“I have studied further the notes I took at Monsieur Pinard’s,” I said. “The payments to Swiveller are the only ones the attorney has made on his client’s behalf that seem wildly out of line. The rest of the expenses for the household are ordinary enough. No one in their right mind would spend so much on flowers, even for three houses, and I do not recall seeing a single blossom at Estella’s house in Belgravia. Part of Swiveller’s money may go for flowers here, but Swiveller’s apartment does not suggest he is keeping the rest. Perhaps Monsieur Pinard has a vested interest in paying Swiveller’s bills without question.”
“Pinard?” Colin’s brow crinkled. “He is a well-respected, successful solicitor who does not appear to be living above his means. Furthermore, he could not have killed Mary Darby. He was dining with the American ambassador and a large party the night of the murder. I have confirmed his alibi. Let us do be careful to remember that Mary Darby’s death is our primary concern.”
“Monsieur Pinard may have been in Paris, but that does not preclude the possibility of his having hired Mr. Swiveller to do the job for him.”
Colin threw his hands in the air. “Theoretically possible, of course, but we would need more evidence—no, not more, some.”
“If neither the solicitor nor this wretched Swiveller isn’t keeping the money, where does it go?” Jeremy asked.
Our lively discussion did not continue, being interrupted by a footman who entered and handed me a small parcel. Almost before my hands were on it, Colin had raced from the room. I heard the front door slam behind him and knew he was doing his best to catch the delivery boy. I tugged at the string wrapping the box until I loosened the knot enough to remove it, and opened the lid, recoiling at what I saw: a fine linen handkerchief, edged with Belgian lace, soaked in a dark, sticky substance that could only be blood. A folded sheet of paper, also damp with blood, had typed on it only a single word:
STOP
Cécile gasped, and Jeremy held her firmly by the shoulders. “This does not mean a thing,” he said. “That blood could be anyone’s.”
“I think we must assume it is not just anyone’s,” I said.
“I do not know what it means, other than that we have no choice but to obey. How can we continue this investigation if, by doing so, we are putting Estella at risk?”
“Cécile, darling, if Estella is in the hands of some madman, the only chance she has to escape from his clutches is for us to continue our work. We have to find her.” My friend, visibly shattered, did not wait for Colin to return before retiring upstairs for a bath. I promised to come to her with any news.
Jeremy and I sat together on a settee, the box and its foul contents on a table in front of us. “Do you think she is alive?” he asked.
“I believe she is, and I would stake my life on a bet that Estella Lamar is not booked on a passage to the Ivory Coast or anywhere else. If she is in Paris, and she is alive, why would Swiveller, or whoever is benefiting from her money, want her dead?”
“Why would he have kept her alive this long?” Colin had just returned, and was breathing heavily from his chase. He poured a glass of whisky before he sat down and raised it to the identical one already in Jeremy’s hand. “I caught the boy. He was paid in advance with a gold coin and given strict instructions to deliver the box and flee.”
“Paid in advance,” I said. “What a disappointment.”
“Risky as well,” Jeremy said.
“Not really.” Colin picked up the box containing the bloody handkerchief. “He scared the boy into thinking he would come to great harm if he didn’t complete the task as directed, and said he would be watching from afar.”
“Was the boy able to describe him?” I asked.
“Yes. It is our old friend, the auburn-haired man. His prominent mustaches make identifying him rather simple—and that is something of which he surely is aware.” He held the box up to me. “I presume we are meant to believe this blood is Estella’s?”
“I can’t imagine what else we would think,” I said. “Let us return to Swiveller’s apartment at once. I realize he is unlikely to be there, but surely with our accumulated evidence, we can justify using your credentials to make that horrible concierge at least give us the man’s real name. French bureaucracy does not allow for taking an apartment using a nom de guerre.”
“You are quite right, Emily, the French are notoriously strict about such matters. If you only knew what one must do to obtain a bank account here. It is a good plan. I shall set off at once.”
I rose to his side. “I shall accompany you.”
“No, Cécile is upset and you should remain with her. Bainbridge, can I trust you to guard the ladies?”
“We do not require guarding,” I said.
“I will derive considerably more pleasure from watching them than from watching the post office,” Jeremy said.
Colin gave him a wry look. “Perhaps it would be better for you to come with me, Bainbridge, on the off chance our friend, if I may call him that, is still in residence.”
“You think I can’t handle the ladies?”
“I’m more afraid that you’ll be too adept at the task.” Colin glowered, but the amusement in his dark eyes belied the expression. “You, Emily, take care of Cécile.”
He gave me no further instructions—a wise decision, as I have never taken well to direction—and left with Jeremy. I went upstairs to Cécile, who was still submerged in her tub, and spoke to her through the bathroom door. “I cannot think of a single reason that Estella, regardless of where she is in the world, would want Mary Darby dead. There can be no doubt that Swiveller killed her—and most likely because she did not succeed in the job for which he had hired her, playing Estella. Swiveller does not live like a criminal mastermind, but more like an ill-used henchman, so we must deduce that he is acting on behalf of someone else, and who else could that be but Monsieur Pinard?”
I heard the sound of dripping water. “I am coming out, Kallista. It was wrong—and cowardly—of me to say we should heed this awful man’s warning. Let us go see Monsieur Pinard. I have realized also that we made a grave error at Swiveller’s today. We did not search the attic room that would be assigned to his apartment for a servant. He could have any number of things stashed up there, including Estella.”
I had forgot that Parisian apartments generally included space for, at the very least, a maid, and Colin was unlikely to think of it, either. “We must go there at once and catch up with the gentlemen. Monsieur Pinard can wait until we are finished there.”
Cécile dressed in near record time, and soon we were in the carriage. When we reached the building, we had to ring repeatedly before the concierge shuffled to the door. “Back so soon, Frau Hohensteinbauergrunewald? Two gentlemen have already been here. Am I to presume they, too, are in search of your niece?” My friend did not dignify this inane question with a response. She shoved past the woman and stomped up the stairs, ignoring the piercing shrieks demanding that she stop. I followed, avoiding eye contact as I passed.
From the fourth-floor landing, I could see that the door to Swiveller’s apartment stood open. I called out to my husband as we crossed the threshold, but he did not answer. Inside, there was no sign either of him or of Jeremy. The scene that greeted me set my heart racing. The dining chairs had been overturned, the lamp in the sitting room lay shattered on the floor, and there was a hole crashed through the front window that could only be described as head-shaped. Blood stained the shards beneath it on the carpet. Cécile gripped my hand.
“Come, let us see what is in the bedroom.”
That room, as well as the kitchen, appeared in every way wholly undisturbed. Whatever action had transpired, it had been limited to the sitting and dining rooms. My lips quivered. “We should check the attic room first and then go back to the concierge.”
“I will go up,” Cécile said. “There is no need for two of us—”
“No.” I pulled myself up to my full height. “I am coming
with you, no matter what is to be found.” I followed my friend through the back door off the kitchen and up a narrow set of stairs that wound up to the eaves. Cécile found the room whose number matched the one on Swiveller’s apartment, and rapped on the door. There was no answer. She turned the handle.
“It is locked.”
I had the set of picks in my reticule, but did not want to waste time using them. I flung myself against the door, confident that the force of the strike would break it down. My aspirations, however, fell somewhat short of reality. I picked myself up from the floor where I had fallen after bouncing off the door, retrieved my tools, and picked the lock with shaking hands. I closed my eyes as I pushed on the door, terrified of what I might see.
A sigh escaped Cécile’s lips. “Mon Dieu.”
I forced my eyes open. The light from the corridor spilled into the small room. The bloodied bodies of neither Colin nor Jeremy were inside, only a desk heaped with voluminous amounts of paper, a filing cabinet, and an enormous rat, chewing on an unidentified but unarguably motley object. That the rodent did not scurry off the moment we entered the room suggested it was all too familiar with humans, so I stamped on the floor as hard as I could. He looked up at me with his beady eyes and slunk into a hole in the knotty wood of the floor. The room, unlike the corridor, did not have electric lights, but there was an old-fashioned oil lamp on the desk, and a box of matches next to it. I entered the room and struck a match. Once illuminated, the lamp’s light spread over the surface of the desk, but not much beyond.
A cursory glance at the papers sent a shiver through me. There were notes about hotels in Bombay and Constantinople and more other places than I could count, as well as contact details for Mary Darby. I picked up the paper that listed her address and her banking details. “He killed her. There can be no doubting that now. As for Estella … I am afraid, Cécile, that we need to try to find Colin and Jeremy before we peruse these papers in detail. The blood on the glass downstairs—”
“I understand.” Without having to be asked, Cécile started to gather up the papers in her arms, carrying as much as she could. We could not take everything. The filing cabinet was locked, and I did not want to waste time on it when the most precious— But I could not think of that now. We carried the papers down to the concierge’s loge.
The Parisian part of Cécile—to be fair, that was all of her—could no longer tolerate dealing with the concierge as she had up until now. She abandoned her pretense of being German as she shoved the collected papers at the woman and spoke in a tone that would have chilled the blood of the most vicious reprobate. “You will guard these papers with your life. Hide them in your little hovel and give them to no one but us when we return. Where did the gentlemen go?”
“They were drunk and disgusting.” The concierge sneered. “Monsieur Jones’s friend could barely hold himself upright. It was a spectacle I hope never to see repeated in this building.”
“What about the other man?” I asked.
“Monsieur Jones was holding him up. Was I not clear enough for you?”
“And the third man?” Truly, this woman was infuriating. I felt a most inappropriate urge to fling her on the floor and stomp on her until she told me what I needed to know.
“There were only the two of them. I told you as much when you stormed into the building. Two gentlemen, I said. I will keep these papers, but if you have not collected them by noon tomorrow—”
“You will keep them as long as I see fit,” Cécile growled. “Now. Which direction did they go when they left the building? Do not pretend you didn’t look.”
“I never said they left the building, did I?” The concierge scowled. A large brindled cat peeked his head out the door, looked dissatisfied with what he saw, and retreated inside.
“They are not upstairs,” I said. “We were just there.”
She shrugged. “If you hadn’t been so rude when you came, I might have told you not to bother with the stairs. It’s your husband, isn’t it? Can’t hold his drink, can he, though I suppose you’re used to that. They’re in the courtyard, no doubt hoping the night air would sober them up.”
Wasting no time, we darted through the foyer and out the back door to what, if well tended, would have been a lovely garden instead of an overgrown mess. There was a wrought-iron table and four chairs on paving stones, but no sign of Colin or Jeremy. Eyewitness testimony is notoriously unreliable, even when the witness in question is trying his best to tell the truth, but I found it hard to believe the concierge could be so very wrong. We went back to confront her.
“They are not in the courtyard, and they are not upstairs, which means they must have left the building.”
The concierge narrowed her eyes. “They did not leave the building.”
She was impossible. “You must not have noticed them, which is odd considering that their alleged drunkenness supposedly disturbed you so very much. Please try to remember—they came down the steps, and they—”
“And they went into the courtyard. That is all.” She stepped back into her loge and slammed the door. Either she was lying, confused, or had not been paying attention. Cécile and I went back into the street, crossed it, and stood looking at Mr. Jones’s building, unsure of where to go next. I hesitated, then started to walk east. Before we had covered fifty yards, I heard a familiar voice, moaning.
“Em? Is that you, Em?”
Jeremy, blood drying on his forehead, was lying in the dark, hidden from the pavement by a large planter containing an immaculately trimmed shrub. He moaned again and reached up to me. “What happened to you?” I dropped to my knees next to him.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said. “You must find Hargreaves. He has Hargreaves.”
Estella
xvii
Estella could not remember when she had passed so many pleasant days in a row. Her captor—but she must not call him that any longer—Monsieur Jones had proved a reliable supplier, well able to follow directions. He came with macarons every day before seven o’clock, along with whatever else she had instructed him to bring. Today, she had even had hot coffee, as he had carried it directly to her after it had been made in a nearby café. She had finished reading Jean-François Champollion’s Monuments de l’Égypte et de la Nubie, an account of that explorer’s journey through the land of the pharaohs, a place to which Estella was becoming more and more attached. Monsieur Jones had brought more Dickens as well, but she had not yet perused any of that.
She had hung tapestries on her stone walls—not the best quality, but it was proving a tad difficult to get Monsieur Jones to spend her money freely—and she now had a chair, as well as plates and cups and cutlery. “You should join me for a glass of wine,” she said as he descended the ladder.
“Mademoiselle Lamar, it has been three days now. You are going to have to leave soon. Shall we make a plan? I am of the opinion that you might feel more comfortable if you knew what, precisely, you wanted to do once you have left this—”
“Prison? Were you going to say prison, Monsieur Jones? An apt description, but one that no longer fits quite so neatly as it once did.”
“I have come to the conclusion that it might be better if I plan to take you home myself. I do believe I can trust you not to alert the police, can I not? You are fragile after this experience, and there is no one to blame for that but me. I cannot in good conscience leave you down here waiting to be rescued.”
“I have very little interest in going home,” Estella said.
“Well, I can take you wherever you want. You have a house in the south, is that correct?”
“It is as boring as the one here. I long for adventure, Monsieur Jones.” She waved her two books about Egypt in front of him. “Messieurs Belzoni and Champollion have lit inside me a fire.”
“You would like to go to Egypt?” He balked at first, but then considered the idea. It was not the worst he had ever heard.
“First, I must read more, so that I might plan a suit
able itinerary.”
Monsieur Jones nodded. “I shall gather all the information I can about ships and hotels and guides. Is there anything else?”
“At the moment, no, unless you would care to join me for wine?”
He refused the offer, and took from her the list she now gave him daily. “No macarons this time?”
“Three days, apparently, is what it takes for me to grow tired of them. I am asking for chocolates instead, and I should like coq au vin for dinner tomorrow.”
“Very well.” He disappeared up the ladder. Estella opened the notebook he had brought her the day before yesterday and sat, not on the chair, but on the slab, so that she might have both of her Egyptian tomes by her side as she started to write:
ALEXANDRIA
She drew a line under the name of the city and then wrote:
WE WILL BEGIN HERE.
18
He has Hargreaves.
I kept hearing Jeremy’s words over and over in my head and could barely manage to focus. All of the world had narrowed for me, and there was nothing but a long, dark tunnel, at the end of which I was destined to find my husband, gravely injured, if not dead—
I felt a sharp slap on my cheek. “Forgive me, Kallista, but you were insensible.” I shook the pain away and nodded to indicate there were no hard feelings; Cécile had, after all, forced me to regain my much-needed composure.
“What happened?” I asked Jeremy. “No, first, how badly are you hurt?”
“There is no cause for concern regarding my health, and, unfortunately, there is very little more I can tell you. When we arrived at the building, Hargreaves instructed me to stay outside and watch for our cursed villain. If I saw him, I was to shout and raise an alarm. Hargreaves went inside, and I presume was able to gain access to the apartment, as he did not return again in short order. Furthermore, from my post I could see the light go on in the front room on the fourth floor. I saw Hargreaves in the window and saluted him from here. A moment later, I felt a large crash of pain in my skull, accompanied by what I can only describe as a decidedly sickening thud. Everything went black as I fell to the ground, and I remember nothing else.”
The Counterfeit Heiress: A Lady Emily Mystery (Lady Emily Mysteries) Page 20