A Crimson Warning

36

Back at Park Lane, it was difficult to reconcile the wrathful, seething man giving Lady Glover a most severe dressing down with the passionate and attentive gentleman who had escorted me home from Scotland Yard. A shiver of excitement charged through me as I watched him. It was bad of me, no doubt, to admire this side of him, but how could I not? He was a master of his work, and within a quarter of an hour he’d got Lady Glover to confess every detail of what she’d done, down to the names of the men she’d hired to “guard” her.

“They were actors?” Colin asked.

“I needed them to be convincing,” she said. “Darling, I’m terribly sorry, you must forgive me.”

“You will not tell me what I must do,” he said. “Sit up. I’ll not speak to you while you’re making such a terrible attempt to mimic Cabanel’s portrait of Ophelia.”

I expected a witty reply from her, but she said nothing. She sat up, pulling my dressing gown close around her shoulders.

“Your husband will be here momentarily,” Colin said. “I suggest you go upstairs and put your own clothes back on. It’s reprehensible that you’re in public rooms in such a state.”

“My clothes are all wet,” she said.

“Because you chose to make them that way.”

“Colin, I could lend her a dress so that she doesn’t—”

He interrupted me. “She doesn’t need comfort right now, Emily. Lord Glover will take her home in short order and she can wear what she likes once she’s there.” He rang for a maid and directed her to take Lady Glover back upstairs. “I’ve no tolerance for what you’ve done. Not only have we wasted time and resources searching for you, you put my wife and the Duke of Bainbridge in danger when you set your thugs on them.”

“I told them not to hit either of them too hard,” she said. “You must see I couldn’t let them rescue me all the way. I just wanted them to be able to make a good-sounding report.”

“What you’ve done is outrageous and despicable,” he said. “Your antics have made it more difficult to find the savage who killed Cordelia Dalton.”

She nodded, chastened, and followed the maid from the room.

“I don’t ever want you mad at me,” Ivy said to him. “You’re very fierce.”

“She’s behaved most appallingly,” Colin said. “Two people are dead, and she’s staged this farce to get attention? It’s outrageous. She’s fortunate I wasn’t harder on her.”

“Fortunate indeed,” I said. “Now tell Ivy what you learned at the Harrises’.”

“Mr. Harris is going to be all right. She was rough with him, and he’s banged up, but the doctor felt there’s no need for serious concern.”

“I imagine he’ll approach marital fidelity with a different view moving forward,” I said.

“Will Winifred be arrested?” Ivy asked.

“I don’t know yet,” Colin said. “Scotland Yard are searching the house right now. We already know she’s guilty of extortion, and now this. I’m afraid it doesn’t look good for her.”

“But you can’t think she killed Mr. Dillman,” Ivy said.

“Why not?” he asked.

“I just can’t believe it, despite what we’ve seen.” Ivy’s shoulders were pulled back, stiff and straight.

“She may have had an accomplice,” I said. “Which is why we need to look at those notebooks right away, Colin.”

I took them to the table, spread them out, and opened the one in which I was the most interested—the one that listed parliamentary bills amongst other things. “We know more about Mr. Dillman’s way of thinking since having come to a full understanding of the game he played with Cordelia. Let’s see if he was doing something similar to that with the information in these books.”

We looked at the numbers and symbols listed next to each bill. I copied out twice each set—numbers and symbols—and gave one to Ivy. Colin and I would use the other.

“Take a notebook and go through, page by page. We need to find all of these.”

The meaning of the numbers proved elusive, so elusive that Colin turned to a thick volume of parliamentary records. “They are just votes, Emily. Votes on bills that passed in the last five years.”

“So why did he pick these in particular?” I asked. “Can you find out more about the bills?”

“I will,” he said, turning back to the book.

Ivy let out a little squeal. “I’ve found one of the symbols!” She turned the notebook she’d been studying so that I could see it right side up. A quite competent watercolor of a laurel was on the page, its small, white flowers executed with great precision. Incorporated into the bottom of the image was the symbol, an upside-down triangle, so small one would only notice it buried amongst the green leaves if one was specifically looking for it. Beneath the picture were the words Daphne Alpina and a date, 18 June 1891. The “a” was underlined.

This spurred us on. Soon we had pictures to go with each of the symbols—and on each of them, something in the accompanying text had been underlined. From the flowers, there were two letters and two numbers. From his drawings of birds, we got thirty letters.

“The first is easy,” I said. “Between the daphne and the hellebores we have A and E. Given what we already know about Mr. Dillman’s game, it’s reasonable to surmise this should be combined to EA, which is how the catalog numbers for all the items in the Department of Ancient Egypt and Sudan begin.”

“So the numbers—5 and 9—are the second bit,” Ivy said. “We need EA 59 or EA 95.”

“And the rest?” Colin asked. “This long string of letters?”

“It’s the hint,” I said. “He’s put an additional layer of disguise this time. And, given the number of letters, it’s undoubtedly more than just telling us what the object is made of. Cordelia said he sometimes gave her quotes as clues.”

“So we need to untangle the letters,” Ivy said.

Colin continued to study the parliamentary record while Ivy and I set to it.

W D T E D M O B R E N A T M O E I A R R D L H U I D Y F H R

“Let’s make a list of every word we can find in it,” I said. “And then see if we can string them together in some sort of sensible fashion.”

“Toady rat in tree,” Ivy said.

“Sensible, darling,” I said.

“Hide now or die,” she said. We fell silent.

Over the course of the next two hours, we’d come up with what seemed an unending list of possible words, almost too many to count.

“This sounded like a good idea,” I said, after having strung together another phrase that was almost promising.

Colin came and stood over my shoulder. “I think you’re trying too hard to make it fit the museum,” he said.

“How goes it with Parliament?” I asked.

“I’ve found absolutely nothing,” he said. “I think we need to take that list of Dillman’s at face value.”

“That’s disappointing,” Ivy said.

“Let’s focus on the words you lot have found instead,” Colin said. “Dream of water?”

“Yearn for more?” I tapped my pencil on the table. “This is incredibly frustrating. We have lots of nonsense, but nothing that uses all of the letters.”

“Let me see everything you have,” he said. I passed him our pages of words. He went to his desk and sat down. “The only thing I prefer to word puzzles is chess.”

“Maybe we should just take the whole list to the museum,” Ivy said. “We’ve narrowed down which galleries to search. Perhaps the clue will become evident once we’ve narrowed down the options with the numbers.”

“That’s an excellent idea,” I said. “We should be there the minute it opens tomorrow.”

“I’ve got it,” Colin said, rising from his chair and walking towards us. “It’s obvious, really. Murder thy breath in middle of a word. It’s from Richard III.”

“I was really hoping for the toady rat,” Ivy said.

“You’re sure?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s quite an unusual animal, don’t you think?”

“Not you, Ivy.”

“I couldn’t be more certain,” Colin said. “There are plenty of phrases we could string together with these words, many of which sound like they are appropriate. But no one will convince me that a line of Shakespeare is going to coincidentally appear within this list. Toady rat notwithstanding.”

“But our villain,” Ivy said. “He quotes Shakespeare.”

“My dear girl,” he said. “Everyone quotes Shakespeare.”

As Colin sketched out his plan for the next morning, Ivy bowed out of coming to the museum. “I’ve tried Robert’s patience enough,” she said. “I think he’d draw the line at my being present when you arrest someone.”

We promised to give her an update as soon as we were finished at the museum. Once she’d gone home, we retired to our bedroom, where I collapsed, exhausted, on the bed.

“Don’t fall asleep just yet,” Colin said. “You’re still in your clothes.”

“I’ll ring for Meg,” I said.

He sat on the edge of the bed and grabbed my wrist as I reached for the bell. “Don’t,” he said, his lips so close to my face I could feel his breath on my cheek. “I’ll provide any assistance you need.” I felt his fingers feel for the buttons on the back of my dress. He undid the top two or three, then pulled me up to sitting. Kneeling in front of me, he started to remove the pins from my hair, one at a time until my curls had tumbled down around my waist.

Blue light had started to force its way around the edges of the curtains before we finally went to sleep. Yet somehow, when Meg brought breakfast to us only a few hours later, I found myself so refreshed, so vividly alive, I felt almost embarrassed.

After eating and getting dressed it was still early enough that we had time to walk to the museum. I pulled on my gloves and made my way to the door. The rain had stopped, though the pavements were damp in spots, and the sun was struggling to make its way through patchy holes in the clouds.

“Sir, I—”

“Not now, Davis,” Colin said. “We must hurry.”

“Very good, sir. Enjoy your walk, sir.” He opened the door. We stepped outside, but he didn’t close it. “It’s dry, so no need to worry where you step. Shall I have it taken care of at once?”

I looked down and saw that our whole front entrance was bathed in red. The steps, the columns of the porch, the front door. All red.

Colin hardly paused. “Very good, Davis. Carry on.” He adjusted his hat and offered me his arm.

“Well?” I asked.

“What?”

“The paint? What’s your secret?”

“I assumed it was yours,” he said. “I’ve lived an entirely blameless life.” He walked a little bit faster, but other than that, showed no further response.

“I know it’s not something I’ve done,” I said.

“I’m not discussing it,” he said. “We have work to do and don’t need to waste our time taking the bait of some disgruntled miscreant.”

I could feel my temples pulsing. “How can you be so calm?”

“Because while there are things in my past others may judge, I’ve neither done anything of which I’m ashamed, nor anything I feel the need to defend,” he said. “So unless you’ve some delicious deceit to share with me, I am not concerned in the least.”

“Don’t you care how I feel about what you’ve done?”

“To an extent,” he said. “But the past is the past, Emily. Why would anything I did before I met you cause a rift between us?”

“So it’s nothing you’ve done since we met?”

“Certainly not since I fell in love with you. Unless, of course it pertains to my work. But if that’s the case, we have a bigger problem on our hands than we know; that would mean our villain has connections in the highest levels of the government.”

“I can’t tell if you’re teasing me or serious,” I said.

“I like to keep you on your toes.” He patted my arm.

“But I—”

“No more, Emily. I’m not going to let us fall prey to this person’s vindictiveness.”

And that was all he would say on the subject. I was still agitated when we got to the museum. Colin stopped and stood in front of me.

“Stop worrying,” he said, taking me by both arms. “You are in your element here, and I couldn’t be doing this without you. I would not have been able to get Cordelia to open up like you did, and I admit freely I probably wouldn’t have taken any note of this game of hers and Dillman’s. So stand tall, and show me where we need to go.”

This bolstered me. If I had his support, what did I care if everyone else was taunting us about red paint? Well, I did care, and probably too much. But I forced it out of my mind, took him by the hand, and led him straight to the first of the Egyptian galleries.

“EA 59,” he said, trailing a bit behind me.

“The numbers will be here.” I showed him on a display card. “Keep our Shakespeare in mind—it will provide something essential. To begin, I think we should look for anything with a museum number that begins with EA and includes 59. If a connection between the object and the quote is obvious, we’ll know our work is done. If not, we’ll keep going.”

“I’ll take this side,” he said. “Murder thy breath in middle of a word.”

Having two rather than three letters, as we had before, was somewhat more difficult. Particularly as our hint, the quote, was more oblique than when we’d known what the piece we were looking for was made out of. In our first two galleries, I’d located four different things that fit the bill when it came to EA 59, but the Shakespeare didn’t mesh with any of them.

“You did a spectacular job figuring this all out,” Colin said. “We’d be lost if you hadn’t recognized the importance of what Cordelia told you. Or if you’d been unable to put her enough at ease to confide in you.”

“Thank you,” I said. “We make an excellent team. You can kick people around in ways I’d never be able to. Although you could teach me.”

“I’ll take a pass on that,” he said. “I don’t want to render myself useless. Where’s the next room?” He’d had as little luck with our search as I so far.

“Turn left here,” I said. We split directions as soon as we entered. I worked my way through the gallery clockwise, Colin anti-clockwise. I was looking at row after row of ushabtis, figurines designed to stand in for the occupant of a tomb should he be called to do any work in the afterlife. One set, made from blue faience, charmed me more than the rest. Their faces, though formed in the traditional Egyptian manner, had an endearing eagerness to them. I should very much have liked to have them in my own tomb as working in the afterlife didn’t have much appeal to me.

“Emily,” Colin called from across the room. “Here’s something, but it’s a series. EA 59197 through 59200.” He stood in front of a display of canopic jars, the vessels used to hold the vital organs that had been removed from the deceased during the process of mummification. These had belonged to Neskhons, the wife of a high priest of Amun. “It could be any of them.”

“No,” I said, excitement growing. “It couldn’t. It has to be this one. The baboon.”

“The baboon?”

“Yes. Each of the lids represents a god, and each god is responsible for protecting a different organ. Murder thy breath in middle of a word. Hapy, the baboon-headed deity, looks after the lungs.”

“Breath,” he said. “Of course. Well done, dear girl. What next? A trip to the library?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Partly because I’ve only just been through the stacks in thorough detail and partly because we’re staring at a jar. If I were Mr. Dillman, I would have used that to store whatever I had that needed protection. We should fetch Mr. May.”

“No,” Colin said. “We’ve no time for that.” He looked around the crowded room. “There are so many people here, we’d be hard-pressed to draw attention to ourselves.”

With great care, he touched the ancient object, gently pulling the lid from its base. It moved without too much effort. He held the lid gingerly in both hands. “I don’t want to risk dropping it,” he said. “You look inside.”

I did as he asked and saw a slim burlap package. I pulled it out, hoping I wasn’t disturbing the remains of Neskhons’s lungs. Colin returned the lid and let out a long breath.

“Glad not to have broken anything.”

“Were you holding your breath?” I asked.

“It seemed appropriate under the circumstances.”

“This is bad,” Colin said. “Very, very bad.” We’d taken our find home to examine it, ignoring both the red paint and the curious onlookers outside the house. The parcel was full of papers similar to those I’d found wrapped around the bottle—these giving much more detailed accounts of similar corruption.

“There’s more?” I asked, leaning over his shoulder.

“Dillman tracked each of the instances of election fraud. Look at this.” He passed a paper back to me. “But it’s more than that. Bribery. Extortion. Every good thing—every initiative, every bill, every project—that Foster’s been involved with was tainted from the beginning.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

“Not given his popularity.”

“No, it’s more than just that. I understand politicians are prone to corruption. And you know how I feel about what we’ve already seen regarding his role at the match factory. But who has so little faith in his own success that he tampers with literally everything?”

“It’s staggering,” Colin said, frowning. “I can’t imagine what he was thinking. He’s the last person I would have suspected of such underhanded behavior.”

“Suspect no more,” I said, handing him the last sheet of paper in the stack I’d been reading. “If this is to be believed, Mr. Foster is no more guilty than you.”

He read the page slowly, then read it again. “We know where to go from here.”