Lord Foxbridge Butts In (31 page)

“You’re determined to shock me, aren’t you?” I reproved gently.

“You blush so prettily, I simply
cannot
help myself,” she reached behind her to pull the bell, summoning the stiff young butler to escort me out of the house; as I followed him down the stairs, I wondered if the delicacy of his movements was due to weals and bruises rather than ill-fitting clothes, which started me down a whole train of thought (complete with images) that made me feel a little queasy and very warm.

Walking back home, I pondered the many things that Lady Bea had said, and also pondered if I could in good conscience wait until Friday to find Claude. No, I would
have
to start nosing around immediately: if I
could
save the boy from the Marquis’s cruel care before he was auctioned off, I really
should
try. So I stopped at the Ritz instead of crossing over to St. James’s, and started nosing around among the waiters and maîtres-d’.

Hotel and restaurant staff are accustomed to being questioned by detectives, particularly private detectives looking for divorce-case evidence, so they’re very easy to get around as long as you’re quick with the pound-notes. The Marquis had
not
been to lunch there on Monday, but he had been on the last Thursday, with a young lady. When pressed, the waiter who most frequently served him thought that he might have gone to Frascati’s on Monday, a restaurant he’d heard the Marquis mention on occasion.

The staff at Frascati’s hadn’t seen him in a week, but sent me on to the Dorchester, right back where I started on Park Lane; but there I struck gold: the Marquis
had
lunched there on Monday with a young man answering to Claude Chatroy’s description. But the young man was taken ill toward the end of lunch, and the Marquis drove him home. The porters in particular remembered the incident, as the Marquis’s Bugatti was so remarkable a machine; it caused some further comment when the Bugatti departed
up
Park Lane, in the direction of Bayswater Road, rather than down toward Knighstbridge, where the young man said he lived — nor toward St. James’s, dashing my hope that he was right under my nose in Hyacinth House.

Tired and hot from walking all over Mayfair, I took a cab back home and got into a cool bath, where I lay in thought for some little while. That Claude had been ‘taken ill’ struck me as proof positive that the Marquis had drugged and abducted him. And though Claude had been taken north from the Dorchester instead of south, the Marquis’s rooms were still worth searching: the address of the place he held his victims before the auction might be on some correspondence in his desk, or some other type of clue amongst his possessions. I determined to break into those rooms at my first opportunity.

My opportunity presented itself almost immediately: Pond had set up a sort of alarm system with the entire Hyacinth House staff, all of whom loathed the Marquis; the signal came in the form of a telephone call from the kitchen, telling us that the Marquis had left the house and was expected to be away for some time, having ordered a cab, which he was overheard to direct to an address in Hampstead.

The alarm system was set up so that his return would also be reported, with bellboys stationed at strategic points to announce and delay the Marquis, so that we’d have time to vacate the rooms before their owner could possibly make it up to the third floor. Pond and I went up to the rooms, which were twin to Baron van der Swertz’s rooms on the second floor, so the layout was familiar to me.

The Marquis’s rooms were done in a sort of Russian style, with gold-stamped oxblood leather paneling and heavy gilded furniture covered in deep maroon velvet, warm and lovely and extremely masculine, not at all as sinister as I’d imagined it would be. However, further examination showed an ugly underside: steel shackles were fixed to the brackets that held the curtain-rod in the alcove archway, fastened with heavy leather braids; a wardrobe revealed an array of whips, crops, and cats arrayed with a chilling precision; a drawer contained a number of devices whose purposes I couldn’t even guess, though the shapes of some of them indicated they might be clamped or inserted about a human body.

Pond went through the Marquis’s clothes, noting the names of his tailors, cleaners, and launderers in a notebook, searching the pockets for tell-tale slips of paper or printed matchboxes, and returning everything to its place so that it didn’t look disturbed in the slightest way. I thought
I
was good at going through a person’s things without anyone knowing, but Pond was a
master
— the clandestine way he handled the garments was a pleasure to watch.

I busied myself with the desk, which contained a great many papers and bills and letters, too many for me to possibly examine in one night. There was nothing labeled “Kidnapped Boys Kept Here,” so it was pretty heavy weather: I wrote down every address I encountered, with a note as to what the address was written on and what it seemed to be, and a summary of its contents, so I could study it all at my leisure.

The
most
suggestive thing I came across was a cardboard wallet containing the deeds and other papers for a half-dozen row houses in Ilford, with lots of cheque-stubs and letters attached to each one, indicating that they were income-producing properties rather than storage for abductees; I’d have to compare the deeds to the addresses on the rent-cheques, which would take some time, to see if any of them were untenanted; or I could just go out to Ilford in the morning and take a look.

All in all a very profitable job, executed in just over an hour and well before the Marquis returned. I felt just like Raffles as Pond and I skulked back to my rooms to organize our plunder — though it was more like swotting for exams as we tried to make sense of it all. We sat down together at the little dining-table, tore the pages out of our notebooks, and sorted the slips of information into three piles: Promising, Unpromising, and Obviously Useless.

The Promising pile was made up mostly of copied hotel bills, from a number of little-known establishments around Mayfair and Westminster, which seemed to be for ballrooms or supper-rooms in which auctions might have been held; there were a couple from Masonic lodges, and catering-halls that could serve as recital rooms, which seemed even better suited to the purpose. The Unpromising pile was the largest, constituted of private correspondence to and from people we did not know at addresses that could only be residential; but it had
some
potential in case I had to track down the Marquis’s auction clientele if Claude was not recovered on Friday. And then the Obviously Useless pile was bills and correspondence from tailors and restaurants and garages, all of which had an inescapably everyday feel to them.

I wished I could talk to Twister about all of this, but I didn’t dare: he would be
very
cross that we hadn’t reported Claude’s disappearance to the police, and absolutely furious with me for illegally searching the Marquis’s rooms; if he found out that I intended to attend a prostitution/slavery auction, he’d probably have me arrested.

******

The next morning after breakfast, Pond dressed me in my most inconspicuous suit so that I could at least
try
to blend in with a suburban crowd. Heading out into the street, I asked a cabbie to take me to Ilford, but he refused to drive thirteen miles outside of Westminster, even with the promise of return fare; but he was obliging enough to get out his A.B.C. and instruct me how to get there on the train; then he drove me to Fenchurch Street Station, where I could catch the LMS to Shoeburyness that passed through Ilford after an hour-long ride. I’d had no idea that “Greater London” was so big, and resolved to get an A.B.C. of my own and start exploring.  The names alone would be entertainment enough.

Arriving in Ilford, I found myself in an odd hybrid of town and village, with a great many buildings quite close together, but none more than three storeys tall. Asking after Montrose Avenue, I was directed off the High Street and to the south, into a vast grid of long treeless streets named after various dukedoms, lined with nearly-identical semidetached houses, rather squat but rendered pleasant by little gardens in front; the five houses in each row were faced in a different colour of brick, which gave them some individuality, and I suppose allowed the residents to find their own homes after getting squiffy at the pub.

I found the houses I was after fairly quickly, as they weren’t very far down the road; they all looked prosperous and well-cared-for, and so incredibly commonplace that I had difficulty connecting them with the sinister Marquis. And absolutely
none
of them was empty. I chatted with some small boys I found in one of the front gardens, poking at a dead pigeon with a stick, and asked them if they’d seen a black-and-scarlet Bugatti roadster in the neighbourhood. They hadn’t, and I knew that no small boy would let such a spectacle pass by without comment to all of his fellows, so I had to surmise that de Mazan was
not
keeping Claude in one of those houses — he likely hadn’t laid eyes on Ilford after buying the property.

Returning to the High, I found an inn and had some lunch, feeling rather sorry for myself. To spend an hour on a suburban train and then hike through a grid of identical semidetached houses, only to find absolutely
nothing
, was extremely discouraging. The next train wasn’t going to be for another hour, so I wandered around a bit, but all I learned is that people who live in suburbs are not very interesting, and offer very little entertainment to the stranger in their midst.

When I got back to London proper, I paused to collect Pond and went along to Buckland House; though I’d already discovered the restaurant that Claude had been to, I still wanted to find out anything I could about Claude that the servants might know; and besides, if I was going to start courting Caro, I’d want to have a lot more information on the family, anyway.  Depositing Pond with the porter, I imposed on Lady Caroline’s hospitality for tea, and shared with her the fruits of my investigation so far — meagre as they were.

Caro pulled me into her father’s study for privacy, hung on my words as I unfolded my tale, was suitably shocked by Lady Bea’s revelations regarding sadomasochism, and commiserated over my pointless exploration of Ilford. She agreed that Claude must have been kidnapped by the Marquis, that his being ‘taken ill’ was simply a ruse to cover his having eaten or drunk some sort of drug. Like me, she presumed that Claude was being kept in one of the many hotels for which I’d found bills in the Marquis’s desk, and despaired at the impossibility of searching so many possible sites. She was also very excited about the idea of the slave auction, and was thrilled that I planned to attend it to rescue her cousin.

“But wait,” she said, after thinking it over for a moment, “He won’t bring Claude out if he knows
you
’re there. He knows you know Claude, and his family. If you go, you’ll blow the whole operation.”

“‘Blow the whole operation’?  Where do you
get
such language?” I gaped at her.

“Here and there,” she said dismissively, “And I can’t go, for the same reason.”

“Maybe Charley could go,” I suggested, thinking that Lady Bea might be tickled by a transvestite escort.

“Oh, that’s brilliant!” she hopped in her chair excitedly, “Do you think Lady Bea would agree?”

“I don’t see why not,” I shrugged, “Though perhaps I should introduce you, first. Unless you already know her.”

“I’ve
met
her, at balls and things, but I’ve never really
talked
to her,” Caro had an oddly speculative look on her face, “And now I think of it, I wouldn’t even know what to
do
if I went. I’m sure I’d do the wrong thing and get poor Claude into worse trouble.”

“Well, then, what should we do?” I asked, then immediately regretted posing the question when I saw her face light up with mischief.

“
You
can go in disguise!” she clapped her hands with delight.

“What sort of disguise?” I frowned, knowing the answer but hoping I was wrong.

“A girl, of course,” she slapped my knee, “You know how pretty you are, and quite unrecognizable.”

“Absolutely
not
,” I said with great fervour.

“For me?” she wheedled, “Please?”

“I’m sure there are a
million
other ways to do this,” I crossed my arms angrily.

“I wonder if Lady Beatrice would take us both,” she ignored me, “or simply give us her invitation. We could dress you as her. She wears so much makeup, nobody would know the difference.”

“
No
!”

“Come along, Foxy,” she stood up and grabbed my elbow, hoisting me out of the chair, “I’m taking you to my costumier.”

“No!” I wailed, trying to dig in my heels, only to lose my footing on the polished floor.

“Yes!” she insisted, pulling me through the front door and across the courtyard to the stable-yard.

“Oh, all right!” I gave up, remembering what Lady Bea had said about saying ‘No’ while I’m young and wishing I’d said ‘Yes’ when I’m old. I
had
enjoyed dressing up, if I was to be perfectly honest; but gender is a funny thing, and I was somehow
afraid
of not being a man, of being somehow diminished by taking on an alien identity.