Blackstone and the Wolf of Wall Street (15 page)

Harold shrugged awkwardly. ‘Yes, well, I . . . I suppose I'd better go and see about getting a room you can use.'

‘That would be very kind of you,' Blackstone agreed.

The sign on the door said ‘Assistant Housekeeper', and when Blackstone and Meade had first entered the room at eight o'clock, it had seemed – with its desk and three chairs – to be the perfect place in which to question the staff.

It began to feel less perfect by nine o'clock, when it started to get hot, and by nine thirty the heat was so sweltering that it reminded Blackstone of his days serving in India.

‘Did Harold do this on purpose?' Alex Meade asked peevishly, wiping the sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. ‘Is putting us in this oven his idea of a good joke?'

‘No, I'm sure it isn't,' Blackstone replied.

It would simply never have occurred to someone like Harold Holt that a room between the bakery and laundry was bound to become unpleasant once both those places had started working at full pelt. He had been shielded from such things from birth, and whilst he might accept – on an intellectual level – that other people's lives were less comfortable than his own, he had no real concept of what that discomfort might feel like.

‘I wouldn't mind the heat if I felt that we were getting somewhere,' Meade said.

But they weren't, Blackstone agreed.

They had questioned almost the entire staff, and not one person had provided them with even a scrap of information which might just possibly be of some help in their investigation.

Mr Fanshawe had kept himself to himself, the cook had said. If he'd had any friends away from the house, then she certainly knew nothing about them.

There hadn't been any strangers loitering in or near the grounds of Ocean Heights in the previous few days – or even the previous few months – the head gardener had said firmly. If there had been, he'd certainly have heard about it, because this wasn't the city, where people went unnoticed, it was a village – and everybody knew everybody else's business.

‘There's only one of the staff who we still haven't seen,' Meade said, looking despondently down at his list. ‘Still,' he added, brightening, ‘she might be just the breakthrough we're looking for – because she's Judith Hawthorne, the girl who cleans Big Bill's bunker.'

Blackstone chuckled. ‘Big Bill's Bunker!' he repeated. ‘I like that!'

‘Then how about Holt's Hideaway?' Meade suggested eagerly. ‘Or William's Warren? Then again, there's always Billie's Bolt-hole and . . .' He paused, and a look of concern crossed his face. ‘Do you think I'm getting hysterical, Sam?' he asked, worriedly.

Blackstone shook his head. ‘You're just exhausted.'

‘But it's not even noon yet.'

‘Doesn't matter what time it is, or how long you've been at it,' Blackstone said. ‘Getting nowhere in an investigation can wear you out quicker than anything else I know. But, as you said, we could be on the verge of a big breakthrough.'

‘Yes, we could,' Meade agreed, without much conviction.

The signs were not hopeful, Blackstone told himself, as he watched Judith slouch into the room.

‘Please take a chair, Miss Hawthorne,' Alex Meade said.

The girl looked around her.

‘Which one?' she asked.

‘Why not take the only one that's free?' Meade suggested, with an encouraging smile.

The girl nodded lethargically, and sat down.

There were some servants whose intelligence naturally shone through, even when they were doing their best to hide it, Blackstone thought.

But Judith Hawthorne was not one of them. Her blank eyes showed no possible interest in the world around her. She had a way of moving, and even sitting, which suggested that she found most – if not all – of the things she had to do too much of an effort, and that, left to herself, she would do nothing at all. She did not even seem to be affected by the fact that handsome young Alex Meade had smiled at her, though most ugly girls – and she was undoubtedly ugly – would have been over the moon about it.

‘You know that you could be of great help to us, don't you, Judith?' Meade asked.

‘Could I?' the girl replied, indifferently.

‘You most certainly could,' Meade told her. ‘Since you've spent more time with Mr Holt than practically anyone else in the house, you might be the one who can provide the vital piece of information which will help us to find him.'

‘Oh,' Judith said, though she did not seem particularly excited about the prospect.

‘How long have you been responsible for cleaning Mr Holt's rooms?' Blackstone asked.

‘Since Mr George hired me,' the girl said, in a flat tone.

‘And that would be . . .?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Take a guess,' Meade urged her. ‘Remember how old you were then, and take it away from how old you are now.

‘It would have been about three years ago,' Judith said, in a tone which suggested she was reluctant to part with so many words in one breath.

‘Are you the only one of the servants, apart from Mr Fanshawe, who goes in there?'

‘Yes.'

‘So keeping the place presentable is all down to you? That's quite a lot of responsibility for a girl of your age, isn't it? You must be quite proud of what you've achieved.'

The girl shook her head, but so sparingly that, had the two detectives not been watching her closely, they would probably have missed it.

‘Not really,' she said.

Meade and Blackstone exchanged exasperated glances.

‘I expect Mr Holt really appreciated your company, Judith,' Meade ploughed on determinedly. ‘It must have been nice for him, living down there, all alone, to have someone to talk to.'

‘We didn't talk.'

‘Not at all?'

‘No.'

‘You must surely have exchanged a few pleasantries. “How are you today, Mr Holt?”, “Is there anything special you'd like me to do for you?” You know the sort of thing.'

Judith shrugged – and even that seemed to take her a great deal of effort.

‘It wasn't allowed,' she said.

‘What wasn't?'

‘Talking to him.'

‘He
told
you that you weren't to talk to him?'

‘No.'

‘Then how do you know it wasn't allowed?'

‘Mr Fanshawe told me – before I ever started working down there.'

‘So Mr Holt never gave you any instructions?' Blackstone asked. ‘He didn't say . . .' he searched around for inspiration, and found it in the laundry cart which was being trundled past the door. ‘He didn't say, for example, “I want these shirts laundered, Judith. Could you please see to it”?'

‘No. I never brought his clothes to the laundry. I only brought the sheets that I'd stripped off the bed.'

‘So what happened to his dirty clothes? Someone must have taken them away for laundering, mustn't they?'

‘I suppose so.'

‘And who do you think that someone might have been?'

‘I saw Mr Fanshawe with a bag of his laundry once or twice,' Judith admitted reluctantly.

‘Ah, now we're getting somewhere,' Meade said. ‘But what I still don't see is why Mr Fanshawe should have taken the dirty clothes to the laundry, when you could quite easily have done it when you were bringing the sheets.'

‘He didn't,' Judith said.

‘Didn't what?'

‘Didn't bring the clothes to the laundry.'

‘Are you sure about that?'

‘You can ask Mrs Mills, the washerwoman, if you don't believe me.'

‘So where did he take the dirty clothes?'

‘Don't know.'

‘Thank you, Judith, you've been very helpful,' Meade said, with an apparent sincerity which Blackstone could not help but admire.

After the heat of the assistant housekeeper's office, it was a real pleasure to be outside, with a gentle sea breeze blowing through their hair.

‘You know you told me I should always try to get inside the heads of all the people involved in an investigation?' Meade asked, as the two detectives stood looking out at the ocean.

‘Yes?'

‘Well, I'm having real trouble getting inside Big Bill Holt's head.'

‘In any particular way?'

‘In all sorts of ways. But mostly, I don't understand why, when he could have had any of the female staff in this household as his personal maid, he was prepared to tolerate Judith.'

‘What's wrong with her?'

‘Don't you
know
?'

‘Perhaps, but tell me anyway.'

‘Well, for a start, I don't get the impression she's very good at her job,' Meade said.

‘I think we can take that as read,' Blackstone agreed.

‘But more importantly, you have to consider Holt's situation. If I was locked away in an underground vault, and my maid was one of only four people – apart from the occasional prostitute – who ever came to see me, I'd have chosen someone I could talk to.'

‘Judith said she wasn't allowed to talk.'

‘Yes, I believe her, because she's really too stupid to lie. But
why
was she told not to talk?'

‘I don't know.'

‘And then there's the fact that Holt has an eye for the ladies. We've seen a number of quite pretty maids while we've been here, haven't we?'

‘We have.'

‘So why didn't Holt ask for one of them, instead of a buck-toothed, sallow-complexioned drudge like Judith?'

‘I don't know,' Blackstone said, for a second time.

‘It's almost as if he was deliberately punishing himself – but from what we've learned about him so far, he doesn't seem like the
kind of man
to ever even think of doing that.'

‘No, he doesn't,' Blackstone agreed. ‘He seems more like the kind of man who'll grab what he wants simply
because
he wants it, and, as far as he's concerned, everyone else can go hang.'

‘So none of it makes sense!'

‘I'll tell you something else that doesn't make sense,' Blackstone said. ‘The laundry question.'

‘The fact that wherever Big Bill's laundry was done, it wasn't done in the house?'

‘Exactly. But
why
wasn't it done in the house? I thought at first it could be because he was afraid his enemies might take the opportunity to slip some kind of poison into his clothes.'

‘But you don't think that any longer?'

‘No, I don't. If he was worried about being poisoned, the thing he'd be
most
careful about would be his food. But all the food he ate was cooked right here in the house – and that didn't seem to bother him at all.'

‘Fanshawe would have known why he was happy with Judith as his maid,' Meade said moodily. ‘Fanshawe would have known why he wouldn't have his clothes washed in the Ocean Heights laundry.'

Indeed he would, Blackstone thought, but we can't
ask
him now, can we – because I had him in my hand and then I let him slip through my fingers!

‘So what do we do now?' Meade asked despondently. ‘Go back to the city?'

Blackstone nodded. In terms of making progress in the investigation, there were half a dozen solid reasons for abandoning Ocean Heights in favour of New York City. It was a decision any seasoned investigator would have taken – and the fact that, in taking it, he would be putting a good few miles between himself and Virginia Holt, was no more than a happy coincidence.

THIRTEEN

H
e was standing just inside the woods, a short distance from the spot where Fanshawe had last been seen alive.

He had been there for half an hour, observing the house through his binoculars. He had seen the chambermaids open the upstairs windows and vigorously shake rugs and bedding out of them, and the gardeners change the plants in the flower beds. He had watched Mrs Virginia Holt set out on her morning ride, and half-wondered if she'd perhaps been involved in an entirely different kind of riding the night before.

But none of that had really interested him – none of that was why he was there.

At eleven thirty, there was the clip-clopping sound of a horse's hooves as a carriage approached. When he turned to look at it, he saw it was the official police carriage from his own precinct – which could only mean that Blackstone and Meade were leaving for the city.

He should have been expecting it, Flynn thought – should have known that Blackstone was a smart enough policeman to realize he would never get to the bottom of the mystery by sitting around on his ass in Ocean Heights.

Yes, he
should have
expected it – but seeing it actually happen still came as a blow.

The two detectives emerged from the house, side by side. As they walked towards the carriage, they seemed hardly aware of their surroundings. In fact, Flynn thought, they appeared to be engaged in an animated – possibly even heated – discussion.

Flynn glanced at his watch – even though he fully understood that the time he had left could not be measured in a given number of hours, but would instead be determined by what the policeman from Scotland Yard decided to do next.

He watched the carriage pull away, and accepted that the clock had already started ticking.

‘You'll have to change your plans, Michael,' he said softly to himself. ‘You've no choice in the matter.'