Touchstone (16 page)

When the glass was empty, he took off his overcoat and draped it over the radiator, unlaced his shoes and tucked them underneath, and got a towel to dry his hat and face.

He put the hat on top of the wardrobe and hung his suit coat inside. Loosing his neck-tie and beginning to undo the buttons of his shirt, he moved over to the desk, shifting the desk lamp so a bar of light shone down the back of the desk. He glanced downwards, frowned, and squatted to look more closely.

It was routine, by now: Before leaving the room, he stuck a sliver of match-wood in the back of the top drawer, every time. It was not much bigger than an eye-lash, far too small for anyone but him to notice, but substantial enough that it could only be dislodged by opening the drawer.

Tonight it lay, half an inch of wood fiber, against the base of the wall. Tonight, when the maids were long finished work.

Stuyvesant sat back on his heels. Well, well. Someone’s searched my room.

But the thought was followed by another, one that had him upright and backing rapidly to the door. He stood there for a long time, caught in the same icy sensation he’d felt in January when he glanced down and noticed a tiny dot of freshly cut copper wire at the base of the bottle his hand was half an inch from picking up.

There’s a bomb in the desk.

Chapter Twenty-Two

I
T TOOK HIM AN HOUR
to be satisfied that he had bombs on the brain, not in his room—not in the desk, nor under the mattress, nor under the lid of the toilet cistern in the bath-room next door. But it was a nerve-wracking sixty minutes, and it left him lying tense in bed trying to second-guess the thoroughness of his hunt.

No, the room had been searched, not booby-trapped, and with an admirable professionalism. Had it not been for that one small sliver of pale wood, he might never have noticed the slight displacement of his possessions.

In fact, there had been nothing much to find, apart from the gun. His case notes and Bureau identification lay in a bank vault half a mile away. His passport was in the hotel safe, but even if the searcher had been willing to expose himself to the manager by offering a bribe, the passport would tell him nothing he didn’t already know.

Still, between the late hour and the residual tension, he hadn’t had a whole lot of sleep Thursday night.

And now, Friday morning, as workers and lorries funneled through the highways into the great city, Harris Stuyvesant drove his borrowed Ford against the tide, following the Thames River valley and the Automobile Club instructions he’d been given, his mind going over and over the previous evening’s events. Now he’d had time to get used to the idea, he had to admit, it wasn’t really out of line for Aldous Carstairs to have ordered a search. Stuyvesant had practically invited it, telling him he’d be out Thursday night.

No, the search of his room was aggravating, but understandable. Much better to return his attention to Richard Bunsen. Looking back, hadn’t the man been just a little too polished, too open and honest to be real?

And really, the speech had about zero substance, once you thought about it. No call for action, no rousing of rabbles, no specific complaints or threats. It was almost as if Bunsen thought the actions of the audience were peripheral to the real action.

He began to see what Carstairs had been talking about—that the Unions, unlike the government, appeared to be doing little to prepare for the Strike.

His thoughts and the RAC map took him out of London and through towns and villages with names from the unfortunate—Slough—to the curious: Maidenhead, Hurley Bottom, and Nettlebed. Henley-on-Thames tempted him with a drifting aroma of frying bacon from an inn, but at his side Bennett Grey slept on, with restless twitches and murmurs, and only fully woke when the motorcar slowed entering Oxford.

Grey stretched like a cat, dry-scrubbed his face, and peered out of the window to catch sight of the distinctive spires of Magdalen College. “Good Lord, Oxford already? You certainly are a restful sort of fellow, Stuyvesant.” He circled the kinks out of his neck and examined the sky, which had been clear blue since London.

“Going to be a pretty day,” Stuyvesant offered.

“Rain tomorrow, though,” Grey opined. “So tell me, what clever tale did you and the Major come up with to explain your presence in my life? What do they call it—a cover story?”

“Actually, Carstairs doesn’t have much to do with our little week-end, although he’s hoping I’ll report in. I’m more or less flying solo, from here on out. Yeah, I didn’t want to wake you up, but we probably ought to stop somewhere and talk it over. You know any place to eat?”

“Turn up here, we can leave the motor and walk down to Queen Street.”

Stuyvesant followed his passenger’s directions and found parking to the north of the high street. Instead of lunch, however, Grey led him through twisty lanes and past ancient colleges, dodging trams, cars, cyclists, and lorries across the congested high street, then down a dim alleyway to end up inside the doors of a Turkish baths.

Spending time with another man in a bath-house, moving from bath to steam-room to massage table, leaves a person with little to hide. By the end of it, Stuyvesant had seen most of Grey’s scars, and knew which of them required the lightest of touches from the masseuse. He listened to Grey’s family history, both the surface facts and the information that lay between the lines. He heard as well those parts of his biography that Grey omitted: He said nothing of lovers, nothing of his father apart from the mere fact of his death in 1912, and nothing of his time with Aldous Carstairs.

Sensitive scars, requiring the lightest of touches.

In return, Stuyvesant displayed his own scars and his own story: big Catholic family; a university education cut short by his father’s death at a factory; a job at a bank, followed by the Bureau, where bank crimes were investigated. Time out for the Army, then back to the Bureau, moving two years later to political crime.

Neither of them talked about the War.

Two hours later, cleansed, pummeled, smooth of cheek, and famished, they walked up the high street in search of food. The sidewalks were crowded with busy shoppers and lounging students and they found a restaurant Grey remembered, ordered their meal, and sat, staring down at their glasses with that discomfort that follows revelation. To break it, both men spoke at once.

“I thought perhaps—” Stuyvesant began.

“Why do they do it?” asked Grey.

They looked at each other, and relaxed.

“You first,” Stuyvesant said. “Why does who do what?”

“Your terrorists. I’d have thought men resorted to random violence only when they felt utterly oppressed and excluded from power. When one feels there is no alternative, I imagine that terror might seem a viable means of striking back. But surely one cannot say that of a man like Bunsen? He’s halfway to being a Member of Parliament.”

“Bunsen doesn’t fit the mold, that’s true. Terrorists—whether they’re Anarchists, Communists, or any other flavor of ist—are usually young, romantic idealists who believe body and soul in a cause, convinced that a shove in the right direction can change the world in a day. They are rarely the actual members of the oppressed classes—for one thing, they have enough free time and energy to think about something other than just putting bread on the table. They’re often educated, either formally or by their own reading, and attach themselves to what they see as their true family, be that a class, a religion, or an ethnic group. They have little interest and no empathy outside their circle—as far as they’re concerned, unbelievers do not really exist. It’s massive egotism, of course, to feel you know better than anyone out there, but then, don’t you find that sort of egotism in most people who change the world? Religious leaders, great generals, inventors, thinkers. Even Members of Parliament.”

“You sound remarkably sympathetic, considering it’s your job to arrest them.”

“They can be enormously attractive—energetic and bright, passionate about their cause. They don’t often have a great sense of humor, since they take themselves pretty seriously, but sure, I’d rather spend time with a political agitator than your average bank president. But they’re wrong in what they do, wrong and dangerous, and I have no problem keeping my likes separate from my job.”

“However, Bunsen’s more than a job.”

“Yeah.” No point in denying it with this man.

“And what were you about to say?” Grey asked.

“Oh, nothing so profound and philosophical. I was just going to say that maybe we should get our stories straight, how we met and what my job is and all.”

A cover story is best when it sticks close to the truth, so one doesn’t need to think about it. By the end of the meal they were in agreement; and replete, restored, and ready with a complete if somewhat fictional history, they walked back to the motorcar.

Steering the car through Oxford’s Medieval streets, Stuyvesant settled himself into his identity, that of a Ford Motor sales representative whose work brought him to England every year or so. He was here with a man whose farm he had stumbled across, while on a hiking holiday in Cornwall two summers before.

They left the town and entered the Oxfordshire countryside, and he asked Grey a few questions about his family, to fill in the gaps. Grey’s mother, who sounded as if she used her robust ill health to keep her family under control, rattled around in the all but empty family home eighty miles to the east. His brother had emigrated to Canada, his sister, Sarah, lived in London; the last three years she’d come down in the late spring for a week in Cornwall.

“She’s not married?” Stuyvesant asked.

“She was engaged briefly, to a nice boy who died of a bullet to the head his first month on the Front. That was the official story; in fact, he died raving of sepsis ten days after taking a round in the belly.”

“Yeah. Our boys tended to get shot cleanly in the head, too, in letters home.”

“Since then Sarah’s devoted herself to good works—first the Vote, then literacy, now health care for the poor.”

“Carstairs told me a little about the medical clinics.”

“I think there’s five now, four in London and one in Manchester.”

“Does your sister work at one of them in particular?”

“She and Laura Hurleigh run the whole show. Laura’s in charge of the big picture, raising funds and gaining support, while Sarah actually runs the operation. Which may be why she’s more or less taken over Bunsen’s group as well. She’s a funny girl, is Sarah—a great one for getting things organized and running smoothly, and then she’ll drop everything in favor of a snap decision that changes everything. Usually for the better, I admit. She says it’s because her mind works faster than her brain. In any case, it’s not just brotherly pride to say the place wouldn’t survive without her.”

“Tell me about Lady Laura Hurleigh.”

“Anyone who reads the papers probably knows as much about her as I do now. When I was young, I spent a certain amount of time with the family, but I haven’t seen most of them since before the War.”

Stuyvesant shot him a glance, hearing a lack of conviction in Grey’s voice, but his passenger was gazing intently out of the side window at a pair of children galloping bareback across a field, and he couldn’t be sure if it was deception he was hearing, or distraction.

“You know her well enough to put in a good word for me?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me about the family.”

“The Duchess of Hurleigh is a distant relation on my mother’s side—my mother’s brother’s wife’s cousin. I spent a couple of summers with them when I was growing up—Mother was very ill for a while, and I suppose the idea was the Hurleighs had enough children that they wouldn’t notice one more. I dare say my father was pleased to have me out of the way during the holidays, and I was very happy in the uproar at Hurleigh House. I was in the same year at school as the oldest boy, Thomas, and one year above the current heir, Daniel.”

“There are five or six children, aren’t there?”

“There were seven: Laura, Thomas, Daniel, Constance, Pamela, Patrick, and Evelyn, in that order. Thomas was killed in the spring of ’15, just a few days after his son was born. The child died in the influenza epidemic of 1919. That was the only grandchild, so far.”

“Still, it’s a respectable size of family, for non-Catholics.”

“Hurleighs have been remarkably consistent over the ages in having large families with many boys. Up to now.”

“What, there’s two sons left, aren’t there?”

“Probably the least in any generation for three hundred years.”

“Okay, but they must be young.”

“Patrick is, certainly. And my sister tells me Daniel is now engaged. He wasn’t yet twenty when the War started, and it shook him badly. Went through a wild patch but he seems to be settling down. He’d have gone far if the War had dragged on another year or two—but then, the Hurleighs have always been brilliant strategists on a battlefield.”

“The other brother—Patrick—he was too young to enlist?”

“He must be twenty now—no, I remember reading about his twenty-first birthday last autumn. It made the newspapers when half the party came up before the magistrate the next morning. Must have been October—everyone but Evie has a birthday in September or October. Evie didn’t come along until January. The Duchess was incensed, which may explain why they stopped at seven. And of course, without the War, three sons would have been seen as sufficient to preserve even the Hurleigh name,” he added somewhat enigmatically.

But Stuyvesant had gotten well tangled up in this string of non sequiturs, and finally had to ask for help. “Sorry, I’m not following you.”

“What, the name? Oh, well, with ancient titles like Hurleigh, there’s invariably a title and then a family name, since even if they started out one and the same, sooner or later the direct line runs out of males and everything shifts sideways to a cousin or what have you. But with the Hurleighs, the surname and title are one. I don’t know if there are any other titled families in the country like that.”

“So the original Duke was named Hurleigh, and he took Hurleigh as his title as well?”

“Exactly. Ralph de Hurleigh, that would have been, Marquess of Pontforth, made duke in the late sixteenth century.”

“I see. And why does the timing come into their stopping at seven children?”

“Timing? Oh—the hunting season. That pregnancy cut the Duchess out of an entire season. I don’t know if she’s forgiven her husband yet.”

“Ah,” Stuyvesant said wisely. “Fox hunting.”

“I should have asked: Do you ride?”

“I know which end of the horse to face.”

“Well, with any luck, the season will be over here. If it’s not, I’d suggest you develop piles or rheumatism or something, unless you want to spend tomorrow hiking ten miles cross-country back from the ditch some diabolical gelding tips you into.”

“Painful experience?”

“Memorable, certainly,” Grey said with feeling. “The Duchess is absolutely mad about hunting. Not as comprehensively mad as her husband, but when it comes to horseflesh and hedges, they are the center of her universe.”

“But the Duke hunts, too, doesn’t he? Seems to me I heard some story about him running students off his land with a pack of hounds.”

“I’d doubt it, more like he sets the house dogs on them. If students come during hunting season when the dogs are expected to be fresh, he brings out the shotgun instead.”