Escapade (44 page)

I shrugged. “Like you said. He was audacious.”

We were in the library, where Doyle had towed me.

He puffed at his pipe. “Yes, but why put himself in such jeopardy?”

“He wanted to show Harry up. Like I said before, I don’t think he ever really wanted to kill him. He was counting coup, in a way, like a Sioux Indian. Getting close enough to kill him, and taking pride in that. Later, probably, if he’d pulled it off, he would’ve told Harry what he’d done, somehow. And I don’t think he planned to hang around long enough to get caught. He wouldn’t have stayed as long as he did, probably, if he hadn’t gotten involved in that bet with Harry. The idea of beating Harry to a solution was too good for him to pass up.”

Chin Soo admitted as much at his trial.

“Yes,” said Doyle, “but it was extraordinarily dangerous.” “This is a guy who catches bullets in his teeth.”

“But that’s merely a trick, you said.”

“Harry tells me that two magicians died trying to perform it.” 

Doyle frowned around the stem of his pipe. “Hmmm. And Lady Purleigh. She was audacious, as well.”

“Yeah.”

“I should never have suspected her. I’ve always believed she was a charming woman, and devoted to her husband. I very much admired her.”

“I liked her, too,” I said. “But if murderers always looked like murderers, and always acted like murderers, we wouldn’t need cops.” I smiled. “Or mystery writers.”

“Hmmm. Yes. Quite so.” He looked at me. “Do you suppose that Lord Reginald somehow influenced Lady Purleigh? Somehow warped her perceptions, twisted her nature?”

“You’d have to ask Running Bear,” I said. “But he’s already been wrong once.”

He frowned. “Not as to Mrs. Corneille’s daughter. Nor to the Earl’s imposing himself upon Miss Turner.”

I still thought that Madame Sosostris had gotten her information from Briggs, and that the innocent woman she’d been talking about had been Darleen. But I knew that Madame Sosostris would never admit it.

“You’d think he’d be right about everything,” I said.

“Passing over into the next life doesn’t make one infallible, you know. One is improved, but one is still subject to human error.” 

“Then what’s the point of dying?”

He smiled. “Still pretending to be a skeptic, eh, Beaumont? Ah well.” He stood up. “Nonetheless, it’s been a pleasure to meet you. Most instructive. I hope we see each other again at some time. I do mean that. Perhaps we can get together in London.’

I stood up. “You’re taking off?” I asked him.

“Taking off? Oh yes, yes, I’m returning to London with Madame Sosostris and Mr. Dempsey. We’ve work to do. Much work.”

“Have you talked to Harry yet? About the seance?”

He puffed at the pipe. “Briefly, yes. He isn’t as impressed as I d hoped. He claims that all the miracles she performed at the seance

could have been performed, just as well, by a fraud.”

“He’s right.”

“Well, of course he is. I don’t dispute that for a moment. But as Madame Sosostris is not a fraud, the point is irrelevant. The woman is a marvel, Beaumont. She’s brought comfort and peace to literally hundreds of people. How many of us can say that?”

“Not many.” Not me, for one.

“I began as a doctor, you know. Medicine. I was helping people. And then I became a writer, and for years all I did was amuse them, really. Entertain them. Now, once again, I can be a part of something that helps them.”    .

I nodded. It seemed to me that being amusing and entertaining was maybe more helpful than confusing them with ghosts, but I didn’t think there was much point in bringing it up.

“Well,” he said. “I wish you the best of luck.”

“I wish you the same, Sir Arthur.” We shook hands and he doubled the number of creases in my palm.

He smiled at me again and then he walked off, trailing the smell of burning burlap.

I SAID GOODBYE to Mrs. Corneille, too, late that Sunday afternoon. She was on her way out, ready to drive back to the city with Sir David. I caught her in the Great Hall, asked her if I could talk to her for a minute.

“I don’t see,” she said, “that we have anything to say to each other.”

“One minute. That’s all I ask.”

She hesitated a moment, narrowing her dark eyes, then she turned to Sir David. “Wait in the car, would you, David? I’ll be there in a moment.”

Sir David glanced at me and frowned but he said nothing. The bruise on his jaw had become the color of stewed prunes.

“What is it?” she said when Sir David left.

“I just wanted to say that I’m sorry about Lady Purleigh. I know she was your friend.”

“She is innocent.”

“She’ll get a chance to prove that.”

“And she will do so. But you’ve ruined her name. You helped that awful little man. Houdini. You
helped
him build a case against her.”

I nodded.

“And you pretended to help that Chin Soo person. That false Inspector Marsh. You deliberately misled him.”

I nodded.

“You and Houdini both knew that he was no police officer.” 

“Yeah,” I said.

The Great Man had figured it out when I told him that English cops don’t carry guns. He’d felt a gun in Sergeant Meadows’s pocket when he tried to move him, up in the Earl’s room. That was what he’d told me at the old mill, and that was what had made Miss Turner gasp.

I figured it out while I watched Chin Soo work. No cop, not even a delicate cop, makes a bet about a case with a magician.

“And last night,” she said, “you made me promise not to talk to Alice,” she said. “Not to inform her of what Miss Turner had found in the Earl’s room. You were trying to entrap her even then.”

“No,” I said. “But she was a suspect, like everyone else.” 

“
Everyone
was a suspect?”

“Yeah.”

She nodded. “Of course. That’s why you came to my room last night, isn’t it?”

“I came because you asked me.”

She shook her head. “What a fool I was. Things like honor, friendship, loyalty—they don’t mean anything at all to you, do they?”

“They mean a lot to me. But so does the job.”

She looked at me. “I suppose I ought to respect you for that,” she said. “But I’m not required to like you, am I?”

“Nope.”

She nodded. “Goodbye, Mr. Beaumont.”

“Goodbye, Mrs. Corneille.”

And she turned and walked away, her heels clicking on the marble floor, the muscles of her calves clenching and unclenching like fists below the snapping hem of her skirt. The scent of her perfume hung in the air.

I could’ve reminded her that I hadn’t said anything to anyone about her daughter. In the formal garden, she’d said that she hadn’t seen her husband for ten years when he died in the war. Later, in her room, she’d let slip that her daughter was bom two years after she’d last seen him. Unless she was lying, her husband wasn’t the father of her child.

But it was something else that I didn’t think there was much point in bringing up.

I SAID GOODBYE to the Great Man a few minutes later. I was in the Great Hall, staring up at the wall of weapons. Everything from cudgels to semiautomatic pistols. People had been using killing tools for a long time, and the tools kept getting better. And they would keep getting better, too, so long as killing was one of the hundreds of thousands of ways we could deny, or escape, our own insignificance.

“Phil. Are you ready to leave? Are you packed?” It was him, carrying his valise.

“Hello, Harry. No, not yet. I talked to Mrs. Allardyce and Miss Turner. I’ll be going back to London on the train with them. It doesn’t leave till seven.” I reached into my pocket, found the key to the Lancia, handed it over.

He looked down at it, looked back up at me. “But Phil. I thought we would be traveling together.”

“Chin Soo’s in jail. The job’s finished. You don’t need me anymore.”

Frowning, he cocked his head. “What is it, Phil? Are you upset about something?”

“No, Harry. I’m fine. I hope you have a good trip. Maybe I’ll see you in London.”

“You
are
upset, Phil. Why? I have solved the mystery. That is a cause for celebration, is it not?”

“For who?”

“For you and me. We can leave now. We can meet Bess at the station, and then we can share a huge breakfast, all of us. At the Savoy, I was thinking. It will be wonderful, Phil!”

“Harry,” I said, “there were people involved in all this.” 

“Excuse me?”

“This wasn’t just a puzzle, Harry, set up so you could solve it. There were human beings involved. Lady Purleigh and this Moseley character—”

“But they killed the Earl!”

“I know. And they deserve to be punished. But they’ve got friends, Harry. They’ve got family. Lord Bob. Cecily. Mrs. Corneille. Even the servants. Something like this happens, it affects everyone close to it. And it keeps affecting them. Forever, maybe. You and I, we can walk away.”

“But Phil,
someone
had to solve the crime.”

“Yeah. And you did a good job. You were terrific.”

“What is it, then?”

I was being foolish. He was who he was.

I put my hand on his shoulder and I said, “Forget it. You go on ahead. Give my regards to Bess. I’ll see you in London.” 

“Phil—”

“Really. It’s okay. You go ahead.”

“All right, Phil. If you insist.” He was beginning to work on a pout.

And then, like the others, he turned and walked away. His back straight, his head high, he stalked across the floor.

I called out, “Drive carefully!”

But he didn’t hear me, or he didn’t want to, and so for once I had the last word.

The Evening Post

Maplewhite, Devon

August 19

Dear Evangeline,

I hope you receive this. Things here are so entirely topsy-turvy that the evening post may never be posted. Perhaps it will go out tomorrow morning; but by then I shall have left myself. The Allardyce and I, and Mrs Stopes, are taking the eight o’clock train to London tonight.

I really can’t tell you what’s happened, Evy, not now. It’s too complicated and, in a way, really too sad to explain in a letter.

And I’m feeling rather guilty at the moment. Despite all the tragedies that have occurred here, and the losses, I am still valiant in my preoccupation with self. A small part of me (which I should like to but cannot ignore) is fluttering with a wild mixture of confusion and excitement.

It’s so ridiculous—

How would you feel, Evy, if you possessed a spinster friend who was not a respectable paid companion but rather a Pinkerton operative? (Operative: that’s the word they use for their agents. I think it’s awfully silly, don’t you?)

Yes. An enquiry agent. Mr Beaumont believes that I’d be ‘good at it’. It was he who broached the idea, only an hour ago. He says that the Pinkerton Agency hires women and that in fact one of the best operatives ‘in the States’ is a woman.

It’s preposterous, of course; and so I said to him. He told me that I needn’t come to a decision immediately. He’ll be in London for a time, he said, at least until the trial (I’ll tell you of the trial when I see you), and perhaps longer; and that we can talk of it further, at my discretion. I should ‘think about it,’ he says.

Evy, it would mean freedom from the Allardyce!

I honestly don’t know what to do.

Can you imagine me solving crimes and rooting out evildoers? Well, actually, I suppose that in a way I’ve already done so, here at Maplewhite, haven’t I?

Well. I shall ‘think about it,’ then. If nothing else, I shall be able to look forward to an occasional visit from Mr Beaumont; and, with any luck at all, these may prove interesting.

All my love, Jane