The moon was still out. White waves crashed clearly on dark rocks below.
And this time, there could be no doubt. He was looking at two broken lives and bodies on the rocks below.
32
It was after midnight. The sycamores lining the driveway were still whipping back and forth in the wind, but the clouds overhead remained parted.
One after another, limousines pulled out from the castle, their tires cutting crisply through the thin layer of water on the pebble-paved roundabout.
Aunt Mabel and the butler came to the front door. She waved to each of the long town cars as they rolled out.
“Do you suppose,” Aunt Mabel said to the butler, “that it was my reference to chamber pots?”
And then, as the last limo rolled out, she looked once more out toward the road.
And she saw them—a pair of headlights, very close together, unlike all the departing vehicles, turning from the muddy two-lane road and onto the castle’s driveway.
It was not the sort of vehicle she was expecting, and she waited in the doorway as it drew closer.
It was a tiny Fiat. None of her friends had one, not even the environmentally conscious ones. It was the sort of vehicle favored by the paparazzi, for maneuverability and access to intimate destinations, she presumed.
It was a two-seater. Well, not formally a two-seater—she knew it had a backseat, but not one big enough to accommodate an actual adult.
The vehicle pulled to a stop in front of the castle door. Lady Darby nodded to the butler, and he went out to assist.
The driver’s door opened. A scruffy man in a hooded sweatshirt stepped out.
The butler ignored him and opened the passenger door.
“Thank you,” said Laura, as she got out. “How are you, Spenser?” she said to the butler.
“I’m quite well, miss,” he said. “And very pleased to see you.”
The butler was ready to escort her toward the door, but she wasn’t ready to head in that direction.
“No, wait,” she said. “There’s more.”
Now one arm became visible, extending from the backseat, getting a grip onto the door frame, and now the other hand got a grip on the passenger seat back—and Reggie Heath extricated himself from the backseat of the tiny Fiat.
He stood. He flexed his back and neck and shoulders and took a moment to straighten out. Then he reached back into the car and pulled out his briefcase.
He came forward to join Laura.
The butler was now finally ready, he thought, to escort them both into the castle.
“Wait,” said the scruffy man in the hooded overcoat. He took a camera from the driver’s side of the car, and nodded expectantly in Laura and Reggie’s direction.
Laura and Reggie obliged. They paused, put their arms around each other, and posed in front of the castle step for the paparazzo.
The camera clicked and flashed several times and from several different angles.
“Got it,” said the man. “Cheers.”
The paparazzo got back in his car and drove back out to the road.
Now, finally, Reggie and Laura turned toward the front door.
“Should I have tipped him or something?” said Aunt Mabel, as the paparazzo drove out of sight.
“No need,” said Laura. “I just promised him a sort of future scoop.”
“Well, that’s fine, so long as he didn’t demand your firstborn or such.”
Laura raised an eyebrow at that, but quickly returned it to neutral.
Both she and Reggie were drenched in rainwater and mud. His coat and Laura’s hair both looked to Aunt Mabel as though they might actually be singed.
“You poor things,” she said, “what you’ve been through. Which do you want first—dry clothes, or brandy?”
“Brandy,” said Laura.
* * *
Moments later, the butler set four large brandies on a table in the study, in front of a roaring fire.
Aunt Mabel, Laura, and Reggie waited—and then, as the butler left the room, Nigel entered. He carried the Scotland Yard evidence box under his arm, but other than that, he was pretty much fresh from his pursuit on the moors.
Aunt Mabel looked at each of them in turn.
“You are all three of you a mess,” she said. “You can have your brandies now, but I’ll expect you all to change before breakfast.”
Now the butler returned.
“Inspector Wembley has arrived,” said the butler.
“Well, tell him to set up a perimeter, or whatever it is they do,” said Aunt Mabel. “I believe he’s missed most of it. So he can wait now until we’ve had our brandy.”
The butler exited to deliver that message.
Laura and Reggie looked across at Nigel.
“How was your flight?” said Laura.
“Wonderful, by comparison,” said Nigel. “How was your drive?”
“Laura plans the next one,” said Reggie.
“All right then,” said Nigel. “Let’s share.”
He placed his Scotland Yard evidence box on the table.
“What I have,” said Nigel, “is an 1893 letter signed by an Inspector Standifer of Scotland Yard Special Branch, stating that an American agent in his employ had taken on the name of James Moriarty for undercover purposes—and that his widow had chosen to keep it, and wanted that fact recorded for any possible descendants, one of whom we all have come to know as Darla Rennie. This was in the Scotland Yard archives for the past hundred years or so, until she managed to smuggle it out.”
Nigel put that document on the table.
Now Reggie opened his briefcase.
“What I have,” said Reggie, “is an 1893 letter written to Sherlock Holmes by a felon named Redgil, in which Redgil in effect confesses to torturing and murdering that same American agent. Which was stored safely away from prying eyes in the Baker Street archives, until it became part of the hotel exhibit.”
Nigel nodded. “As expected,” he said. “Handwritten, and signed, by Redgil himself.”
Now Nigel took out the document that he had grabbed above the cliff.
“And that signature will match this one—from a couple of years later, in which a man calling himself Redfern established the first Marylebone Grand Hotel, using, clearly, the counterfeit money he had obtained during the process of murdering the American agent. All of which would have been a considerable embarrassment to
his
descendants, the siblings Harold Redfern and Helene Redfern. Which, I gather, was the reason for some of the apparent inconveniences on your trip. The Redferns were concerned about what would happen if someone other than Darla Rennie succeeded in matching up those signatures and revealed them to the press, say at a media event already scheduled at Darby House.”
“Murder for that?” said Laura, “Over a little corporate embarrassment?”
“One thing leads to another,” said Reggie.
“Well,” said Nigel, after a moment, “I think one of the Redferns had more of a motivation than that. Helene Redfern had a hand in the attempts to get the letter from Reggie’s briefcase. But I think that’s where she drew a line. We know that she died trying to go back and warn you both about the gas.”
“It’s a shame we didn’t cross paths with her,” said Laura. “We’d gone back toward the car, so we didn’t see her come from the lobby.”
Nigel nodded. “The two Redferns shared a lineage and a history, but I don’t think it was quite exactly the same history. I think the nine-year-old Harold Redfern helped his grandfather kill the American captain, in the chaos and rubble after the V-2 bomb attack. It’s clear that Darla Rennie thought so.”
Now Nigel picked up all the documents and bundled them together.
“Darla Rennie wasn’t stalking you two,” he said. “She was back on her meds and that delusion was gone. But she was in fact tracking down Harold Redfern; something she started doing from the moment she knew who her own ancestors actually were. After surviving the river, she had started reconstructing her own history—not just who she had been, but where she had come from. She started at the National Archives, where she found a reference to the document at Scotland Yard that recorded the actual identity of her great-great-grandfather. Then she went to the exhibit at the Marylebone Grand Hotel. And there it was, all laid out in front of her—the murder letter from the original Redgil, the founder’s document for the hotel, showing the same signature as on the incriminating letter; and the war photograph, showing where her great-grandfather had died—and who was around him when it happened.”
“There’s a good lesson there for family dynasties,” said Laura. “If you start your corporate empire by torturing and murdering someone, be sure to advise your descendants not to brag about it later.”
“Yes,” said Nigel. “But unfortunately, at the same time that Darla Rennie was discovering the documents exhibited at the hotel, the hotel security chief was discovering her. She’d been there too often, and too conspicuously, and that made Redfern realize that they had actually put evidence of a murder on display. So Redfern’s security man tracked Darla Rennie to Canvey Island, found out where she lived, and went there intending no doubt to retrieve the incriminating signed document she had stolen—or perhaps to do worse. But Cheeverton came back to the house early, surprised him there—and got killed for his trouble. And I think Dr. Miner had a similar encounter at the institute, although we’ll have to wait for O’Shea’s report on that. But we know that Redfern’s security man has been trailing Darla Rennie all the while she has been in pursuit of Redfern—and I think he was just as willing to kill as his employer.”
There was silence for a moment.
Then Laura said, “We’re lucky, I suppose, that Darla Rennie switched from avenging a fictional ancestor to avenging her real ones.”
Reggie put the bundled documents back into the Scotland Yard evidence box.
“When she found the letter from Scotland Yard about who her great-great-grandfather really was, I suspect that had a positive effect on her,” said Reggie. “But when she saw the murderous letter that Redgil wrote to Sherlock Holmes—well, that was another matter.”
“One needs to be careful about the past,” said Laura. “We all get at least one clean slate.”
Nigel closed the box.
“I suppose Wembley will be getting anxious,” said Nigel. “How about Aunt Mabel and I deal with him now, and leave you two alone for a bit?”
33
Several hours later, sometime well after midnight was Nigel’s guess, but nowhere near a reasonable hour in the morning, it became necessary to determine whether the rumors about lack of plumbing on the third floor were in fact true. Too much brandy, possibly, or too much water chaser as an afterthought.
He got up out of bed and took a look around.
Yes, it was true. The choices were either a chamber pot or go downstairs one level to the shared loo on the second floor.
And tired as he was, Nigel was not going to use the chamber pot.
He stumbled out the door and into the corridor. He had a rough idea which direction to take, at least, and he took it.
Several wrong turns later, and then finally a correct one, he found the shared loo—or someone’s loo, anyway—made use of it, and then headed back in search of his own room.
He was in the corridor now that overlooked the grand ballroom. Or else it was
the
ballroom; he wasn’t sure there was actually more than one. But a ballroom was what it was.
Nigel heard a sound. He looked down into the ballroom.
There was a high turret window overhead, letting in moonlight that was finally shining unimpeded. In the ballroom, it shone on two figures, wrapped closely together, dancing, so slowly that the motion was almost imperceptible, in silence.
Laura’s eyes were closed, her head resting on Reggie’s chest. Reggie stood as tall and relaxed as Nigel had ever seen him.
Nigel nodded in the affirmative, and then continued on. He had a plane to catch in the morning.
A
LSO BY
M
ICHAEL
R
OBERTSON
The Baker Street Translation
The Brothers of Baker Street
The Baker Street Letters
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL ROBERTSON works for a large company with branches in the United States and England. The previous three books in this series,
The Baker Street Letters, The Brothers of Baker Street,
and
Baker Street Translation,
were also published by Minotaur/Thomas Dunne Books. He lives in Southern California.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group
MORIARTY RETURNS A LETTER.
Copyright © 2014 by Michael Robertson. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein and James Iacobelli
Cover photo illustration by Hugh Syme
e-ISBN 9781466840560
First Edition: January 2014