The Lost Empress (13 page)

Chapter Fourteen

It was early evening by the time Davina was allowed back into her apartment. The police had left, but Tayte was still with her, knowing she would be glad of his company for a while longer. Visiting her house near Foxburrow Wood had realised Davina’s fears that it, too, had been broken into earlier that day, and the chaos and sense of violation that had greeted her as she opened her front door and walked into her second nightmare, so soon after the first, made her feel so light-headed she had to sit down for a few minutes.

It had taken DI Bishop little time to discover that access to the property had been gained through a downstairs window at the back of the house: the glass was broken, and the latch had been lifted in order to fully open the window and climb inside, unobserved and unhindered. Davina’s insurance had covered the twenty-four-hour tradesmen who had promptly been dispatched to make both of her homes secure again.

‘You should stay with family tonight,’ Tayte said as soon as the locksmith had left. He was helping Davina straighten the place up, and they had almost finished. Surprisingly, Davina had reported nothing broken.

‘I don’t have anyone within two hundred miles of here,’ Davina said as she moved closer, straightening one of the sofa cushions on the way.

‘Well, maybe you could stay with friends, or book into a hotel—anywhere but here.’

‘I won’t be chased away from my own home, JT. Besides, if whoever did this wanted to harm me, he could have done so last night.’

Tayte didn’t doubt that was true under the circumstances, and it seemed unlikely to him that anyone would come back to the apartment tonight, especially given that by now the intruder already knew that what he was looking for wasn’t there. He straightened the last of the crooked paintings and said, ‘Okay, so why don’t I come by again in the morning and see how you are?’

Davina looked horrified by the thought. ‘What about our research?’ She checked her watch. ‘It’s only just after six.’

Tayte had thought the research would have been the last thing on Davina’s mind right now. He fully intended to continue himself, but he’d supposed, given everything that had happened, that he’d be doing it alone in his hotel room. ‘You want to carry on as if none of this happened?’

Davina’s eyes widened into a resolute stare. ‘More than ever. What’s happened today has only made me more determined.’

Tayte liked her spirit, and he wasn’t about to pour cold water over it. He went to his briefcase, which he’d left inside the door, and brought it back with him. ‘Shall we set up at the dining table?’

Davina gave a small smile—the first Tayte had seen since they’d left her boat that afternoon. ‘Thank you,’ she said, pulling out a chair for Tayte to sit on. ‘I’ve lost my appetite, and I don’t suppose I’ll get it back tonight, but I can order you a take-away later if you’re hungry.’

All the excitement had made Tayte feel very hungry, but he thought he could hold out until he was back at his hotel. ‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’

‘A drink then?’ Davina said. ‘I’m definitely having one of those—probably several. I’ve got wine, gin, Jack Daniels . . .’

A part of Tayte knew it was a bad idea, but the thought of a JD over ice right now was too much for him to resist. Davina left him briefly and came back with two large tumblers full of ice in one hand and a half full bottle of Jack Daniels in the other. She poured two large measures and raised her glass.

‘Cheers,’ Tayte said, and they both took a mouthful. Then as Davina sat beside him at the table, facing the picture windows and the shimmering early evening view of the estuary, he opened his laptop and logged in. ‘We might as well just use mine for now. Can we take a look at that group photo you showed me on the
Osprey
again?’

Davina fetched her research files and laid them out on the table. She handed Tayte the photograph showing Alice on her father’s knee, with her mother standing beside them, Oscar Scanlon and his wife Cordelia to the right, Frank Saxby to the left, and a line of highly decorated naval uniforms in the background.

‘So, what are we looking for?’ Tayte said. ‘I find it’s good to focus on something specific and see where it leads.’

‘You said you were looking to prove that Alice Stilwell and your client’s grandmother, Alice Dixon, were one and the same person.’

‘Yes, and if that’s true—as I believe it is—I also want to find out why she felt she had to leave her old life and her young family behind her when the
Empress of Ireland
sank. Those are the main answers I hope to find—the big picture if you like—but to see it clearly, I think it might help if we first try to put some of the smaller pieces of the puzzle into place.’

‘The people in the photo?’ Davina said.

Tayte tapped the image, nodding thoughtfully. ‘All these people knew Alice. Most of them would have been around her in the years before she’s supposed to have died. What do you know about Alice’s father, Lord Charles Metcalfe?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid. As I said earlier, most of my research has been about my husband’s and my direct family history.’ She tapped the image of Cordelia Scanlon née Metcalfe as she finished speaking. ‘My husband’s ancestry is only connected to the Metcalfe
family through Oscar Scanlon’s marriage to Alice’s Aunt Cordelia here.’

‘I just wondered whether you knew anything about Charles Metcalfe from his descendants, since you’re in touch—whether you’d heard any stories over the years.’

‘No, I can’t say I have,’ Davina said as she topped up her drink. ‘He was something of a British bulldog, by all accounts—very patriotic and pro British Empire. He served in the Royal Navy most of his life, extended service in the Admiralty before dabbling in politics after that. What do you know about him?’

‘Only as much as Wikipedia and his vital records tell me, and what I’ve learned since arriving in England, which so far isn’t much.’ Tayte entered ‘Lord Charles Metcalfe’ into his Internet browser. ‘The current family’s attitude towards Alice must stem from her father, though. He’s as good a place as any to start digging.’

The search came back with too many results for Tayte to get interested in anything. Most were for a first baron, Charles Theophilus Metcalfe, who was a British colonial administrator in the early Victorian period.

‘It’s not him,’ Tayte said as he added ‘Admiral’ to the search, which brought up the Wikipedia link he’d previously looked at.

‘There’s another entry for him,’ Davina said a moment later, pointing a long polished fingernail at an entry partway down the screen.

‘House of Commons speeches,’ Tayte said. ‘We could be here all night wading through those for anything useful.’ He ran through the results, page by page, skipping over what appeared to be several minor connections to the Charles Metcalfe they were interested in, most of which were political. Then he saw a familiar entry that never failed to excite him. ‘Here we are.’ He clicked on the link. ‘
The Times
Digital Archive. It’s one of my favourite resources.’

Tayte logged in via his paid subscription to the online newspaper archive that contained scanned images of every complete page from the newspaper dating from recent years back to its creation in 1785. Available to search online for close to a decade, it had helped him to break through many brick walls, and as he finished entering his information and the page he had requested came up, he hoped it might do so again now.

The article was dated December 1911, which Tayte thought was perhaps a little early to be of any interest. It concerned the Admiralty, in particular a memo from Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty at the time, proposing that, because of the Anglo-German arms race, British merchant ships should be armed for their own protection, in case the need to defend themselves should arise. Reading on, Tayte saw only a passing mention of Charles Metcalfe in connection with the establishment of a committee to explore the matter further.

‘That’s no good,’ Tayte said, but he hadn’t expected to get lucky with the first hit. He knew he had to be more specific.

Returning to the archive’s main search screen, he entered the date range he was interested in, which was between January and June 1914, covering those months of the year up until the date of death on Alice Stilwell’s death certificate—29 May 1914. He entered ‘Charles Metcalfe’ into the search keywords field and clicked the search button. Several entries came back, and most seemed to be in connection with general Admiralty business as before, but not all.

‘Admiral Christopher Waverley,’ Tayte said to Davina. ‘You mentioned that name before.’ He brought Davina’s photograph closer and singled out the man standing in the background with white hair and wiry sideburns.

‘That’s him,’ Davina said. ‘It looks like his obituary.’

‘It is.’ Tayte quickly found the entry in the right-hand column of the scanned newspaper page he was looking at.

‘You’re pretty good at this, aren’t you?’ Davina said.

Tayte zoomed in on the information they were interested in. ‘I guess I’ve been in the business long enough to develop some kind of nose for it. There’s so much information out there. It really helps if you know where to look.’

‘You’ll have to give me some pointers before you go home,’ Davina said. ‘You’ve certainly rekindled my interest.’

Tayte just smiled and continued the research. ‘Waverley died on April 6th, 1914,’ he said as he read on. ‘Caring husband and loving father to two sons . . . A few names are mentioned.’ He took out his notepad and wrote them all down. ‘Charles Metcalfe is noted here as being a friend, which we already know from the photograph. Apart from a few name connections, it doesn’t really tell us much.’

He went back to the search results, and as he scrolled down, Davina drew a sharp breath and pointed at the screen. ‘That’s got to be important.’

Tayte saw the entry, dated 20 April 1914, and he felt a tingle at the back of his neck. It concerned a discovery that had been made the day before the article was published, and it carried the title ‘Body Found in River Thames!’ He clicked the entry, wondering as he did so how it was connected to Lord Charles Metcalfe, the subject of his search, and whether it might be connected to Alice Stilwell. His thoughts drifted back to the accounts he’d read of those spies who were executed at the start of the First World War.

Executed for passing information useful to an enemy . . .

Tayte still knew very little about the nature of Alice’s spying activity in 1914, but he supposed that her involvement was along the same lines. Whatever Alice was doing, and for whatever reasons, the timing and the nature of this article from
The Times
, published barely more than a month before Alice was supposed to have died, was close enough to make Tayte feel excited about it. When the corresponding page from
The Times
displayed on his laptop screen and he began to read the article, every instinct in his body told him that he was on to something.

Chapter Fifteen

Tuesday, 21 April 1914.

It was just after ten in the morning, and with breakfast at Hamberley finished, Alice Stilwell sensed that her father was as keen to share the details of his trip to London with the police as the rest of the family were to hear about it. Lord Metcalfe ushered them into the front sitting room, where he asked everyone to be seated while he remained standing. Alice and her mother, Lilian, sat together on one settee, while her aunt and uncle, Cordelia and Oscar Scanlon, sat on the settee opposite them. Chester, though much improved after having been poisoned by Raskin’s liquorice, was to remain in bed for the rest of the day under doctor’s orders, and Charlotte had been placed in the care of Mrs Morris the cook, because, as Alice’s father had said, his ‘terrible news’ was not for the ears of children.

Lord Metcalfe paced the rug that was laid out between the two settees, tapping his fingers together as though contemplating where to start. He reached the fireplace and wheeled around. ‘I’ll not leave you to your own suppositions a moment longer,’ he said. ‘The good admiral’s wife, Florence Waverley, is dead!’

Oscar Scanlon was the only person in the room who didn’t gasp at hearing the news. ‘Dead?’ he repeated.

‘That is correct. Her body was found two days ago on the south bank of the River Thames. Beneath Blackfriars Bridge to be precise.’

‘That really is terrible news,’ Alice said.

‘Indeed. Just as I said it was.’

Lilian Metcalfe’s hand had been raised to her mouth since hearing the news. She slowly lowered it and said, ‘What happened, Charles? Did the police say?’

‘For the moment it’s assumed she drowned, although I’m told the precise cause of death was difficult to establish because the body was so badly decomposed.’

‘She must have died a while ago, then,’ Alice said. ‘Perhaps around the time Admiral Waverley had his heart attack.’

‘Yes,’ her father said. ‘And a connection between the two deaths seems highly likely, which is one of the reasons I was asked to go to London—to help the police establish a motive for why Admiral Waverley should want to murder his own wife.’

‘That’s preposterous,’ Lilian said. ‘They’ve been married nearly forty years.’

‘I told them exactly that,’ Lord Metcalfe said.

Oscar Scanlon sat forward. ‘You said that was
one
of the reasons you were asked to go to London. What was the other?’

‘Indeed, there were two reasons,’ Lord Metcalfe said, ‘and together they have helped the police to form a theory that is damnably hard to refute. One is that certain documents were discovered at Admiral Waverley’s house—the details of which I am not at liberty to divulge, but suffice it to say that I was able to confirm that the contents of these documents were of a most secret nature. The other is that Admiral Waverley’s sidearm is missing.’

‘Secret documents?’ Scanlon said.

‘Most secret,’ Lord Metcalfe corrected. ‘The recently formed Secret Service Bureau is also involved, not least because the proposed theory is that Admiral Waverley was in the pay of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Their suggestion is that his wife discovered his traitorous activities, so he took her out to Tilbury to drown her, taking his sidearm with him as a precaution in case he had to use it on her. They’re supposing that performing this dark deed was all too much for him—hence the heart attack that followed.’

‘But why is his gun missing?’ Alice asked. ‘Surely it would have been found on his person or beside his body where he fell.’

‘A simple matter. Someone else must have discovered the body prior to the alarm being raised and taken the revolver. It’s a reasonable explanation, I suppose, but I can’t think it of Waverley. He was a good man. I knew him too long and too well to doubt his allegiance. Christopher Waverley, a spy for the kaiser? I can’t think of a single person besides myself least likely to do such a lowly and unpatriotic thing.’

In light of Alice’s current situation, another theory was running through her mind, but she didn’t dare voice it. What if Florence Waverley had been kidnapped, just as her husband had been? What if she had been held to ransom in exchange for naval secrets? Perhaps the Admiral had removed the documents, ready for the exchange, but had chosen to take his revolver instead, hoping to free his wife. But the excitement had proven too much for him. His revolver might have been taken after he dropped it, and his wife later drowned and her body cast into the Thames. It was just another theory, but given what she knew, Alice thought it the more likely of the two.

Lowly and unpatriotic . . .

Alice felt just that as she got to her feet and delivered the lie that, between bouts of fitful sleep, it had taken her most of the night to invent.

‘If you’ll all excuse me,’ she said. ‘I have to go out and won’t be back until this evening.’

‘Where are you going?’ Alice’s mother asked.

‘To Margate. I saw an old friend in Rochester yesterday who told me that my good friend Violet is very sick. I must go and see her. You remember Violet, don’t you?’

Lilian looked confused. ‘Yes, dear, but I didn’t know you two were still friends. You’ve not seen her since the family moved away, have you? You were still children then.’

Alice took a step towards the door. ‘Which is all the more reason I must go and see her now. Suppose she dies?’

‘Yes, well, of course you must go and see her.’

‘How will you get there?’ her father asked.

Alice made a point of eying the mantle clock. ‘I’m going by train, and I really must be getting along, or I’ll miss it. I want to look in on Chester and Charlotte first.’

She felt bad about leaving Chester while he was still confined to his bed, but he was making a speedy recovery, just as Raskin had said he would, and not to go to Dover as he had instructed her to would only put her son in danger again. Raskin had been very clear about that.

Alice’s Aunt Cordelia spoke then for the first time since breakfast. ‘Oscar will drive you to the railway station, won’t you Oscar?’

‘Yes, of course. I was going out anyway. I’ve got to see a man about a camera. It won’t be any bother.’

‘It’s a new business idea,’ Cordelia said. ‘Oscar wants to open a photographic studio, don’t you Oscar?’

‘Well, I—’

Alice cut in, not wishing to be detained any longer. ‘Thank you,’ she said, thinking that her lie, which had perhaps slipped too easily from her lips, had worked very well.