The Prisoner in the Castle

by Susan Elia MacNeal

  “It’s about Maggie Hope,” Durgin began without preamble, as the two men shook hands at the Marlborough Gate to St. James’s Park. Although the ornate ironwork had been removed to be melted down for munitions, the stone columns remained. The air was chilly and frost coated the grass. They trod the paths, finding themselves by the curving green lake, its surface ruffling in the wind as white pelicans, introduced to the park in 1664 as a gift from the Russian Ambassador to King Charles II, preened their feathers on the bank.

  “Maggie?” David’s breath made white clouds. He was just past thirty, elegantly slender and fair, eyes framed by round silver spectacles. A bowler hat and university scarf lent him gravitas, but nothing could suppress his innate vivacity. “Merciful Minerva—what’s wrong? Is she in some sort of trouble?”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Oh, let’s see…the last time I literally laid eyes on her was almost a year ago. But I heard from Chuck—that is, Charlotte Ludlow—that Mags swung through town this past spring.”

  “Do you know where she is now?”

  “Couldn’t say.”

  “Can’t—or won’t?”

  “What’s this about?” David demanded, brows knitting together in concern. “Is Maggie all right?”

  “She’s needed as a witness in the trial of Nicholas Reitter. We can’t find her and no one seems to know where she is. I’m concerned.”

  They turned to walk over John Nash’s graceful suspension bridge. Through the branches on one side was a view of Buckingham Palace and on the other, the Horse Guards Parade and the redbrick Old Admiralty.

  “Miss Hope’s testimony is of utmost importance,” Durgin continued. “And no one seems to know where she is or how to find her. I spoke with the man I believe to be her current supervisor, Colonel Henrik Martens, and he says she’s on active service in the field.”

  “I know Martens. He was with SOE in Norway for a while. He suffered an injury and Mr. Churchill named him Master of Deception or some such title recently. If Maggie’s working for him and that’s what he says—well, that’s it, then, yes? Not much we can do about it.” He shrugged. “There are secrets in war, DCI Durgin. And while I appreciate the fact Maggie’s absence might be inconvenient to your trial, the war’s the bigger picture here.”

  Durgin stopped. “I didn’t like the way he said it.”

  David stopped as well, pushing the frames of his glasses up his nose. He nodded. “Go on.”

  “I don’t trust Martens. My gut tells me something’s off. Something’s not right.”

  “Your ‘gut’?” David frowned.

  “It’s never steered me wrong.”

  David’s eyes followed one of the pelicans as it waddled to the water and splashed in. Then he inhaled. “Let me see what I can do, Detective Chief Inspector.”

  “I know you must be busy,” Durgin said, “but time really is of the essence.”

  “This is about Mags,” David reassured him. “You can believe I’ll move heaven and earth to find her.” He smiled. “Then give her a good what-for for worrying us.”

  * * *

  —

  The prisoners had pried open the drawers of Dr. Jaeger’s desk with his letter opener and pulled out a pile of folders, bringing them back to Maggie and Teddy in the great room. “Perhaps to no one’s surprise, some of us were telling half-truths at dinner,” Leo began, slamming the paperwork down on a low table in front of the fireplace. “I’ll start with Miss Hope—what brings you here?”

  “Remember?” Maggie looked up from her knitting as the lights flickered. “I decline to say.”

  Leo pressed. “And apparently you wouldn’t talk about it with Jaeger, either.”

  “No.” Maggie continued to knit, mangling the heel of the soldier’s sock. “And if I didn’t feel I needed to discuss it with Dr. Jaeger, why should I tell you?”

  “Because we’re all being hunted by a murderer,” Anna offered with a furious gesture. “We all know why we’re here—all of us, except for you.”

  “Miss O’Malley, you’re a trained SOE agent. You’ve also signed the Official Secrets Act. Why on earth would you press me on this?”

  “But why won’t you tell us?” Leo insisted, his face reddening in frustration. “It’s not as if we can reveal any huge war secrets from this back of beyond!”

  “It’s the principle,” Maggie stated, finishing her row.

  Leo glared. “You. Will. Tell. Us.”

  “No. I. Won’t.” I’ve resisted questioning from more dangerous men than you, Maggie thought. Kept my mouth shut in front of the SS, the Abwehr, and Hermann bloody Goering. You’ve never even been on an assignment, you stupid novice.

  As Leo stepped forward to confront Maggie, Sayid stood, blocking the way. “Be careful,” he warned. “No one likes a bully.”

  Leo faced the doctor, a muscle in his jaw twitching. “Don’t test me, old thing.”

  The lights went out. The room was left deep in shadows, illuminated only by the flames in the fireplace and the sickly greenish light of the storm raging outside. Ramsey gasped. “What’s happening?” Quentin cried.

  “The storm,” Sayid explained. “It’s blown out the power.”

  “Or the McNaughtons have cut it,” Torvald suggested. “To make it easier to finish the rest of us off.”

  Maggie set down her knitting. “Everyone needs to remain calm.”

  “I’ll fetch more candles,” Anna offered.

  “We’ll need oil lamps, with these drafts!” Torvald called after her.

  Sayid turned his back on Leo. “I’m going to take the files upstairs to read.”

  “I don’t need light,” said Teddy by the fireplace. “I can make flies by sense of touch at this point.”

  Maggie’s gaze went to Quentin. “Shall we get a candle and explore the castle?” she suggested. “You seem to know all its secrets, but maybe we can learn something new—find a piece of evidence we’ve overlooked.” Leo threw up his hands in resignation and turned away.

  Quentin acquiesced. “Lead on, Macduff.”

  “Would anyone like tea?” Teddy queried. “I can ask Mrs. McNaughton.”

  “Damn the tea,” Leo growled, heading for the bar. “I’m getting some bloody whiskey.”

  * * *

  —

  As the Prime Minister’s head private secretary, David had access to top-secret files, kept in a vault in the basement of Number 10. He took his bristling key ring and walked down narrow stairs, let himself through multiple doors with various locks, and eventually found a small metal room with drawers upon drawers of files. He looked through those Colonel Martens’s office had sent over since he’d been promoted to coordinate the work of SOE and MI-6 in the spring. But going through file after file stamped TOP SECRET in heavy red ink, David saw nothing mentioning Maggie.

  Finally, he found a single piece of paper, wrinkled and folded, at the end of a file on SOE training camps. It referred to “The ISRB Operation at Isle of Scarra.” There was a list of names and at the bottom, Margaret Rose Hope. In loopy handwriting in pencil was the cryptic instruction If relatives or friends ask about agents interred at ISRB Scarra, have them told, verbatim, that the agent is ‘on active service in the field.’ Agents at ISRB Scarra are allowed no communication whatsoever.

  “Great Odin, what’s ISRB Scarra? And what the devil’s happening there?” David muttered. “Why are communications cut off? And why is there no paperwork explaining the nature of this camp?”

  But he’d worked for the P.M. long enough to know the answer: plausible deniability. Whatever was happening on the Isle of Scarra, Colonel Martens didn’t want Mr. Churchill to know the specifics.

  Which did not bode well for Maggie. “Maybe Durgin’s right…” he said aloud, putting the file back in perfect order, replacing all the folders, then locki
ng the drawer. “Maybe Maggie is in danger.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I’ve never been much for reading,” Quentin admitted as they searched through books in the dark mahogany library, taking each one out and flipping through it to make sure the pages didn’t contain any secrets. The scent of ink, vanilla, and decay prickled Maggie’s nose.

  “Well, most of these aren’t very good books,” she pointed out as she flipped through the gold-tooled leather tomes that looked as though they’d never once been cracked open, let alone read. She’d heard of decorators buying volumes by the yard, for ornamental purposes.

  She sighed, wiping dusty hands on her trousers. They’d been at it all morning and afternoon and had found nothing. “I’m sure if you had the right book, you’d fall in love with reading.” She stepped back from the floor-to-ceiling shelves, gazing up. “We’ll need the steps for the high ones.” She looked at the library steps, a curved wooden staircase with a carved twisted snake as the railing.

  “Are you certain?” Quentin gave the staircase a push in her direction; as it rolled, it squealed a noisy protest. “It doesn’t seem very safe.”

  “Fiddlesticks.” Maggie scrambled up the creaking stairs to reach the top shelves, on level with the room’s chandelier. The dust seemed thicker there, mixed with dead insects and cobwebs. The volumes on these higher shelves differed from the rest, as if they hadn’t been bought as part of the set. They were narrower, darker, and looked well worn. When she paged through, she realized to her astonishment that they were appointment books. She picked one up and opened it, sneezing. “What year did the Killoch murders take place?” she called down to Quentin.

  “Nineteen twenty-two. Seventeen November, I think.”

  Maggie rifled through until she found the book for that year and plucked it from the shelf. Climbing down the stairs, she brought the volume to the desk and opened its heavy tooled-leather cover, revealing exquisite Florentine endpapers. She flipped through the pages. “It’s Marcus Killoch’s diary,” she said, as Quentin came to stand behind her, peering over her shoulder at page after page of cramped Victorian-era script.

  “So many names of women,” she realized. Every evening had names, written in the same heavy, controlled script, the male friends and business associates who’d died. But also: Fflur, Aideen, Nesta. Oona, Aela, Ertha. And Shona, Valma, Fiona.

  Her eyes returned to one name. Fiona. It appeared quite a number of times through the month. In fact, it appeared in the last entry, for the evening of November 17, 1922—the date of the murders. Maggie felt a chill.

  “Are you all right?” Quentin asked. “You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

  “Maybe I have.” Maggie’s mind whirled. Mrs. McNaughton, she knew, had been a maid at Killoch Castle before she married. And Fiona was Mrs. McNaughton’s first name. All the women’s names listed, at least for the last month, were Scottish Gaelic, names the island girls would have had. Not upper-class names. Not names of Killoch’s guests’ wives.

  The names of his female servants.

  “What? Tell me!”

  Maggie pointed. “Fiona is Mrs. McNaughton’s first name.”

  Quentin digested the information. “Why would she be in his appointment book? She was only a maid.”

  “Think, Mr. Asquith.”

  “Oh.” Realization dawned on his face. “You suspect Mrs. McNaughton had an affair with Killoch?”

  Maggie bit her lip. It was twenty years since Killoch’s murder. “How old is Murdo?”

  “Wait—” His eyebrows shot up. “You think Murdo’s the son of Mrs. McNaughton and Marcus Killoch?”

  “Well, Fiona may not have been Mrs. McNaughton then, but the dates seem to coincide.”

  “I know his birthday—it’s August nineteenth, nineteen twenty-three. He just turned nineteen.”

  “How do you know his birthday?” Maggie asked, puzzled.

  “It’s awfully boring here,” Quentin admitted, color flooding his face. “Men need to get their exercise somehow.” He glanced at her, to gauge her reaction. “You’re not shocked, are you?”

  He was not the first man—or woman—she’d met who was “like that.” Maggie tilted her head. “Hardly.”

  “I hoped you wouldn’t be. Of course now I’m shaken. He’s always been a wee bit off, if you know what I mean, but…” Quentin rubbed at his chin. “So Murdo could be old Marcus’s son—do you suspect he could be our murderer? That it runs in the blood?” He shuddered. “To think I’ve been…intimate…with him.” He grabbed at his fox, wrapping his arms around the dead creature for comfort.

  Maggie closed her eyes as she did the sums in her head. “November nineteen ’twenty-two is nine months before August nineteen ’twenty-three. And Murdo doesn’t take after McNaughton—he’s dark and fine-boned. Just like Marcus Killoch.”

  Quentin smacked himself on the head. “Why didn’t I see it before?”

  Maggie felt stupid as well. “We can’t be sure.”

  “Oh—oh—” Quentin went to one of the bottom shelves and pulled out a box, covered in marbled paper. “I saw these when I first arrived.” He brought it over to the desk and opened the lid. Inside, there were photographs, hundreds of them. Photographs of women in various states of undress, in different positions, most often tied up, some with bruises and other dark marks on their flesh. “Didn’t do much for me,” he admitted. “Not my thing, if you know what I mean. Killoch must have taken the pictures of the girls in his dungeon in the cellar. I never would have dreamed that…” His voice faltered.

  Maggie sorted through them, battling revulsion, until she noticed a girl who looked like a younger version of Mrs. McNaughton, bound and gagged. She looked closer. The woman’s flesh was bruised, but the eyes were the same. “Oh, God.”

  “So Murdo really could be Marcus Killoch’s son.”

  “We need to burn these—” Maggie said.

  “No, we need to show the others—”

  “No!” Her instinct was to destroy them immediately, but deep in her heart, she realized that they were all evidence.

  “It must be Murdo—” Quentin began pacing, cradling Monsieur Reynard. “He likes things a bit rough. I should have guessed…”

  “We don’t know Murdo did anything. The date book and the photograph prove nothing.”

  “It all happened before, and it’s all happening again—this time with us as the victims.”

  Maggie was trying to think it through logically. “But even if Murdo is Marcus Killoch’s son—and I’m not saying he is—it doesn’t mean he’s done anything wrong. You can’t visit the sins of the father on the son and label him a killer just because—”

  “He hates you—” Quentin cut in. “Us, I mean. The English. The toffs. Especially those of us on the island—he thinks we’re lazy and shirking our duties. Believe me, I know. We’ve talked about it.

  “He’s said, on multiple occasions, he’d love to kill every last one of us.”

  * * *

  —

  David was very nearly late to the security meeting Churchill was presiding over at Number 10. “What will you have?” General Hastings Ismay, Churchill’s personal Chief of Staff, asked the assembled men, as he stood by the bar cart in the Cabinet Room.

  “Gimme whiskey and soda,” the P.M. answered. “Light on the whiskey.” He was already seated at the head of the oak table, scowling at the papers spread before him.

  “Brandy and soda for me,” General Stewart Menzies stated. “Heavy on the brandy.” He walked to the window, lifted the blackout shade, and peered out. The sky was gray and overcast.

  “Take those blasted shades off!” growled Churchill. “If I wanted to meet in the dark, I would have held this meeting down in the War Rooms.”

  Even though the Blitz had paused, the Prime Minister’s staff preferred him to work underground, in th
e protected Cabinet War Rooms. But the P.M. loathed working in the basement offices, “like a troglodyte.” He favored either the Annexe, the Churchills’ private wartime residence, or Number 10. Which made his team nearly apoplectic in their concern for his safety—the two-hundred-year-old building had been bombed by the Luftwaffe on October 14, 1940, with damage to the kitchen and state rooms. The bombing had taken place while Churchill dined mere yards away in the Garden Room.

  But the Prime Minister insisted on light and air. And so the day’s security meeting was being held in Number 10’s rectangular Cabinet Room, though the windows were taped over, the portrait of Sir Robert Walpole by Jean-Baptiste van Loo was in storage, and the mahogany chairs replaced by gray metal folding ones.

  The men gathering around the green-baize-covered table with their drinks included General Ismay; General Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff; Menzies, chief of MI-6; Colonel Lord Roger Leycock, the director of SOE; and Martens. David was there to take notes for the P.M., and at the last minute Frain joined the group.

  David waited, his back ramrod straight, until there was an opening in the conversation on activities by various cells in France. When Martens paused, David held up one hand.

  “What, Mr. Greene?” growled Churchill, through a cloud of blue smoke.

  “I have a question for Colonel Martens,” David said.

  The Master of Deception frowned.

  “The ISRB operation on the Isle of Scarra, in Scotland. What exactly goes on there? What sort of a venture is it?”

  “That’s—that’s top-secret!” Then, “How did you hear about it?”

  “Something crossed my desk.”

  “We’re not here to talk about that operation,” Martens snapped. “It’s an entirely different conversation.”

  “If it’s in Scotland,” David pressed, “it must be some sort of training operation, yes? SOE? But it would be coordinated with MI-Six by your department, wouldn’t it, Colonel Martens?”