Touchstone E-Book

Laurie R. King

• Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 890

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

London, 1926. Harris Stuyvesant, agent of the US Bureau of Investigation, is on a mission. A series of bomb attacks on American soil, thought to be the work of an up-and-coming British politician, have left him with a vendetta more personal than professional. But when his search for answers leads him to government official Aldous Carstairs, the US agent may find himself in over his head. At Carstairs' recommendation, Stuyvesant enlists the help of Bennett Grey, a man with unique abilities. After the Great War left him with an excruciating sensitivity to human deceit, Grey has withdrawn from the world. Now, however, he must help the American insert himself into the terrorist's rich and radical social circle. Here Stuyvesant uncovers hidden secrets, a horrifying conspiracy, and wonders if he can trust his touchstone, Grey, to reveal the most dangerous player of all . . .

Leseprobe

PRAISE FOR LAURIE R. KING AND

Touchstone

‘Cinematic … Combines a compelling plot with a richly, even lushly, imagined time and place’

Booklist

‘Intelligent and nuanced … Indelible characters … A plot as tight as a drum. What more could you want?’

Seattle Times

‘Intelligent, witty, complex and atmospheric. Spellbinding’

The Washington Post

‘Knotted with tension … A thriller of classic proportions’

Good Book Guide

‘Meticulously plotted’

Entertainment Weekly

‘Daunting, mysterious, warm, inviting and ferocious. Read it!’

Historical Novels Review

TOUCHSTONE

LAURIE R. KING

To Michael and Josefa, with thanks for giving far, far beyond duty’s call.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Map

PROLOGUE

BOOK ONE:LONDON FRIDAY, APRIL 9TH, 1926

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

BOOK TWO: CORNWALL MONDAY, APRIL 12TH, 1926

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

BOOK THREE:HURLEIGH HOUSE FRIDAY, APRIL 16TH, 1926TO SUNDAY, APRIL 18TH, 1926

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

CHAPTER FIFTY

BOOK FOUR: LONDON SUNDAY, APRIL 18TH, 1926 TO THURSDAY, APRIL 22ND, 1926

CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

BOOK FIVE: HURLEIGH HOUSE THURSDAY, APRIL 22ND, 1926 TO SUNDAY, APRIL 25TH, 1926

CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX

CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

CHAPTER SIXTY

CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE

CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO

CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE

CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR

CHAPTER SIXTY-FIVE

CHAPTER SIXTY-SIX

CHAPTER SIXTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

EPILOGUE: CORNWALL AUGUST 1926

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

By Laurie R. King

Copyright

Map

PROLOGUE

I

MARCH 1921

SMALL THINGS: STRAWS ON CAMELS’ BACKS. A spark on a tinder-dry hillside. A whisper of falling snow, settling just below an infinitesimal crack.

For her, it was the scarf.

A small thing, a pure white, light-as-air length of weaver’s art, exquisitely rare and unbelievably warm, one of her grandmother’s idiosyncratic Christmas whims.

Thirty guineas of screaming luxury, and she tore it from her neck without a thought, to wrap the tiny body going cool in her arms. Make the shroud snug, tuck it around the shrivelled limbs, as if it mattered. As if a dead infant could find comfort in swaddling.

Even then, as she thrust the child at its mother and wiped her hands surreptitiously on her coat – even then, the heavy-laden camel staggered on, the snow-pack gave a shudder, but held.

It wasn’t until the following day that the hillside of snow began to groan and creak. The following day, when she came with a motor-car to take the Margolins to the cemetery.

She trudged up the dark, filthy, stinking stairway to the third floor, knocking on the door to the two tiny, ice-cold rooms that housed the last five Margolins. The family emerged, dressed in its pitiful attempt at funeral finery: Mary first, carrying her bundled two-year-old, then the boys, Tom and Jims. Five-year-old Molly came last, tugging her hat down to hide the shame of lice-cropped hair. She looked down at the little girl, and felt the premonitory tremor, deep within.

Molly was wearing the dead infant’s shroud.

Afterwards, the only thing she was grateful for was her own self-control, which had stopped the exclamation before it could reach her tongue, kept her hands from snatching her grandmother’s gift from the throat of a child the old lady wouldn’t have bothered to rein a galloping horse around.

The scarf had been a shroud, yes. But it was also a warm garment, and warmth belonged to the living. The Margolin family simply couldn’t afford sentiment.

She made it through the funeral without breaking down. She accompanied the little family back home, she summoned words, she made promises, she sat unseeing as the driver steered her back through the London streets to her flat.

It wasn’t until she was alone that the avalanche let go its hold.

The Margolins were one of ‘her’ families. They should have been safe. But everything she was – all the wealth, honour, and authority at her command – had proved just so many delusions of usefulness, inadequate to keep one tiny human being from death. She’d been called and she had come, but before she could summon a doctor, while she’d stood in that dim room with its scrubbed floor and the threadbare, neatly tucked bed-clothes, the wise infant-grey eyes held hers, and the child stopped breathing.

Just stopped.

The death of a badly wounded man was one thing: God knew she’d seen enough of that during the War. This was another matter altogether. She’d looked up in horror at the survivors: bright little Molly pressed against her mother’s side, thumb in mouth; Tom and Jims kicking their heels in embarrassment on the bench; their once-pretty mother, Mary, at twenty-five a widow with lank grey hair and rotting teeth, seated dry-eyed on the room’s other chair with the toddler.

They’d named the infant Christopher. And because his family could not afford sentiment, he’d gone to the earth without his shroud.

Her teeth chattered against the glass, her fingers refused to carry the silver lighter to the cigarette. She placed her hands on her knees, but the slow, calming breaths refused to come, and sounded more like gasps.

It was exhaustion, as much as anything, that broke her, the bone-deep fatigue that came from too many fourteen-hour days followed by too many sleepless nights. Rage had burnt to ash long ago, despair was her daily bread, but the bitter cold and the disgusting surroundings and the glimpse into those new-born eyes, heaped as they were on top of grinding worry and the devastating failure of love, made the world flare and consume itself. In the bleak, scorched hopelessness that followed, she broke.

She bent forward over her knees, her arms curled around the back of her head as if to protect herself from a beating, and she wept.

There was just no end to London’s store of greying twenty-five-year-olds; no end to their damaged men, their malnourished children, their dying infants. Huddled before the fireplace, she had a hallucinatory vision of the baby Christopher as a grain of sand, tumbling with ten thousand other grains through an hour-glass. The sheer futility of trying to catch all those grains before they fell overwhelmed her; the sobs came so hard she gagged on them.

But eventually, every avalanche must reach its plateau and settle. The sobs slowed, the choking noises trickled into hiccoughs. She sat upright in the chair, clawed the hair from her swollen eyes, and stretched out a steady hand for her drink. When the cigarette was lit, she stared into the heedless coals, thinking about lives pouring unstopped through an hour-glass.

The poor will be with you always.

Wasn’t that the bitter, cold truth? Even if she were given the keys to the Hurleigh coffers, to empty everything – paintings and jewels, houses and land – into the slums of London, it would disappear without a trace. The Hurleigh legacy could be reduced to the bones, and still poor mothers would strip the dead to warm the living.

Yes, money narrowed the neck of the glass, slowing the stream. Money bought medicine, nutrition, warmth, education, giving the poor a chance against the downward pull of the sand.

But it was so slow, so terribly, agonisingly slow. What the world needed was a cork to stop the flow completely. Some invention, some idea, some electrifying event that would not only galvanise the working classes, but would stick in the minds of the powerful like a stone in the neck of the hour-glass, to cut off the flow of poor.

Perhaps if she stayed here a while, alone and resting in the quiet, she might think of something.

II

MARCH 1926

The small man stood on the hill-top, naked beneath the gibbous moon, welcoming the air with his body.

His clothing lay, neatly stacked, in the centre of the slab of stone: coat at the bottom, socks tucked into boots at the top. His bright hair stirred with the breeze, catching reflections of pale moonlight. His hands were stretched out at his sides, palms facing the horizon, and he swayed, ever so slightly, to the rhythm of the waves sixty feet below.

Moments like this were rare, when he could let down the barriers and open himself to his surroundings. During daylight hours, even in this remote place, human intrusion was a constant threat. Even on those days when he saw no one, the texture of the outside world was ever on his tongue, the sound of events in far-off London insinuating itself into his mind, like the scuffle of the monster beneath his childhood bed.

In recent weeks, the creature under the bed had begun to stir and swell. It had not yet taken notice of him as he lay frozen beneath the covers of his retreat. There was no real reason to believe it would. It was just as likely to lumber into life, jostling the bed as it emerged, and shamble away to devour some other innocent child.

Of course, if he was already gone from the bed when the monster came looking, that would solve the problem. A slight sway forward, here on the edge of the world, and the salt fingers below would reach for him, embrace him, soothe and welcome and bury his worries forever.

To, and fro. To, and fro. To …

His body would decide. The same body that read the breath of the wind as it flowed off the sea, that drew in the flavour of the land behind him, that noted the passing of an owl a quarter mile inland, that felt the thump of a rabbit going to ground a hundred yards off, that counted the hairs on his forearms stirred by the breeze …

One by one, the barriers slipped away, leaving the man naked and exposed to the night, like some soft and defenceless undersea creature when the waters drew back, and back again as they built into a monstrous swell on the horizon.

The wave was building – even now, he could feel it in the distance. But until it broke over him, or until his body chose to sway forward a fraction too far, he would stand in the moonlight and give himself, body and soul, to the brush of air, the odour of green, the solidity of rock.

To the joy and the terror of pure sensation.

III

APRIL 1926

The fingers paused to warm themselves against the radiator, for the room was very cold. Pressed against the ticking metal, they could feel the vibration of the water within, transferring heat from boiler’s flame to inert metal and thence to flesh, making possible the job at hand – which, in a fitting completion of the cycle, entailed the creation of flame.

When circulation was restored, the finger-tips rubbed one another into suppleness, then resumed their work. They moved with delicacy and deliberation, sure of themselves and their purpose: switch, wire, detonator, snip, twist, fold; nestle the mechanism against the final purposeful load of explosive, perfect beneath its creator’s hand.

Some such objects were raw and ugly, aimed at nothing but immediate effect. The Devices shaped by this pair of hands – this particular builder had never cared for the blunt monosyllable bomb – were invariably simple and balanced: elegant. The pleasing irony of a small, perfectly shaped conveyer of brutal mayhem was an essential part of the process – perhaps even the most essential part. Curiously like the radiator, designed to transfer the bright, hot violence of ideas into society’s inert status quo: flames into warmth; an infernal machine effecting very human change.

The fingers paused for a moment as the mind considered, then they went on: No, this was not the time for a public speech advocating the transformative aspects of violence.

Still, wasn’t that precisely what people did not understand? That death was the very foundation of life; order was built from the raw material of disorder? The Prayer Book had it backwards when it said, In the midst of life we are in death. St Paul put it more precisely: That which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die. A seed had to die before it could come to life. Wasn’t that the whole idea behind the Resurrection?

Now, they called it anarchy.

The word had become synonymous with chaos, but the true anarchist community was a place of exquisite balance and stability, a society of equals. True, the path to anarchy must be carved through the rubble of the status quo, but birth was never an easy business.

Or another analogy: A well-placed Device was like a surgeon’s blade. It caused pain and shed blood, but it was necessary for healing. A sacrifice for the greater good.

And, truth to tell (shameful truth, never spoken aloud, never acknowledged even to one’s self, but somehow, the fingers knew), there was a definite frisson of satisfaction in creating a Device. Not the deaths themselves – one was not an animal, after all, killing for pleasure – but nonetheless, there was an element of gratification about making, literally, an impact on society.

(The hands paused again, with amusement, then finished their task.)

Fingers, slim and deft, tucked the final wire into a more pleasing arrangement. Two meditative hands eased the oversized cover shut, feeling the gentle pressure before the minuscule latch hooked into place.

Simple; elegant.

Order through anarchy.

Life out of death.

The hands tidied the workbench, patted the Device as if soothing an infant in its cot, then switched off the lights.

On the bench, the gilt letters on the spine of the Device caught the light from the corridor as the door swung open, then shut:

BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

BOOK ONE

LONDON FRIDAY, APRIL 9TH, 1926

CHAPTER ONE

EIGHT DAYS AFTER STEPPING OFF THESpirit of New Orleans from New York, Harris Stuyvesant nearly killed a man.

The fact of the near-homicide did not surprise him; that it had taken him eight days to get there, considering the circumstances, was downright astonishing.

Fortunately, his arm drew back from full force at the last instant, so he didn’t actually smash the guy’s face in. But as he stood over the prostrate figure, watching the woozy eyelids flicker back towards consciousness, the tingle of frustration in his right arm told him what a near thing it had been. He’d been running on rage for so long, driven by fury and failure and the scars on Tim’s skull and the vivid memory of bright new blood on a sparkling glass carpet followed by flat black and the sound of the funeral dirges that – well, the guy had got off lucky, that was all.

He couldn’t even claim it was self-defence. The cops were right there – constables, he should call them, this being England – and they’d already been moving to intercept the red-faced Miners’ Union demonstrator who was hammering one meaty forefinger against Stuyvesant’s chest to make a point when Stuyvesant’s arm came up all on its own and just laid the man out on the paving stones.

A uniformed constable cut Stuyvesant away from the miner’s friends as neatly as a sheepdog with a flock and suggested in no uncertain terms that now would be a good time for him to go about his business, sir. Stuyvesant looked into the clean-shaven English face beneath the helmet and felt his fist tighten, but he caught hold of himself before things got out of control.

He nodded to the cop, glanced at the knot of demonstrators forming around the fallen warrior, and bent to pick up the envelope he’d dropped in the scuffle. He turned on his heels and within sixty seconds and two corners found silence, as abrupt and unexpected as the sudden appearance of the Union workers had been five minutes earlier.

He put his back against the dirty London bricks, closed his eyes, and drew in, then let out, one prolonged breath. After a minute, he raised his hand to study the damage: a fresh slice across the already-scarred knuckle, bleeding freely. With his left hand he fished out his handkerchief and wrapped the hand, looking around until he spotted a promising doorway down the street. Inside was a saloon bar. ‘Whisky,’ he told the man behind the bar. ‘Double.’

When the glass hit the bar, he dribbled half of it onto the cut – teeth were dirty things – and tossed the rest down his throat. He started to order a repeat, then remembered, and looked at his wrist-watch with an oath.

Late already.

Oh, what the hell did it matter? He’d spent the last week chewing the ears of one office-worker after another; what made him think this one would be any different?

But that was just an excuse to stay here and drink.

Stuyvesant slapped some coins on the bar and went out onto the street. It was raining, again. He settled his hat, pulled up his collar, and hurried away.

It had proven a piss-poor time to come to London and talk to men behind desks. He’d known before he left New York that there was a General Strike scheduled at the end of the month, in sympathy for the coal miners. However, this was England, not the States, and he’d figured there would be a lot of big talk followed by a disgruntled, probably last-minute settlement. Instead, the working classes were rumbling, and their talk had gone past coal mining into a confrontation with the ruling class. The polite, Olde Worlde tea-party dispute he’d envisioned, cake-on-a-plate compared to some of the rib-cracking, skull-smashing strikes Stuyvesant had been in, didn’t look as if it was going to turn out the way he’d thought, either – not if men like those demonstrators had their way in the matter.

And God, the distraction it had caused in this town! One after another, the desk-bound men he’d come to see had listened to his questions, then given him the same response: Does this have anything to do with the Strike? Then please, I’m busy, there’s the door.

Yeah, that miner had been damned lucky, considering.

Maybe when this next one showed him the door – Carstairs was his name, Aldous Carstairs, what kind of pansy handle was that? – maybe that would be where his temper broke. Maybe the bureaucrat would get what the demonstrator hadn’t.

He couldn’t help feeling he had reached the bottom of the barrel when it came to a straightforward investigation. Certainly, he held out little hope that Carstairs would do more than go through motions – he’d heard of the man more or less by accident the previous afternoon, sitting across the desk from a Scotland Yard official he’d met in New York years before. Now an exhausted and harassed-looking official in a day-old shirt who, even before the inevitable tea tray arrived, was sorry he’d let Stuyvesant in.

‘No, I’ve already talked to that man,’ Stuyvesant told him, in answer to a suggested contact. ‘Yeah, him, too. And him. That idiot? He was one of the first I saw, and frankly, the sooner he retires, the better off your country will be. No, that guy’s in France, and his secretary’s useless. Now, him I haven’t talked to, where—Scotland? Jesus, do I have to go to Scotland to ask about a man who lives in London?’

‘I should give you to Carstairs,’ the Yard official muttered, then immediately regretted the slip and hurried on. ‘What about—’

‘Been there. Who’s this Carstairs fellow?’ Stuyvesant’s instincts had come alert, aware of some overtone in the way the man said the name, but the fellow shook his head.

‘Just a name, honestly, he doesn’t have anything to do with what you need. I think you should go talk to …’ Stuyvesant was soon out the door, holding nothing more than three names on a slip of paper.

Outside the office door, a pair of men in bowlers sat waiting. Stuyvesant nodded to them, collected his hat and overcoat, and walked down the hallway and around the corner. There he stopped, staring unseeing at the scrap of paper.

Give you to Carstairs. Not, Give you Carstairs, which would have suggested the resolution of a grudge, but a phrase with a touch of fear in the background: I should feed you to Carstairs.

Stuyvesant counted to thirty, then doubled back to the Yard man’s office. The two men were nowhere in sight when he walked in, and the secretary was just settling back at his desk.

‘Sorry,’ the American said, ‘I neglected to get a phone number. Just let me pop in—’

‘I’m sorry, sir, he has another appointment.’

‘Oh, I’ll just be—wait, maybe I could get it from you instead? The name’s Carstairs.’

The secretary looked blank for a moment and Stuyvesant resigned himself to a dud, but then the man’s eyebrows shot up. ‘Aldous Carstairs?’

‘That’s the man. You have a phone number for him?’

The secretary’s glance at the closed door was eloquent testimony of the unusual nature of the request, but reluctantly, he went to a book in the bottom drawer of his desk, opened it to a page at the back, and copied out a number.

‘Thanks,’ Stuyvesant told him, and that was how he found himself running ten minutes late on a pouring wet Friday afternoon, a bloody handkerchief around one hand and a sodden scrap of paper in the other, searching for an address that he finally located in an utterly anonymous building a stone’s throw from Big Ben.

CHAPTER TWO

THE DOORMAN TOOK ONE LOOK at the figure that lurched into his tidy foyer and moved to return the straying lunatic to the streets. Stuyvesant pushed down the impulse to deck another Brit and summoned his most charming, lop-sided smile, assuring the man that he did, in fact, have an appointment with Mr Carstairs, although he’d had a little accident, if he could just phone …?

Without turning his back on the dishevelled American, the doorman went to his desk to pick up his telephone. He spoke, listened, grunted, and hung up.

‘If you’ll just wait a minute.’

It was less time than that when a weedy specimen with freckles and twitchy hands came through the connecting door and stopped dead. He looked at Stuyvesant, and at the doorman (who gave him a What-did-I-say? shrug), then stood back, holding the door.

‘Mr Carstairs?’ Stuyvesant asked.

‘His secretary,’ the man replied. ‘The Major is expecting you.’

He led the sodden visitor through a hallway and up a flight of stairs to a dark, highly polished wooden door. Inside, he took Stuyvesant’s hat and coat, hung them over the radiator, and went to the desk, where he pushed a button and said to the air, ‘Mr Stuyvesant.’ He got the pronunciation right, Sty rather than the usual Stooey.

The response five seconds later was a click at the inner door; the secretary came back around the desk and opened it. Stuyvesant stepped into the dim office.

The man behind the desk was in his early forties, slightly older than Harris Stuyvesant, and smooth: dark, oiled hair, the sheen of manicured finger-nails, a perfectly knotted silk tie, and nary a wrinkle on his spotless shirt. A visitor’s gaze might have slid right off him had they not caught on his striking eyes and unlikely mouth.

The eyes were an unrelieved black, with irises so dark they looked like vastly dilated pupils. They reminded Stuyvesant of a wealthy Parisian courtesan he’d known once who attributed her success to belladonna, used to simulate wide-eyed fascination in the gaze she turned upon her clientele. Personally, her eyes had made Stuyvesant uneasy, because they’d robbed him of that subtle and incontrovertible flare of true interest. This man’s eyes were the same; they looked like the doorway to an unlit and windowless room, a room from which anyone at all might be looking out.

The man’s mouth, on the other hand, was almost obscenely generous, full and red and moist looking. His lips might have made one think of passion, but somehow, a person could not imagine this man lost in a kiss.

When he put down his pen and rose at Stuyvesant’s entrance, the American saw the third element to the man’s visage: a twisting, long-healed scar down the left side of his face, hairline to collar.

Stuyvesant walked forward, forcing his gaze away from the scar and onto those ungiving eyes. The scar was nothing, after all, compared to some of the damage he’d seen that week, seven and a half years after the war to end wars – although it looked more like the work of a knife than a bayonet. The man held out his hand; in response, Stuyvesant lifted the once-white rag.

‘You probably don’t want to shake this,’ he said. ‘I had a little altercation on the way here with one of your miners. I’ll try not to bleed on the carpet.’

The dark gaze studied the makeshift dressing, then shifted to Stuyvesant’s clothing, and the man’s nostrils flared just a touch – why the hell had he stopped for that drink, Stuyvesant asked himself? – before he reached for the telephone on his desk.

‘Bring some sticking plasters please, Mr Lakely,’ Aldous Carstairs said.

The secretary came in carrying a small box. Carstairs lifted his chin at Stuyvesant’s hand, and Lakely efficiently stripped away the handkerchief, wiped away the blood, applied the sticky bandages, and gathered the debris, without a word being exchanged.

‘Our guest would probably like a coffee,’ Carstairs said. Stuyvesant might have hugged him, then and there, had he not noticed that, the entire time the secretary was in the office, he didn’t look at his employer once. I should feed you to Carstairs.

Not a huggable kind of a guy, Aldous Carstairs.

When the door was shut again, Carstairs held out his hand, starting anew. Stuyvesant took it briefly, grateful the man didn’t bear down: his whole hand had begun to throb.

‘Aldous Carstairs,’ the man said.

‘Harris Stuyvesant. Thanks for seeing me.’

‘Do sit down, Mr Stuyvesant. What can I do for you?’

And for the twelfth – thirteenth? No, fourteenth time – Harris Stuyvesant launched into his tale of woe, which repetition had long since stripped of anything resembling urgency, or even interest: terrorist bombs, communist plots, ho hum.

He began, as he had thirteen times already, by laying his identification on the man’s desk, along with the brief letter from Hoover, which said little more than Harris Stuyvesant was an active agent of the United States Justice Department’s Bureau of Investigation, and any assistance would be appreciated. The letter was showing signs of wear.

Carstairs directed his unrevealing regard on the lines of type-script and the signature, then back to Stuyvesant, who gathered away his possessions and began his spiel.

‘Like it says, I’m an agent with the Bureau of Investigation. I’ve come over here, unofficial-like, because we’re looking into some possible links between a series of bombs in our country and one of your citizens.’

The coffee came then. Both men waited for it to be laid out and the secretary to leave.

‘There are, hmm, official channels,’ Carstairs noted.

‘Sure, and sometimes they’re fine, but sometimes they’re not.’ Stuyvesant listened to his own voice, and wondered why he was sounding like some small-town hick – he’d very nearly said ‘ain’t’. Act like a Bureau agent, he ordered himself, not some bloody brawler marching into this fellow’s nice office at three in the afternoon stinking of booze. He took the envelope from his pocket, seeing for the first time the scuff of someone’s shoe on its crumpled flap, and removed the contents. One at a time, he unfolded each and laid it in front of the man.

‘Last July, there was a fire-bomb at a communist house in Chicago.’ He gave Carstairs a minute to look over the outline concerning the fire, then topped it with a newspaper clipping. ‘In November, a Pennsylvania judge in charge of a sensitive Union case nearly got himself burnt to a crisp when his car went up in flames.’ Another piece of paper: ‘And in January, five men in a New York hotel room narrowly missed getting blown to pieces. The newspapers haven’t put the three together yet, but it’s only a matter of time.’

He sat back and let the man look at the pages. Three explosions, one gelignite, two incendiaries, all packaged in unexpected but carefully thought out containers. The target of the first one still didn’t make much sense, unless there was some rivalry – personal or political – that the Bureau hadn’t picked up on, but one confusing motive was the least of his problems.

When he’d reached the end of the pages, Carstairs lifted those dark holes back onto Stuyvesant.

They were approaching the tough part, when thirteen desk-dwellers had showed Stuyvesant the door.

‘Took us a while to match up the pieces, but then we noticed that the devices had a couple things in common. One, it seemed they were inside everyday objects – a box of groceries delivered to the Reds in Chicago, a child’s doll on the back seat of the judge’s car, and a tray full of drinks in the New York hotel. Secondly, witnesses placed an Englishman near two of them.’

He put the sketch down first, the one based on the description given by the boy who’d delivered the Reds’ groceries. It showed a slim man with dark hair, tinted glasses, and a thin moustache. He could have been any of one in ten men on the sidewalks outside.

On top of the drawing he set a glossy photograph, showing passengers gathered on the deck of a ship, New York’s skyline in the background. One figure had a circle around him: a slim man with dark hair and a moustache – and dark glasses.

Suppressing a sigh, he laid down his last piece of evidence: three photostat copies of passenger manifests, from three sailings, with three black circles.

Invariably, it was this that raised thirteen pairs of eyebrows and had each man behind the desk pushing back to distance himself from absurdity. And Carstairs was no different.

Stuyvesant spoke before the man could drag out the inevitable Scarlet Pimpernel joke. ‘Yeah, I know how it looks: Richard Bunsen, your Labour Party’s fair-haired boy. Crazy, huh? And that’s why I’m not here officially, because who’d want an official inquiry until we’re a little more sure of the facts? Basically, my boss is hoping you can give me something to take Bunsen’s name off our list.’ No need to mention that Stuyvesant himself hoped for evidence in the other direction, like maybe a couple of similar bombs on British soil that tied The Bastard in.

Because Stuyvesant had known in his bones back in January that the three were connected, and knew in his bones now that Bunsen was the one. And Harris Stuyvesant’s bones were never wrong.

Well, almost never.

But he hadn’t been able to convince John Edgar Hoover, and he hadn’t even tried to explain it to the others, any more than he could to Aldous Carstairs. He waited for the man’s face to take on the wary expression of someone trapped on a train with a muttering lunatic, and for the man’s eyes to slide over to the office door, calculating just how dangerous the American was.

But Carstairs surprised him.

Something shifted in the back of those black eyes, something other than wariness. The Englishman reached down to jerk open a drawer, fumbling through it with unexpected clumsiness before his hand came out with a brown cigarillo. He made much of the business of lighting it, then sat back inside the cloud of smoke. When he raised his gaze again to his visitor, the little crow’s feet next to his eyes had gone completely smooth and his face was just a little too open, a little too wide-eyed innocent, to believe.

Stuyvesant had figured Carstairs for some kind of Intelligence man – the uneasiness of the Scotland Yard man and the lack of identifying plaque on the front door of this building told him this wasn’t a more open official. And because he’d met several of the domestic Intelligence men already – his equivalents here – he assumed Carstairs inhabited the more clandestine reaches of MI6, Britain’s international arm. For a man like that – in other words, a spy – to suddenly twitch with interest, the interest had to be considerable. The man’s bland expression showed no more concern than any other Brit across whose desk Stuyvesant had sat in the last week, but that sharp, uncontrolled reaction was like a tug on a fishing line, alerting the American that something had nibbled his hook.

The man’s hand dipped into his breast pocket and came out with a leather journal. Cigarillo in one hand, pen in the other, he opened the pages to write half a dozen words. Stuyvesant watched the man’s act of nonchalance and thought: Gotcha!

Maybe this trip wouldn’t be a total wash-out after all.

Then Carstairs put the journal away, rested the smoking cigar in the desk ash-tray, and stood up, holding out his hand.

Baffled, fighting down a surge of angry disappointment, Stuyvesant rose as well.

‘I often walk in Hyde Park on Saturday mornings,’ Carstairs told him. ‘I should like you to join me there tomorrow, near Speakers’ Corner. Shall we say, hmm, eleven o’clock? I might have something for you then.’

The form was so familiar, a secret meeting held out in the open, that Stuyvesant responded automatically, with a handshake, a thanks for the coffee, a collecting of his papers, and a retrieval of coat and hat from the pasty-faced secretary. Before he knew it, he was out on the street again, where the rain had turned to sleet, and he wondered what had just happened. He glanced down at his hand, reassured by the sight of the tidy sticking-plasters on his knuckle: Without that, he’d wonder if he had been inside this building at all.

Eight days pounding the London streets, fourteen times trotting out his tale of woe, and here he was, turned out yet again. The hell with it: If he couldn’t get at The Bastard Bunsen through the proper channels, he’d take a more direct approach.

Tomorrow.

Tonight he was going to celebrate the close cooperation of American and British law enforcement by getting drunk.

CHAPTER THREE

STUYVESANT’S BAYSWATER HOTEL walked a narrow line between respectable and seedy, but it was quiet, and had weekly rates. His ‘luxury room’ even had a telephone and a nearly private bath, with a helpful restaurant next door for when he wanted to eat in. The looks of the clientele and staff didn’t encourage him to leave his valuables in the desk drawer, but he’d found a bank down the street happy to rent him a safe-deposit box. Best of all, the radiators were enthusiastic – a blessing on an evening that had replaced rain with a penetrating cold.

Stuyvesant peeled away the heavy coat, so wet it looked more black than brown, and draped it across the radiator. He put his hat on top, his shoes underneath, and dropped into his chair with the bottle and a glass.

And there he sat, frowning at the amber liquid in his glass.

Harris Stuyvesant was not a person given to introspection. He was a big muscular man who got fidgety when he wasn’t moving, and subtlety was not a thing that came naturally.

Still, Stuyvesant had been an agent of the US Bureau of Investigation since 1911, when he was twenty-five years old. Apart from the two years he’d taken off to point his rifle at Germans in northern France, he’d spent the last fifteen years paying attention to unexpected details, noting them, returning to them until he understood what they meant. He’d also spent so many years undercover – play-acting around the clock, asleep or awake, with his life on the line – that he’d long since learnt that when his body made one of its snap decisions, he’d better go along with it.

So he had to wonder why, when he’d been faced with yet another law enforcement bureaucrat, that little switch in the undercover part of Stuyvesant’s mind had flipped and started him play-acting. Because it definitely had: Before his trousers’ seat hit the chair in Aldous Carstairs’ office, he’d been acting a role.

He didn’t think it was just the business of feeling like an utter oaf off the streets in the presence of a man who exuded authority and competence: He’d held his own in conversations with railway barons and US Presidents, and whatever authority Carstairs had, it couldn’t be anywhere near that level.

No, some aspect of Carstairs had set Stuyvesant’s inner alarm to jangling, kicking him into a near-instantaneous assumption of the role of bumpkin, both disarming and concealing. He hadn’t even been aware of his visceral mistrust of the man until he heard his own stretched vowels, found he was slumped like an idiot in the chair, felt his fingers go up to rumple his hair: Gee, golly.

Gee, golly, indeed, he now said to himself with interest: That guy with the knife scar and the belladonna eyes just alarmed the crap out of little Harris Stuyvesant.

He took a first swallow from his glass, and felt the satisfying burn down his gullet.

If he’d shown Carstairs his usual, more or less competent face, Stuyvesant wondered, would the man have given himself away with that sharp reaction? Would his guard have been up, as it had not been for the galoot in the chair?

And more to the point, had the man merely found a novel way to ease the departure of an unwanted visitor, or did he honestly intend to meet Stuyvesant at Hyde Park in the morning?

Maybe, Stuyvesant decided, he wouldn’t finish off the whole bottle tonight. Just in case.

He woke the next morning with a hell of a head and no inclination whatsoever to be made a fool of. Still, the narrow slice of sky he could see out of his grimy window was actually blue for a change, and he decided that he couldn’t very well not show up at all. So he shaved and dressed and forced down breakfast, then walked through the spring-greened streets towards Hyde Park. He came out from the back roads directly across from the corner that Carstairs had specified, and looked across the streaming traffic at a riot.

This corner of Hyde Park, an area dedicated to the spirit of free and open debate, was always a hive of activity, but the scene over there now was several steps up from any Speakers’ Corner tumult he’d seen yet. A sea of hats seethed in motion, hedged in between road and park by half a dozen mounted policemen. Stuyvesant hesitated, but it appeared that the crowd’s anger was still at the verbal stage, and the police had it in hand.

Nothing like a man on a horse for intimidating a crowd, Stuyvesant always said.

The restless mass was, inevitably, a group of Miners’ Union supporters trading vehement insults with anti-Union forces. It was the same unrest that festered and fevered throughout the city, come to a head here like a boil. Had it been a hot summer’s day, the boil might have burst and spilt its furious contents into a window-smashing spree down Oxford Street, but this was April, and even if the bitter wind felt more like snow than spring, the English sun was nonetheless shining, and the night’s frost had melted on all but the north-facing lawns. On a morning like this, a man would have to be furious indeed not to succumb to some degree of bonhomie.

Still, not wanting another split knuckle, he gave the yelling debaters wide berth, retreating down the Bayswater road a distance before crossing over to the park. When he came back towards the Corner, he found Aldous Carstairs sitting on a bench, his beautifully gloved hands gathered primly atop a slim dispatch case.

‘Morning,’ Stuyvesant said when he was near enough for his voice to reach over the nearby commotion. He stuck out his hand, and again received the soft grasp.

‘Your man Bunsen moves in some interesting circles,’ was Carstairs’ greeting.

Right down to business, then. Stuyvesant lowered himself to the bench beside the Englishman.

‘Is that so?’

‘One might say that the fellow is a, hmm, veritable Scarlet Pimpernel of the working classes, if your suspicions about him are justified. An open and relatively respectable life here, a mad bomber on the other side of the Atlantic.’

The American sighed, perversely disappointed that Carstairs hadn’t come up with a more original criticism. Didn’t bureaucrats have anything better to do than read that romantic claptrap? British aristocrat-spies in the French Revolution – that Orczy woman should have been strangled. ‘I really don’t—’

‘Do not mind me, Mr Stuyvesant, I am only pulling your leg. Although the merry conceit of an aristocrat-turned-secret-agent is not a great deal more unlikely than a man of Richard Bunsen’s background being chosen by the Labour Party. It is true that his mentor, Matthew Ruddle, is one of the more left-wing Members of Parliament, but I wouldn’t have thought him an out-and-out radical. The Trades Union tends to be suspicious of extreme politics.’

‘I don’t know if Bunsen’s respectability means that the Labour Party has decided it doesn’t mind Red agitators, or if he’s just good at putting on a respectable face. He’s giving a speech down in Battersea on Thursday night – I thought I’d go listen to it, see if I can figure out which is the case.’

‘That should prove educational for you. In any event, it’s not unheard of, is it, for a man to live two lives? Sometimes, the one life seems to, hmm, fill in the gaps in the other. Actually, I was referring to a less publicised aspect of Mr Bunsen’s life. Do you know who I mean by the Hurleigh family?’

‘As in the Duke of Hurleigh? Sure. Our papers love them, and not just the scandal rags – if your country ever wants to try taking back their colonies, that’d be the family to send over to convince us.’ But the name conjured some other, more specific stir in the recesses of Stuyvesant’s mind. What?

‘As you say, the Hurleighs are of interest to a broad spectrum of the public. And similarly broad is their spectrum of influence: Members of the Hurleigh clan determine policy in everything from a lady’s choice of frock to a government’s choice of ambassador.’

‘Okay. What about them?’

‘Captain Bunsen may be having an affair with the eldest child, Laura.’

‘Jesus.’ Stuyvesant’s eyes absently tracked two girls in drab winter coats topped by bright spring cloche hats, whose progress was being thwarted by the turmoil on the corner, but behind his eyes, his mind was in nearly as much turmoil as the crowd. Could his ‘demmed, elusive Pimpernel’ be literally hand in hand with the bluest blood in the realm?

But yes, that’s what the name Hurleigh had stirred up in his mind: a Lady Laura Hurleigh on the passenger manifest of two of the ships Bunsen had travelled on. Stuyvesant would have to retrieve his full folder of case notes from the bank to be sure, but he thought it was the July and January crossings. And if he remembered correctly, both times her cabin had been just down the corridor from his.

Well, well: Richard Bunsen, lover to a Hurleigh. Could The Bastard have used such a woman to camouflage his ties to American radicals?

Or could it be that Stuyvesant was wrong about the man?

He shook himself mentally: Of course he could be wrong about Bunsen, for Christ sake – he wasn’t so utterly fixed on the man’s guilt that he walked around with his eyes shut. But his bones had brought him here, and after spending a week’s spare hours in reading rooms, hunting down the man’s speeches and articles in back issues of the newspapers, he still didn’t think his bones were wrong.

However, this information changed things, no doubt about that. If nothing else, it raised the question of how in hell he was supposed to infiltrate a circle as heady as that one. Quite a different matter from his usual working-men-and-students set.

‘You’re pretty sure?’

‘It is common knowledge among a certain coterie of, so to speak, political bohemians.’

‘Artistic types,’ Stuyvesant said. He’d met girls like Laura Hurleigh – Lady Laura, he supposed: rich, spoilt, eager to grab any fruit that society said was forbidden. Girls who played at politics, with no particular conviction except that if their elders disapproved, it must be worthy. Tiresome girls.

‘Quite.’

Well, he thought, staring at the two young women without seeing either of them, I suppose I could try that approach. He couldn’t very well clothe himself in the personality of a member of the leisured classes – he was ten years too old, twenty pounds of muscle too heavy, and a whole lot of dollars short of what it called for – but if he didn’t find a way in through Bunsen’s Union connections, he’d try being a starving artist. A Modernistic sculptor, maybe, since he had the build for a man who spent his life bashing stone.

‘You need an “in”,’ Carstairs noted; he might have been reading Stuyvesant’s thoughts.

‘You got one?’ Stuyvesant asked, not expecting much.

‘I may.’

That caught Stuyvesant’s attention.

‘I need to come at this obliquely,’ Carstairs began. When Stuyvesant nodded his understanding, the man sat back and took out his cigar case. The girls came along the path, and one of them caught Stuyvesant’s eye. Another day, he’d have risen to the occasion; this time he merely gave a polite touch to the brim of his hat. Disappointed, they went on; when Carstairs had his cigarillo alight, he continued.

‘During the War,’ the Englishman said, ‘I was with Intelligence. I spent time in a number of different divisions, but I ended up in the, hmm, research wing. Things cooled off considerably, of course, when the War ended, but there were certain programmes that maintained their funding, and mine was one of those.

‘I cannot go into any detail, you’ll understand, but I will tell you that from time to time we investigated reports of individuals with particular … gifts. Most of them turned out to be either delusions or outright fakes, but every so often, a man or woman would come along with, hmm, knacks we couldn’t quite explain. And when that happened, we tended to keep an eye on that person. Still do, for that matter, although I personally have almost nothing to do with research these days.’

‘Okay,’ Stuyvesant said.

‘There is one man, currently living in Cornwall, who came to my attention shortly after Armistice. He’d been wounded and was convalescing near London. I interviewed him, supervised a series of tests, and found that, indeed, some of his abilities were verifiable. Unfortunately, his wartime experiences had left him, shall we say, vulnerable to stress, and he proved … unsuitable for our purposes. Still, every so often I take a look at him, to see how he is, and to see if his skills remain. When last I had word, he appeared to be, hmm, recovering nicely.’

‘Shell shock?’

‘Of the worst kind.’

‘I’ve seen a few.’ Felt it himself, too, although thanks to the ox-like Stuyvesant constitution and a job to get back to, he’d pulled out of it entirely. Almost entirely: Back-firing engines occasionally found him diving for cover. ‘What do you mean by “abilities”? Mind-reading? Talking to spirits?’

Carstairs bristled. ‘Mr Stuyvesant, do I seem to you like a gullible person?’

‘No,’ the American admitted.

‘Then please rest assured that our, hmm, tests of his abilities were thought out with care. This man is not a mind-reader. It is not parlour tricks. He is, as they say, the real thing.’

As they were talking, the crowd on the corner had continued to grow. Now, one of the speakers, who was either seven feet tall or standing on a soap-box, launched himself into the sea of hats – working-men’s cloth caps, office-workers’ bowlers, and fashionable soft felt – heading in the direction of his rival, thirty feet away. A roar rose up, whistles pierced the air, and the policemen urged their enormous mounts forward. Carstairs stood impatiently.

‘Let us leave this entertainment for the quieter reaches of the park. It’s a pity to waste a fine spring day.’

It was hardly spring, not going by the thermometer anyway, but Stuyvesant had grown up in New York and he wasn’t going to be intimidated by anything less than knee-deep snow. Carstairs led him into the park, away from the riot, while Stuyvesant’s mind chewed on the possibility that this shady Englishman wasn’t just feeding him a heap of horse crap, for some unguessable reason of his own.

‘What’s this guy’s name? And what is it he can do?’

‘His name is Grey. Captain Bennett Grey.’ Carstairs’ oddly sensuous mouth seemed to linger over the name. ‘As for his abilities, I think the details shall have to wait for a time. Let us say merely that Captain Grey knows things he should not be able to, as if he sees into people. He can, as it were, tell gold from gilt at a touch.’ This phrase seemed to please its speaker; one corner of his mouth curled a fraction.

Jesus, these Brits, Stuyvesant thought – you ask them a simple question and they give you Shakespeare, or hints to a maze. Were they always as convoluted as he’d found them, or was all this wool-pulling a way of hiding their Strike jitters? Every bureaucrat he’d talked to acted as if he felt solely responsible for holding the working class at bay with a stack of forms.

‘Okay, so Captain Grey has some funny skills. Why should I be interested in him?’

Carstairs’ cigar had gone out, so he slowed his steps to concentrate on restoring it to a clean, burning end, then resumed. ‘I needed to tell you about Captain Grey so you would know why Richard Bunsen’s name caught my attention when you brought it up. In fact, I had to go back into the files to refresh my memory, but it turns out that we have been, hmm, aware of Mr Bunsen as early as 1919, when he was arrested for inciting mutiny.

‘He’s an interesting fellow, quite bright, by all accounts very good looking, although I haven’t met him myself. Comes from what you might call mixed stock. His maternal grandfather was knighted, but turned out to have something of a weakness for the horses, so there wasn’t much to pass on. After he died, the daughter took a position in a boys’ school near Leeds to support herself and her mother. There she married a retired accountant, the son of a stonemason, who himself had been born to a family of coal miners. A heritage, you understand, that Bunsen flaunts when he wishes to claim working-class origins.

‘The accountant died when young Richard was ten. The mother worked herself into an early grave to get the boy to a good school, where he shed his accent and learnt to fit in – to a certain extent. He was invited to leave that school at fifteen when he threw his first rock through a window – seemed the headmaster had instructed his pretty daughter to have nothing to do with young Bunsen, and the boy resented it. Threatened to burn the school down, in fact.’

‘A temper, then?’

‘Quite. He kept himself under control through his remaining years at a lesser school, did well enough to get into university in London, and joined the Army in 1914, at the age of twenty. He served until Armistice, most of the time in France. Injured twice, once seriously enough for home leave, when I’d say he had too much time to sit and think about things. As I said, he was arrested in the spring of 1919 for inciting soldiers awaiting demobilisation to take things into their own hands. To mutiny.

‘Charges were dismissed, eventually, but after that, one began to see Bunsen’s name regularly in the Workers’ Weekly, articles or reports of speeches given at communist rallies. He made a trip to Moscow in 1920, although he quieted down a little afterwards. I’d have said he was becoming a little disillusioned with the Workers’ Party, although he was arrested again in 1921, during our last unrest among the coal miners. He got banged around a bit and spent a few weeks in prison. That may have effected a change of heart in the man, because he drew back from the more extreme policies he’d been promoting, and within a year began to cultivate friends in key places. Such as Matthew Ruddle, Labour Party Member of Parliament.’

Bunsen was thirty-two years old, Stuyvesant reflected, and firebrands often cooled with age, as the anger and energy of their radical youth diminished. However, sometimes the bright ones simply learnt to hide their fire under a basket.

And if Bunsen was saving his most radical tendencies for export, it might make it easier to put on a mask of calm and reason at home. He wouldn’t be the first revolutionary to lead a double life.

‘And this, finally—’ Carstairs began, but Stuyvesant interrupted.

‘Sorry, I knew some of what you’ve told me, his age and his rank and some of his history, but one thing I’ve never heard was what he did during the War, whether he was frontline or rear echelon. I don’t suppose you know?’

Carstairs raised his face and gave Stuyvesant a smile that was startlingly full and warm, a smile that even touched those cold obsidian eyes.

‘I wondered when you would ask me that. Halfway through the War, while he was recovering from his wound, Captain Richard Bunsen entered a training course that his maternal forefathers might have understood, one that kept him underground, there to be a leader among a tightly knit group of workers.

‘Bunsen was, hmm, a sapper. He crawled through tunnels dug by his men, to lay explosive charges beneath enemy lines.’

CHAPTER FOUR

CARSTAIRS’ WIDE MOUTH CURLED SLIGHTLY at Stuyvesant’s reaction, but Stuyvesant could not begrudge him his gloat – the man deserved it, even if he’d forced Stuyvesant to tease it out of him like a big fish on a light line. This one piece of knowledge alone made his trip across the ocean worthwhile.

‘Demolitions, huh? Thank you, Major Carstairs.’

‘It adds a certain pleasing, hmm, completeness to the picture, does it not? And this brings us around to your particular need. As I was saying, Bunsen appears to have been distancing himself from the radical fringe. He is working his way up in the more mainstream political world, in part by immersing himself in Union work, but also through his establishment of a politically orientated organisation with the, shall we say, rather optimistic name of Look Forward, which sponsors speakers, free legal representation, and educational opportunities to the working classes.

‘As a part of this transformation, Bunsen takes care to make regular appearances in the vicinity of Good Works. In recent years, many of those stem from his attachment to Lady Laura Hurleigh. She is a founding member of a group of health-care clinics called Women’s Help, which operate in the poorest areas of London. An association with these clinics bestows on Bunsen a distinct cachet of respectability and responsibility.’

‘Like they say, you can’t buy that kind of press.’

‘Er, quite. In any case, Lady Laura has a number of staff who oversee the day-to-day running of the clinics, but her overall assistant, her right-hand woman, if you will, who appears recently to have taken on a number of functions in the Bunsen organisation as well’ – (if he dragged this out any longer, Stuyvesant was going to throttle it out of him) – ‘is a sweet but naÏve young lady by the name of Sarah Grey.’

Ha! Stuyvesant thought – at last. ‘Grey. Related to your mind-reader?’

‘His sister. But please don’t call him—’

‘Yeah, I know, he’s just another shell-shocked officer.’

Carstairs frowned again at the end of his cigar, although it was burning just fine. ‘You know, Agent Stuyvesant, I am grateful to you for bringing me your question regarding Bunsen yesterday. Not only have you caused me to focus on a potential trouble-maker, but in reviewing his file, I remembered Captain Grey, and realised that I hadn’t been in touch with him in some time. Honestly, I’d nearly forgotten about him, but I’d be neglecting my duty if I didn’t check on him.’

When someone like Aldous Carstairs used the word honestly – and in a speech devoid of hmms, shall we says, or so to speaks – it might have been a neon arrow flashing at the opposite.

‘Glad to be of service. So, how does your man Grey come into this?’

‘Almost not at all, considering how much of a hermit the man has become. I gather that he and his sister – whom I met briefly, long ago – see each other rarely, although they no doubt exchange letters. However, they are in some contact, which is what brought him to mind as a potential link in your chain. What if Captain Grey were to provide you with an introduction to his sister? Would that give you enough of a foot in Bunsen’s door?’