Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“Then let me tell you what I believe happened.” Oliver set the notebook down.
“I believe you saw Ashby leave the soirée, and you followed him. The man who’d been handed your ambassadorship, brought in over your head from nowhere, and now, as you’d discovered, trading in the very information you’d been selling yourself.
Competition in every sense. Ten years of being passed over, a public humiliation not an hour old, and there he was, strolling along the quai without a care in the world.
I don’t say you planned it. I say the pistol was in your pocket and the rage did the rest.”
“No.” The word came out flat. “No, Sterling. I did not follow him; I did not shoot him; I have never in my life so much as owned a pistol. This is madness, pure speculation.”
“Then we come to the day of Sir Conrad’s death.” Oliver pressed on. “Sir Conrad returned from the Quai d’Orsay and sent for you. You went to the residence later that afternoon. The footman remembers admitting you.”
“I did yes, but I left again almost immediately, without even seeing him.”
“You were summoned by your ambassador and simply … left?”
“I knew what he was going to tell me. The correspondence about my new posting had already crossed my desk, because Sir Conrad was either too idle or too arrogant to keep even his private letters out of the chancery’s channels.
” His voice climbed, cracking at its edges.
“For years I’ve run this embassy for that man.
I drafted his despatches, I corrected his blunders before London ever saw them, I covered for him more times than I can count, and I learned I was to be shipped off to the end of the earth from a letter I was never meant to read.
So no, Sterling, I did not stay to hear him say it to my face. ”
“Did anyone see you leave?”
Arbuthnot’s hands stilled for a moment, pressed hard together, and then the tremor resumed.
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“The shooting, Mr Arbuthnot, and Sir Conrad – those are matters for London now, and London will have you for them either way.” Oliver squared the notebook in front of him. “All we’re interested in is the name of your connection.”
“My … connection?”
“The person you’ve been selling to.” Jonathan rested his forearms on the table. “The one who pays. Or did you deal with Lenoir directly?”
Lenoir again. Elizabeth’s pencil hovered over the page.
“I have no connection, because I have sold nothing to anyone.” Arbuthnot’s voice rose, thinning as it climbed. “How many times must I say it before one of you hears me?”
“A name would go a long way, Arbuthnot.” Oliver’s voice remained level. “For a man in your position, cooperation is currency. I’d advise you to spend it while it still buys something.”
“I cannot give you what I do not have.” His clasped hands broke apart, spreading wide above the table, both of them shaking in the open now.
“There is no name. There is no connection. I have told you everything, everything, and you sit there asking me to invent a man out of thin air to save myself–”
A knock sounded at the corridor door.
Oliver crossed the room and opened the corridor door a hand’s width, his voice dropping to a murmur that Elizabeth couldn’t catch. Then he stepped back and admitted two men in plain dark suits, hats in their hands, who took up positions on either side of the doorway without being told.
Arbuthnot’s gaze travelled from one to the other, then to Oliver, and something in his face gave way. He knew what they were.
“These gentlemen will accompany you home to collect your things, and from there to the boat train.” Oliver remained standing. “You’ll be in London by morning. This is your last opportunity, Arbuthnot. The name of your connection, and I’ll see it’s weighed in your favour.”
“I cannot tell you what I do not know.” The fight had gone out of his voice, leaving something smaller behind. “You are making a mistake, Sterling. I have made my share, God knows, but this one is yours.”
“That’s for the court to decide now. It’s out of my hands.”
Arbuthnot looked down at the papers scattered about his feet, the staff lists and registry schedules he’d squared into their piles not half an hour ago, and made no move to gather them. He rose, buttoned his jacket at the second attempt, and turned towards the door.
He paused as he drew level with Elizabeth, his eyes finding hers beneath the brim of her cloche.
“Whoever you are,” he said quietly, “I hope you wrote it all down.”
The two men fell into step on either side of him, and the door closed on the three of them, their footsteps fading down the corridor towards the stairs.
“Well?” Oliver gathered the scattered pages from the floor and stacked them into a single pile. “What did you make of him?”
“Believable.” Jonathan stretched out his legs. “But then, in our line of work, one has to be. I’ve watched men lie their way past better questioners than us without their pulse so much as rising.”
“He gave up nothing. No name, no slip. One catch over Lenoir, and even that could pass for a man surprised by the question.” Oliver dropped into his chair. “Either he’s innocent, or he’s the best I’ve ever sat across from.”
“May I say something?” Elizabeth closed her notebook. “I can’t tell you whether Mr Arbuthnot is your mole. But I don’t believe he’s your shooter.”
Both men turned towards her.
“His hands. There’s a tremor in them. It was there from the moment he dealt out his papers, before you showed him the newspaper, before any of it, and it never truly left him.
I’ve read of such a condition, a tremor that lives in the hands and worsens under strain.
And a man with hands like those didn’t write the note on Sir Conrad’s blotter.
You saw that script, Oliver. Not a waver in it from the first line to the signature.
Arbuthnot couldn’t have written his own name that steadily, let alone a full confession. ”
“The man had just worked out he was likely facing the gallows, Elizabeth. I’d have been surprised if his hands weren’t shaking.”
“And before? When he was dealing out staff lists for a meeting he thought was routine?”
“Elizabeth…” Oliver spread his hands. “Then consider the shooting instead. Sir Conrad’s wound was too precise for distance, you agreed as much yourself, and a shot that clean means either point-blank or a very steady hand.
The evidence rules out point-blank, and Mr Arbuthnot’s hands rule out the rest. As for the bridge, would a man who can’t square his own papers really have chanced a shot across a crowded parapet, at night, with theatregoers not ten feet from his target? ”
Jonathan and Oliver exchanged a glance.
“Is it not possible,” Elizabeth pressed on, “that your mole and your murderer are two different people?”
“Our job was the mole, Elizabeth.” Jonathan glanced at Oliver.
“And on that score there’s no doubt left worth having.
Three people saw those terms. Oliver wrote them, I read them, and Arbuthnot was left alone with them.
The rest of the time that paper sat locked in Oliver’s drawer, and Oliver has the only key.
They surfaced in L’Humanité this morning.
There’s no other way they could have got out. ”
Oliver drew out his watch, glanced at it, and rose. “Well, there’s paperwork to be signed before that boat train leaves, and it won’t wait. Elizabeth, shall I have a car brought round for you?”
“Thank you, no. But might I use a telephone before I go?”
“There’s one in my office.” He was already gathering Arbuthnot’s papers under his arm. “Help yourself.”
Elizabeth slipped into Oliver’s office and pressed the door shut behind her. Beyond the window, the pressmen still held the railings, hats tipped back, waiting for a statement that would never come.
They could believe what they liked about nerves and the gallows.
She’d watched those hands shake to the same measure through accusation and small talk alike, and no amount of paperwork tonight would change what they couldn’t have done.
And if Arbuthnot wasn’t their shooter, then the neat script on Sir Conrad’s blotter belonged to someone else entirely, someone with a perfectly steady hand, and every door in the chancery still open to them.
She retrieved the Café Colette matchbook from her bag and lifted the receiver from its cradle.
“Numéro, s’il vous pla?t.”
Elizabeth read out the number pencilled inside the cover and waited while the line clicked and crackled its way across Paris.
Let’s see what Cybil knows about Monsieur Raoul Lenoir.