When the Devil Drives (36 page)

He goggled at me for long seconds, resenting having to turn. ‘Fellow's gone and shot himself, that's what.'

‘Fellow? You're sure it's a man?'

For answer, he stood fractionally aside, revealing that the person was wearing black trousers and shoes. Neat, narrow shoes in highly polished leather. An elegant gentleman's shoes. Not far away from them, a pistol on its side as if it had been dropped. From behind, a hand came round my wrist, trying to pull me away. I resisted, thinking it was some officious do-gooder.

‘Come on, before they do it to us.' Tabby's voice. I let her take me to the other side of the street.

‘It's the same man, isn't it?' I said. ‘Mr Clyde?'

She nodded, looking at me sideways on, as if surprised by something in my voice.

‘And he shot himself?'

The sound she made was a growl of disbelief.

‘He didn't?'

‘Nah. It was one of the men following him. The one that's kneeling down there.'

She nodded towards the man in shirtsleeves. As we watched, a mixed party of soldiers and civilians came out of the castle gate. There were about a dozen of them and they made for the group round the dead man. Two soldiers were carrying a rolled-up stretcher. One of the civilians was giving the orders. They made the crowd stand back while the two soldiers unrolled the stretcher and lifted the body onto it, face still covered. A hand flopped down, blood dripping from the limp fingers. Another order, then the hand was tucked tidily inside the jacket and the stretcher lifted. As the party went towards the castle gateway, the man in the shirtsleeves and the other man who'd been trying to keep back the crowd fell in behind them.

‘Are those two the ones you saw following him?' I asked Tabby.

‘That's right.'

The stretcher party reached the gateway and turned inside. All except the man in the shirtsleeves and his colleague. They simply walked away and round the corner, like any other Sunday morning strollers. The sound of the organ and voices raised in the first hymn drifted out of the chapel.

‘They're just letting them get away,' I said.

I couldn't have gone after the two men even if I'd wanted to. My feet felt as if they were welded to the pavement.

‘Do you want me to follow them?' Tabby said, sounding unconcerned.

‘For heaven's sake, no. But did you really see one of them shoot him?'

She nodded. ‘I was right behind them. I knew you'd want to know where they were going. They didn't see me because they were too set on going after him and he was too set on running away from them.'

‘Running?'

‘When they came out of the castle, he was just walking fast but they were walking faster and catching up with him. Then he turned round and saw them and started running. Only he didn't get far. They started running too and one of them shouted something at him. Then they got up close, the one who'd shouted grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled him round and the other one shot him right in the heart. They were so close the gun must have been nearly touching him.'

‘Didn't anybody else see?'

‘Nobody to see. Everybody was inside, watching the queen and the others. He might of, only I think he's probably a waxwork.'

She gave a nod towards the unblinking sentry at the castle gate. I thought he might as well have been.

‘What happened then?'

‘The one who'd done the shooting got down on his knees, so when people started coming up to see what was happening, it looked as if he was trying to help. I suppose he must have told them the man had killed himself. I didn't get close enough to hear. I thought I'd just wait until you got here.'

Silence. Even without looking, I could feel her staring at me.

‘You all right?'

She sounded both concerned and puzzled. I nodded.

‘You didn't . . .
like
him did you?'

Something worse than puzzlement there, panic almost. I couldn't find words to deal with it. Did I like a man who'd killed innocent girls, or had them killed, on the instructions of some unknown paymaster? No. Did I like a man who'd used me so ruthlessly? No. But a part of my mind that was still refusing to catch up with things clung to the thought of a sad and civilized gentleman who'd walked lightly, enjoyed good music and been gallantly in love with his beautiful contessa. He'd never existed and I was in the first rank of fools – the fools who fool themselves. Even if I could have said it, why burden Tabby with that?

‘No,' I said.

She sighed with relief. ‘He was a bad'un, wasn't he?' Then, inevitably: ‘So what do we do about Mr Legge?'

I dragged my feet into motion and we went towards the castle gate. With anybody but Tabby, the fact that she was sole witness to a murder would have complicated things even more. But I knew without thinking about it that she was no more likely to describe what she'd seen to any person in authority than the castle sentry to jump out of his box and dance a jig on the cobbles. We walked past him, under the archway that led to the courtyard. In half an hour or so the royal party would leave the chapel and walk back to their own part of the castle. There were still a few people waiting in the courtyard to see them. This time, I'd talk to Lord Palmerston even if I had to throw myself in his path. It never came to that. Tabby and I had only taken a few steps under the arch when a man appeared out of the shadows. Or not appeared, exactly. It was as if he'd always been there, growing out of the stonework like a statue in a niche. Stone man himself. Sir Francis Downton.

‘Good morning, Miss Lane. I've got your note. This may be a convenient time to talk.'

He didn't wait for a response. A door opened behind him and we were inside the castle.

TWENTY-FOUR

S
ir Francis led the way along a corridor to a small room with a bare table and four or five upright chairs. The walls were plain white distemper, the only decoration a framed engraving of some naval battle. The room had a damp smell, as if not often used.

‘Please sit down, Miss Lane.'

He ignored Tabby, but when I sat down, so did she. He remained standing, but ill at ease as if the surroundings were as strange to him as to us.

‘Were they your assassins?' I said.

The twitch of his mouth might have been meant for a smile. ‘You are determined to think badly of us, aren't you? We don't use assassins.'

‘Don't use them or don't call them by that name?'

‘Don't use them under any name. Those men were nothing to do with us.'

‘But you knew about them?'

He sighed and sat down heavily. The outer corner of his left eyebrow was twitching. He pressed his fingers to the twitch to make it stop. His eyes, meeting mine, showed an instant of distress that anything should be out of his control.

‘Yes, we knew about them.'

‘They were foreign.'

The announcement came flatly from Tabby. If the table had spoken, Sir Francis couldn't have looked more surprised.

‘How do you know that?' I said.

‘I told you one of them shouted something before they shot the man. It was something foreign.'

‘What did it sound like?' I said.

Tabby made a series of guttural barks like a terrier with laryngitis. I'd been relying too much on her powers of mimicry. It didn't resemble any language I knew. I could see from Sir Francis's face that it didn't mean anything to him either. He looked relieved about that.

‘Tom said the men that tried to burn us down were foreign too,' Tabby said, not at all put out by being centre stage. ‘I suppose they were the same ones.'

‘I see your . . . er . . . friend doesn't think quite so badly of us as you do,' Sir Francis said to me. ‘I told you we had nothing to do with your fire. Do you believe me?'

‘About the fire or the two men?'

‘Both.'

‘About the fire, I'll believe you. But if those two men weren't working for you, why did they shoot him?' I said.

‘Because he'd failed.'

Sir Francis' words fell like drops of water in a cave. I waited.

‘You will remember that we spoke in London on Friday, Miss Lane. You told me certain things of which we had not been aware.'

‘About the deaths of Janet Priest and Peggy Brown.'

His nod acknowledged their names. We'd achieved that at least. ‘Yes. That evening, back here at Windsor, Her Majesty entertained a large number of people to dinner, including several ambassadors. It was arranged that I should be sitting next to a certain gentleman from one of the embassies. Naturally we talked, as one does, about this gentleman's impressions of London.'

Tabby gave me a look from under lowered brows, asking what all this was about. I signed to her not to interrupt, now that Stone Man had decided to talk.

‘My neighbour was properly impressed by our parks, Hyde Park, Regent's Park and so on. Naturally, I agreed with him that Regent's Park is a delightful place.'

I began to see. His fingers were clamped to his eyebrow again. I suspected that he'd had to struggle hard to stop it twitching during that civilized conversation with the gentleman from a foreign embassy.

‘So many places near it of interest too,' he said. ‘Could he believe, for instance, that just to the side of the park was a deep pit containing thousands of tons of ice, a regular little Arctic in the heart of London? So convenient to be able to bring ice so close to where it was needed.'

I was leaning forward in my chair now. I couldn't help it. ‘And how did he react?'

‘He entirely agreed with me. So very convenient. He must mention it to their own ministry of works when he next returned to his home country.'

‘Was that all? Surely he must have understood,' I said.

He smiled. ‘Of course he understood. For the rest of the dinner we talked about other things, but when we moved to the drawing room for coffee I noticed that my neighbour and several of his colleagues were absent. An almost unprecedented display of bad manners in diplomatic circles. They returned later, after what I'm sure was a council of war in somebody's bedroom. The ambassador did not look pleased. They knew they'd lost the game.'

‘They'd lost their chariot too,' I said.

‘Indeed. But that wasn't the decisive blow in itself. What mattered was that we had knowledge of their whole operation, and they knew it.'

‘Knowledge we'd given you,' I said.

A slight shift in the angle of his head was the nearest he came to a nod of agreement.

‘So what happens now?' I said.

‘Nothing. The object is achieved. The attempt to destroy Prince Ernest's reputation is back where it belongs, in the fictions of hack journalists and various disreputables. You'll remember what Virgil says about rumour?
Adquirit eundo
: she gains strength by moving. Conversely, when rumour stops moving, she dies.'

He was flattering me with Latin, trying to draw me into his world. I didn't care for the reminder that, to the Romans, rumour was female.

‘So all we have to do is stop talking about it?' I said.

A deeper inclination of the head.

‘And what will happen to the people responsible?'

‘One of them is dead, as you saw. Several of the fellows who operated the chariot are in custody.'

‘Yes, and the men who planned it all are dining with the queen.'

The surge of anger I felt came from guilt. On Friday evening, Clyde's employers had discovered that the whole mechanism of their plot was known to the Foreign Office, because of what I'd told them. Thirty-six hours later, he'd paid the price of failure.

‘I didn't make the world, you know,' Sir Francis said. ‘Are we to break off diplomatic relations, risk war even?'

‘The man who called himself Clyde knew what was going to happen,' I said. ‘Those men were trailing him from Saturday onwards, waiting for their chance. I think he was watching that walk to church this morning, knowing that the person who'd planned the whole thing was there with the rest of the party. He was going to appeal to him directly for sanctuary, but the two men with the gun headed him off.'

Clyde been waiting for his chance, much as I'd been waiting. But the ambassadors had paced on with the rest of the important gentlemen, while Clyde died outside the walls. I was sure of that now.

Silence inside the room. The sound of an organ voluntary came faintly from the chapel.

‘Making it public wouldn't bring those young women back to life,' Sir Francis said.

It was as near as he'd come so far to a direct appeal for continued silence.

‘If you're hoping to get any kind of promise from me, you'll have to release Amos Legge first,' I said.

At least he didn't pretend not to know who Amos was. ‘Your friend seems to have intervened in a somewhat impulsive fashion.'

‘Amos Legge's anything but impulsive. He's the only one who's done anything useful and you've got him locked up in the barracks.'

‘If he's innocent, I'm sure the processes of the law—'

‘Why should he be subject to the processes of the law when nobody else is? He was nothing to do with the chariot, apart from carrying out a citizen's arrest single-handed. You should be thanking him. And incidentally, you owe him the price of a race horse.'

He looked surprised at my anger. ‘Very well, I'll see it's attended to. But I'm sure an intelligent woman like you will take the point that—'

‘I'm not discussing anything else until I see Amos a free man.'