Chapter 22

 

In Which John Pickett Hosts a Most Unusual Party

 

You are now an extremely wealthy young man…an extremely wealthy young man… extremely wealthy…

The German kept talking—Pickett could hear his excellent though heavily-accented English—but his voice seemed to come from very far away, and his words, which took some effort to understand even under far more tranquil conditions than those under which Pickett now labored, seemed to have no meaning. It took nothing less than the crash of shattering glass to rouse Pickett from his stunned stupor, and he found himself staring down at his empty hand, his fingers curled as if he still held the glass that lay in shards at his feet, the liquid it had contained now spreading in a widening pool of amber.

“I beg—I’m—I didn’t—Rogers!” Stammering incoherent apologies for his own clumsiness, Pickett greeted the appearance of the butler with patent relief.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but I heard the crash and thought you might be in need of some assistance. If you will excuse me, I will return directly to clean it up. In the meantime, may I suggest that you and your guests might be more comfortable in the dining room?”

“What—oh—yes—yes, of course.” Pulling himself together with an effort, Pickett turned to the two men still seated on the sofa, both of them trying to pretend they were not watching the expanding puddle with wary eyes lest their shoes suffer collateral damage. “If you will come with me?”

Neither man took him up on this invitation, both citing instead their need to go about their respective businesses now that they had accomplished their purpose for having called in Curzon Street, that of reporting to Pickett the results of Herr Kellermann’s analysis. Now, the physician said, they would be on their way so that he could impart the good news to his wife in privacy.

The chemist gave Pickett his card, then recollected that this was printed in German—a language in which Pickett was very likely untutored—and assured that rather dazed young man that if he had any further questions regarding the chemical composition of his inheritance, Pickett might contact him through the Royal Society, as he was fixed in London for the next fortnight.

Pickett walked with them as far as the front door and said all that was proper. At least, he hoped he did; he could never afterwards remember. He thanked Herr Kellermann again for his services and accepted the return of the glass vial, then, as soon as his visitors had gone, closed the door behind them and sagged against it as if for support.

He had no idea how long he remained there, but eventually he found himself climbing the stairs and entering the bedchamber. Julia, sitting up in bed with her damp hair tied back in a single braid, looked up from the book she was reading and tried without success to interpret the expression on his face.

“John? What’s the matter?” Receiving no answer, she scooted toward the center of the mattress, making room for him to sit on the edge of the bed. “John, has something happened?”

He gave an odd little laugh. “You might say so.”

This answer didn’t tell her much, for his tone of voice was as uncommunicative as his facial expression. She took his hand and pulled him down to sit beside her.

“Tell me.”

And so he told her, haltingly at first, then in a great rush of words to which she listened in growing astonishment, her blue eyes growing ever wider.

“You don’t seem very happy about it,” she said when he at last fell silent.

“I’m stunned,” he said, and looked it. “It’s a lot to take in.”

She regarded him shrewdly. “But not entirely unexpected, I think. If I noticed those little flecks that gleamed in the light, I’m sure you did. I wondered at the time, but I didn’t want to say anything in front of Kit.” She also hadn’t wanted to say anything that might raise false hopes in her husband’s breast, but she would keep this observation to herself.

“Oh, I noticed them. I even pointed them out to Mr. Colquhoun. He said there have been rumors for decades, but they’ve all turned out to be false.”

“All but this one, it seems.” She laced her fingers through his, adding in a much lighter tone, “So, Mr. Pickett, now that you’re a wealthy man, what do you intend to do?”

He replied without hesitation. “Tell Lord Melrose to go to the devil.”

“I thought you’d already done that.”

“Yes, but this time, he won’t be able to convince himself that it’s only a matter of time before I come to him with hat in hand. Now, where was I? Oh, yes: Next, I’m going to go to Rundell and Bridge’s and buy you something extravagant—something blue, maybe, to match your eyes. What would you like?”

“Sapphires,” she said promptly. “It cost me such a pang, surrendering the Fieldhurst sapphires to George—Lord Fieldhurst, I should say—to give to his wife. I take some comfort in the knowledge that at least Caroline is not the one wearing them.”

“Sapphires, then,” he agreed. “Or should I make Cousin George an offer for the Fieldhurst set?”

“Don’t you dare!” she exclaimed, choking back her laughter. “Poor George would go off in an apoplexy!”

But Pickett did not join in her merriment. “You realize, don’t you, that this is it?” he asked, suddenly serious. “This is what our intruder was after, what my father was killed for.”

“Oh, certainly.” She sounded almost dismissive. “But John, what about your father’s will?”

He gave her a blank look. “What about it?”

“What good would the deed do him, when the will says explicitly that it belongs to you?”

“That’s just it: The will doesn’t say it explicitly. It says only ‘money, property, and other assets.’ If someone else has the deed in his possession, who’s to say it ever belonged to my father at all?”

“But surely there must be records,” Julia insisted.

“Perhaps,” conceded Pickett, although he sounded doubtful. “But in a place where most of the land is unsettled, and many of the residents are illiterate”—he shrugged—“who knows?”

Julia looked rather daunted. “So where does that leave us?”

He liked that “us,” with its casual assumption that whatever concerned him must of necessity concern her, too. At the same time, he wished he could keep her well out of it.

“He’s going to try again, you know. Now that we know exactly what’s at stake, it’s plain as a pikestaff that he won’t give up that easily. He went to the wrong part of the house before, but now that he knows his mistake, he’ll try again. I let him think I considered the whole thing an error on the intruder’s part, that he must have chosen the wrong house by mistake. Unless I overplayed my hand, he’ll think we won’t be expecting a second attempt. He’ll probably search the study first—that would be the logical place to keep important papers, besides being easier to access from the street than the bedroom would be—but it’s just possible that he’ll expect me to keep all Da’s effects closer at hand until I decide what to do with them.”

He glanced toward the corner of the room where the paper-wrapped package and the valise awaited his decision on their eventual fate. If he hadn’t been so taken aback by the revelations of his father’s papers that he’d dumped them all back into the strongbox and left the lot in Coutts’s basement, it was very likely that they would be here, too, with all the rest.

“So, if he doesn’t find what he’s looking for in the study,” Julia deduced, “then he’ll come here. To this room, I mean.”

He sighed, uncertain whether to be relieved at having been spared the necessity of pointing out this disturbing possibility, or regretful that his wife was sometimes much too perceptive for his peace of mind.

“Oh, he’ll find it in the study,” he promised. “Make no mistake about that. Still, I won’t leave you alone. I’ll be waiting for him in the study—I still think it’s his most likely course of action—but I’ll have Rogers stay with you, or Thomas or Andrew, if you would feel safer with a younger man. If Dr. Gilroy hadn’t ordered you to stay in bed, I would send you to Lady Dunnington for the night, but as matters stand—”

“Oh, yes!” exclaimed Julia, although her tone was more suggestive of accusation than agreement. “I could have gone off to Emily Dunnington’s, and we could have placed wagers on whether or not my husband would still be alive come morning. It is too bad of Dr. Gilroy to deny me such a treat!” In a very different tone, she added, “Really, John, how can such a clever man be so obtuse? I won’t beg to keep you company, for I am sure I would be very much in the way, especially in my present condition, but as for the idea that I should leave you to your fate while I go merrily off to Park Lane—no, John. Just—no. Pray don’t ask it of me. Not now, not ever.”

He raised their joined hands to his lips and kissed the fingers that were intertwined with his. Finding this expression of marital affection unsatisfactory, he kissed her on the lips instead—an exercise so protracted that not until Julia’s book slid off the bed and landed quite noisily on the floor did both participants return to their senses.

“And then there’s Kit,” Pickett said, returning the book to his wife and the conversation to the subject at hand. “Should we have a pallet made up for him in our room, or, since I’ll be downstairs, should we let him sleep in the camp bed for the night? I shouldn’t think he would want to be left alone, in any case.”

“He most certainly will not,” said Julia, readily conceding the point. “But if you think for one minute that he is going to be content to sleep—on a pallet or a camp bed or anywhere else—while all this excitement is going on, I can only say that your assessment of his character is very different from mine.”

He acknowledged this home truth with a grin. “I suppose I’ll have to think of something for him to do that will keep him out of harm’s way. Perhaps the schoolroom needs guarding,” he suggested blandly. “I wouldn’t wonder at it if all sorts of important papers were hidden amongst the copybooks.”

“Yes, indeed! Someone must certainly stand guard.”

“Armed,” Pickett continued, “with a cricket bat.”

Julia choked back a gurgle of laughter. “Poor Kit! You shouldn’t tease him.”

“I’m perfectly serious! And what’s more, he’ll have a fine time on guard duty; you just see if he doesn’t.”

“I’m sure he will—at least until he begins to suspect there’s no real threat to the schoolroom after all.”

“Oh, the threat is real enough,” Pickett said dryly. “Because this time, thanks to my popping off pistols, he’s going to be armed.”

* * *

Pickett left the house a short time later, but in spite of his previously stated intentions, his peregrinations took him neither eastward to the Ludgate Hill showroom of Rundell and Bridge nor westward to the Park Lane residence of the Marquess of Melrose. Instead, he went first to Coutts in the Strand, where he closed his father’s safe deposit box and took possession of its contents, after which he paid a certain call and issued an invitation, of sorts, to a select group whose presence was requested in Curzon Street that very night.

It was an odd way of celebrating an inheritance, even for a house of mourning. The guests did not arrive in Curzon Street until eleven o’clock, and although they were dressed in the deepest black, this circumstance seemed to be unrelated to the fact that their host had suffered a recent bereavement; indeed, only one of the visitors had been in any way acquainted with the deceased.

In any case, this uniformity of dress appeared to be the only point of similarity between them, for in every other particular, they appeared to be an ill-assorted lot. There were four in all, ranging in age from a white-haired, bushy-browed man in his sixties to a slender youth whose smooth cheeks had almost certainly never known a razor. The other two fell somewhere between these extremes, one being an incredibly handsome man in his late twenties with fair hair that glinted like burnished gold in the candlelight, while the other, fully a decade older, was a tight-lipped man whose erect posture suggested a military career presumably cut short by the same injury that had left him with a slight limp.

Nor was the entertainment of a sort that most visitors would find amusing; certainly it was unworthy of anyone claiming to be a wealthy man. There were no cards, nor was there any dancing or, for that matter, any music at all. As for refreshments, Pickett offered his guests no other sustenance but a meager repast of cold meat, bread, and cheese, eaten in a dark dining room with no more illumination than that afforded by five tin lanterns, each one with adjustable shutters that could be opened or closed. Even with all the shutters open, the light they afforded somehow seemed to emphasize the shadows more than it banished them.

None of Pickett’s guests seemed to object to these peculiar arrangements, however, or indeed to find anything amiss with them at all. For these were no ordinary guests, but his former colleagues at Bow Street: the magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun; Mr. Maxwell, the soldier who had come to Bow Street after an injury at Corunna had put paid to his military career; Mr. Carson, previously of the Horse Patrol, who had been promoted to Principal Officer and now occupied the place Pickett had held before turning in his resignation; and young Mr. Yates, who had recently been assigned to Carson as a partner and assistant.

“But what if he doesn’t come?” The slightly tremulous voice betrayed Yates’s youth, containing as it did eager anticipation mixed with nervousness and perhaps just a hint of fear.

It was the magistrate who answered. “Then we try again tomorrow night, and the night after that, and the night after that. But I don’t think we’ll have long to wait. He’ll want to get his hands on that deed before Mr. Pickett discovers exactly what it represents.”

He’s a bit late for that. Pickett thought the words, but did not say them. He’d been obliged to disclose the whole to Mr. Colquhoun when he’d asked for Bow Street’s assistance, but as for how much the magistrate had told the others, he wasn’t quite sure. He thought it unlikely that they knew the whole, for Harry Carson would never have wasted an opportunity to roast him on his newfound wealth.

“Mr. Pickett, can you furnish Mr. Yates with paper and pencil?”

Pickett nodded. “Yes, sir. I shall do so as soon as we remove to the study.”

“Good man.” The magistrate turned his attention back to the youth. “Mr. Yates, once we assume our positions, I want you to take down every word said in that room, whether by our quarry or amongst ourselves. I want a record that will stand up as evidence in court, no matter how much the defense counsel may try to discredit it.”

“Yes, sir. But won’t I need light to see the page?”

“You will. And that’s why you will go with me through the service door. But while I will be just inside the door ready to intervene if necessary, you will set up shop on a step low enough that the light from your lantern can’t be seen.”

“Yes, sir.”

The youth’s face fell, and despite the strain of the moment, Pickett had to smile a little at Yates’s obvious disappointment at being relegated to the rôle of clerk. He suspected Kit would enter wholeheartedly into Yates’s sentiments. He thought of Kit standing guard upstairs with his cricket bat, and hoped some obliging mouse in the wainscoting would create enough of a stir to give the boy some sport.

“Mr. Maxwell,” Mr. Colquhoun said, turning to the soldier, “I want you to go outside and take up a position that gives you a view up and down the street for some distance. If you see anyone coming, anyone at all, you sound the alarm. I seem to recall that you can imitate certain bird calls; can you do a nightjar?”

Maxwell frowned, the light from his lantern casting his features into sharp relief. “Yes, sir, but—forgive me, but a nightjar in December?”

“Bear in mind that our man is accustomed to the seasons of the Southern Hemisphere. It’s midsummer in New South Wales.” Maxwell nodded thoughtfully, although his expression still appeared doubtful, and Mr. Colquhoun addressed the group as a whole. “Once Maxwell sounds the alarm, hold yourself in readiness and listen for a repeat. If he makes a second call—the ‘all clear,’ you might say—it will mean the man he saw, or thought he saw, proved to be a false alarm.”

Uneasy glances sought each other in the dark room, until at last Carson spoke for the group. “Sir, what if we hear what we think is Maxwell sounding the all clear, when really he’s just spotted a second person coming up the street? One of those people could be our man, and we’d never know it.”

“Your point is well taken, Mr. Carson,” the magistrate conceded with a sigh. “It’s an imperfect plan, I’ll admit, but if any of you can think of a better one, I am open to suggestion. If not, we’ll just have to trust to there being few people about in a quiet residential street at such an hour.”

“Begging your pardon, sir,” the usually taciturn Maxwell spoke up, “but what if, instead of a second signal as an all clear, I give the second signal to confirm that the person I saw is our quarry?”

Mr. Colquhoun shook his head. “I’m afraid it won’t do, Mr. Maxwell. You yourself noted the unlikelihood of a nightjar in December. While a single call may go unremarked, if we’re lucky, I’m afraid a second such call—one at close range, at that—would only make our man get the wind up.” A related thought occurred to him, and he added, “While we’re on the subject, I should caution you against taking up your sentry post on the service stair. If he chooses to enter the house the same way he did before, we don’t want him stumbling over you in the dark.”

Although a member of the Bow Street force for only a month, Yates recognized in these instructions a missed opportunity. “But—forgive me, sir, but Maxwell might be able to restrain the man before he could enter the house at all.”

Far from being offended at having his word questioned by a mere stripling, Mr. Colquhoun regarded Yates as he might a small child who had not perfectly ciphered a difficult sum, but had come very close. “Just so, Mr. Yates. But when we make an arrest, it will be for murder, or perhaps attempted murder, not housebreaking.”

Yates’s smooth brow puckered in confusion. “Attempted—?”

“He means me,” Pickett told the youth. “Mr. Colquhoun thinks our man will try to kill me.”

Yates’s eyes grew wide with alarm. “Oh!”

“You need have no fear for Mr. Pickett’s safety, Mr. Yates, for he was clearly born to be hanged. Now,” the magistrate added briskly, as the long-case clock in the foyer chimed the half-hour, “are there any more questions?”

Silence and a few head shakes in the negative were his only answer.

“Well, then, since it’s half past eleven, I suggest we take up our posts. Let me remind you all that I want no shooting in the dark! You’re not to go letting off firearms unless you know exactly who you’re shooting at. Remember, too, that if you must shoot, you’re shooting only to wound, not to kill. We’re not after vigilante justice here; we want this man to answer for his crimes in a court of law.”

The group left the dining room and made their way to the study. Maxwell parted from the others as they reached the foyer, wishing them all luck before he opened the door and slipped silently out into the night.

The others repaired to a small but well-proportioned room at the front of the house with a single window that overlooked the street. Upon Pickett’s successful completion of his first case as an independent investigator, Julia had dubbed this chamber his study, and had taken great pains to furnish it accordingly. Now it boasted an elegant mahogany desk boasting scrolled legs, half a dozen pigeonholes, and four drawers in which Pickett might keep the records (assuming he eventually had some) pertaining to his fledgling investigative business. In addition to the straight chair behind the desk, there were two button-backed wing chairs facing it, which would, according to Julia, allow him to interview potential clients in comfort as well as privacy, without his having to banish his wife and half-brother to some other part of the house. Finally, the window had been hung with new curtains, which were now tightly closed.

Pickett went at once to the desk, then pulled open one of the drawers and withdrew a pencil and three sheets of paper. “Will this be enough?” he asked, handing them to Yates.

“It should be.” It was Mr. Colquhoun who answered. His gaze rested briefly on the desk before flicking back up to Pickett’s face, barely visible in the feeble light penetrating through the half-closed shutters of his lantern.

“You’ve planted it there, I suppose?”

“Yes, sir, in the bottom drawer on the left.” His smile held a hint of mischief. “Not too well-hidden, just enough that it’ll take two hands to search for it.”

Mr. Colquhoun nodded. What Pickett had not said, what the magistrate had not had to ask, was that the intruder would have to put down anything he might be holding—a lantern, for instance. Or a gun.

The narrow jib door that gave the servants access to the room was difficult to see even in daylight, so Pickett felt for the catch and opened it, sparing the magistrate a possibly lengthy search. Mr. Colquhoun gave a gallant little wave of his hand for Yates to precede him, and once the youth was settled in relative comfort on the fourth step down, with paper and pencil laid out on the third step as if it were a desk, the magistrate stepped through the jib door and pulled it as nearly completely shut as possible, leaving a gap wide enough to give him a view of the desk while still concealing the light from Yates’s lantern.

Carson, meanwhile, had positioned himself behind the door through which they had just come, pulling it as wide open as possible so that he would not be visible from anyone entering the room either through the door itself or through the window in the opposite wall.

Pickett pushed the drawer closed, then left the desk and pressed himself against the exterior wall as near as possible to the window, putting him out of the range of vision of anyone attempting a clandestine entry by that route. If the intruder should enter through the front door, however, and access the study by the same door through which they had all come, and behind which Harry Carson was now hidden…

Pickett tried not to think about that. If the intruder was bold enough to enter by the front door, the four people hidden within the room must surely hear some sign of his entry, in which case he would…what? He wouldn’t have time to dart behind the door with Harry, and there were surely enough people on the servants’ stair already to preclude his diving through the jib door; he would surely stumble right into Mr. Colquhoun and Yates, and he’d had his fill of tumbling down stairs of late. He supposed he could hide under the desk if needs must, but every feeling revolted at the thought of being discovered cowering on the floor like the merest craven.

It was, as Mr. Colquhoun had said, an imperfect plan. Still, it was his best chance to see his father’s killer brought to justice, and in any case, it was too late to back down now.

Thrusting his misgivings to the back of his mind, he withdrew the pistol from the waistband of his breeches, feeling the weapon solid and heavy in his hand. He took a deep breath, then thumbed the safety catch off and settled himself to wait.