Your father and I have not always seen eye to eye – he thought writing novels was a foolish pursuit which I encouraged – but I must admit that he was always generous to her, even to the extent of covering her gambling debts. Which were small fry compared with what that man eventually wanted from her – nothing less than the icon which had come down through her family, to be sold and the money sent to the freedom fighters in Russia. I could not believe she was serious in agreeing to this. There is a world of difference between translating articles and sacrificing precious family heirlooms, but she would have none of it. ‘Don’t you see, the harder the sacrifice, the more worthwhile it is!’
It was only then I learnt that the icon hanging in the holy corner in her bedroom was simply a copy and the real one – the one she intended to give away – was in your father’s safe. And no, it would not do, she insisted, to give Grey Wolf the copy, even though it is a work of art in its own right, and must be valuable. ‘He has a right to the real thing,’ she insisted. ‘In any case, it’s mine to do with as I wish.’
I could only hope your father would prevent this, but she told him nothing of her decision. She knew only too well what he would say to her parting with something as precious and valuable as that. Instead, she thought up a wild scheme of simply taking it and hoping it would look like a robbery, an idea I told her was too much even for Marie Bartholemew! ‘I don’t want to quarrel with Louis over what I want to do with it,’ she said. ‘He sleeps like a log and will never know.’
I begged her to think again, but she wouldn’t listen. When I think of her now, I could weep. She was almost like a child, planning this mad escapade. And yet, there was something different about her that night, something hard and determined that I didn’t recognise and made me even more uneasy. Especially when she took the gun as well as the icon. To add verisimilitude, she said with a very odd smile. It all went as easily as she had predicted, after which she carried them both to her room. The icon was given to the Grey Wolf, but she hid the gun in her firebird box.
A week later, she was dead.
It was all Kitty could do to force herself to read on.
That terrible day, when the police came. Everyone asking why, and who – when all the time I knew. I knew it was what I had feared would come from associating with that fiend she called Grey Wolf. I knew it instinctively but what proof had I? I did not even know his real name, who he was. She had once mentioned someone called Sasha who might or might not have been him. All I knew was that she had been drawn into all this by Jon Devenish introducing them. I did not believe then, and I do not now, that he had anything to do with her being killed, but the whole affair had started with that visit to the Voice.
I told you when I saw you yesterday that I had done something incredibly foolish. That afternoon, when we learnt that she had been murdered, I suddenly remembered the gun. I left you all in the drawing room and went up to her room with the intention of hiding it before the police found it. It seemed important it should not be known to have been in her possession. As I took it out of the box an idea as wild as any Lydia herself had ever had came to me. Underneath the gun I noticed a sketch, presumably drawn either by Lydia or Grey Wolf himself, of the wolf that appears on the front page of the Voice. I didn’t stop to examine my motives or think through what I was doing. I simply tore it across, left one half in the box and put the other in an envelope which I addressed to Marcus Villiers. Before I could change my mind, I went out immediately and put it through his door.
Why him? There is a great deal more to Marcus Villiers, I have always thought, than appears on the surface and I had long suspected his motives in acting as lapdog to Lydia were not quite what they seemed to be. I hoped he would be intrigued by the torn drawing and sooner or later I knew he would connect it with your cousin’s newspaper. If not, there was the other half in the firebird box which would lead someone else in the same direction.
How naive! You will have realised by now that I was right, Kitty, when I said I had no imagination. Otherwise, I would have seen that my actions might be less likely to throw suspicion on to this Grey Wolf than on to Jon Devenish, who I am convinced, for all his faults, cannot be guilty of such a crime against Lydia. Even now, I cannot believe what possessed me. But there is nothing I can do about it, not now.
I cannot bring myself to go to the police but you may show them this letter.
P.S. When I left Egremont Gardens for good, I could not think of anything else to do with the gun but push it under the big, five-drawer chest of drawers. It should still be there.
Kitty pushed away her cold tea after she had finished reading. Despite her disclaimers, she wondered if Miss Drax was as unoriginal in thought as she made out. The crazy idea of delivering half of a drawing to set Marcus thinking had worked, in a weird sort of way. And she herself could now recall what had escaped her yesterday: while waiting for her father to return from being questioned by the police that day, she’d been staring out over the square and had seen the hurrying figure of Miss Drax leaving the house and wondered where she was going. Now she knew that she had been on her way to deliver the drawing to Marcus.
She thought of the unknown life her mother had been pursuing, she thought of that man, Grey Wolf, the copy icon in the krasny ugol and its powerful radiance, and wondered just what the original must have been like, and what it must have cost her mother to part with it. And where it was now. Already exchanged for money by Grey Wolf, no doubt.
The household telephone lived in small, glass-doored space under the stairs. Kitty closed the door behind her and put through a telephone call to Marcus. She was informed that he was out and had left no indication as to when he would be back. For a moment she sat wondering what to do, then she went upstairs and made a careful copy of the letter. She collected her hat and gloves, checked she had enough money in her purse, and left the house. She hadn’t told anyone where she was going. Rules that had before seemed immutable didn’t seem to matter any more.
Twenty-Four
The tight feeling was back in Kitty’s chest, and she sipped valiantly at the strong, sweet tea she had been given, almost wishing she hadn’t accepted the offer, however well meant it had been. They had found a cup and saucer too, rather than a mug, though it was thick and white and as unlike the rose-garlanded bone china she had drunk her breakfast tea from as this place was from Egremont Gardens. Gaines had clearly been startled when she arrived alone and he’d done his best to put her at her ease. He must have wondered why she had decided to come to Scotland Yard rather than send for him, but the last thing she’d wanted was for the police to come to the house, with all the explanations to her family that would have meant. Explanations which might not be necessary if there was some big mistake, some innocent explanation for what Miss Drax had written. But that she knew was wishful thinking; it was beyond the bounds of credibility.
Inskip seemed to be thinking the same. She was by now looking on the sergeant more favourably than she had done previously. He’d reacted to the information she’d brought with more enthusiasm than Gaines, quickly cottoning on to the implications while Gaines remained apparently unimpressed. But suddenly Gaines roused himself from his cogitations and thanked her for coming. ‘This is useful information, Miss Challoner. We shall act on it, you may be sure, and we’ll let you know the outcome.’
Kitty hesitated. ‘She – my mother – wasn’t doing anything actually against the law, was she?’
‘From our point of view, no. As far as the Russians are concerned – smuggling subversive literature into the country, I’m not so sure.’
‘I see.’ That didn’t feel like reassurance. ‘But Miss Drax is right about one thing, you know. My cousin, Mr Devenish, would never have deliberately involved her in anything – in anything that was likely to endanger her life.’
‘Probably not.’
Kitty played with the button on her glove. She’d known she ought not to have stopped Marcus when he’d been about to tell the police
about the man Mama had been meeting, however much against the grain it went. Miss Drax’s letter had changed all that. However unpalatable the facts were, however hard it was to swallow, saving Mama’s reputation didn’t seem so vital an issue now as finding out who had killed her. She told Gaines everything, about the rendezvous at Burlington House which Marcus had witnessed, her own glimpse of the man in the garden. When she’d finished it was as if something disagreeable which she’d swallowed had become dislodged and she could breathe easily again.
‘Thank you, Miss Challoner,’ Gaines said. He made no reproaches for withholding information, as he had before, but held out his hand and smiled, as if he knew what it had cost her. ‘We shall do our best.’
She was escorted to the door by a bashful young constable who whistled up a cab for her.
She reached home and found that no one had missed her. And her father was not at home.
‘The question is,’ said Gaines, ‘what does it all mean?’
‘Well, look at that mark,’ Inskip said, pointing to the smudge in the corner of the wolf drawing on the desk between them.
‘That squiggle?’
‘It could be an “S”, you know. Like those in Lydia’s diary … S for Sasha, short for Aleksandr – and Aleksandr Lukin’s the owner of the Voice. The man I saw wearing that cross.’ Inskip, growing excited, waved the copy letter Kitty had left. ‘Sasha – Miss Drax’s Grey Wolf.’
‘Yes, yes, of course it could,’ Gaines replied, annoyingly unimpressed. ‘So it seems that Lydia apparently gave the real icon to someone known as Grey Wolf, or Sasha – who isn’t necessarily Aleksandr Lukin. How many Sashas are there in and around London just now?’
‘Oh, come on, sir’!’ Inskip stared in disbelief. They should have been making straight for the offices of the Britannia Voice right now, to get out of Jon Devenish where they could find this Lukin and knock the truth out of him. ‘Sorry, sir, but—’
‘Hold your horses, Inskip,’ Gaines said irritably. ‘We can’t bring him in on supposition, and that’s all we have so far – a cross similar to Mrs Challoner’s missing one, a possible “S” which may or may not mean Sasha, short for Aleksandr, and a drawing a child could have done.’ He fell silent, lost in thought, doodling again as if it helped his thought processes. ‘Lydia Challoner gave away the icon,’ he said at last. ‘Yet she’s never struck me, from what we’ve learnt of her, as being enough of a fanatic to do that.’
‘They were lovers.’
‘So it would seem.’
‘And she cared a lot about all this business with Russia.’
‘Enough to give away a family heirloom? One she prized above everything, according to her daughter?’
When he’d seen the icon, even though it was apparently a skilful copy, he hadn’t thought it beautiful. Compelling, yes, but beauty was in the eye of the beholder, or so they said. In itself the copy must have been worth something – so how far had Lydia Challoner’s loyalties extended – and to whom – for her to be willing to give away the far more valuable original? He said suddenly, ‘Estrabon would know. Know its value, where it might have been sold, for how much.’
‘Estrabon?’ Inskip made a dubious face. Like all good detectives, he had his own ways of getting information. Gaines hadn’t enquired too closely how Inskip had acquired the backstairs gossip that Estrabon apparently had a bit of a reputation with the ladies – which in Inskip’s opinion wasn’t surprising, with a wife like his. Gaines had put him down as too careful and calculated to indulge himself with extra-marital affairs, but you never knew. When it came down to that, nobody was immune.
Meanwhile, like the rest of them, this Lukin had an alibi. He and Jon Devenish had been together just before the murder. Gaines rubbed his hand across his face. There was every chance they might be left with that miserable option of a contract killing – the worst of all worlds, because unless they actually found the man who’d pulled the trigger and he was persuaded to confess who’d hired him, they were unlikely ever to know who the real culprit was. ‘Maybe we need to look at the suffragettes again, after all,’ Inskip suggested gloomily.
This didn’t seem to raise the DCI’s spirits. ‘We’re dealing with facts, not improbable fantasy.’
‘I know how it sounds. But they do keep cropping up, don’t they?’
‘They crop up everywhere,’ he said wearily, ‘and they will, till they get the bloomin’ vote. Wear us down, they will. Nothing as persistent as a woman when she’s determined to have her way.’ Something in his voice said he spoke from experience. ‘All right, if you think there’s anything in it, get out there and find this Rina Collingwood.’
‘She’s not on any of our lists and we can’t get her for what she might have done. We’ve no basis for questioning her, always supposing we’ve any hope of finding her.’ Which Gaines knew as well as he. If she’d decided to drop out of circulation, there was no knowing where she could be. Losing herself in London, or anywhere else in the country for that matter, would be as easy as falling off a log, when women all over England were beginning to give their support – to those convalescing after the ordeal of prison and forcible feeding, or to those still on the run from authority after the crimes they’d committed – and all simply in the name of female franchise. Inskip just couldn’t understand the hysteria that was gripping the women of this country.
‘Well, I don’t think Emma Pavell was talking out of spite,’ he ended. ‘I think she was genuinely worried about Bridget Devenish.’
‘With good reason, probably,’ Gaines muttered. ‘Clever as a box of monkeys, that one. And you know what they say – intellectually bright but lacking in the common sense department.’
And if she was under the influence of this Collingwood woman she wasn’t likely to volunteer information on her whereabouts. It would simply waste more time, following up what at best could be called a woman’s intuition, at worst spite. Though Inskip could have sworn Emma Pavell wasn’t the sort to bear a grudge.
Unlike Gaines, he didn’t have a wife and family to go home to and, late in the day, he settled down to get his daily report into some sort of order. The written word didn’t come easily to him but Renshaw was sure to be demanding it at any time. He typed with two fingers and a well-used eraser. Scratched his head. Puzzled over the sometimes incomprehensible hieroglyphics that stood for notes in his notebook which were never as good as his memory …
A shadow fell on the desk. ‘I’ve just had a session with Renshaw,’ said Gaines. He looked tired. Renshaw, probably, giving him a hard time. ‘He agrees we should talk to Lukin. Stir your stumps, Sergeant.’
‘Now?’
‘That’s the general idea. The Voice offices. Devenish lives on the premises, doesn’t he? He’ll know where we can find him.’
‘Right.’ Inskip was already halfway to the door. ‘Armed?’ he chanced, without much hope. Despite a noisily growing representation for officers of the law to be routinely armed, following all the publicity those police murders had generated, they could still only carry arms by special dispensation. The more moderate men in the Force were in agreement with this, knowing what arming the police could lead to. But some were in agreement with the press and members of the public. Not Gaines.
‘This isn’t a bloody raid, Sergeant.’ Gaines rarely swore and Inskip bit back the retort that it hadn’t been a raid at Houndsditch, either, the police had simply been called in to investigate a suspicious noise. They hadn’t expected guns to be pulled on them, that three of them would end up dead. ‘We’re merely going to question someone who might give us a lead,’ Gaines said more mildly. ‘We’re not out to intimidate.’
‘Think that matters to a Bolshie? He’ll have a gun out as soon as look at us.’
‘Assuming he’s not entirely innocent. Which we’ve no reason to assume.’
True enough, they couldn’t enter with all guns blazing but Inskip felt they could be walking into it. Trapped like rats in a cage if Lukin wasn’t the innocent Gaines
was trying to believe in, especially if he had any of his associates with him.
They left, on the way picking up another man to go with them, the only person still left in the office, an inexperienced young DC by the name of Watts, but keen as mustard and evidently not giving a damn that he was being thrown in at the deep end.
Approaching the piemaker’s shop above which the Voice offices were situated, Gaines confessed himself curious to speak to the newspaper’s editor, this young fellow, Devenish, as yet only a name to him. There was no time, however, for that. Devenish was eating his supper but after a slight hesitation, when Inskip told him who they were looking for, said they were fortunate, Mr Lukin was on the premises at that very moment. Upstairs, in the attic room above the offices which was rented by a group of his Russian friends. Giving him no time to ask further questions, Gaines told him to stay where he was. Inskip was already halfway out of the door and Gaines went after him, motioning young Watts to follow.
An intimation that things might not go as Gaines hoped came as they were filing quietly up the next leg of the narrow stairs and the door at the top opened. Someone was coming down the steps. Inskip was going up first and his gut wrenched. One of their colleagues murdered in Houndsditch had been killed by a gun fired from the top of a staircase. In a rush, he shouldered the man aside, spun him round and forced him back up the stairs, through the still-open door. He was too surprised even to make a sound.
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