Chapter Twenty-One
RRAAOOW!
Elizabeth startled awake; the window a navy rectangle where the afternoon had slid into evening.
For a moment she couldn’t place herself. Nothing was as it should be, the shape of the armoire was all wrong, her dressing table on the opposite wall, and…
“Oust! Hors d’ici, voyou!” Madame Lefèvre cried out from the courtyard below, Georgette contributing a frantic volley of yips from a safe distance.
Of course … Paris.
Or rather, Clemmi’s apartment on the rue de Louvencourt.
Elizabeth pushed herself up against the pillows and switched on the bedside lamp, angling her wrist towards the light. Half-past-nine. She’d slept the whole evening away.
She swung her feet to the floor and felt for her shoes.
The magazine had slipped from the coverlet, lying splayed on the carpet where it had fallen. She retrieved it and set it on the nightstand, smoothing a bent page flat before straightening it .
Elizabeth crossed to the dressing table and switched on the small lamp, lowering herself onto the stool. She reached for her silver-backed hairbrush, smoothing her dark locks back into place.
A light dusting of powder, a fresh sweep of lipstick, and she pressed her lips together, checking the result in the triptych mirror.
Her dress had fared better than her hair, only a shallow crease or two across the lap where she’d slept. She rose from the stool and shook out the skirt, running her palms down the pleats.
Giving her appearance a final once-over, she eased the bedroom door open and stepped into the passage.
The low murmur of Oliver’s voice reached her from the salon. So, he’d managed to make it home in time for dinner for a change.
Elizabeth made her way along the passage, Oliver’s voice growing clearer as she neared the salon. She paused at the open door; her gaze settling on Oliver in the bergère nearest the fireplace, a brandy glass resting on his knee as he spoke with the fair-haired man on the settee opposite.
Jonathan glanced towards the door. “Elizabeth.” He was on his feet at once, a smile spreading across his face. “At last. I was beginning to think you’d sleep until breakfast.”
“If it hadn’t been for Madame Lefèvre and Georgette, I might well have. And please, don’t get up on my account.” She crossed the salon and settled into the bergère opposite.
“Clemmi tried to wake you twice.” Oliver lowered himself back into his chair. “She said you didn’t so much as stir, and that anyone who could sleep through her second attempt clearly needed the rest more than the dinner.”
“Where is she now?”
“Retired early. She was asleep on her feet by the time Sylvie cleared the table, though she’d never have admitted it.”.
Sylvie tapped at the open door and entered with a tray, setting it down on the table in front of her. Chicken sandwiches and a pot of tea. “Madame Sterling asked Cook to keep this back for you, milady. She said you would be hungry when you woke.”
“She was quite right. Thank you, Sylvie, and thank Cook for me.”
“Oui, milady.” Sylvie gathered the empty coffeepot and cups onto her tray. “Will you be needing anything else, monsieur?”
“Nothing else tonight, Sylvie, thank you. Leave the rest; we’ll manage.”
“Très bien, monsieur. Bonsoir.” She bobbed her head and withdrew.
Oliver waited until her footsteps had faded towards the kitchen, then rose and pressed the salon doors shut.
“I’m assuming Clemmi knows you’re here?”
“She does. Who do you think insisted I stay for dinner? And I must say, you missed a treat there, Elizabeth. Cook’s poulet r?ti is second to none.”
“And what exactly have you told her, so I don’t contradict your official line?” Elizabeth reached for the teapot and filled her cup.
“That I’m in Paris for a few days on my way to Geneva.”
“But don’t you think it was rather reckless of you to come here tonight? What if someone saw you?”
“I was careful.”
“I’m sure you thought you’d been careful that night on the Pont Neuf, too.” Elizabeth set down the teapot. “And look how that ended.”
“Touché.” Jonathan arched a brow over the rim of his brandy glass.
Jonathan Ashcroft was one of the most infuriating men she’d ever met. He never seemed to take anything seriously, not even being shot.
“The difference,” Oliver said, returning to his seat, “is that someone followed Ashby from the Castellane that night, but I hardly think anyone is expecting to run into a dead man on the streets of Paris.”
“And Sir Conrad? Is his death to be tidied away like the shooting? Cybil said Gaston Vidal hadn’t breathed a word of it, and nothing happens in Paris without Gaston knowing.”
“No. The story breaks tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Elizabeth reached for the plate Sylvie had left her.
“There won’t be a whisper before the morning edition,” Oliver said.
“Sir Conrad Davenport, one of His Majesty’s most distinguished servants, died at the residence on Tuesday evening.
A tragic accident while cleaning his service revolver.
Dr Lawson’s certificate says nothing to contradict it, and the funeral arrangements will follow in due course. ”
“So when the murderer reads tomorrow’s headlines and learns the police aren’t looking for anyone else, they’ll believe they’ve got away with it.”
“And that’s exactly what we’re counting on.” Jonathan shifted in his seat. “We want them complacent because–”
“That’s when people make mistakes,” Elizabeth said, her gaze flicking between Jonathan and Oliver.
“Exactly.” Oliver set his glass aside. “If they have even a whiff that we’re onto them, they’ll disappear and everything Jonathan’s spent two months building will disappear with them.”
Jonathan set down his glass. “I understand you took coffee with Pippin Westcott at the Café de la Paix this afternoon.”
Elizabeth paused, her sandwich halfway to her lips. First Lanvin and Rumpelmayer’s, then her visit to the chancery, and now this. Was there anything that happened in this city that Oliver Sterling didn’t know about?
“I did, as it happens, among other things.” She returned the sandwich to the plate.
“And a most enlightening day it was, too. That piece in Le Figaro’s society page, about the English lady and her devotion to the baize?
It was Lady Davenport, and the tables she’s been losing at belong to a private gambling club called Le Frisson. ”
The two men exchanged a glance.
“You already knew, didn’t you?”
“Cecily Davenport’s fondness for the tables goes back years,” Jonathan said, “long before Paris. And usually Sir Conrad would just settle her debts, but the sums she’s run up with émile Girard were another matter entirely. And this time he refused.”
“Which made her one of the first people we considered,” Oliver said.
“But consider what that note does. It doesn’t simply kill her husband; it convicts him – treason, murder, the lot.
A widow can survive a dead husband. She cannot survive a traitor.
Every door in Paris that opens for Lady Davenport opens on Sir Conrad’s name, and whoever wrote that confession burned the name along with the man.
If she’d wanted him dead, she’d have wanted him mourned as a hero, not remembered as a disgrace. ”
“Then you still believe it’s Mr Arbuthnot.”
“We do.” Oliver rose and crossed to the fireplace, resting his elbow on the mantel. “And by this time tomorrow, we should have the proof we need.”
“Then you don’t have it yet.”
“What we have is certainty. Proof is another matter, and it’s coming.
The material that’s been reaching the other side isn’t the sort of thing that crosses an ambassador’s desk.
Sir Conrad saw conclusions, the polished despatch, the final position.
What’s been sold is the working detail underneath: dates of meetings, drafts, positions we abandoned before they were ever put on the table.
That material lives in the chancery, and everything in the chancery crosses one desk before it crosses any other. ”
“Mr Arbuthnot’s?” Elizabeth asked.
“Every telegram in, every telegram out,” Jonathan said.
“As Minister Plenipotentiary, he supervises the cipher room; he decides what rises to the Ambassador and what doesn’t, and he sat through every working session at the Quai d’Orsay while Sir Conrad was upstairs charming the Americans.
If a man wished to sell the British position, he could not stand in a better spot in Europe. ”
“But that only proves he could have done it.“ Elizabeth reached for her cup. “Not that he did.”
“Which is why there’s more,” Jonathan said. “Registry records. Sensitive Dawes material signed out through Arbuthnot’s office that his work gave him no earthly reason to touch. Not once, but a pattern stretching back months. We’ve been through the distribution books line by line.”
“And then there’s the man himself,” Oliver said.
“Passed over in July when Ashby arrived out of nowhere to claim the succession he’d spent ten years earning.
And on the day Sir Conrad died, he was summoned to the residence and informed that the restructuring would go ahead.
A new man from Constantinople to take the embassy, and Arbuthnot to be reassigned. ”
“Reassigned?”
“To a posting nobody could find on a map without their spectacles. Almost a decade of running this embassy in all but name, and that was to be his reward. Sir Conrad delivered the news himself, and within hours he was dead, with a confession on his blotter taking the treason to the grave with him.”
“Who else handles the chancery’s papers? The typists, the clerks. The registry doesn’t keep itself.”
“Fragments, nothing more.” Oliver waved the question away. “A girl types a page here, files a page there. Nobody below Arbuthnot sees the whole picture. That’s rather the point of the system.”
Elizabeth returned her cup to its saucer. The question, it seemed, was closed.
“Which brings us to last week,” Jonathan said.
“During a meeting with Arbuthnot, Oliver left the room for a few minutes on some pretext or other. And on the corner of his desk sat a paper with fresh terms from London on the loan disbursement. Numbers, dates, a position His Majesty’s Government would very much prefer the other side didn’t know.
And all of it false. If those terms surface, they can only have travelled through one man.
And we have a fair idea where they’ll appear: L’Humanité.
Nothing would suit that rag better than a British scandal. ”
“And if they never surface?”
“Then we’re wrong about him, and no harm done.
But they’ll surface, we’re sure of it. Ten years of service, and his reward is a posting to the middle of nowhere.
He has nothing left here to protect and every reason to line his pockets on the way out.
If he was ever going to sell, it’s now.” The mantel clock chimed the half-hour, and Oliver’s gaze drifted to the silver-framed wedding photograph beside it.
“The death notice runs in tomorrow’s Le Figaro.
After that, it’s a question of how hungry his buyers are, and how careless a man becomes when he believes nobody is looking. ”
The access. The registry books. A decade of swallowed pride, and the final insult delivered mere hours before the shot.
And yet.
Selling one’s country to the highest bidder was one thing.
But murdering someone in cold blood was something else entirely.
Was Julian Arbuthnot really capable of either?