Escapade (6 page)

‘Never saw him, Marjorie. Told you, I don’t credit all that nonsense.’

‘Rebecca said that he’s in his seventies. And that he has this
terrible
long white hair and a long white beard. He holds his head at a
peculiar
sort of angle.’

‘Rubbish.’ Here he turned to me and smiled. ‘Not to worry, Miss Turner. Hundreds of women have stayed in the East Wing, thousands of’em. And a fair share of virgins among ’em, I dare say. And not a one of ’em’s been bothered by a ghost.’

We were interrupted then by one of the footmen, who was escorting the two newest arrivals, one of whom was the famous American magician, Harry Houdini. He’s much shorter than I should have imagined, but very exotic looking and very energetic. And talented, as well: he ‘found’ a five-pound note in the Allardyce’s teapot (a lovely piece of rococo silver, flower-chased, that one of the footmen provided for her when she explained that she simply couldn’t drink coffee). Mr Houdini made her a present of the banknote, which thrilled her, needless to say. She would have been thrilled by a ha’penny, but of course he wasn’t to know that.

The other arrival was Mr Houdini’s secretary, a tall, swarthy American named Beaumont who seems to spend most of his time smirking. Obviously, and for no reason that I can determine, he is extremely taken with himself. Like Sir David, but without even his feeble wit.

Enough. I really ought to try to sleep, Evy. There is, in any event, scarcely anything else of note to recount.

So I shall tiptoe past the snorting form of the Allardyce and post this in the hallway, and then tiptoe back to my comfy nest. And perhaps during the dark hours I shall be visited by a ghost!

All my love,

Jane

I KNOCKED.

“Who is it?” The Great Man’s voice, sounding flimsy through the thick oak door.

“Beaumont.”

“Come in.”

The Great Man was sprawled, face up, on the bedspread as though he had toppled there from the edge of a cliff. He was wearing all his clothes and his right arm was flung over his eyes.

“What’s up, Harry?” I asked him.

“Filth,” he said. Even though I was in the same room with him, his voice still sounded flimsy. “Filth. I have never in my life heard such filth.”

“Which filth is that, Harry?”

He swung his arm from his eyes. He sat up and swept his feet off the bed. “You heard him, Phil? That vile little German dwarf?”

“I thought he was Austrian.”

He shrugged. “Austrian, German, what difference? Did you
hear
him? The child craves
sexual
possession of his mother! His
mother
!” He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them again. “Phil, if my own dear mother were alive to hear this, the shock of it would kill her in an instant. Did you ever
hear
such an obscenity? I was afraid I would vomit.”

“Well, Harry,” I said. “I’ve read about these psychoanalysts. I don’t think you have to take them all that seriously. They’ve got a lot of theories.”

He shook his head and looked off into the distance. “And this Sir David—how could he possibly talk like that?”

“Sir David likes to shake people up, I think.”

“But to say that about his mother.” He looked at me and said earnestly, “Phil, I truly believe that if ever an angel walked the earth, it was my mother.”

He had said that before, and often.

It was the death of his mother, I think, that had sent him chasing after mediums. Looking for one he could trust, but knowing too much to trust any of them.

I said, “Sounds like Sir David doesn’t feel the same way about his.”

Abruptly, he stood up. “We are leaving, Phil. I cannot remain here, among such people.”

I leaned back against the stone wall and put my hands in my pockets. “What about the seance?”

He waved a hand. “They can hold their ridiculous seance without Houdini.”

“Won’t look good,” I said.

He frowned. “What do you mean?”

“You leave now, you’re admitting defeat.”

He drew himself fully upright. “Houdini never admits defeat.” 

“That psychic, Madame Sosostris, she’ll claim you lammed out because you couldn’t prove fraud.”

He snorted. “The famous Madame Sosostris. Where is she? She hasn’t arrived yet, even.”

“Looks worse, then. You wouldn’t even hang around till she showed up.”

He screwed up his face and chewed pensively at his lower lip. He turned and walked over to the window. He put his arms behind his back and grasped his left fist in his right hand and he stared out through the glass.

Maybe he wasn’t staring through it. All he could see through it was darkness. Maybe he was staring at his own reflection.

“Why not just ignore them?” I said. “You’ve got the rest of the world in your pocket, Harry. After this weekend, you’ll never see those two again.”

“Filthy vermin,” he said. He stared at the window.

“What about Conan Doyle?” I said. “Isn’t he a friend of yours? Won’t he be disappointed if you’re not here?”

What I wasn’t saying was that my job would be a lot easier out here in the country than it could ever be in London.

I also wasn’t saying that if we left now, the drive back to London would take us all night. I was too tired to do it myself and too fond of living to let him do it.

“And Lord Bob and Lady Alice,” I said. “You’ll hurt their feelings. That might get around. Maybe you wouldn’t get invited to any more of these soirees.”

He thought for another moment and then he turned from the window. “Yes. Yes, of course. You are entirely right, Phil. They are extremely fine people, Lord and Lady Purleigh, are they not? Extremely gracious. I cannot abuse their wonderful hospitality.” 

“Right.”

He nodded. “Very well. We will stay. I can rise above this, above the other two. The vermin. I can ignore them, as you say. What are they to me? Nothing. Less than nothing.”

“Right.”

“Yes. Good.” Once more, he nodded. “But now I think I shall retire for the night. I find myself curiously fatigued.”

“I think I’ll pack it in myself. Mind if I use the bathroom?”

“No, no. Of course not.”

I left his room, walked past the bathroom into mine. I circled around the four-poster bed to the night table. I opened my bag. I hadn’t locked it. People don’t usually bother with an unlocked bag.

But when I dug around a bit, I realized that someone had bothered with this one. Someone had gone through it. Carefully, but not carefully enough.

I lifted out the clothes and set them on the bed. I took out the case that held my razor and my toothbrush and I put it beside the clothes. I lifted out the pint bottle of bourbon and put that beside the case.

“Phil?” The Great Man stood at the doorway between our two rooms.

I straightened up and looked at him across the satin bedspread. “Yeah?”

He was frowning, puzzled. “Someone has attempted to unlock my bag.”

I nodded. “Anything missing?”

He shook his head impatiently. “No, no. The locks are made to my own design and, naturally, they are impregnable. But someone has clearly tried to pick them. To an expert like myself, the signs are unmistakable.” He frowned again. “You seem very calm about this, Phil.”

“Someone got into mine. Didn’t take anything, looks like.” “But who would do such a thing?”

“Couldn’t be any of the others. They were all downstairs. One of the servants, maybe.”

He was standing fully upright. “Phil,” he said, “we must report this at once.”

“Let’s hold off on that for a while, Harry.”

Another frown. “But this is a personal violation. A defilement. And if one of his servants is a thief, Lord Purleigh must learn of it.”

“Whoever he was, he didn’t take anything. And if we tell the boss, all the servants will know we know. Including the one who did it. Maybe things will work out better if he doesn’t know.” 

The Great Man considered this. Then he nodded. “We shall possess knowledge that he does not.”

“Like a magician and his audience.”

He nodded again. “It provides us an advantage. And possibly it will enable us to catch him in the act.”

“Right.”

He grinned. “Excellent. I approve. Mum is the word, eh?” 

“Mum,” I said.

“Excellent.”

After the Great Man went back inside his room, I reached down into the empty bag and pressed the two concealed snaps with my thumbs. I raised the bag’s false bottom. The little Colt .32 was still in there. So were the spare magazines.

I replaced the bottom. I hung some clothes in the wardrobe, took my watch from my pocket, placed it on the night table. I undressed, climbed into my pajamas and robe, grabbed the toilet case, went into the bathroom and washed up.

When I opened the bathroom door, the Great Man was standing outside it in his own pajamas. They were impressive. They were black silk and the lapels were piped with gold, and a large ornate golden
H
was stitched over the chest pocket. He was carrying his toothbrush in one hand and his tooth powder in the other and he was wearing his black silk blindfold across his forehead.

“Good night, Harry,” I said.

He stuck the toothbrush into his left hand, with the tooth powder, and then reached up to his ear and twisted out the lump of beeswax. “What was that?”

“Good night.”

He smiled and nodded. “Good night, Phil. Many pleasant dreams.” He corked up his ear again.

At night he put the blindfold across his eyes and the lumps of wax into his ears because he believed he was an insomniac. He wasn’t. All night long, maybe, he dreamed he was awake. But I had slept in the same compartment with him on the train from Paris to Amsterdam, and for hours I had listened to snores that sounded like coupling hogs. In the morning he told me he hadn’t slept a wink.

I returned to my room, shutting the dividing door behind me. I took off my robe and hung it on a hanger in the wardrobe, then slipped into bed and turned off the light.

I lay there for a while wondering who had broken into my bag. I decided there was nothing I could do about it now. A few minutes later I was asleep.

Something had awakened me.

The door to the suite opening? A footstep?

My eyes were wide open. I narrowed them slightly. I was lying flat on my back. My head was facing the door, my hands were outside the covers.

I kept my breathing slow and regular.

The clouds must have cleared away outside. A slab of moonlight slanted across the room and painted a rectangle of colorless design on the dark Oriental carpet.

I listened.

I heard the faint ticking of my watch on the night table. Nothing else.

With my eyes still narrowed, I peered through the gloom toward the door.

Was there something there,
someone
there, a lighter shade of gray lurking over there in the darkness?

There was. Something tall and thin. Something the color of ash. It had moved toward me.

It moved again. Very slowly. Silently.

I found myself wishing that I had taken the Colt from the suitcase and tucked it beneath my pillow. I hadn’t thought I would need it tonight.

The thing came closer. It was only a pale smudge against the sooty background and it made no sound at all. And then it floated into the spill of frosty moonlight and I saw that it was a figure shrouded from head to toe in white. It wore a hood that made an empty hole where the face should have been. It held something in its right hand, something that gleamed for an instant in the light of the moon.

It came still closer. It glided out of the moonlight and it became a silhouette, black against silver.

Four feet away.

Three feet.

Two feet from the bed.

It leaned toward me.

I whirled over, swinging my arm. Aiming my fist into the hood, at the spot where its chin should be.

My knuckles clipped the corner of something.

The figure toppled to the carpet, boneless and slack.

I sat up, turned on the light, jumped from the bed, bent down and turned the figure over. The hood fell away

Cecily Fitzwilliam lay there, out cold.

I said an impolite word.



CECILY'S EYES opened. “What?” she said. She blinked.

I took the damp washcloth away from her face and dropped it into the ceramic basin I’d set on the floor. “Everything’s okay,” I said.

She blinked again. Her eyes were still unfocused.

I moved the lamp on the nightstand a bit farther away. “Everything’s okay,” I said.

She looked at me. “What happened?”

She was lying on my bed. It wasn’t a shroud she was wearing, it was a white silk robe with an attached hood. She was naked beneath it. I had learned this when I scooped her up and stretched her out along the bed.

“You tripped,” I said.

“I . . .” She winced. She reached up and put her fingers to her chin. “I hurt, ” she said. She looked vulnerable and lost and about twelve years old.

“Must’ve banged yourself when you fell. Probably what knocked you out.”

Suddenly her eyes opened wide. She looked quickly around the room, then back at me. I was sitting on the edge of the bed in my bathrobe. Her own robe was belted shut but she clutched at it with both hands and tried to draw the front of it closer together. She moved to sit up and then winced again and fell back to the pillow. “What are you doing here?” She was whispering now.

I smiled. “I was just going to ask you the same question.”

“But this is Mr. Houdini’s room!”

“We switched.”

She frowned. “Switched?”

“Exchanged rooms. What did you want with Mr. Houdini?” She lowered her eyebrows. Her hands still gripped the front of her robe. “I don’t see that it’s any of your business.”

Her flat, bored drawl was gone. Maybe it was something she hung up at the end of the day, with her clothes. Before she started wandering into other people’s rooms.

“I handle his appointments,” I said. “Usually he doesn’t have any at two o’clock in the morning.”

“I . . . If you really
must
know,” she said in a ferocious whisper, “I wanted to ask him something.” She winced again and she brought her left hand up to her jaw. “
Ow
. ”