Touchstone (47 page)

“You remember how to get to the clinic Bennett stayed at, somewhere near here?”

“That horrible place? Of course I can get there, but why? Bennett would never go there.”

“Maybe not by choice.”

She stared at him. Without a word, she opened the door and slid behind the wheel.

Chapter Fifty-Nine

S
ARAH WAS A QUICK, ATTENTIVE DRIVER.
She also knew the area very well, and twice dove into short-cuts between the major roads, merging from farm track back into paved road without a blink, but Stuyvesant could see the tension in her, and kept silent so as not to distract her.

After twenty minutes, she asked, “Do you want me to motor up to the front door?”

“Is there another way?”

“Yes. Laura was driving, but I think I can find it. That way is shorter, but I have to go off here.”

“Then go off here.”

The road deteriorated, but she kept the speed up, traveling occasionally on the shoulder to save the tires from bad ruts.

“Tell me the layout of the place,” he asked.

“I’ll go with you, that would be easier.”

“No. And not because you’re a girl,” he added, not entirely truthfully. “It’s just possible I’ll have to send Bennett out and stay behind, to talk to the people there. If that’s the case, I want you to be there to meet him and get him away. Take him…where would you take him?”

“The Dog and Pony lets rooms,” she suggested. “And the innkeeper is a great friend of the Hurleighs, he wouldn’t say a word.”

“Fine. Now, tell me what you know about the layout.” He found a scrap of paper and the stub of a pencil in his coat pocket, and sketched in the information she gave him.

From the inside, she’d only seen the public rooms at the front, but she had once been upstairs, to her brother’s room, and she’d spent both her visits here walking through the grounds, so she could describe the outside in detail. He listened, asked questions, corrected the sketch, and felt he knew it as well as he could.

Forty minutes after getting into the car, she steered hesitantly off the road, aiming directly at some low branches. They gave way, dragging against the car (Sarah clamped her hat on with one hand) with the sound of a witch’s finger-nail before revealing an overgrown track that clearly hadn’t been used in months, if not years.

“Well done,” he said. “How far are we from the place now?”

“About half a mile.”

“I’ll get out here. Any closer and the engine will attract attention. Now, is this more or less accurate?”

She studied his rough drawing, made a couple of minor corrections, and handed it back to him.

“Harris, do you honestly think…?” She couldn’t complete the sentence, nor did Stuyvesant want her to.

“I think Bennett is fine, just a little stuck. But if he and I don’t come back within an hour, we may both be stuck. In that case, I want you to promise you won’t come after us. The best thing would be to go talk to Laura—no, not Laura, the Duke. He likes Bennett, and he is well equipped to ride to the rescue.”

“I promise. And, Harris? Thank you.”

“He’s my friend, like you said.”

“You be careful.”

“Piece of cake, lady,” he said, and gave her cheek a quick peck before getting out of the car.

Twenty yards away, he stopped to shift his gun from pocket to belt, and heard the car engine start up again. Puzzled, he looked back, and realized she was maneuvering it to face the opposite direction, for a quick getaway. He grinned:
That’s my girl.

Stuyvesant worked his way among the trees until he could see brick walls. It had been a country house, he thought, built by some Victorian who had cornered the market in wool blankets or pottery clay, then sold either when the bottom dropped out, or when all the sons died in one war or another. From the back it was an ugly building, although he doubted that the front was much more appealing.

The bricks could use a repointing, the grass needed mowing, and weeds grew between the stones paving the yard behind the house. The doors to the garage behind the house stood open, showing two cars; a beat-up delivery van stood outside. The door to the house stood open as well, two steps up to a hallway, and probably a kitchen. No sign of life, other than the open doors.

One advantage of a run-down house was, the shrubs near the walls hadn’t been pruned in a long time. He’d be able to hear a lot, once he was under them, and the day’s mild breeze would cover his movements.

It was an easy matter to slip behind the garage, follow the fence that hid the clothes-line from sight, and cross ten feet to the corner of the house.

Problem was, the house was silent. Not a voice, not a footstep, not even through the windows that stood open. There had to be people inside, but he couldn’t begin to guess where they were.

Except for Grey, and that wasn’t in the upstairs room Sarah had visited. Several of the ground-floor windows had bars across them, but in one of those, the moving curtains billowed back far enough to show a desk littered with objects, one of which was a silver flask very like Grey’s. And although in the States pretty much every pocket had its flask, in this country, where booze was to be had for the asking, the pocket-flask was not as ubiquitous.

He moved back around the house to the kitchen yard, found it still empty, its door standing open at the same angle as before. He took his gun from the small of his back and moved cautiously across the exposed wall and through the door. The sensation of being watched was strong, but then he was as exposed as a pea on a plate, so the sensation was inescapable.

Once inside the thick walls, he could hear movement: someone walking across an upstairs room, water running into a vessel of some kind, nearer by. Holding the revolver up in front of him, he went down the hallway, passing an open doorway, then two closed doors.

The door marking the end of the servants’ realm was propped open. Stuyvesant put his head around, and saw the expected jog in the hallway (Victorian builders didn’t like to inflict on their clients any view of the servants at work). He went down it, fully expecting at any second that Carstairs or one of his men would step out and raise the alarm, but the gentle impress of his shoes on the worn carpet was all he heard.

Several doors, thick wooden affairs that would never give way to a heel, had been decorated with sturdy iron bolts on the outside, none of them new. Only the last of these, which roughly corresponded to the room with the silver flask, had the bolt pushed to.

With his back to the door and the gun out to cover the hallway, Stuyvesant eased the bolt over with his left hand. He flattened his palm against the door to push it open, then stopped, patted his pockets, and came out with the pencil stub. He inserted it into the drilled bolt-hole in the jamb, shoving it in with his thumb. There: He wasn’t too keen on the idea of being locked inside a room with bars on its windows.

Now he pushed on the door, which opened without so much as a creak. He took a last glance down the hallway in both directions, and stepped inside.

Being outside of London made Tom Lakely feel uneasy at the best of times, but the deserted countryside around the clinic always struck him as downright sinister. The only animal within miles that he could recognize with comfort as not about to attack him was the cat that lived in the garage, and even that he’d had to shoo away that morning, for fear it would make him sneeze.

Because this morning, Major Carstairs wanted silence. Major Carstairs wanted him to sit inside the garage’s storage room and stare out of the small, dirty window at the back of the house. He’d been there for hours, his bladder was killing him, and he’d been eyeing the various bins and containers on the shelves around him for a likely impromptu
pissoir
when out of the blue, the man appeared.

Lakely was so surprised he let out a noise, fortunately too small to be heard. His heart began to pound so wildly he thought the American would hear that, across the kitchen yard—or maybe it would beat so hard he’d pass out, crashing into the canisters and bins, and Mr. Carstairs would become very angry indeed.

The American disappeared down the side of the house, and Lakely swallowed, trying to get himself under control. Major Carstairs needed him, he’d said so. And all he had to do was wait until the American went inside the house, and then walk in a completely normal fashion around the house (the other side of the house) and let Mr. Carstairs know.

The wait was interminable. Lakely thought his bladder was going to explode, but he didn’t take his eyes off the house, and eventually the man came back around the corner. The intruder then took out a gun and fiddled with it for a minute, before creeping along the bricks to the door, and slipping inside.

Lakely let out a breath, then grabbed the first bucket that came to hand and took care of his bladder. Only when that danger was out of the way did he leave the garage.

He strolled along the house as if admiring the blue sky, the green grass. He might have whistled to illustrate his nonchalance if his mouth hadn’t been dust-dry. Only when he’d rounded the front corner of the house did he drop all pretense, scampering up the wide steps and fumbling with the knob until he got it open, then quick-stepping down the hallway to Major Carstairs’ office.

He rapped on the door then flung it open so hard it bounced back at him. Carstairs looked up, startled at the dramatic entrance, and Lakely swallowed.

“He’s here!” he squeaked, then cleared his throat. “The American, he’s here. He went through the kitchen door not two minutes ago.” An exaggeration: add three minutes to pee, since his bladder had responded to the sudden permission by seizing up entirely. But no need to tell Major Carstairs that.

Carstairs nodded and put the cap on his pen, then pushed himself up from the desk. “Very well, Snow and I will take it from here. You can finish up the letter to Steel-Maitland.”

He took a pair of gloves from the top drawer of the desk and pulled them on, dropped a small revolver into his coat pocket, and left the room.

When the door closed, Tom Lakely collapsed into the nearest chair as if his tendons had been cut. He mopped his forehead, and swore he’d never leave London again.

Bennett Grey was sitting in a chair. Not reading, not listening to the wireless, not even looking out of the window, just sitting in front of the cold fireplace, hands slack over the chair’s arms. He did not seem surprised at the sudden apparition of a man through his door. Stuyvesant, on the other hand, stopped dead at the sight of him.

“Jesus, Grey, are you all right?”

The man’s first name might have been Dorian rather than Bennett—the muscular woodcutter Stuyvesant had met just twelve days earlier had been replaced by a small, gaunt figure with dull eyes and four days of beard. He did not respond, just watched as Stuyvesant carefully shut the door and walked over to draw the gauze curtains together.

On the table next to Grey was a breakfast tray; the contents of the tray were untouched. Stuyvesant put down the gun to scoop a cold fried egg onto the limp toast, thrusting it at the other man. “Eat this.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t want to carry you to the car after you pass out from hunger.”

“I’m not going with you.”

“Of course you’re going with me. You knew I would come. You were waiting for me.”

Grey studied the object in Stuyvesant’s hand as if it contained some message. A slight grimace passed over his face. “The body’s hope is a terrible thing.”

“Ain’t that the truth? Eat.”

“There’s no point.”

“Grey, listen to me. Carstairs is using Sarah against you, isn’t he? Threatening to expose her involvement in—something.”

“I can’t risk her life.”

“What did he tell you she’d done?”

“I…I don’t remember. A conspiracy? Tell you the truth, I had a headache and so I wasn’t listening. I could see he believed it, so I went with him.”

“She is innocent, Grey.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do.”

“Carstairs knows otherwise.”

“Carstairs is wrong.” The green eyes left the food to travel to Stuyvesant’s face; a small frown line appeared. “Oh, it’s possible Carstairs believes he’s right. But I think it’s just as possible that Carstairs knows how to get around you. That he knows what his presence does to you, and he knows you won’t be able to see through him, not right away. What you’re seeing is his satisfaction, not his conviction. It doesn’t matter. Whatever he says she’s done, Sarah’s innocent.”

“How do you know?”

“I know. Now, do I have to shove this down your throat?”

Grey took the thing, looked at it dubiously, then nibbled a corner.

A thud came from somewhere in the house, as if someone had dropped a heavy object or slammed a door. Stuyvesant moved over to the door to listen, but it was not repeated; still, it was hard not to rush the man away.

Instead, he went back to the breakfast tray and poured out a cup of tepid coffee, dosing it with cream and sugar. He put the cup on the desk next to Grey, then sat in the chair on the other side of the fireplace, watching the man eat.

Grey finished the food and drank the coffee, and although at the end of it he gulped and Stuyvesant thought he would be sick, he was not. Stuyvesant sat for another minute, just to be certain, then got to his feet and went to find Grey’s coat—the woods were cool, for a man in this condition, and he hadn’t seen a rug in Sarah’s car, either.