The Deadly Embrace (20 page)

Except for a small pitcher of rancid cream, the refrigerator was empty. The cupboards contained nothing but a wide assortment of crockery He walked into the large cold pantry off the kitchen. He found only some small burlap bags containing moldy onions and potatoes.

Taggart went back into the library, put on his trench coat, and headed out to the rain-slicked street in front of the mansion. A few blocks to the east, he found a busier crossroad that led to a small food shop. Most of the shelves were empty, but Taggart collected a fresh loaf of bread, one jar of homemade currant jam, a small round of butter, some packets of brown sugar, a pint of milk, and six ounces of tea.

When the shopkeeper asked for his ration coupons, Taggart told him he didn’t have any. Scowling, the man began to remove the items from the sack. Taggart took a twenty-dollar bill out of his wallet and laid it on the counter. After the man glanced in both directions, he replaced all the items in the sack.

“We call these Yank coupons,” said the storekeeper, putting the bill in his pants pocket.

The mansion house was silent when Taggart returned. He went straight back to the kitchen. The stovetop was hot, and he put a kettle of water on to boil. Ten minutes later, he headed upstairs carrying a pot of tea and some toast rounds slathered with butter and jam on a silver tray.

He could hear her gentle breathing through the partially open bedroom door. She opened her eyes as he approached the bed. Putting the tray down on the nightstand, he gently clasped her wrist and took her pulse again. It was slow and steady.

“How long was I out?” she asked.

“About an hour,” he said. “They came for … your servant.”

“Thank you,” she said. Seeing the food on the tray she said, “That smells exceptionally good.”

“I gather you’ve been running on nerve for a while.”

“A bit, perhaps,” she said.

She sat up in bed as he poured the tea. When he handed her the mug, she added a full spoon of brown sugar to it, along with a dollop of milk. Between sips, she ate the toast and jam with obvious relish. Within minutes, a hint of color began to suffuse her pallid cheeks.

“You’re hired,” she said with a shy smile.

As he poured her a second mug of tea, an electric light suddenly came on above their heads.

“Power is restored,” she said. “The British Empire endures.”

The light was coming from a cut-glass chandelier in the center of the room. Taggart noticed that of more than twenty flame bulbs on its arms all but two were burned out. Helen’s eyes met his when he turned back to her.

“You’ve seen enough to know that I live in genteel poverty, Major Taggart,” she said icily.

“I only know about the other kind,” he said. “I grew up in a coldwater flat. At the age of five, my first winter chore was to hunt for chunks of coal at the railroad yard.”

“Genteel poverty is not much better,” said Helen Bellayne. “One tries at all costs to appear proper and refined while selling off the good silver and paintings … never letting friends and relatives see how far you have sunk. It was particularly difficult for my mother. She worked so hard to keep up the pretense of wealth without having any money to do it.”

“My mother spent all day sewing button sets onto pasteboard cards,” said Taggart. “She earned a penny a card.”

“Perhaps a nip of this tea would improve your humor,” she said with a puckish grin.

Taking it from her outstretched hand, he sipped from the mug.

“So what happened to the family fortune?” he asked.

“It is now part of the Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere,” she replied evenly.

“The Japs?” he said, and she nodded.

“My father inherited rubber plantations in Malaya, tea plantations in Ceylon, and textile mills in Shanghai. They had been in our family for generations. All his wealth was intertwined with the fortunes of the British Empire. As the empire died, so did our family holdings. The Nipponese took everything we owned. My father was murdered eight years ago in Shanghai, trying to save the Chinese who worked for us there. My brother Edward died trying to protect our interests in Malaya. I am the only one left.”

Taggart examined her amber eyes for a sign of self-pity. There was none.

“Forgive me,” said Helen Bellayne. “I don’t usually prattle on like this, I assure you, Major Taggart. Perhaps it was Gwendolyn’s death last night. She was my last connection to the past … or maybe it was the thought that one of those German bombs last night would eradicate everything I have ever known. You know, I wasn’t entirely sure it would be such a bad idea.”

“Where is your husband?” asked Taggart.

“Colonel Roderick Bellayne. There is a good painting of him by Linklater over the mantelpiece in my bedroom. My Roddy … he is dead, too … killed very early in the war. He was commanding a battalion in Tunisia when we denied Mussolini his new African empire.”

She had said it all so casually that Taggart wondered if, like him, she had accomplished the very difficult task of walling off any emotion from her daily life.

“What about you, Major? Are you married?”

He nodded and said, “She’s dead, too … she took her life…. That’s what living with me for eighteen years will do for a woman.”

“I’m sure there was more to it than that,” said Helen Bellayne, obviously waiting for him to say more.

Instead, Taggart stood up next to the bed and glanced at his watch.

“So what is it you want of me?” she asked. “In spite of your obviously fine qualifications, I assume you did not come to my home this morning to play the role of my butler.”

“I was told that Jocelyn Dunbar stayed here often,” said Taggart, his voice becoming harder.

“Yes, she did,” said Helen Bellayne. “In fact, this was her room.”

“I wonder if you wouldn’t mind my looking through her things when we finish talking,” he said.

“Not at all. She was my niece by marriage, you know. Her father married my cousin Angela.”

“I didn’t know,” said Taggart.

“I feel so horrible about her death,” she said. “She had a very difficult time growing up. Of course, she had the Dunbar blood, which made long life problematic anyway.”

“The Dunbar blood?”

“Her father was a Dunbar. Very good lineage, but a streak of madness has always run through the family. My mother once said that they should never have had children—end the line, if you will.”

“Who might have wanted to kill her?” asked Taggart.

“I have absolutely no idea. When Colonel Gaines called me to say that she had committed suicide, I wasn’t terribly surprised.”

“Why not?”

“For one thing, she had tried it once before … with sleeping drafts.”

“Do you know why?” asked Taggart.

“She fell in love with someone when she was very young. It apparently turned out badly. I never learned who it was. Our family was very good at keeping secrets, particularly of the heart.”

“Do you know if it might have been someone named Noel?” asked Taggart.

She thought about it and said, “Inspector Drummond asked me that same question. I don’t recall her having any friends with that name.”

“Who were her friends?” asked Taggart.

“Growing up as a child in the country, she was a wild spirit—she loved horses more than boys back then. Recently, I know she spent time with Charles Wainwright and his crowd … Lord Ainsley, of course, and several other RAF types. One of her boyfriends was killed early in the war at Benghazi.”

“Any other affairs?” asked Taggart.

“It’s fair to say that Joss had difficulty maintaining relationships. She...”

Helen paused in mid-sentence, seemingly lost in thought.

“Go on,” said Taggart.

“Joss had a troubled upbringing,” she said. “Her father had the pronounced strain of erratic behavior that was so prevalent in the Dunbar line. It’s entirely possible that he abused her as a child … in a sexual way.”

Taggart decided to come right to the point.

“I’d like to ask you about Admiral Jellico,” he said.

“I have no direct knowledge of their relationship,” she said without a pause. “Joss never told me about it. I have never asked Thomas about it.”

“As I told the admiral when we first met, I have proof that he was engaged in a sexual relationship with her.”

“So?” she replied. “What of it?”

“He’s a married man, and he is old enough to be her grandfather. Those could be motives for murder if she decided to expose their relationship,” said Taggart.

She shook her head as if he were a naive schoolboy.

“You don’t understand the English, I’m afraid,” she said. “Joss was a free spirit, Major Taggart—like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. She did as she pleased. Besides, the admiral’s wife had full knowledge of it. In fact, she encouraged the affair. She happens to prefer younger men.”

“And it didn’t bother you as her aunt?”

“That was a choice Joss made as an adult. We all have to live with our life decisions when we are no longer young.”

“You’re right. I don’t understand you people,” said Taggart.

She removed the feather tick covering her and stood up. Taking the silver tray from the table, she began walking toward the door.

“Thank you for the tea and toast,” she said. “I mean it.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, watching her go. At the door, she turned and said, “Why don’t you conduct your policeman’s search now, Major. I’ll see you downstairs before you leave.”

Taggart spent almost an hour systematically going through Joss’s room and the bathroom that adjoined it. The closet was full of her uniforms, shoes, and other personal clothing. The bathroom contained her makeup and medications. But there were no letters, notes, or personal items that offered even the hint of a clue to her death.

When he appeared again at the bottom of the stairs, Helen Bellayne was waiting for him in the foyer. She had changed into a conservative black woolen suit, her hair was newly brushed, and she had applied fresh lipstick.

“Any luck?” she asked.

He shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

“Well, I need to get back to work. Is there anything else you want of me?” she asked, looking up at him with the hint of a smile.

“A woman as beautiful as you shouldn’t have to ask a question like that,” he found himself saying.

She slowly raised her chin almost defiantly toward his.

He leaned down and kissed her. Her mouth was uncertainly responsive. She parted her lips for a moment before slowly pulling them away. He felt a warm, sweet exhalation against his throat.

“Thank you again for the tea, Major. That was pleasant.”

“Yeah,” he said, turning to go out the door.

CHAPTER 17

L
iza bolted awake in the semidarkness, her brain still racing with the vivid nightmarish images. For several moments, she could not remember where she was. Then she heard the familiar sounds of vehicle traffic down on Grosvenor Road.

A narrow patch of daylight was leaking through the frayed lower comer of her blackout curtains. She could just make out the hands of the small travel clock next to her bed. It was almost ten.

Drawing open the curtains, she barely noticed the remarkable sight of an English battleship gliding silently down the narrow river toward the East End repair docks. All she saw was another dreary morning with a harsh wind that rattled the broken frames of the bomb-damaged windows.

As she headed to the bathroom, her mind was still sorting through the possibilities that had begun to coalesce in her mind. Upon reflection, the lurid idea seemed fantastic, even if it did fit the facts. But it could have happened that way, she concluded, sitting naked in the cold bathwater.

After putting on a bathrobe back in her room, Liza walked downstairs to the telephone box in the first-floor hallway. Ten minutes later, she had reached one of the two men whose help she needed to prove the hypothesis.

As soon as she was dressed, she went out and hailed a taxi, giving the driver the address of J.P.’s apartment near Charing Cross Station. The sidewalk was deserted as she came up to the front entrance of the row house. Before she could knock, the door swung open to reveal Inspector Drummond standing in the hallway.

“Well, are you going to tell me who or what we’re looking for?” he asked, smiling at her in an almost fatherly way.

“Winston Churchill,” she said, moving past him down the hallway.

He had already unlocked the door of J.P.’s apartment. The airless rooms still smelled rank as she went directly to the fireplace. The round Churchill pincushion was sitting in the center of the mantelpiece.

Holding the bulbous leather head between her two index fingers, she carried it into the bathroom and set it down on J.P.’s dressing table, then stepped back into the hallway and switched on the bright bathroom lights. Inspector Drummond stood in the doorway watching her with sleepy eyes and scratching his head.

Using a paper tissue from the top drawer of the dressing table, she pulled one of the hatpins out of the cushion and held it up to the light. The large garnet on the head of the pin glinted smoky red in the lamplight.

The six-inch pin was made of burnished steel and looked as if it had never been used. After a thorough examination, she put it down on the dressing table and drew out another pin. One after another, she removed all of them from Churchill’s head and studied the shafts carefully in the light. When she was down to the last two, her frustration became evident.

“Damn,” she said. “Perhaps I was wrong.”

“Could you enlighten me as to what it is we’re looking for?” asked Inspector Drummond.

As she pulled out the next hatpin, Liza’s lips arched upward in a grim smile.

“This,” she said, holding up a pin that was crowned with a polished brass knob.

Drummond could see a brownish discoloration at the pointed tip, as well as along the shaft.

“Do you have a car, Inspector?” she asked.

“Certainly,” he said.

“I would like to go to the pathology unit at the SHAEF hospital right away”

“May I assume this is important?” he asked.

She nodded. After carefully wrapping the pin in a towel, she placed it in her handbag. On their way to the hospital, she explained what she thought had taken place on the night of J.P.’s murder. He listened patiently. When she was finished, he said, “Do you think you can prove it?”

“We’ll know in a little while,” she replied.

After stopping briefly at the laboratory to have the stains on the shaft scraped for analysis, they headed to the pathology suite. Liza asked one of the nurses if Dr. Channing was still on duty.

“He rarely leaves the hospital,” she said. “You’ll find him in the storeroom at the back of the morgue.”

Liza found a closed door just beyond the refrigerated lockers. A hand-lettered sign on the front of it read “Medical Supply.” She opened the door, stepped inside, and turned on the light. Wooden shelves held unopened vats of formaldehyde and an assortment of surgical tools and supplies. Beyond the last rack, a metal-framed cot sat snug against the brick wall. Something was lying on it, covered by a blanket. Leaning over the cot, she pulled back the blanket.

The old man’s eyes flickered open and stared up at her.

“Even at my age, young lady, sleep is sporadically valuable,” he muttered. “What do you want now?”

“I need your help, Dr. Channing. It involves the postmortem you conducted yesterday on Lieutenant Barnes. Do you remember your initial examination of her entry wound?”

“I am not yet fully impaired with senility,” said the pathologist.

He slid back the blanket and slowly sat up, rubbing his eyes.

“Do you know how to brew a respectable cup of tea?” he asked querulously.

“I do,” said Drummond, who was standing in the doorway.

“You will find the burner and empty pot out there behind the meat lockers,” said Channing. “Please use fresh water.”

A few minutes later, he took a sip from a steaming mug, licked his lips, and said, “How can I be of help?”

“As I told you yesterday, Doctor, there was something abnormal about her body temperature when it was recorded the morning after her death,” said Liza, the words pouring out. “Based on the temperature of the room she was in, it suggested that she had died at around midnight, but we know that she was alive several hours later, which is what led me to believe that she might have been immersed in water.”

“I remember the question,” he said, “but there was no evidence to support any form of hypoxia. There was a bullet in her brain.”

“Correct,” said Liza. “But I would like you to consider the hypothesis that she was already dead when the bullet was fired—that she had been murdered by a different instrument while sitting in her bath.”

“And what instrument would that be?” he asked.

“Do you remember the reddened tissue you showed me that was just outside the bullet track? You conjectured about it at the time.”

“A bullet can do peculiar things,” he said.

“Of course,” she agreed. “I am merely asking you to reopen the inquest to investigate that one curious element.”

Dr. Channing led them into the morgue, asking one of the attendants to retrieve J.P.’s body from its locker.

“That one’s already gone, sir,” said the attendant.

“By whose authority?” demanded Liza.

“Colonel Baird sent orders that the body was to be shipped immediately back to the United States at the urgent request of her husband.”

“That’s a lie. Her husband is in a Japanese prison camp,” said Liza, seething with outrage.

Dr. Channing patted her gently on the back.

“Perhaps all is not lost,” he said.

She and Drummond followed him back to the pathology unit. Channing walked over to a long row of specimen jars on one of the wooden shelves. Grasping a large formaldehyde-filled jar, he brought it over to an examination table.

“We still have her brain,” said Channing. “That will give us the answer, one way or another.”

With a wheezy sigh, he dragged out his brass lamp and switched it on. For the next fifteen minutes, he carefully studied the tissue just inside the wound with a magnifying glass. At one point, he retrieved a small scalpel and incised the wound from the point of entry, parting the two sections with forceps. He spent another five minutes focused on the exposed gray-pinkish brain matter.

“It could be a separate wound,” he said, finally.

“Possibly made by this?” Liza asked, holding out the polished brass hatpin.

Channing took it from her hand and held it up to the light.

“Let’s find out,” he said. Before fitting it to the secondary wound, he asked, “Have you already checked it for blood type?”

“We dropped off several scrapings at the laboratory on our way here.”

Channing used the scalpel again to extend his incision deeper into the brain, tracking every millimeter of damaged tissue under the brilliance of his spotlight.

“I can’t be certain this was the actual weapon, but it’s entirely consistent with the size, shape, and track of the wound,” said Channing. “The murderer almost certainly attempted to obliterate it with the gunshot.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” said Liza.

When she gave him a hug, the wizened old man actually came out of his crablike slouch and beamed. Liza and Drummond headed back to the laboratory, where the blood analysis was waiting for them. She placed an immediate call to Sam Taggart in his office at SHAEF.

“J.P was murdered, Sam,” she said. “The murder weapon was a six-inch-long hatpin. Apparently, she collected them. The murderer killed her while she was taking a bath, and left her there until he arranged the scene of the fake suicide in the bedroom. The blood on the tip of the pin matches J.P.’s.”

“Very good,” said Taggart, his mind racing.

“Two other things,” said Liza. “First, the scrapings you took from under General Kilgore’s fingernails contained no other skin tissue.”

“What else?” said Taggart, disappointment obvious in his voice.

“Colonel Baird had her body removed from the morgue before we got here,” she went on. “He apparently claimed that her husband was requesting its return to the States.”

“They’re covering their tracks just in case,” said Taggart.

“Who is Colonel Baird?” she asked.

“One of Kilgore’s hatchet men. He ran a military prison before the war. The Alcatraz of military stockades. Anything else? I’m calling Kilgore’s office as soon as we hang up.”

For a moment, Liza debated whether to tell him about the man who might have been chasing her during the bombing raid.

“It will wait,” she said.

CHAPTER 18

T
he blonde secretary in Kilgore’s office put Taggart on hold for over a minute before coming back on the phone to tell him that General Kilgore was out of the office and wouldn’t be back until later that afternoon.

Taggart got a fresh cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and lay down on his sprung leather couch to ruminate over what they had learned so far in the two investigations. “Couch time” was what he used to call it back at the homicide-squad office. “Loafing” is what the commander used to call it before Taggart was fired.

Two young women had been murdered in the same week. They had worked in the same office. Both were in possession of highly classified information. In Joss’s case, she was familiar with virtually every facet of the Normandy invasion plan, as well as the even more secret ULTRA intercepts. J.P. had indirect access across the pillow to the invasion plans and God knew what else.

Both young women had been sexually intimate with high-ranking Allied officers who knew the Overlord plans. Based on the diary she kept, J.P. had slept with at least a half-dozen top generals. But would one of them have had a motive to kill her? And Joss?

Taggart knew that some killers possessed the hunting instinct, enjoying the chase more than anything else. For others it was the kill, cherishing the moment when they could look into the eyes of their prey and watch its life ebb away. The lust to kill was in many men, and many of them were soldiers. But these two crimes had clear sexual overtones. Even if they had something to do with war, there were other elements involved as well.

As he went over the evidence they had amassed in investigating Joss Dunbar’s death, his mind kept returning to the note written in blood he had found in her apartment. Was the man named Noel no more than a red herring? And what of Drummond’s view that the royal family was concerned that one of its own might be a serial murderer?

His mind drifted back to Overlord. The most important question was whether Overlord had potentially been compromised. That had to be the central focus of his investigation.

The proposed invasion date was still a few months away, but with millions of men involved, the supreme commander’s planning staff had grown exponentially in recent weeks. According to the last count he had seen, more than seven hundred Allied officers were cleared to know that the invasion target was Normandy and that the projected attack would take place in late May or the first week of June. If even one of them betrayed those plans to the Abwehr, the war could go on for years. And if the rumors were true about Hitler’s secret weapons, they could still lose. Or old Joe Stalin could strike a separate peace with Hitler, as he had done before the war.

Taggart had to wrestle with yet another problem. He personally hoped the murderer was General Everett Kilgore, whom he detested for what he had done to J.P. after her husband had been captured at Corregidor. What defenses did she have when he made his move on her? What does the deer say to the point of the rifle?

But he had also learned the hard way through his years as a homicide detective that hate was like an empty .45. Taggart always had to battle his inner demons. But what he felt now was a different emotion, almost out of control. It was more like a disease of the soul. He wasn’t sure if he could harness it. He knew he had to try.

As he sat on the couch staring out at the park, the image of Helen Bellayne suddenly came into his mind, her sad heart-shaped face, the shy smile, and the amber eyes. The image of her was enough to drive away the demons momentarily. She was the first woman he had desired since his wife died.

Barbara. His wife. How had General Kilgore learned about the circumstances of her death? And how had he learned the contents of her suicide note? To Taggart’s knowledge, only two men aside from him had ever seen it—the judge at the inquest and the commander of the homicide squad.

“Major Taggart?”

He looked up to see Lieutenant Rusty Courtemanche, one of his criminal investigators, standing in the open doorway. Only twenty-two, he had yet to subject his fair skin to the regular stroke of a razor. Before the war, he had been a police patrolman in Saint Louis. His only ambition when it ended was to go back into the city department as a plainclothes detective.