‘Could you try the attics?’ she said. ‘I don’t see why she’d have gone up there, but it’s a real rabbit warren. Maybe she thought she’d go exploring where we can’t find her. There might be footprints.’
‘Might be, but I don’t know how she’d have got the key. Very careful with those, I am, and Mrs Partridge, too. Accidents waiting to happen, those attics are, and dry as tinder besides. One silly fool poking around with a candle or gas lamp, and the whole Castle’s on fire before you know it.’
‘Don’t say such things, you’ll frighten us all witless.’
Ben shook his head. ‘I doubt very much she’s up there, but I shall take a look nonetheless. Best to be sure.’
They parted company, Ben to the attics and Freya to the guest rooms above her father’s suite, in the Jacobean part of the Castle. She passed through the Long Gallery, generations of ancestors watching her from the shadows. Two or three of the girls’ skittles had fallen over and rolled into corners, had that been Georgia’s doing? She called, but no answer came. Now thoroughly worried, she pressed on.
Scene 10
Freya came back in alone. Seeing her face, Hugo fell quiet, and the whole room with him.
‘Something’s the matter,’ said Father Leo at once, putting his cup down. ‘What can we do?’
‘Nothing that Ben and I haven’t already done,’ said Freya. ‘There’s no sign of Georgia anywhere, nor of her bike.’
‘Then we must search,’ said Árpád. ‘For one to wander through the corridors calling her name, this she can ignore. But to hear all of us, worried, in search of her, then if she is hiding she will come out.’
‘But she was just behind us,’ said Polly, looking around for reassurance.
‘Árpád is right,’ said Gus at once. ‘I’m sure we shall find her soon, but we should split up. There are plenty of us.’
‘What if she tripped and hit her head?’ said Polly. ‘She could be lying out in the gardens somewhere.’
‘It is too cold to be outside for long,’ said Árpád. ‘She will be in danger.’
‘Ben couldn’t search the gardens on his own,’ Freya said.
‘Then we must help him, it is our duty,’ said Árpád. ‘Perhaps the gentlemen can search outside, and the ladies inside?’
‘Should we tell the police?’ Gus asked. ‘We’ll need them if we have to search the grounds.’
‘Let’s try the house and gardens first,’ said Hugo, who had no mind to call out the county police force only to discover Georgia sulking in a cupboard somewhere. If he were to clear Saul’s name, it was essential Jarrett and MacLeod took him seriously.
‘Must we?’ said Sonia. ‘She’s just after attention. Leave her alone and she’ll come creeping out of whatever hole she’s hidden herself in.’
Valerie was of like mind. ‘You should have left her at Yorkshire Ladies’, they’d have put a stop to such nonsense. I shall call a taxi to take me to the station, you’ll need all hands on deck here.’
Árpád, standing behind Valerie, scowled at her, but it was Lady Sonia he spoke to. ‘I do not believe that Miss Georgia would act as you say. Shall we proceed?’
Scene 11
It was a cold and dispirited group who trudged back towards the house an hour or so later. There was a chill north wind across the valley, a frost on the ground, and no sign of Georgia.
Polly had ventured out, bundled in coat and hat, to show them where she’d last seen Georgia, between the box hedges on the sweeping path down from the Italian garden. They tried to follow the imprint of her tyres, but the path emptied on to gravel trodden by too many feet at the end of the rehearsal.
Nowhere in the gardens was there a trace of Georgia, bicycle, or even of intruder. Undertended these past seven years, the gardens were untidy and overgrown, but nowhere could they see so much as a hint of someone pushing their way through a hedge or lying comatose behind a wall. They looked in summerhouses, sheds, the Gothick folly at the gardens’ far edge. They shouted out across the parkland, beneath bare winter trees bright with ice.
The searchers of the house were back in the kitchen, hastily drinking mugs of hot tea. Sonia looked distinctly put out, this wasn’t what she’d signed up for.
Freya didn’t need to ask to know they’d been unsuccessful. She’d heard no joyful shouts or cheerful murmur of voices.
‘I shall phone the police,’ said Gus.
‘We thought,’ said Polly, ‘that some of the people coming out of the rehearsal might have seen something. We could try them.’
‘That’s my girl,’ said Gus. ‘Let’s get the Superintendent in, then we’ll see.’
He disappeared through into Grace Hall.
‘She must have run away,’ said Hugo. ‘But where? I can’t imagine who she’d go to.’
‘She’d not run away,’ said Mrs Partridge. ‘Poor thing’s so desperate at the thought of being uprooted again, leaving’s the last thing she’d do. She feels safe here.’
Then where had she gone?
Gus came back in. ‘The phone’s down. I can’t get a dial tone.’
‘Can’t be,’ said Sonia. ‘I rang a friend this afternoon, while you were all hanging around at that rehearsal.’
Probably chatted for hours on Gus’s phone bill, too.
‘What time was that?’ Freya said.
Sonia shrugged. ‘Three o’clock, perhaps? It was still daylight when I hung up.’
‘I shall go to the police station in person,’ Hugo said.
‘I’ll come with you,’ said Leo at once. ‘Hot tea can wait.’
They headed back outside. Hugo had left the Lago by the front door, expecting to drive Valerie to the station. He opened the door, it wasn’t locked. There was a folded sheet of paper on the driver’s seat, where none had been before. He went very still.
Leo saw his expression. ‘What is it?’
Hugo came back around to the light, unfolded the paper. Ordinary typing paper, a few lines.
Mr Hawksworth,
If you wish your sister to be returned, you will put in writing your considered opinion that Dr Bruno Rothesay, Soviet spy, was killed by Mr Saul Ingham in the course of a personal quarrel, and ensure that this report is received by the police. If you do so, she will be released unharmed.
You will then return this note by any means you wish to Major Lukács at the embassy of the People’s Republic of Hungary.
Should you subsequently attempt to retract this opinion, suggest that your sister has done anything more than attempt to run away from home, or mention the existence of this note to the police at any point, you will never see her again.
Hugo took a deep, furious breath, and handed the note to Leo. He took in the contents in a second.
‘The oldest and ugliest way to make a man do what you want,’ he said. ‘I doubt it will be any consolation that this has quite convinced me on the matter of Mr Ingham’s innocence.’
Hugo struck the edge of his fist against the doorpost, all those years of training counting for nothing in the face of such a letter.
‘Could they carry through on such a threat?’ Leo asked. ‘To make her disappear again?’
Hugo nodded. ‘There was a case in Berlin in ’47, I think, when the Soviets were just getting a grip. The parents went to the police the moment the child was returned. A month later, she disappeared again. They never found her.’
‘Harder to pull off in England, I think.’
‘I can’t risk it,’ Hugo said.
‘The alternative,’ said Leo, ‘and I say this with as much concern for my niece as you have, is to allow Saul’s trial to go ahead, a trial which will almost certainly end with a death sentence.’
‘I know,’ said Hugo. ‘I should like to send whoever wrote this note to the gallows, believe me.’
‘That’s your anger speaking. The immediate priority is to ensure no one else finds out about this,’ said Leo. ‘Here, tuck it in your pocket. We can tell Freya – she must know what’s really going
on – and Gus, but that’s as far as it must go for now.’
Hugo took the note and slipped it inside his jacket, wanting rather to throw it in the fire and scour his hands clean. His sister had been kidnapped, was in the hands of people capable of any barbarity if it served their ends. He’d seen plenty of it in Berlin.
‘Emerson?’ Someone else who knew Service procedure would be invaluable.
Leo shook his head. ‘In any normal situation, I would trust Mr Emerson, but cold logic tells me that he’s a man who knows Saul very well indeed, more than well enough to frame him. He’s also been to Selchester before, and has all the necessary connections to arrange something like this.’
Leo was right. Where were Hugo’s wits?
‘Then to the police station it is,’ he said, turning to the Lago. ‘They can put an appeal out, one of the people leaving the rehearsal may have noticed something.’
‘Not in the Lago,’ said Leo. ‘I’ll get the keys to Gus’s car. Someone capable of kidnapping is equally capable of cutting a car’s brake lines. From their point of view, silenced is good, but dead is better.’
Scene 12
The duty inspector was brisk, sympathetic. ‘Terrible thing to happen, Mr Hawksworth,’ he said, ‘but they can be right awkward at that age, and it sounds as if she’s had a hard time of it. Likely as not she’s gone to someone she knows, but we’ll do our part. Not much to be done now, mind you, it’ll have to wait till morning before we go around asking questions. You say there were a deal of possible witnesses, do you have a list?’
‘Vivian Witt will. She’s directing the play.’
‘I know about Miss Witt and her play, I shall give her a ring this very moment. Bad time for your telephone to go down, but we’ll send a constable up if there’s any news.’
‘Thank you, Inspector.’
‘Don’t worry, Mr Hawksworth, this is a good area, and people are friendly. If she’s wandering around lost, someone will look out for her. We’ll have her back with you in no time.’
Hugo gave a tight smile. ‘I hope you do.’
Scene 13
Georgia drifted up out of a strange groggy sleep. Her head was thick and fuzzy, and when she opened her eyes she couldn’t see a thing. She waggled her fingers slowly in front of her face, still nothing.
The air was cold, and she was wrapped in rough blankets. The floor was made of boards, dry and dusty. She reached her other hand up and banged into something, a beam, only just above her head. Her skull was throbbing. She had cut her head, and it hurt.
‘I must be brave,’ she said, feeling nothing of the kind. She hated dark enclosed spaces, cupboards and holes and suchlike. Until she was eight she had always slept with a nightlight. Otherwise she remembered the long ghastly hours trapped in the ruins of her parents’ house after the doodlebug hit. The dark, and the cold, and the rafters pressing down on top of her, throat choked with dust so she couldn’t even scream.
She wrapped one of the blankets more tightly around her, movements slow. Her head was really very foggy indeed, all she wanted was to go back to sleep. Her throat was dry again. Where was she? What time was it? What had happened? She remembered seeing the little doorway in the turret ajar, going into the dark servants’ stairs, then something soft held over her face, a cloying smell like hospitals.
She groped her way around the room until there weren’t beams over her head any more. Not a chink of light. It was quite dark, and her head was swimming. The walls were wood, or bare brick, it felt like a shed. She worked her way around, not finding a door, until she came to something earthenware. It was a jug of water. She tried a little, gingerly, but it tasted just like water out of the taps.
So tired, why was she so tired? She would sit down against the wall for a bit, wrap the blankets around her. Just for a few minutes.
Scene 14
‘Kidnapped?’ said Freya.
Hugo pulled the note out of his pocket. It was much later, the Castle quiet at last. Mrs Partridge had served a plain supper, and everyone had gone in search of a fitful sleep, alarms set for first thing. A constable had cycled up to inform them that the police had a list of the cast, and would be attending the rehearsal on Sunday afternoon to appeal for witnesses.
He and Leo had come to find Freya in her tower, where they wouldn’t be overheard. She had hastily cleared her notes into a pile, plonked some worthy tomes down on top of them, propped some dull eighteenth-century prospect of the gardens and Castle open on the desk.
She felt a little ashamed for bothering. What was the point of keeping secrets when something like this was going on? Force of habit, no doubt.
‘I suppose Bruno wasn’t the spy, then,’ she said, ‘and Saul didn’t kill him. But surely no one from Foxley could have done this? A scientist?’
‘Science is a rational, analytical endeavour,’ said Leo, ‘no more moral than any other profession. It can attract those rather detached from ordinary human sympathy. I’ve met men of genius who were almost completely dissociated from the world around them. But in this case, I’d have said the skill and tradecraft were beyond any of them.’
‘Then who could have done this? They must be desperate, which means Hugo was close to the truth.’
‘As to the spy,’ said Hugo, ‘I’m almost certain it’s Dr Oldcastle. Not willingly – he’s being blackmailed. I should say Dr Rothesay’s compulsive grumbling came to the ears of someone who could put two and two together. They, whoever they are, realised Oldcastle had covered up his own part in a serious accident, and contrived to gain promotion on the back of it.’
‘And you believe this person killed Dr Rothesay,’ Leo said. ‘Do we have a motive?’
‘To silence him, surely?’ said Freya, staring at the ghastly note. ‘That’s what this is all about, to keep things quiet. They’ll threaten a thirteen-year-old girl to halt Hugo’s investigation. Why would they cavil at shooting a troublesome scientist in the back of the neck?’
‘Making it look as if he’d taken himself off to Russia,’ Leo added. ‘Thus neatly wrapping up the investigation into the source of the leak.’
‘Why do they want you to return the note?’ Freya asked. ‘And why to the Hungarian embassy, not the Russian?’
‘To keep the evidence in their hands,’ Leo said. ‘And to implicate Hugo to a degree. His fingerprints will be on the note, don’t forget, and he’ll have to get it there somehow. As to the Hungarian connection, might it be the AVH running this, rather than the MGB?’
The AVH were the Hungarian secret police, an unpleasant bunch.
‘It could be all sorts of things,’ said Hugo. ‘To undermine our trust in Árpád? They’re well aware we’ve got him here. To throw us off the scent? After all, the Service isn’t quite as concerned about Hungarians as about Russians. The AVH is efficient enough when it comes to boots stamping on faces, to use Mr Orwell’s term, but they’re not in the MGB’s league when it comes to foreign espionage. They don’t have the experience – they’ve only been going a few years.’
‘Whoever did this is an expert,’ said Leo. ‘To abduct Georgia from the Castle, to cut the phone line and leave the note, all without any of us noticing, takes quite a deal of skill. Not to mention making such a convincing case against Saul. I was inclined to believe it myself.’
‘Jenkins may well have the skill,’ said Hugo, ‘but we know far too little about him, and we don’t know whether he’s been in Selchester since Monday.’
Freya said, ‘Surely it must have been someone in the cast?’ It wasn’t something she cared to think about. They were mostly locals of some kind, while Vivian would surely know who the professional actors were.
‘What makes you think that?’
‘It would be the perfect cover. In and out of the Castle all afternoon with no one really keeping an eye on them.’
‘There were cars arriving to pick people up at the end, though,’ said Hugo. ‘One was just behind the Lago, coming up the drive. A big black Vauxhall, if I’m not mi
staken.’ He was trained to observe inconsequential details, car makes and number plates. It could be a bore sometimes, he found himself paying attention to a car on the road if he caught sight of it more than once.
‘The trouble is,’ he went on, ‘I can’t ask the police to look out for it. Whoever’s behind this seems to know everything the police do. Doubtless the Selchester gossip mill at work again.’
‘That would rule Jenkins out,’ said Freya. ‘He’s hardly here enough to be plugged in to the gossip mill, and everyone’s quite tight-lipped about blabbing to outsiders.’
‘You seem intent on the idea that it’s a member of the cast.’
‘Yes, although it’s a very disagreeable thing to think. Call it instinct, the way you didn’t believe Saul was guilty. I think whoever it was had the whole afternoon to prepare. It’s too much of a stretch to imagine they could hope to turn up at the right moment, like your black Vauxhall.’
‘Then they could as easily be someone who’d just come to nose around, watch the rehearsal,’ said Leo. ‘I saw several people with no particular reason to be there, aside from the fame of Miss Witt and the chance to see inside the Castle. I shall enquire who they were this afternoon. After all, they could quite legitimately have seen Georgia making her way off.’
‘I can record the cars as they come in,’ said Freya. ‘I have a good view from that window. I shall see all the comings and goings.’
‘Which reminds me,’ said Leo, reaching inside his clerical jacket. ‘Emerson gave this to me. I believe it’s from one of your colleagues in London.’
Hugo read it, read it again, with a look almost of bafflement. He reached down and rubbed his bad leg, the one he always said was the result of a bicycle accident. Freya had her suspicions, but she rather suspected Leo knew the whole story.
‘I think we should turn in,’ she said, to give them an opportunity to talk without her. ‘At least try to sleep.’
The men took their leave, down the spiral stair past her bedroom, back towards their own wing of the Castle.
A Matter of Loyalty Page 23