked.
‘Famished!’ She allowed him to take off her sortie de bal and hang it from the peg on the back of the door.
‘Me too. I’ll make some supper.’
He went into the kitchen and started unpacking the groceries while she sat down at the upright pianoforte in one corner of the parlour. The piano had been there when Killigrew had moved in, and would probably remain there long after he had moved on. Having no musical talent himself, he had used it to keep books on before Araminta had become a regular visitor to his rooms. Now she started playing ‘I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls’: sentimental pap, in Killigrew’s opinion, but she played so exquisitely he would have been happy to listen if it had been ‘Home, Sweet Home’; but that was a shade of sentiment too far even for Araminta.
He suspected she played the tune out of a mischievous sense of irony. The truth was she did dwell in marble halls – when she was at her father’s country estate, at least – and his town house was nothing to be sniffed at, either.
But she loved Killigrew all the same.
He loved good music well played, and had he had the least musical accomplishment he would much have preferred to be a concert musician than a naval officer, a sentiment that would have given his grandfather apoplexy. But he had known from childhood that he had never been destined for an artistic life: generations of portraits of naval officers on the walls of the gallery at Killigrew House in Falmouth had told him that.
‘Where do your parents think you are tonight?’ he asked her, cracking some eggs into a mixing bowl. The suite of rooms was small enough that a man whisking eggs in the kitchen could have a conversation with someone playing the piano in the parlour without any great vocal effort on the part of either.
‘The Panopticon, with Lord Hartcliffe and his mother,’ Araminta replied without missing a note.
‘How is Hartcliffe?’
‘Not good. He had a blazing row with his father over Christmas.’
‘Hartcliffe always has blazing rows with his father over Christmas. It’s a Hartcliffe family tradition.’ Killigrew did not need to ask what the row had been about. Hartcliffe’s elder brother had married an American woman, to the disgust of his father, the duke, who had disinherited him and even arranged an Act of Parliament so that Endymion was made his only heir and thus gained the title Lord Hartcliffe. His lordship had been at sea at the time, serving with Killigrew on board HMS Tisiphone in the South Seas, otherwise he might have pointed out the folly of his being made heir to the Dukedom of Hartcliffe: even if Lord Hartcliffe had been remotely interested in becoming duke one day, his natural inclinations made it highly unlikely he would ever produce an heir of his own. By the time the duke had learned the truth, his elder son had disappeared into the wilds of the American frontier.
‘I hear there’s some Scottish chap set up an inquiry agency in Chicago,’ said Killigrew, adding some butter to a saucepan. ‘Pinkstone, I think his name is, or something like that. He’s supposed to be very good. I keep meaning to dig out his address for Hartcliffe.’
‘What good would that do? I mean, even if you could get in touch with Augustus, there’s no guarantee he’d be any more interested in becoming duke than Endymion is.’
‘You should never underestimate the power of noblesse oblige,’ Killigrew told her, lighting one of the rings on the gas stove and turning it down to melt the butter.
‘And you should never underestimate the duke’s stubbornness. Honestly, from what Hartcliffe says, he’s as bad as Papa. You really think he’d swallow his pride and welcome home the prodigal son?’
‘If it meant keeping the family estates in the family? Yes, I think he would.’ Killigrew speared a piece of bread with a toasting fork and entered the parlour, propping it up in front of the fire.
‘Scrambled eggs on toast again?’
‘You always said you liked my scrambled eggs,’ he said defensively.
‘I do. But I thought that you’d have prepared something a little more special for our reunion?’
‘If I’d known you were coming, I’d’ve booked a table at Rules.’
‘What do you mean, if you’d known I was coming? You invited me, remember?’
‘My dearest Minty, far be it from me to suggest you’re anything other than welcome, but I didn’t invite you. I was planning a quiet night in, so I could be fresh and rested when I called on you tomorrow.’
She stopped playing and turned to face him. ‘Then why in the world did you send me a note?’
‘Note? What note?’
‘This note!’ She dug in the pocket of her skirt and took out a small, crumpled note that she thrust into his hands. ‘And don’t try and tell me that isn’t your handwriting! I should think I know it well enough by now.’
He stared at the note, a nasty cold feeling stirring in the pit of his stomach. It was his handwriting. It was even his notepaper – or the same brand, at any rate.
But he knew he had not written it.
He took her sortie de bal down from its peg and tossed it at her. ‘Come on. We’re leaving.’
She stared in astonishment. ‘Kit? What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know, but I’m fairly certain it would be better if we weren’t around to find out.’ He turned out the gas under the saucepan. Then, taking his revolver, he thrust it in one of the pockets of his frock-coat, grabbed her by the hand and opened the door.
To find Colonel Radimir Fokavich Nekrasoff coming up the stairs with Killigrew’s attacker from the Double Express Service, whose unsmiling face was now one mass of bramble-scratches.
Araminta let out a gasp of shock. She knew Nekrasoff from her adventure in the Baltic the previous summer; more importantly, she knew what he was capable of.
Killigrew reached for his revolver, but Nekrasoff was faster. ‘Please don’t,’ he said urbanely. ‘No one has to die.’
Moving in front of Araminta, Killigrew slowly raised his hands.
A door opened in the hallway below. ‘Gotcha!’ said Mrs Antrobus. ‘Oh, I’m sorry! I thought you were someone else.’ Killigrew could not see her from where he stood on the landing, and from the sound of it she could not see the revolver in Nekrasoff’s hand. ‘Er… who are you?’
‘Deal with her,’ Nekrasoff told his burly companion, without taking his eyes off Killigrew.
The other man raised his hands placatingly. ‘It’s quite all right, ma’am,’ he said. His English was, if anything, even better than Nekrasoff’s. ‘We’re detective police officers from Scotland Yard…’
As the other man descended to confront Mrs Antrobus, Nekrasoff gestured with his revolver for Killigrew to back into his rooms.
The commander was too stunned to do anything but comply. He had found himself looking down the barrel of a gun plenty of times before, but it was never a situation one took lightly. Besides, that was usually in the far-flung corners of the British Empire, when he was on duty. This was Britain, damn it; London!
Nekrasoff paused on the landing, facing Killigrew through the open door. ‘Keep going.’
As Killigrew obeyed, he saw Araminta had already snatched the poker from the fireplace and was standing against the wall by the door, ready to smash Nekrasoff in the face with it. It was a risky tactic, but it might be their only chance, and Killigrew’s fear for her mingled with admiration.
Nekrasoff hesitated on the threshold, however, trying to look past Killigrew into the rooms beyond. He rolled his eyes in exasperation. ‘Miss Maltravers, would you be so kind as to put down whatever makeshift weapon you’ve snatched up and move away from the door to where I can see you?’
She stared at Killigrew in disbelief. Nekrasoff pointed his revolver at the other side of the wall. He had guessed her position exactly; and at that range there
was every chance that the bullet would pass through the wall and through her as well.
‘You’d best do as he says,’ sighed Killigrew.
Araminta propped the poker against the wall and moved behind him once more.
‘That’s better.’ Nekrasoff stepped into the parlour, and smiled. ‘Well, here we all are: together again.’
‘I wish we could say we were pleased to renew your acquaintance,’ Killigrew said drily.
The other man came through the door and closed it behind him, nodding at Nekrasoff. The colonel gestured to one of the easy chairs with his revolver. ‘Sit down, Miss Maltravers.’
She shook her head. The big man put a hand on her chest and shoved her back into the seat. Killigrew managed to take two steps towards him before Nekrasoff thumbed back the hammer of his revolver.
Killigrew froze.
The big man took a length of rope from his coat pocket and started to tie Araminta up.
‘Up against the wall, Commander,’ ordered Nekrasoff. ‘Feet spread, leaning on your fingertips.’
Killigrew obeyed. Nekrasoff kept the muzzle of the revolver pressed against his spine as he frisked him expertly, quickly finding the revolver in his coat pocket. ‘Ah! I see you were expecting me.’ He threw the gun into a corner.
‘If I’d been expecting you, Nekrasoff, I’d’ve brought a rusty knife!’
Straightening, the colonel smiled. ‘Turn round.’
Killigrew turned. The big man had finished tying Araminta into the chair.
Nekrasoff pushed Killigrew towards the other chair. ‘Do sit down.’
The big man put a huge hand on one of Killigrew’s shoulders, forcing him down into the chair. The next thing Killigrew knew, the man was wrapping ropes around him, tying him fast. Killigrew tensed his muscles: Petty Officer Molineaux had once told him that if you did that, the ropes might have some slack in them when you relaxed.
‘There!’ Nekrasoff said in satisfaction as soon as the big man had finished tying Killigrew up. ‘I feel much safer now.’
‘I wish I could say the same,’ said Killigrew. He wriggled surreptitiously: as far as he could tell, tensing his muscles had not done a blind bit of good.
Killigrew and the Sea Devil Page 5