A Crimson Warning

30

The sun was high and bright when I left the museum, but dark clouds had started to take over patches of the sky and the air had a chill reminiscent of autumn. It felt more like England than it had in weeks. I hailed a cab and went straight to Mr. Barnes’s office, feeling my best hope was to appeal to someone who’d lived in the West Indies.

“I have a strange question for you,” I said as soon as I was seated in a comfortable leather-backed chair. “Do you know anything about voodoo?”

“Voodoo?” he asked, straightening a pile of papers on his desk.

“I found something I have reason to believe may be related to it,” I said, pulling it out of the bag in which I’d been carrying the bottle and handed it to him.

He removed it from the bag and touched the glass. “This isn’t voodoo,” he said, his voice soft and soothing. “It’s Obeah, a religion common amongst the natives in the West Indies. The Europeans were often terrified by it.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They didn’t understand it,” he said. “It’s all spells and shamans and things unfamiliar to them.” He turned the bottle over in his hands and half smiled, his lips closed. “I never expected to see this again.”

“You recognize it?”

“I made it,” he said. His voice, rich and smooth, was softer than usual. “Not the bottle itself, but I put the contents together. Are you horrified?”

“Should I be?” I asked.

“It’s not as if I practice black magic,” he said. “But I do remember the spells my nanny swore worked. Mr. Dillman came to me one night—I assume you found this with his possessions?”

“Yes,” I said.

“We didn’t start off as terribly close friends,” he said. “But I saw him on a fairly regular basis at political functions and we realized we shared very similar values. He had progressive ideas about business, and I thought he could offer excellent advice to those making pertinent policy decisions. We came to trust each other very much.”

He sat back down, holding the bottle. “One night, he came to see me unexpectedly. He was agitated and desperate. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on, but was obviously in need of some friendly comfort. All I could get out of him was that he was terrified someone was trying to destroy him. Without knowing additional details, there was not much I could do for him that would be of real help.”

“What a terrible situation to be in,” I said.

“It was, but I managed to console him with rather too much claret. Before long, he was saying that he wished there was some way he could strike back at someone—I don’t know whom—who had crossed him in a business deal. He became angry and frustrated and fixated on bringing this man, or these men, down. At that point, I thought it best to find some way to distract him from his troubles, and island superstition seemed as good a way as any.”

“So you put this together for him?” I asked.

“As I said, there had been rather too much claret consumed,” he said. “I found an old empty bottle and we set off to fill it in an appropriate manner. By the end of the evening, his spirits had been restored. He took the bottle, telling me he was going to give it to the man causing his grief.”

“He didn’t tell you anything at all about what specifically was troubling him?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “And I didn’t see a need to press him on the subject at the time. You can imagine how this has haunted me since his death. I should have pushed him harder.”

“So what, exactly, does one do with something like this?” I asked, reaching for the bottle.

“You put it near your enemy’s door and it will bring to him just a touch of trouble,” he said.

“Who was he going to use it on?” I asked.

“He wouldn’t tell me,” he said. “When I heard what had happened to Dillman, I felt ill. I went to Scotland Yard at once and told them everything. They were decent to me, but I could tell they thought I was a little crazy. Still, it seemed the right thing to have informed them, even if it came to naught.”

I thanked him for his candor, but was not quite trusting enough to take him at his word. After I left his office, I stopped at Scotland Yard to corroborate Mr. Barnes’s story. The detectives were less than pleased to see me, but showed signs of amusement when I asked them my question.

“Right,” one of them said, thumbing through a file. “I do remember something like that. Yes, here it is.” He held up a paper to show me. “All documented, black magic and everything. Mr. Barnes was half mortified telling us, the poor man. Did the right thing, though, coming forward, even if it didn’t prove significant to the case. Wish more people were as concerned with justice as he is.”

Satisfied, I continued home, where I found Ivy and Jeremy waiting for me in my Impressionist-filled drawing room.

“We asked Davis if we could wait for you,” Ivy said. “Jeremy said the two of you have quite a story for me. He refused to breathe a word of it until you got back.”

“Indeed we do,” I said. “But first, I have some information about our bottle.”

“It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?” Ivy said, after I’d filled them in on everything I’d learned. “Instead of leaving the bottle for his nemesis, Mr. Dillman used it to protect the papers.”

“Would the charm bring to harm whoever found it?” Jeremy asked.

“I hope not,” Ivy said. “Do you think we should be worried?”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t believe in magic and evil spells. But this does make me want to take a much closer look at the papers we found with it.”

“Let’s do that,” Jeremy said.

“We can’t,” I said. “Colin has them. So I suppose we should tell Ivy what happened to us last night.” We recounted for her all that had happened in the park.

“I’ve never heard anything so terrible!” Ivy said, leaning so far forward in her chair I feared she would fall over. “Are you all right?”

“Perfectly,” I said. “My head is fine today.”

“And you?” she asked Jeremy.

“I’m only thankful the ingrate hit the back of my head,” he said. “It would have been much worse if he’d mangled my face.”

“Vanity will be the end of you,” Ivy said.

“I think we should go back to Hyde Park,” I said. “Scotland Yard insist they found nothing significant in the lodge, but I don’t think they looked hard enough. Are you two game? We cannot let Lady Glover suffer the same fate as Cordelia.”

“I certainly wouldn’t let you go alone, not even in broad daylight,” Jeremy said. “I never would have dragged you there last night if I had thought I’d be putting you in danger.”

“I don’t believe we were in much danger,” I said. “And now I feel even more secure. If they’d wanted to kill or abduct us, they could have easily done so last night. The fact that they didn’t suggests to me that we’re not causing them much worry.”

“They just needed us out of commission long enough to move Lady Glover,” he said.

“There’s something strange about it, isn’t there?” I asked. “You’d think they’d be more concerned about us tracking them down.”

“Maybe they’re about to collect the ransom and let their prisoner go,” Ivy said.

“Perhaps,” I said. “Regardless, I want to take another look at that lodge, and I’m going to need both your help.”

The afternoon had turned still chillier, and heavy rain clouds were on the verge of expunging the last blots of blue left in the sky. Armed with umbrellas and coats, we rushed to the park, which was relatively crowded given the weather, and made our way to the lodge I’d visited the previous night. There were too many people around for us to gawk in the front windows, so we adopted a different strategy. Ivy and Jeremy walked boldly up to the door and knocked.

“Why aren’t they answering?” Ivy asked, far too loudly.

“I’ve no idea.” Jeremy was using his best reading voice. It was not what could be called natural, but it was certainly audible to everyone nearby. “They’re expecting us.”

A main pavement ran only a few feet in front of the lodge. My friends’ subterfuge was providing a necessary distraction.

“Hello there!” Ivy called to a gentleman passing by. “Could you please tell me what time it is?” She stepped towards him and he met her near the gate in the fence. Everyone else’s eyes were on her.

I was stunned. Ivy commanded the attention of all the people in the immediate vicinity. She had the presence of a skilled stage actress.

“I despise it when people don’t keep an appointment, don’t you?” she continued. While everyone was focused on her, I moved from my position behind a shrub on the side of the lodge to its back garden. No one had noticed me, and now, safely installed behind the house, no one could see me. I pressed my face against the windows, but could see very little. There was no light coming from the interior as there’d been at night. I would need to get inside to investigate. Having tested all the windows and the back door only to find them firmly fastened, I did the only thing I could think of.

I removed my shoe and struck its heel against a pane of glass, right above the window’s lock. Then, gathering my skirt around my hand, I pushed it inside, released the cloth, and flipped the lock. Now the window opened with relative ease. I looked around, just to reassure myself there was no one watching, and climbed into the lodge. The room into which I descended was a pokey bedroom, small, with no furniture in it. I walked towards the front of the building, to the chamber into which I’d peered yesterday.

The chairs were gone, as were the newspapers. The bookcase remained, empty, as did the table. But the table had a dark stain in its center. I touched it. It was damp. I bent over and sniffed.

Cognac.

They must have spilled some in their hurry to clean out the room.

It was decent evidence, but not enough to convince Scotland Yard Lady Glover—or any woman of rank—had been in the room. I covered the room in measured steps, studying every detail that I passed. The wide, deep windowsills were clear and entirely dust-free, which did not suggest long-term vacancy. The floor itself left something to be desired—there was dried mud and scattered leaves on it … mud that must have been old, for it had been so long since it had rained.

As I turned direction, continuing my study of the floor, something caught my eye: a golden crystal bead. One that had clearly fallen off the dress of the lady who’d been here last night. I picked it up. There was nothing else of interest on the floor. The fireplace showed signs of recent use—I wondered if Scotland Yard had noticed—but rather than the faded embers one would expect to find from burning coal, the hearth was filled with ash like that from burnt paper. I pulled a sheet from my notebook and scooped some onto it, folding the page to form a sort of pocket around the ash.

Finally, I crouched in front of the bookshelf. Not even a crumble of newsprint remained in it, but on its top, stuck to the wood, was the slightest bit of wax.

Yellow sealing wax.

I left part of it in situ. The rest I scraped off with a fingernail and wrapped in another sheet of paper. Ivy and Jeremy had started knocking on the door again, our prearranged signal to alert me it was time to go. I crawled back through the window and to the path on the side of the house. I peeked around the edge, making sure it was a good time to make my entrance, then stepped onto the pavement and waved at my friends.

“Whatever can you two be up to?” I asked, trying to modulate my voice to sound like Ivy’s had during her earlier stellar performance. I would never be the actress she was.

“We were trying to pay a call, but they’re not home,” Ivy said. “What a bother. Shall we go for tea?”

It had started to drizzle, but not quite hard enough to justify opening our umbrellas. She and Jeremy met me on the pavement.

“Success?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll show you everything when we’re home.”