Death at Rottingdean (31 page)

“According to the boy, the smugglers are to signal from the old house on the cliff just to the west of the village,” Charles said. “We shall simply observe what transpires and—”

Sir Robert shook his head. “I'm sorry, Sheridan,” he said gruffly. “I fear there's to be more to it than that.” He pushed a yellow telegram across the desktop.

With a sinking feeling, Charles picked it up. “OBSERVE MY HAT STOP,” he read out loud. “APPREHEND KILLER FORTHWITH STOP ARREST WHOLE DAMNED VILLAGE IF YOU HAVE TO STOP WALES.” He looked at Sir Robert questioningly. “You told HRH?”

Sir Robert winced. “I had to, didn't I? He left explicit orders to be kept informed.”

Kipling was gloomy. “To be sure. But if you bring your men down the coast en masse, it's bound to get into the newspapers. You know what a fuss they'll make of it. Underneath, the story is desperately tawdry, but on the surface it reads like a romantic fiction—smuggling, secret tunnels, hidden guns, all the trappings of a cheap adventure novel.” He shook his head. “Things are bad enough now, but after this, the day-trippers and souvenir-seekers will swarm all over the village. They'll make a circus of the place. No sane person will want to live there ever again.”

“Worst of all,” Charles said, “a company of law enforcement officers will drive the killer or killers underground and erase any hope of discovering who's behind those guns.” He leaned forward. “Maybe we can effect a compromise between your orders and the requirements of the situation.”

“If we can, I'm willing to work something out,” Sir Robert said. “What do you have in mind?”

Charles described the plan he had been considering. They spent the next half-hour fine-tuning their strategy. By the time they shook hands and he and Kipling took their leave, Charles was reasonably satisfied with what they had agreed to.

The question now was whether it would work as they hoped, or whether something they could not foresee would destroy their carefully laid plans.

You must lose a fly to catch a trout.

—GEORGE HERBERT
Jacula Prudentum
(1651)

 

 

 

 

 

“
I
don't
want
to be calm,” Aunt Georgie cried. “I want the boy found, do you hear me?” She thumped her hand on the constable's desk. “Turn out the men of the village! I want an immediate search.”

Constable Woodhouse sighed heavily. “But Lady Burne-Jones,” he said, “I am trying to tell ye that th' boy
will
be found, no doubt about it. ‘E'll turn up, in 'is own good time. Boys do that, y‘know. They pop off, I mean. On their own business. 'E's gone fishin‘, most like.” He gave her what was obviously meant to be a reassuring smile. “It's near on teatime, milady. If th' young imp ain't back tomorrow mornin', come an' tell me, an' I'll ‘ave a look for 'im myself.”

Kate made another attempt. “I believe,” she said, “that what Lady Burne-Jones is saying is that the boy did
not
pop off on his own business. He did not go fishing, because he had no fishing equipment. We do not believe he has been injured, for we thoroughly searched the area. We think he has been ...” She swallowed. The idea was almost too terrible to contemplate.

The stout constable raised both eyebrows. “Been wot?” he asked.

“Kidnapped,” Kate said.

“Kidnapped!” the constable echoed, his bulbous eyes opening wide with a took of utter disbelief.

“Yes, kidnapped,” Aunt Georgie snapped. “Would you like us to spell the word for you, sir?”

“That'll not be necess‘ry.” The constable could scarcely suppress his smile. “Ye'll pardon me, yer ladyships, but 'oo would want to kidnap a worthless
boy
?”

Kate bit her lip. When she had seen the photographer standing near the barn, she had thought nothing of it. Why should she? The South Downs were crowded with photographers and painters seeking to capture the wild, sweeping beauty of earth and sky and sea, and falling all over one another in the general melee. There was nothing about this particular photographer that should have caught her attention.

So it wasn't until Patrick had vanished and she had begun the fruitless search for him that she remembered the man in the gray bowler, packing his camera equipment hurriedly, as if he wanted to make his escape. She remembered, too, that Patrick had stiffened as if he recognized the man, and that all through the picnic lunch, the boy had been nearly silent. And then, with a sudden start, she remembered something else, as well: talking with another photographer, similarly dressed in tweed knickerbockers and gray bowler, on the Quarter Deck above the beach on the morning that George Radford's body was pulled out of the ocean. That man had spoken with an accent—French or Belgian, perhaps—and had said something about the natives being driven by the powers of darkness to jump off the cliff, as if suggesting that the victim had killed himself. An intuition told her that the photographer on the Quarter Deck and the photographer near the barn were the same man. But why in heaven's name would he want to kidnap Patrick? How was this foreign photographer—if that's what he was—connected to the unhappy events in Rottingdean? And if he had the boy, what did he intend to do with him? Oh, if she hadn't fallen asleep! If she'd kept a closer eye on the boy, if she'd taken her responsibility more seriously, none of this might have happened!

But Constable Woodhouse suffered none of Kate's distress or guilt. “It's clear as day, milady,” he declared cheerfully. “Since there's nobody‘ud want the foolish boy, there's nobody'ud take ‘im. Th' lad's got hisself lost, is all. 'E'll come draggin' back to th' village when ‘e's 'ungry an' cold. Go ‘ome an' 'ave yer tea an' don't fret.”

But somebody
did
want the boy, and somebody
had
taken him, for some appalling purpose or another. Kate was as sure of that as she was of her own name, and the certainty made her sick with apprehension. Patrick knew too much about the village's profitable smuggling operation. Patrick knew what was going on in the tunnels, and what was planned for this very evening. He had seen the man who rowed George Radford's body out to sea and had overheard Harry Tudwell talking with one of the investors about—

“Well!” Aunt Georgie exclaimed indignantly, rising from the chair in front of the constable's desk. “I can see that we are going to gain no cooperation from the law, which is either too indolent or too inept to be of any real use.” She pulled at Kate's sleeve. “Come, Lady Sheridan. We will organize our
own
search. When the boy is found, it will be no thanks to the law!” And with a last withering look at the constable, she swept out the door.

But as Kate and Aunt Georgie quickly discovered, it was impossible to organize a search. For one thing, the men to whom they spoke appeared to share the constable's view: that Patrick had simply gone off in pursuit of his own affairs and would return when he was ready. For another, there seemed to be an air of barely suppressed anticipation in the village, as if everyone were waiting for something important to happen and had no interest in anything else. Kate thought she knew what they were waiting for and wished desperately that she knew whether it and Patrick's disappearance were connected.

And now that she'd had time to consider it, she was beginning to understand that a search of the area where Patrick had disappeared was not likely to do any good, anyway. If her intuition was right and the photographer had abducted Patrick, the boy wouldn't be on the downs—he would be hidden somewhere, bound so that he could not escape and gagged so that he could not cry out. But
where?

“My head aches so terribly that I can scarcely see,” Aunt Georgie said with a heavy sigh, after they had met with their third or fourth refusal. “I must go home, Kate. There's nothing more I can do except pray for him.”

Kate put her arms around Aunt Georgie. “And I'm beginning to think that there's no point in trying to search, even if we could get the men to do it,” she said, feeling a great weariness. “Anyway, it will be dark soon. Charles and Rud will return from Brighton shortly, and they will surely know what to do.”

But as she made her own way back to Seabrooke House, she was not at all sure that Charles and Rud would have any answers, or be able to offer any helpful suggestions. Patrick had been taken for an unknown purpose by a man who seemed to stand far behind the scenes, a man whose face she could neither remember nor describe with any clarity.

But she could remember Patrick, his freckled face, his fiery hair, his dancing eyes green as springtime. And his loss burned like a fire in her heart.

Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind;
The thief doth fear each bush an
officer.

—WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Henry VI,
3

 

 

 

 

 

H
arry Tudwell's misgivings about tonight's undertaking had been growing deeper and darker over the past twenty-four hours. On the one hand, he was glad to have been advanced in rank—“promoted,” as the representative of the investors had so agreeably put it. He could scarcely wait to tell Trunky Thomas and the others that he had been chosen to take over the deceased Foxy's position, and that from now on, the instructions from the investors would come solely through him. On the other hand, Harry could not rid himself of the ominous suspicion that the sinister man who had visited him was Foxy Smith's killer, and that if he did not do as he was instructed, he would find himself ticked off as “superfluous,” as well.

Harry's misgivings had darkened even further after he had been visited by that dandified lord in his Homburg hat, who claimed to represent the Crown and who wrote down everything Harry said in a fancy leather-bound notebook with a fountain pen. But even though the investors' representative had warned him that Lord Sheridan might prove meddlesome, his lordship was clearly more interested in his stylish trouser creases than in digging up the truth, and Harry hardly thought that the toff posed any real danger. It was the Chief Constable in Brighton that Harry feared, and although there had been no sign of him since he took away Foxy's corpse, Harry couldn't shake the feeling that he and his men might be waiting when the ship came in that night.

Taken altogether, then, Harry was not in the highest of spirits as he began tonight's work—a mood that was not brightened by the threat of a menacing storm blowing out of the southeast, over the Channel. But the leather traveling case had arrived safely, just as the investors' representative had said, and Harry had kept to his office the entire day so that it would not go unguarded. As dusk fell, he took his bull's-eye lantern and picked up the traveling case, carrying it down a seldom-used path to the beach, where he locked it into the first bathing machine. Then he located one of Trunky's skiffs and pulled it onto the deserted shingle near the bathing machines. Having managed all of this without being detected, he climbed up the stairs to the top of the cliff.

There was a light in the window of Trunky's shack and as he walked across the gravel, Harry wondered once again why the man had agreed to be the third lantern for tonight's landing. Harry was sure enough of John Landsdowne's loyalty, for their friendship went back to boyhood days, and even though the chemist had openly criticized him in that noisy meeting at the Black Horse, Harry knew John would never let him down. But Trunky Thomas was certainly no friend, and Harry had been surprised when Landsdowne had told him yesterday that Trunky had volunteered for signaling duty. It had even occurred to Harry that Trunky might have some sort of villainous intention in mind. Still, the loyal John would be there, so if Trunky meant to make a move, he would have to take on the both of them. Anyway, it seemed better to have Trunky with him and out of mischief when the ship came in.
If
the ship came in, Harry reminded himself, eyeing the waves licking at the beach and the angry lightning that flickered far out to sea. They were in for a blow, there was no doubt about it. The men would have to work fast to get everything unloaded and into the tunnel while the ship could still stand close off the shore without danger.

If Trunky had any malevolent ambitions, he gave no sign of them when he opened the door to Harry. Neither did he offer any friendly remark. They greeted one another with wary nods, took their lanterns and walked to the chemist's shop to meet John Landsdowne. As the three walked back down the High Street to the coast road, Harry's disquietude took on a new coloring. At this time of evening, the villagers should have been at table, wolfing down their suppers in preparation for the night's work. Instead, they stood in their doorways or sat in their windows, silently watching the trio pass. Something in their guarded expressions gave Harry to suspect that they knew some secret to which he was not privy, but he passed this off as his nerves playing tricks on him. They were getting what they wanted, weren't they? The ship was coming in, just as they had demanded. They had nothing to gain and everything to lose if there was trouble tonight. When the time came, in an hour or so, they'd be gathered on the beach, ready to unload the goods.

Still, Harry couldn't shake the thought of the chief constable's men lurking somewhere on the cliff, so as the three of them turned onto the coast road and began the uphill eastward climb, he said to John and Trunky, “Best be on your guard, boys. The Queen's forces may be about tonight.”

Trunky snorted contemptuously. “Ain't no forces hereabouts. Queen's or any other. If there was, my men 'ud told me.”