ALDERSHOTT PUSHED ERIC into his study and into a chair. He slammed the door shut behind him, locked it, and shoved the key into his pocket. All around, the glassy eyes of taxidermied animal heads stared down at them. An Andean condor spread its wings over the door and cast jagged shadows down the wall. Eric saw a glass-fronted gun cabinet in one corner, housing a trio of well-oiled rifles and a German pistol—a “Red 9” Mauser C96 with the characteristic red 9 burnt into the grip, no doubt a souvenir of the War. He didn’t think Aldershott looked like the type who hunted big game or collected firearms, but one never knew.
There was a letter opener on Aldershott’s desk. It looked like the twin of the one that had ended up in Benson’s neck: a slim-bladed steel dagger with a decorative brass handle. Eric wanted to pick it up for a closer look, but Aldershott strode up to him before he could get up.
“I’ll be blunt,” said Aldershott, looming over Eric. “What’s this business with Emily Ang? She has nothing to do with Benson’s murder.”
“How did you know her, then?”
“She worked for Sir Andrew Sotheby, who was a close friend of mine. Of course I knew who she was.” Aldershott tugged uncomfortably at his collar, then tore off his tie with a snarl of frustration. His front collar stud flew off, and the stiffly starched collar sprang wide. It would have been comical but for the full exposure of the mustard boil scars underneath: they had the appearance of melting flesh, and they never looked half so awful when his collar was in place.
“Well, Benson was looking for her,” Eric said, his attention riveted by the scars melting down Aldershott’s neck and under his shirt. “And now Benson is dead. At this point, the two things are looking very much connected.”
“Did Benson actually tell you he was looking for her?”
“Not precisely, no.” Eric wondered how much to reveal of what he knew. He’d come here tonight thinking that Aldershott had nothing but the most superficial of connections to Emily Ang’s disappearance or Benson’s murder, but Aldershott’s furious reaction seemed to indicate otherwise. “Benson had a photograph of Emily,” he said carefully, “and it’s now missing. I’d say that means there’s a connection.”
Aldershott lit a cigarette with shaking fingers and flung the match aside. “Damn it all. It’s been years. Ancient history, and I don’t like having it raked up again. Martha pretends she’s stronger than she really is. She always felt responsible for that Ang girl, and she is not going to take this at all well.”
“There was a skeleton found in Bruton Wood—”
“Nothing to do with Emily Ang!” Aldershott leaned down, planting his hands on the arms of Eric’s chair and trapping him there. The cigarette clenched between his teeth was inches from Eric’s face, and Eric had to lean away to avoid burning his nose on it. Below the line of Aldershott’s jaw, boil scars swam with the movement of his throat. “Have you ever considered that she left of her own accord and simply doesn’t want to be found? Sir Andrew told me she was with child.”
“What!”
“Yes. An unwed mother.” Aldershott seemed to relish the words. “He didn’t note it in her file, out of respect for whatever poor fool made an honest woman of her later, but he told me about her condition. If she left, it was probably to hide the shame.”
Could Benson have been the father? Eric didn’t want to say it, out of respect for the woman who’d become Mrs. Benson afterwards, but … if what Aldershott said were true, then the identity of her child’s father could be vital to finding the murderer.
Aldershott straightened up and sat back against the edge of his desk. Eric’s shock seemed to have restored some of his self-assurance, and he said, “Dozens of dashing young soldiers passed through Sotheby Manor. I’ve no doubt she was a great comfort to more than one of them. You know that when the Brighton Pavilion was used as a hospital for Indian soldiers, there were strict rules limiting the interactions between the Indian patients and their English nurses? Perhaps we should have had similar rules about interactions between English patients and foreign nurses.”
Eric leapt to his feet, but Aldershott snatched up the letter opener and pointed it at him. “Sit down, Peterkin!” he barked.
Eric dropped back into the chair, eyeing the point of Aldershott’s letter opener. Had Benson leapt to Emily’s defence, much as Eric had responded to Aldershott’s insinuations, and got the knife in his neck as a result?
“She was as much a foreigner as I am,” Eric muttered in protest.
“Yes,” said Aldershott, looking down at his letter opener. “I daresay she was.”
Eric flushed red.
“Martha still thinks of her as some sort of pure, shining angel,” Aldershott continued, shaking the letter opener at Eric for emphasis, “but she knew nothing of Emily’s condition. You are not to dig further, and you are not to enlighten my wife as to the truth about her friend. Is that understood?”
“But—”
“I’m warning you, Peterkin!”
“Well, then, how is—”
“Leave it alone!”
Eric took a deep breath. “Horatio Parker! How is he connected to all this?”
“He isn’t!” Aldershott stood and glared down at Eric.
There was a knock on the door. Aldershott sidled around, not taking his eyes off Eric, to unlock the door and open it a crack. Mrs. Aldershott pushed it open farther and stepped inside.
“I’m done with Peterkin, Martha,” Aldershott said, gesturing for Eric to leave. “What is it?”
“Actually, Edward, I was hoping for a few words with Mr. Peterkin. In private, if you please.”
Aldershott made an inarticulate, explosive noise, threw his letter opener down on his desk, and swept out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The letter opener skittered across the desk and fell to the floor.
Mrs. Aldershott sighed and bent to retrieve both the letter opener and the lost collar stud. “Such a temper. It appears I shall have to be especially persuasive if you are ever to return here as a dinner guest, Mr. Peterkin.”
“I’m sure I’ll survive.” Aldershott was terrified of something, and the thought gave Eric a small degree of satisfaction. But he remembered, too, that an animal was at its most dangerous when frightened.
Mrs. Aldershott said, “You seem quite certain that Emily’s disappearance had something to do with Benson’s death. I wish I’d known what he was up to; I’d have liked to help. But then, I never actually saw him until that night before he died, and he left so quickly with Oliver. If you’re taking up the torch, as it were, I wish you the best of luck.”
She went to open the drapes. Yellow-grey fog obscured the street outside, and she wrinkled her nose in distaste before closing the drapes again. Still, the act seemed to lighten the atmosphere, and Eric felt himself relax.
“You said that Emily was your sister,” he said. “How did that happen?”
Mrs. Aldershott was silent for a minute. She sat down in the chair Eric himself had vacated, and said, “My parents were Chinese missionaries, Mr. Peterkin. I spent much of my childhood in a Chinese village in the Hokkien countryside, the only European child in the vicinity.” She looked at him shrewdly. “I fancy you must know a little of what that’s like.”
“My mother was Chinese, but I actually grew up in India.”
“I meant being the odd one out, Mr. Peterkin. Anyhow, I shouldn’t presume.” Getting back to Emily Ang, she continued, “Of course, we were a little better off than the villagers we worked with. When Emily’s parents died, my parents took her in and raised her beside me. I think she was meant only to be a playmate for a very lonely English girl, but as time went by, we became as good as sisters. When we came back to England, Emily came with us; and when I went to be a nurse, Emily went with me. The only difference was that I wanted to be a military nurse, while she wanted to stay with the civilian hospitals. Then the War started. I went to Flanders, and Emily went to Sotheby Manor.”
Mrs. Aldershott paused wistfully. If there was a party going on outside, Eric didn’t hear it: the only sound was the ticking of the clock behind Aldershott’s desk. More quietly, she said, “So many of my uncles and cousins were killed in the fighting, but Emily was supposed to remain safe. Her disappearance was … well, one more tragedy on top of many. I’m not sure I ever got the chance to think about it. That’s the cruel thing about disappearances, Mr. Peterkin: you never really think about them as deaths, so you never grieve over them as such. Then, years later, you realise you really have been thinking of the missing person as dead all along, and by then it’s too late to grieve. Looking back now, I just wonder if I should have put more effort into finding out what happened to her.”
Eric nodded in sympathy. It looked to him as though Martha Aldershott had survived tragedy simply by not having the luxury of dwelling on it when it happened. “When I was at Sotheby Manor,” he said, “there seemed to be some confusion as to whether Emily was a maid or a nurse …”
“Oh, that.” Mrs. Aldershott made a face and stood up again. “Sir Andrew Sotheby had no right to treat her as he did. I was furious when I realised. I had to read between the lines of Emily’s letters, because she was simply too accepting to complain to me about her situation. But her last letter seemed to hint at some sort of distress … There wasn’t a thing I could do while I was in Flanders, so I wrote to cousin Oliver and had him go look into what was going on. He’d always been fond of Emily, in his own bottled-up way. So he went and he looked and he wrote back that it was exactly as I suspected. But by the time I got back on leave, it was too late. She was gone.” She sighed heavily.
“So Saxon was there on your behalf?” That explained why he had been poking around in Emily’s file: he’d come to check on her welfare, and part of that involved finding out about Sir Andrew Sotheby’s treatment of her. And if Aldershott was telling the truth, then Emily’s apparent distress must have been over the matter of her unborn child.
“He was. And it sounds as though he put Sir Andrew Sotheby’s back right up, like a flag on a flagpole. When Oliver gets angry, he doesn’t care what he says. Mind you, Sir Andrew probably deserved it.”
“If Saxon was fond of Emily,” Eric said, “he’ll probably want to know what happened to her too.” Saxon might still have something to hide, but could he turn out to be an ally after all?
But Mrs. Aldershott shook her head. “I get the distinct impression that Oliver would rather drop the inquiry altogether. It isn’t like him. He’s never cared about the consequences to himself, as long as he’s done what he thought was right. Norris seemed to agree, but then Norris always struck me as the sort who doesn’t give a fig for yesterday’s storm as long as today is sunny. Mr. Peterkin, for all Oliver’s faults, he’s still my cousin, and I still remember the three of us as children—Oliver, Emily, and myself—tearing about the garden, sharing secrets, discussing our hopes for the future. I don’t like to think of Oliver being … being complicit in whatever happened to Emily. But I expect the truth will out, as they say.”
Head bowed, Mrs. Aldershott hurried out of the study, leaving Eric to meditate on what he’d learnt.
So, there was an innocent explanation for Saxon’s presence at Sotheby Manor. Eric had been almost certain that Saxon was his man, but Mrs. Aldershott’s explanation changed all that. On the other hand, there was Aldershott. Eric had not been expecting Aldershott’s reaction, and it convinced him that Aldershott certainly was hiding something with regards to Emily Ang and, subsequently, Benson’s murder. Even as Eric gained confidence in one quarter, he began to lose confidence in another.
This new revelation about Emily’s unborn child, though. Who could the father be?
Eric waited a moment or two longer in the study, half expecting either Norris or Saxon, or both of them together, to confront him with a piece of their minds as well. When neither one appeared, Eric finally ventured forth and made his way back to the drawing room.
Aldershott, freshly buttoned up in a new collar and tie, eyed him balefully from a corner. Otherwise, he was motionless, a grey statue watching over the proceedings but holding itself aloof. The fellow was about as much fun as a barrel of your yearly taxes, in Eric’s opinion.
Norris was valiantly trying to cheer up the party with a sprightly melody on the piano, and having some marginal success. Eric didn’t recognise the tune, though it felt as though he should.
Wolfe, whose mind was on the music and not on any past mysteries, said, “That is a fascinating piece of work, but I know I’ve heard it before. Just this morning, in fact. It can’t be original.”
“Impossible,” said Norris, stopping abruptly and lowering his hands from the keyboard. “I just finished writing it yesterday. Look!” He held up the crumpled sheet music, with all its attendant ink stains and jottings and notes.
“Well, I think it’s lovely,” said Mrs. Aldershott firmly. “I can’t wait to hear it onstage, with lyrics.”
That seemed to soothe Norris’s temper. Eric had never seen Norris upset before, but he supposed that Wolfe really did specialise in upsetting people. Norris, for all his happy-go-lucky ways, still had an artist’s sensitivity and a craftsman’s pride.
Wolfe said, “I can’t wait, either. And I should love to meet the composer.”
No amount of pleading could induce Norris to play more after that. He shoved his sheet music into his briefcase, barely managed a polite farewell to the Aldershotts, then slammed out of the house.
Even Mortimer Wolfe’s urbane charm couldn’t salvage the dinner party now—not that he seemed inclined to do so. Given his treatment of Norris, it seemed more likely to Eric that Wolfe was aiming for quite the reverse. When Wolfe made his excuses only a few minutes after Norris’s precipitous departure, Eric politely but quickly followed suit.
London was cloaked in a thick greenish-yellow fog when Eric stepped out of the Aldershott residence. Mayfair was an affluent neighbourhood, and when Eric had arrived earlier in the evening, the stately facades of the local terraced townhouses had loomed all around him like canyon walls of expensive red brick. None of that was visible now. The houses were barely discernible, dark shapes beyond the haze, and the pungent odour of sulphur hung in the air. It was indeed a pea-souper, one of those oppressive, isolating fogs that reduced your world to just a few feet in any direction.
Wolfe stood by a lamppost a few houses down, at the corner of a somewhat busier street. He waved Eric over to the island of light around the lamppost, and Eric joined him. The headlamps of a passing motorcar bathed them momentarily in a white glare before disappearing again into the foggy darkness.
“Couldn’t stand it much longer, could you? Of course not. I don’t know what Aldershott is thinking, gathering all of us so-called suspects together like that. Mutual support indeed! It’s more likely the murderer was sitting right there with us at the table.”
“Or right here under this lamppost.”
Wolfe flashed him a look of scorn and said, “You tell me, Peterkin. You seem to be the one who’s been asking all the intelligent questions—surprisingly enough—so tell me what you think.”
“If, as Mrs. Aldershott says, Emily Ang was her adoptive sister, that connects her to both Aldershott and Saxon, and leaves me wondering about you and Norris. Did you know her?”
“Only through a haze of morphine. And she was gone by the time I was taken off the stuff.”
“So you were there when she disappeared! What about Norris?”
“Malingering his head off to keep himself surrounded with pretty nurses. That man is a menace, Peterkin. I hope you haven’t let him within a hundred yards of your sister.”
Eric had a suspicion that Wolfe already knew about the previous night’s outing to Brolly’s. This casual assessment of Norris’s popularity with the opposite sex made Eric wonder, though, if Norris might be the father of Emily Ang’s unborn child. For Penny’s sake, he hoped not. It didn’t bear thinking.
A sturdy, snub-nosed Beardmore rolled out of the fog, cautiously slow in the reduced visibility. Its engine did not sound very healthy, but its slowness made it seem almost ghostly. Eric, mistaking it for a taxicab, raised his hand, but it cruised on by without stopping. There was a loud, explosive crack—a backfire—and in that same instant, Eric was thrown flat on the ground with Wolfe’s full weight pressed on his back.
Eric didn’t have time to be shocked. He reacted instinctively, bucking sharply to kick himself free, then rolling across the mud into a defensive crouch. The other man, he saw, was now in a similarly defensive posture, but, instead of focusing on Eric, his eyes were scanning the fog for the source of the sound. Which was a backfire from a passing motorcar. Of course. The other man—Wolfe, of course it was Wolfe; who did he imagine it was?—had had his back to the street, and must have missed seeing it. Even now, Wolfe’s expression was stony, savage, quite unlike the cool, supercilious half sneer he normally presented; and somewhere behind the mask, Eric thought he saw a flicker of blind terror.
Eric straightened up, slowly. “Wolfe,” he said soothingly. “Wolfe! It was only a backfire from a motorcar.”
Wolfe blinked. He looked at Eric as if seeing him for the first time. Slowly, he stood and brushed himself down. It was plain to Eric that even this action cost him significant effort. Wolfe took a deep breath. He screwed his eyes shut, opened them, and took another deep breath. Then he gave a disapproving glance at Eric’s coat, which was rumpled from their brief scuffle, and drawled, “Honestly, Peterkin. One simply cannot take you anywhere.”
Eric let Wolfe tweak his coat into shape. He knew a number of the Britannia Club members were jumpy around loud noises, but this was the first time Eric had actually been jumped.
A taxicab, responding to Wolfe’s summons, sailed up and came to a stop beside them. “Good night, Peterkin,” Wolfe said, climbing inside with every appearance of normality. “I’d wish you good luck in your quest for my peculiar methods of burglary, but I fancy it would be more to my interest to wish you the reverse.” The cab door shut, and Wolfe was gone.
Eric watched Wolfe’s cab disappear into the fog, then leaned against the lamppost to consider everything he’d learnt this evening. It was enough to make one’s head spin. He really ought to write everything down at the first opportunity.
This was odd. There was a sort of scar on the side of the lamppost that he was sure hadn’t been there a few minutes ago …
That hadn’t been a motor backfire.
Eric dived for the pavement again as another bang echoed off the buildings around him. He swore he saw the fog split like the Red Sea around the path of a bullet.
Someone was shooting at him.
Instinct took over. It was the War all over again: caught out alone in no-man’s-land, with bullets whizzing overhead and the wet mud sucking at his prone body. His instincts had saved him then, and they saved him again now. Without realising any of his thought processes, he recognised that the shot had come from the direction of the Aldershott house, and discarded any idea of running back that way. Instead, he scrambled to his feet and dashed around the corner of the intersecting street. He was sure he heard another two shots somewhere behind him, and someone shouting in the darkness. The important thing right now was to get away.
The Haig Fund poppy, torn loose from Eric’s lapel in the excitement, floated into the gutter and disappeared.