The God of the Hive (30 page)

“Whom did you have to ask?”

“Don’t worry,” he said, “my wife has an old friend who works with the
voters’ registration lists, she popped into the office for me and looked him up. She’ll say nothing.”

He gave me an address across the river from Westminster. I wrote it down, and remarked, “That doesn’t seem very likely.”

“I know, there’s not many houses down there, but you’ll always find one or two residences even in that sort of district.”

“I’ll try it,” I said, and told him I hoped he enjoyed the sermon. A glance at the solicitor’s clock told me I had plenty of time to stop at West’s address before the funeral.

But first, another telephone call, this one to Richmond.

The butler answered. After a minute or two of silence, Javitz’s loud American accents were assaulting my ear.

“Yeah? Is that Mary Russell?”

“Hello, Captain Javitz, I thought—”

“You gotta get us out of here,” he said sharply. “Like, now.”

Cold air seemed to blast through the stuffy office, and I found I was on my feet. “Why? What’s happened?”

“You know who your crazy hermit Goodman is?”

“I know whose house that is, but—”

“But you don’t know who
he
is?”

“No, who is he?”

“I’d have thought—oh, look, I really can’t go into it here. Just, how soon can you come get us?”

“Hours. I don’t know the train schedule.”

“Then the kid and I are setting off now, we’ll be at Waterloo when we can.”

“Wait! You can’t set off on crutches, you’ll hurt yourself.”

“I’m not staying here. Get a car and come.”

“For heaven’s sake, what
is
going on?”

“One hour, we leave.” The instrument went dead.

I swore, and looked at my wrist-watch: It had to be twenty-five miles, even if I left this instant … But first, one last call.

“The Travellers’ Club,” the voice answered.

“I’m looking for Captain Lofte.” Lofte was my last hope, this fleet-footed traveller from Shanghai, Mycroft’s man who had given us key
information about Brothers. No one working with Brothers would have given us what Lofte did.

“I’m sorry,” the smooth voice said, “Captain Lofte is no longer with us.”

For a horrible moment, I thought the man meant—but he went on. “I do not think he will be returning for some time.”

“Has he gone back to Shanghai?”

“I am sorry, Madam, but The Travellers’ does not divulge the destination of its members.”

“This is terribly important,” I begged.

Something in my voice must have taken him aback, because after a moment’s silence, he said, “He left a week past. I believe the gentleman had a message on the Friday, directing him to return to the East.”

Rats, I thought; Lofte would have made a resourceful colleague. Billy was beyond reach, Holmes was gone, none of Mycroft’s other agents were beyond taint. I should have to make do with what I had. Namely, myself.

I thanked the person at the club, put up the earpiece, and scurried back into the bolt-hole to cram a valise with everything I thought I might need.

Goodman had not returned. I thought of leaving him another note, but couldn’t decide what that should say. So I shut off the lights and stepped into the corridor—and then I stopped.

My hand went to the pocket in which I was collecting all the bits concerning the case, and thumbed through the scraps until I found the notes I’d made in Richard Sosa’s flat.

A number jumped out at me, because I’d just rung it. Sosa had written down the number of The Travellers’ Club on Thursday, on the diary page beside the telephone. And, I thought, he rang the number, either then or on the Friday, to send out of the country the only person apart from Holmes and me who could link Mycroft to the investigation of Thomas Brothers.

I hoped to God he’d only sent Lofte away. I did not want that valiant individual on my conscience as well.

Somewhere in the building, a clock chimed the quarter. I woke with a start, and hurried down to the street to hail a taxicab.

Chapter 49

J
avitz was standing outside the gates of the house on the quiet and dignified road, a large, bruised man looking very out of place with a small girl on one side and a white-haired housekeeper on the other. He leant heavily on his crutch, the child kicked her heels from the top of the low wall, the woman was wringing her hands. He had acquired an elderly carpet-bag, now lying at his feet; his hand was on the taxicab’s door-handle before the hand-brake was set.

“Come on, ’Stella-my-heart,” he said, sounding more like a father than a man on whom a stray had been pressed. She hopped down and scrambled into the taxi, Dolly in hand, to stand at my knees and demand, “Where is Mr Robert?”

“I don’t really know,” I told her. “Mr Jav—”

She cut me short. “But he was with you. When will he come back?”

“He didn’t tell me,” I said. “Mr Javitz, do you need a hand?”

By way of answer he threw his bag and crutch inside and hopped against the door frame to manoeuvre himself within.

“I want to see him,” Estelle persisted.

“But sir,” the housekeeper was saying.

“I’ll do what I can,” I said to Estelle. “Here, let’s pull the seat down for you.”

“Terribly good of you to put up with us,” Javitz was saying to the woman. “We have to be away, see you around.”

And then both his legs were inside and he was shutting the door in her face.

The driver slid down the window to ask where we wanted to go, and I merely told him to head back towards London while we decided. He slid up the window. I turned to Javitz.

“What on earth was all that about?”

He cast an eloquent look at Estelle, who blinked her limpid eyes at me and said, “That means he doesn’t want to talk in front of me. Papa looks like that sometimes.”

“I imagine he does,” I said. “Does your Papa also tell you that you’re too bright for your own good?”

“Sometimes.
I
don’t think a person can be too bright, do you?”

“Certainly too bright for the convenience of others,” I said, then told Javitz, “I’m not sure where to take you. They could be watching my friends’ houses. For sure they’ll be keeping an eye on the local hotels. I even tried to reach Mr Lofte, who struck me as a valuable ally in any circumstances, but he’s gone back to Shanghai.”

“Do you know yet who this mysterious ‘they’ is?” he asked.

It was my turn to cast a significant “not in front of the children” glance at the small person on the seat across from us. She rolled her eyes in disgust and looked out of the window.

“What about a park?” Javitz suggested in desperation.

A park it would have to be. It had the advantage of being one of the last places any enemy of Mary Russell’s would expect to find her on a Sunday morning.

I paid the driver, unloaded my crew, and we set off slowly across the manicured paths on what was surely one of the last sunny week-ends of this lingering summer. Estelle tipped her head up at us and asked in a long-suffering voice, “You probably want me to go away, don’t you?”

“Not too far,” I agreed.

She turned away with a soft sigh, but I dropped the carpet-bag and said, “Estelle?”

She turned, and I knelt down and, cautiously, put my arms around her.

She flung hers around me and held on for a long time, the only sign
she’d given of being frightened or lonely. I murmured in her little ear, telling her that I hoped we’d see her Papa soon, and that she’d meet her Grandpapa. That she was a very brave and clever girl, and her parents would be as proud of her as I was. That she’d have to be patient, but I was working hard to straighten everything out. When she finally let go of me, there was a bounce in her step.

Javitz had settled gingerly onto a bench.

“How is the leg?” I asked him, sitting down beside him.

He stretched it out with a grimace, which he denied by saying, “Not too bad,” then modified by adding, “Getting better, anyway.”

“I am so sorry about all of this.”

“Hey, not to worry. The War didn’t stop altogether with Armistice.”

“Yes, but you were hired for a piloting job, not as nurse-maid to a small child.”

“Yeah, well, you did hire me to help you save the kid and her father,” he pointed out cheerfully. “That’s more or less what I’m doing.” Why was he sounding so hearty, I wondered? Over the telephone he’d been in a state of agitation.

“This whole thing is taking rather longer than I’d anticipated.”

“I have nothing else on at the moment. Couldn’t fly for a while, now, anyway.”

“Again, sorry.”

“You didn’t crash the crate, I did.”

“After someone took a shot—” I stopped; this was getting us nowhere. “What did you need to tell me about Robert Goodman?”

“That’s not his name.”

“I never imagined it was.”

“Then you know who he is?”

I shook my head, since the family whose house we had motored away from was one I did not know personally and Holmes had neither investigated, nor investigated for. “I’d have to look him up in
Debrett’s.”

“The Honourable Winfred Stanley Moreton. His father’s an earl.”

“Should I know him?”

“His name was all over the newspapers this spring.”

“I’ve been out of the country. What did he do?”

“He’s nuts!”

“That, too, is fairly self-evident.”

“I don’t mean just cheerfully fruitcake, I mean loony-bin nuts. Straight-jacket and locked doors nuts. And, he’s a fairy.”

Since for days now I’d been thinking of Goodman as Puck, this assessment hardly surprised me. However, it appeared that was not what Javitz meant.

“And, he was involved in a murder, with one of his fairy friends.”

That word got my attention.

“Murder? Goodman?”

“His name is—”

“Yes, yes. He was tried for murder?”

“This spring. Well, no, not him, but a friend of his—Johnny McAlpin—was tried for murder, and everyone seemed to think that Goodman—Moreton—knew more about it than he was saying.”

“Mr Javitz, you really need to explain this to me.”

He tried, but the legal details were rather fuzzy in his mind. The sensational details, however, were quite clear.

The death itself had occurred in the summer of 1917, in Edinburgh. The victim was a middle-aged man well known as an habitué of the sorts of clubs where the singers are boys dressed up as girls. The murder went unsolved all those years, until this past January, when the newly jilted boyfriend of Johnny McAlpin started telling his friends how McAlpin had once drunkenly bragged about killing the man and getting away with it.

The police heard, and arrested McAlpin. He, in an attempt to spread the blame as thinly as possible, named every friend he could think of—including Win Moreton, who was among those dragged in to testify.

Bearded and wild-haired and sounding more than a little unbalanced, Goodman made quite a splash on the stand. He refused to acknowledge the name “Moreton,” would say only that McAlpin had once been his friend, and was narrowly saved from being gaoled for contempt of court when his sister brought to light a file concerning her brother’s history: Moreton had indeed known McAlpin, the two men having both drunk
at the same pub during April and May, 1917, but Moreton had left Edinburgh in June, three weeks before the murder, and there was no evidence that he had been back.

Moreton was a decorated hero, in Edinburgh for treatment of shell shock that spring, but had never been violent even at his most disturbed.

McAlpin alone was convicted. However, the trial of the Honorable Winfred Moreton in the court of public opinion, had been both loud and unequivocal: He had to be guilty of something, and murder would do as well as any other charge.

The story itself sounded more colourful than factual, so I finally interrupted Javitz to ask how he’d heard all this.

He bent down and pulled an oversized envelope from the carpet-bag, thrusting it into my hands. I unlooped the fastener and looked in at a mess of pages, newspaper clippings, letters, and pocket diaries. I eased a few out of the pile, and read enough to catch the drift of their meaning.

Meanwhile, Javitz was explaining how he had come across this, after the boy in the house had told him who “Goodman” was: He’d gone to the butler who took him to the housekeeper who showed him a clipping she kept in one of her ledgers and then, when he demanded to know more, led him to the butler’s pantry and the collection in the envelope.

“You stole this?” I asked.

“Borrowed it—send it back to them if you want. But I needed you to see, and understand.” The earlier heartiness had gone; he shifted, his leg troubling him.

I closed the envelope, trying to follow the currents. I felt that Javitz was honestly concerned at the idea of permitting a madman and accused murderer near Estelle. I also thought that he was more than a little worried at letting a man with dubious relationships near to his own person. I couldn’t imagine what threat the five-and-a-half-foot-tall Goodman might be to a strapping six-footer, but sex and sensibility do not always go hand in hand.

Beyond his concern, however, I thought I detected traces of embarrassment, which I had seen in him before. He was a captain in the RAF, a hero and man of action, who had permitted me to shove him to the back with the children. That he had uncomplainingly set aside his personal
dignity for the sake of a child—and moreover, continued to do so—was a sign of his true valiant nature. Reasoned argument would be no help, since his mind was already delivering that. I needed a means of permitting the man to retain his self-respect.

I let his story and his explanation fade away, watching Estelle solemnly constructing a Dolly-sized hut out of some twigs and dry grasses. Then I sat back.

“I can’t tell you whether these newspaper charges are substantiated, although I’ll find out. However, we still need to decide where to put you—and, if you honestly don’t mind, Estelle. It shouldn’t be for more than a day, at the most two.”

He settled a bit, which allowed his embarrassment to come closer to the surface. When he realised I was not about to accuse him of cowardice or point out his irrational fear of a man who had never so much as looked at him sideways, he relaxed. Suddenly he sat up and dug out his watch. “You have to be at the funeral in, what, three hours?”