Chapter Twenty-Nine
A few hours ago
De Lacey, Moriarty’s chief lieutenant in Britain, was uneasy.
Since he’d joined De Lacey Industries, there had been three other de Laceys, each a wilier, more capable man than he, and each had met an unnatural demise. So the former Timmy Ruston dared not be too comfortable in his new identity, his new authority, or his new surroundings.
A man of extremely moderate ambitions, he believed in sticking to one’s primary proficiency. In the case of De Lacey Industries, it meant doing what they’d always done, what they’d proved beyond a shadow of a doubt to be good at: the fleecing of other enterprises.
But forces beyond his control always pushed new and uncertain tasks on him. Case in point, Lord Bancroft Ashburton.
De Lacey did not want to traffic in state secrets. But Moriarty, referred to by his subordinates as Mr. Baxter, much as Timmy Ruston was de Lacey, hankered for state secrets as opium addicts needed their next puff. For months, Mrs. Kirby, the woman he’d sent to negotiate with Lord Bancroft, had prowled in and out of de Lacey’s fiefdom, treating it quite as her own.
When Moriarty and Lord Bancroft had at last settled on the terms of their agreement, de Lacey had almost laughed to learn that Lord Bancroft had wanted a disposable woman agent and Mr. Baxter had said why not sacrifice Kirby the negotiator—neither had any use for her afterward.
But the pleasure de Lacey took in her misfortune was quickly displaced by fear. She might have been annoying, but had she been any less capable or less loyal than he?
What, in the end, would be his fate?
At least Mr. Baxter had been pleased about Lord Bancroft’s partial surrender.
De Lacey, who had to do the actual work of arranging for Lord Bancroft’s escape, was less pleased. His lordship had devised a plan he proclaimed to be foolproof, not realizing that de Lacey wasn’t worried about fools but gods.
The gods punished hubris.
He’d learned the word from Mr. Baxter. Immediately after Mr. Baxter had executed a previous de Lacey at a company soiree, he’d said, “The man had too much hubris. And too much hubris displeases the gods.”
Yet men like Mr. Baxter and Lord Bancroft feared no gods.
But that was because the gods had not yet acted.
Charlotte Holmes, of course, wasn’t a god. But to de Lacey, she was a countervailing force, a reminder from the gods to the Mr. Baxters and the Lord Bancrofts of the world not to go too far.
One ought to leave some people alone. A woman who managed to escape Mr. Baxter’s trap unscathed—and who now had Lord Remington Ashburton’s protection—ranked high among “some people.”
Of course, de Lacey, with his sheer mediocrity, could not make the great men around him understand that. But at least his own part in all this was coming to an end. Tonight, in fact. He didn’t mind in the least the request to pick Lord Bancroft up from the abandoned old abbey a day or two early. The soonest over, the best.
He planned to arrive at the abandoned abbey fashionably late, at quarter to four in the morning. Which meant he needed to reach De Lacey Industries by quarter past eleven, to load the body into a second vehicle.
For the sake of comity and politesse—the vocabulary he’d acquired since he’d first met Mr. Baxter!—he’d acceded to Lord Bancroft’s request to hold Underwood’s body. But after tonight, it didn’t need to stay hidden anymore. Might as well get rid of it at the ruins. It would bother no one there and might even provide sustenance to carrion eaters.
His brougham stopped. De Lacey, who had dozed off a little, if with worrying thoughts crowding the landscape of his head like so many uncounted sheep, opened his eyes and glanced at his watch. Perfect timing.
His coachman opened the door. But instead of standing back respectfully to let him descend, the man leaned into the vehicle and whispered urgently, “Mr. de Lacey, something ain’t right! Men are coming out from the front door.”
A jolt went through de Lacey. “What do you mean?”
He pulled aside the carriage curtain. Across the street, there were indeed men exiting the wide-open front door of De Lacey Industries. Moreover, there were several police vans piled helter-skelter in the street, with uniformed men milling about.
De Lacey, having been a petty criminal in his youth, had a healthy fear of the police, especially a uniformed bobby wielding a nightstick. But Mr. Baxter was a criminal of a different order of magnitude, the kind who never had to deal with the law. And De Lacey Industries, on the outside at least, was a legitimate business with legitimate assets generating legitimate profits.
De Lacey swallowed his instinctive trepidation, leaped out of the brougham, and charged toward his fiefdom.
He was stopped at the door by an owlish-looking man. “Mr. de Lacey, I presume? You quite resemble your photograph in the foyer.”
De Lacey regarded the man warily. “And you are?”
“Chief Inspector Fowler of Scotland Yard. How do you do, Mr. de Lacey?”
Fowler. De Lacey remembered that name. The one who had investigated the murder at Stern Hollow last year and mistakenly arrested Lord Ingram.
Chief Inspector Fowler, however, did not look like a man with an egg on his face. Instead, he seemed to be someone who had singlehandedly found all the eggs at Easter and could barely restrain himself from outright gloating.
“If I may ask, what are you doing here, Chief Inspector?”
Only as de Lacey barked the question did he notice that the policeman’s attire was mud-stained. An effort had been made to brush away the splotches, but still, now that he paid attention…why in the world would anyone who hadn’t been crawling around a pig farm have this much mud on his person?
“I am, of course, investigating a serious crime, which then turned out to be a number of serious crimes, Mr. de Lacey, all on the very premises of De Lacey Industries, if you can believe that.”
De Lacey was so staggered he barely heard the alarm clanging in the back of his head. “Chief Inspector, I have no idea of what you speak. This is a most respectable establishment, and there are no crimes of any kind taking place either on these premises or in any activities connected with the running of De Lacey Industries.”
“Oh, I certainly thought this a most respectable establishment, but I’m afraid I’ve had my mind changed for me tonight.” The policeman wagged a finger. “What kind of respectable establishment, Mr. de Lacey, would dig a tunnel from its wine cellar to the strong room of the City and Suburban Bank, where there sit thirty thousand pounds’ worth of napoleons borrowed from the Banque de France?”
If the policeman had told him that he was the long-lost tenth child of Queen Victoria and her prince consort, he could not have been more dumbfounded. What tunnel? What bank? He vaguely recalled that there was a bank on a parallel street, but the business of De Lacey Industries was not bank-robbing. There weren’t even any plans to rob banks, let alone tunnels already dug from the cellar.
Wait, the cellar? The wine cellar?
Officially, there was no wine cellar. Because the wine cellar was beneath the subbasement, and the very respectable De Lacey Industries, officially, at least, had no subbasement!
But—but—
De Lacey stared some more at the mud stains on the policeman’s clothes. If there had really been a tunnel running from De Lacey Industries to the branch of City and Suburban Bank on the next street, and Chief Inspector Fowler had crawled through that tunnel and reached the wine cellar, then he would have come out of the wine cellar—never mind how he managed that with the wine cellar padlocked from the outside—directly into the subbasement.
And in the subbasement—
“As if it is not egregious enough that you have done that,” continued Fowler, “what should I discover when I came up, but prisoners in your lower basement? Six individuals held against their will, some for months.”
“There—there must have been some mistake. There—”
Dear God, six individuals held against their will, did the policeman say? Six? But there had been only five prisoners in the subbasement.
“Oh, believe me, Mr. de Lacey, there was no mistake. I, as well as my men, even two directors of the City and Suburban Bank, can bear witness to that in court.”
Perhaps this was not real. Perhaps he was in fact being driven to the ruined abbey and suffering from a nightmare featuring an abundance of horrors well beyond what his own limited mind could have conjured.
“And guess what we found in addition to those prisoners held against their will? A dead body kept on ice, a man who had been shot in the back.”
Fowler’s words still ringing in de Lacey’s head, he saw two uniformed men carry out a stretcher. Under the sheet lay no doubt the late Mr. Underwood, now no longer to be breakfast for crows and vultures.
Behind them, four men and two women slowly shuffled out of De Lacey Industries. One of the women saw de Lacey and flashed a sardonic smile, as if to say, Your turn, you knobstick.
And the other woman—he felt faint. The other woman was Lady Ingram, who had been at large since last autumn and never found, let alone brought to him for incarceration.
“Chief Inspector,” he said hoarsely, “I’m afraid there has been a horrible mix-up. There have never been any dead bodies at De Lacey Industries, any prisoners, or any tunnels.”
“Well, Mr. de Lacey, I came via the tunnel, so most assuredly there is a tunnel. The prisoners that I and a dozen men of sound mind freed from the subbasement were certainly there, and they told me not only that you were the one who personally brought them their food every day, but that for months on end, they’d heard digging crews come down to work at night. And that they heard you, swearing profusely, drag something heavy into the subbasement—and then brought in chunks of ice, too, which caused the temperature in the subbasement to drop.”
Fowler smiled, now no longer trying to stop himself from gloating. “Mr. de Lacey, for all those reasons and more, I am placing you under arrest.”