The Lost Empress (19 page)

When Bishop opened the penultimate file, Tayte saw that on
30 April
1914, the SSB had been successful. Hamberley was mentioned, as was Admiral Lord Charles Metcalfe, and Tayte thought this was why the records had been classified as sensitive material and not transferred to the public archive. The Metcalfe family held high positions in the Admiralty and the British government. At the very least it could have caused the family public embarrassment and perhaps even provided a motive for blackmail, making it a potential threat to national security.

Tayte was already wondering what was in the last file, and he felt certain it would offer more incriminating evidence against Alice. That she was spying against her own country now seemed irrefutable, although he had yet to understand why. Bishop was about to open the file when Tayte’s phone started playing the theme from
Guys and Dolls
. He quickly took it out.

‘Sorry,’ he said, checking the display. ‘It’s Davina Scanlon. I’d better take it.’ He pushed a button and pressed the phone to his ear.

‘JT,’ Davina said. ‘I hope I’m not calling at a bad time.’

Tayte thought she sounded bright about something. ‘No, that’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m with DI Bishop, going through a few files.’ He cast a glance at Bishop and smiled apologetically. ‘Is everything okay?’

‘Yes, I’m perfectly fine. I went back to the house today to finish tidying up. I’ve found something I think you should see. It might be important. I was wondering if you were free to come over and take a look.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a telegram. I think it’s better that you come and see it. Perhaps you could bring me up to date on how your assignment’s going at the same time.’

‘Sure,’ Tayte said, thinking that his assignment was suddenly on a roll. ‘How about I come by later this afternoon?’

‘Great. I’ll be waiting.’

The call ended and Tayte slipped his phone back inside his jacket. ‘She has a telegram to show me,’ he said to Bishop, wondering why she thought it could be important and what bearing it might have on his assignment.

Bishop drained his coffee back. ‘Seems we’re keeping you busy between us.’ He eyed Tayte seriously. ‘I’m going to need something from you soon.’

Tayte nodded that he understood. He had to find the connection to Lionel Scanlon’s murder, or their collaboration was over. Bishop turned back to the screen and the last of the SSB files on Alice Stilwell. This file was different from the others—that much was apparent to Tayte as soon as the scanned document image appeared on the screen.

‘It’s an arrest warrant,’ Bishop said. ‘Special Branch, Metropolitan Police.’

‘May 2nd, 1914,’ Tayte said. ‘We’re getting closer to the date Alice is supposed to have died. This warrant was issued just under a month before the
Empress of Ireland
sank.’ He looked quizzically at Bishop. ‘How come the Metropolitan Police were involved?’

‘The Secret Service Bureau had no powers of arrest, which is still true of the SIS today. They worked in conjunction with special branches of the police service, assisting with investigations and dealing with arrests. The Metropolitan Police in London had the largest Special Branch, so I’m not surprised to see they issued this warrant.’

Tayte read on and learned that the warrant for Alice’s arrest had been issued on grounds of high treason and in connection with the murder of a Special Branch detective in Green Park, London, on the day before the attempted arrest was made. That the arrest had not been successful was evident from the events that followed; otherwise, Tayte suspected that given the enormity of her situation, Alice’s name might have appeared alongside Carl Lody’s on the list of executed spies he’d previously seen.

High treason and murder . . .

Tayte thought back to Lord Reginald Metcalfe’s reaction to seeing the photograph of Alice he’d shown him on his visit to Hamberley the day before. In light of this new information, Tayte began to re-evaluate his earlier thoughts about the lengths to which such a family might go to protect their good name and family honour. Reginald Metcalfe was surely too old and in too poor a state of health to have acted directly, but Tayte supposed now that this obviously wealthy man could have been behind Lionel Scanlon’s murder. And he could just as easily have sent someone to run him off the road after his first visit to Hamberley.

Tayte didn’t voice his thoughts to Bishop; it was mere speculation for now. He gazed at the window and wondered what further discoveries he was going to make about Alice Stilwell, and he began to think over what he knew about the journey she had made, which had taken her to Canada in 1914. That Alice was in Quebec on
28 May
and that she had boarded the
Empress of Ireland
was a fact he could bank. The reason she had fled from her home, and from her country, was now also clear to him from the records Bishop had just shown him. And they had also provided him with the date on which Alice’s journey to meet that voyage had begun: 2 May.

What puzzled Tayte about Alice’s journey now was why she was returning to England. She had made it out of the country. She was as safe from prosecution as could reasonably be expected as long as she managed to keep a low profile. Surely a better journey, and one which he knew she had later made, was to make her way south into America, leaving the British Commonwealth behind for good. But the
Empress of Ireland
had been bound for Liverpool. Alice was returning, then, to certain arrest and probable execution. Yet still she had intended to return.

Tayte gave a thoughtful sigh as he turned back to Bishop and thanked him. He collected his briefcase and rose from his chair, his thoughts drifting ahead to the telegram Davina had told him she’d found. He was keen now to go and see it. Perhaps it would unlock another piece of the puzzle that was Alice Stilwell’s life. He knew there had to be more to her story than he’d so far been able to uncover, and he reminded himself that something must have happened to instil the belief in Alice that when she returned to England, she would do so in the knowledge, or at least the hope, that she could return safely to her family—to her children—without the threat to her life that had taken her to Quebec in the first place. But what?

Chapter Twenty-Three

Saturday, 2 May 1914.

The day after Alice Stilwell met Archie in London, it was Oscar Scanlon’s birthday. He was drunk by lunchtime, and Alice couldn’t wait to get away from the dining table, having heard enough of the man’s bad jokes and having seen enough of his nauseating behaviour at being the centre of attention to last her a lifetime. Her father and Frank Saxby had already managed to escape. Saxby had arrived at Hamberley earlier that morning in part by invitation to the birthday lunch, and Alice thought that he and her father must have had some business to discuss because they had taken themselves off to the library and did not want to be disturbed.

Alice could not chase the memories of the past twenty-four hours from her mind, no matter how hard she tried. On her return to Hamberley the night before, the feelings she had somehow managed to keep in check on the train journey home finally overcame her, and she was physically sick. She lay awake most of the night, thinking about the poor man who had chased her in Green Park, knowing he was only doing his duty and that her criminal actions, even if they had been forced upon her, had likely led to his murder. She supposed he was dead because she knew Raskin could not let the man live, although she hadn’t waited to see him go to work with that hideous flensing knife of his.

I know what you’ve been doing . . .

Those words haunted Alice. She wondered who else knew, and more importantly whether the authorities knew who she was. If they did, then she supposed they would come for her soon enough, and she was resolved to go quietly now to meet her fate, not least because she could see no way through this living nightmare that her life had become. She had not seen Raskin again, and that at least was a blessing. He had not come to her for the camera as she expected he would, and she supposed it was because he was lying low after what had happened.

Alice forced a polite smile and rose from her seat. ‘Do excuse me,’ she said. ‘I’ve been feeling light-headed all morning and need to rest.’ It was a lie, even if she did have good reason to feel unwell. She turned to her mother, who was sitting beside Aunt Cordelia. ‘Would you mind looking after the children?’

‘Of course not, dear. It must be all the travelling you’ve been doing this week. How is your friend, the poor thing? Is she much improved?’

‘Yes, very much,’ Alice said.

She ran a hand over Charlotte’s hair as she passed her, and then over Chester’s, dragging her feet as she went.

Oscar Scanlon stood up as she left. ‘Make sure you come down again in time for the cake,’ he called after her.

Alice kept up her pretence until she reached the top of the main staircase, and then instead of turning left towards her room, she turned right towards her uncle’s. She had been away from Hamberley so much that past week that she had not had time to follow up on her plan to discover whether it was Oscar Scanlon or Frank Saxby whom she had heard on the telephone the night she returned from Dover. She was all the more keen now to find out who it was. It was no secret that Oscar Scanlon was bankrupt, and Alice supposed he might be doing it for the money, or at least for the promise of some great fortune ‘come the day.’

Alice reached his room and opened the door, confident that he would not leave the dining room until the last drop of wine had been wrung from the decanter, which was still half full. She stepped inside and pulled the door to behind her. It was a tidier room than she’d imagined, perhaps because she knew her uncle did not share it with her Aunt Cordelia. She had no idea why that was, but the situation afforded him greater opportunity for secrecy.

After taking the room in briefly, she went to the mahogany chest of drawers beneath the window and opened each drawer tentatively, as though expecting something unpleasant to jump out at her. She found shirts, neatly folded; an assortment of undergarments; several ties and a box of cufflinks. The wardrobe yielded nothing out of the ordinary either. There was writing paper and ink on the table, but on closer inspection of the nibs, Alice found them to be bone dry and only slightly stained, as though rarely used. After checking beneath the mattress and under the bed, she decided that if her uncle was a spy, then he, like Raimund Drescher at the Burlington Hotel, kept the tools of his trade elsewhere. There wasn’t so much as a sniff of lemon juice in the air, which was more than could be said for her room.

Alice went back to the door and checked to make sure the way was clear. She could hear her uncle’s voice all the way from the dining room, delivering a terrible rendition of a new song she’d recently heard called ‘You Made Me Love You (I Didn’t Want to Do It).’ She imagined only her Aunt Cordelia remained in the room with him and that her mother had, thankfully, taken the children off somewhere else.

Alice slipped out onto the landing and quietly clicked the door shut behind her. When she reached the top of the stairs she relaxed again, and she began to think about Frank Saxby. She supposed there was little chance of finding out whether he was the other Hamberley spy, and she had the idea then to wait until afternoon tea, when they would all be gathered again for the cutting of her uncle’s birthday cake. She started down the stairs, thinking that she would ask a few well-chosen questions. It occurred to her that all she had to do was to fit the words ‘come the day’ into an otherwise innocent sentence and see who reacted. It wouldn’t prove anything, but she thought it would be a good place to start.

She was almost at the last step when she heard a door open along the passageway to her right. She thought it must be her father and Frank Saxby coming back from the library, so she ran back up the stairs and hid behind the banister. It was only once she was there, peering down through the rails, that she realised she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She watched them pass by, heading towards the dulcet tones of Oscar Scanlon, and she noticed that Saxby wasn’t wearing his jacket. She was sure he’d had it on when he left the dining room earlier, in which case he must have left it in the library. As soon as they were out of sight, Alice went down the stairs again, taking them two at a time. Then she made for the library, thinking it was at least worth having a look through his pockets for incriminating evidence.

The library door was not quite closed. Alice pushed it open and entered into a sunlit room that was several degrees warmer than the hallway. Her father often used the library in the afternoons because his regular office faced east, whereas the library windows looked to the west, catching the afternoon sun and making the room brighter and warmer in the cooler months. She saw Saxby’s jacket hanging on a chair by the desk and went to it. Two weeks ago she would have thought it appalling to go through another person’s pockets, but now she did so without apprehension or guilt.

In one pocket she found a train timetable and a used steamship ticket to Bruges. In the other were some keys and a white paper bag containing a few pieces of toffee. She tried the inside pocket and found two tickets to a play by George Bernard Shaw called
Pygmalion
, which Alice knew had opened just last month at His Majesty’s Theatre in London. There was nothing incriminating at all given that Frank Saxby was a businessman who inherently travelled a great deal.

Alice heaved a sigh as she put the items back. Then as she slid her hand into the inside pocket to return the play tickets, she felt something catch against her fingernail. She felt inside the pocket again, sure that she hadn’t missed anything, but there was definitely something else there. She felt over the jacket and confirmed that it contained something rectangular within the lining. Looking more closely at the inside seam, where the outer cloth met the silk, she found a slit, and her pulse began to rise. There was another pocket—a secret pocket.

What Alice withdrew from that secret pocket made her jaw drop. It was a notebook. She opened it and saw page after page of jumbled letters and numbers arranged in blocks of three. She saw it at once for what it was: a cipher like the transition cipher Raskin had told her to use. But this was not the same. When she tried to switch the letters around in pairs the result still made no sense. This was clearly a variant of the cipher she had been using, and it was something far more complex. It would take time to work it out, but Alice was confident she could do it now that she knew how these things worked.

The library door began to open then, and the sound made Alice jump. In that same instant she wheeled around, picked up a book at random, and slid the notebook inside.

‘Alice?’

Frank Saxby was standing by the door.

‘Whatever are you doing in here?’

Alice swallowed dryly. ‘I came in for a book,’ she said, stepping away from the desk. ‘I’ve been reading a lot lately.’

She made for the door, and Saxby met her halfway.

‘What are you reading?’

Alice had no idea which book she’d picked up. She held it out for Saxby to see for himself. He reached for it and held it firmly as if to take it from her, but Alice did not let go.

‘
The Influence of Sea Power upon History, 1660–1783
by Alfred Thayer Mayhan.’ He gave a small laugh. ‘Seems an odd reading choice for a young lady?’

Saxby was still holding the book, and Alice was now holding her breath. Their eyes met, and caught as she was in his inquisitive stare, she was lost for words.

Eventually, she managed a smile. ‘Well, I am an admiral’s daughter,’ she said, and Saxby smiled back at her.

‘Indeed you are, Alice.’ He let go of the book at last. ‘I forgot my jacket.’ He indicated it with a nod of his head, and Alice glanced at it. When she looked at Saxby again, he was still staring at
his jacket.

‘I must be going,’ Alice said. ‘I don’t want to miss the birthday cake.’

Saxby stepped towards the desk. ‘Wait a second. I’ll come with you,’ he said, but Alice was already heading for the door, wishing it was several feet closer. She reached it at a painfully normal pace, and when she was on the other side, she ran.

‘Alice!’

She ran faster, emerging from the corridor into the main hall.

‘Alice!’

Saxby was out in the corridor now, and Alice kept going. She crossed the main hallway into another passage, heading for the voices ahead of her. They were coming from the front sitting room. A second later she burst in and was glad to see everyone already gathered for the cutting of Oscar Scanlon’s cake.

‘Alice, you made it!’ Scanlon said, full of exuberance and slurring his words.

Alice forced a smile and tried to control her breathing as she went to her parents and stood next to them by the fireplace.

‘Are you feeling better, dear?’ her mother asked.

Alice nodded, and then her attention was drawn sharply to the door as Frank Saxby came in. He was wearing his jacket now, and he looked red-faced and angry. Their eyes locked, and there was no question in Alice’s mind that he knew she had discovered him—the other Hamberley spy. She wondered what type of spy he was, and she doubted a man of his standing would be assigned the kind of tasks she had been engaged in. Neither could she imagine Saxby taking his orders from Raskin, as she did. She doubted that Saxby was an agent, either, so close to the area the Dutchman operated in. It dawned on her then that Frank Saxby was in all likelihood no mere spy at all, but a spy-ring leader. His notebook could prove it, she thought, but that was of little concern to her now. Whatever his role, Alice had found him out, and the only question on her mind now was what he was going to do about it.

Several uncomfortable minutes passed in general conversation that both Alice and Frank Saxby avoided. The cake was cut with great pomp and ceremony because Oscar Scanlon insisted on cutting his own birthday cake, handing each piece out himself and exhibiting great flair as he did so on account of the amount of wine he’d drunk. Alice was sitting beside her father on one of the settees, with Chester and Charlotte to the other side of her, wondering how she was going to escape this new predicament she now found herself in. She had decided that staying close to her father was best for now. Her mother was on the other settee with Cordelia and Oscar Scanlon, and Frank Saxby was sitting opposite Alice with nothing more than a low table laid out with the tea between them.

She was still clutching her book, cake balanced on her knees. Everyone was eating the cake except Saxby, who kept looking at Alice, and he would often catch her stealing glances at him. She grew nervous when Saxby sat up and edged forward on his seat.

‘What’s that you’re reading?’ he asked her.

The question was unexpected given that he had already asked Alice that in the library, but she couldn’t very well let on.

‘It’s a book about naval warfare,’ she said, and her father eyed her curiously.

‘I thought it was about time I took an interest.’ She turned to Chester, who was busy devouring his cake. ‘If I don’t, I shall have little to discuss with my son in a few years.’

Her father laughed. ‘It’s a fine book, although you might find it a little heavy going.’

‘May I see it?’ Saxby said. He stood up and leaned over the table, his arm outstretched.

Alice hesitated, but how could she deny him? She offered the book, and Saxby took it from her. He sat back with a satisfied grin on his face, opened it and guardedly flicked through the pages. Then Alice watched his grin dissolve. The notebook was no longer there.

Saxby shot a knowing look at Alice. Then he scoffed as he rose again and handed the book back. ‘I’m afraid it would be too heavy going for me,’ he said, and then everyone laughed except Alice.

Several more minutes passed, and gradually everyone began to stand up and move about the room, chatting in small groups and laughing at the children every now and then as they chased one another and ran rings around them. Alice remained close to her father, and Saxby remained close to Alice. She couldn’t think how this was going to end, but it took a natural course when someone suggested a game of charades, which prompted Lord Metcalfe to pull out his fob watch.