The Glenister Papers, page 11
"Quite." Harry’s mouth was grim. "If Martinez had learned who the Goshawk was and was going to expose him to the French, that might have led allies of the Goshawk’s—or the Goshawk himself—to kill him. Harder to see why those same people would attack Annabel now. Not when she’d been working against Martinez herself." Harry’s gaze went to their daughters. Jessica was trying to make one of the doll hats stay on her own head. Drusilla was giggling. "I’ll talk to Josefina. If she’s performing tonight, I suppose that means going to Vauxhall. God, the places our work takes us. I haven’t been to see her enough. Though I’ve seen her more than Annabel. Less guilt, perhaps, about the way I had Josefina spying for me."
Malcolm frowned. "You’re right about Rachel. My using her to spy for me is little different from your work with Annabel. I suppose if I thought about it at all—which I didn’t, not nearly enough— I told myself she was deceiving paid clients, not men with whom she had a personal relationship."
"Henri Rivaux started out as a paid client. Now he’s her husband. Sandy Trenor and Bet Simcox started out that way."
"You’re right. I was focused on the immediate objective."
"As one has to be, on the eve of battle. And you didn’t yet know Mélanie was spying on you."
Malcolm met his gaze. "That’s why I love you, Davenport. Ruthless honesty."
"I’ve heard you do the same yourself."
"The only way to confront such a situation. And yes, knowing the truth about Mel does make me view things differently. But it doesn’t change the fact that I was having Rachel gather intelligence doing something I wouldn’t do myself." Malcolm frowned at his hands. "I hate the idea of human relationships being manipulated."
Harry stretched an arm along the back of the bench. "I wouldn’t have claimed it as a virtue, but I suppose I can at least say I wasn’t asking Annabel to do anything I hadn’t done myself." He regarded Malcolm for a moment. "I assume you know that."
"I don’t make assumptions. But, yes, I’m not surprised."
Harry shrugged. "It's a tool of spycraft. Part of the challenge. Part of the allure. Though I don't expect you to understand that."
Malcolm watched his friend in the shadows of the overhanging branches. "So sure we're different?"
"In some ways. I don't think you ever gave up on humanity to the extent I did."
Malcolm gave a short laugh. His gaze went to his daughter as he thought of the man he had been and the wonder of the man he was now. "Speak for yourself, Davenport. Don't you think it took an overall bleak outlook to work for Carfax?"
"I think you were always trying to make a difference. Long after I was reduced to playing a game. In some ways, not so different from the games my wife was playing at home. And I think disillusionment and restlessness had a lot to do with it for me, as well as for Cordy."
"Which is another way of saying you were far more clear-sighted about what we were doing."
"Perhaps. But I went on doing it." He shot a look at Malcolm. "I’ll even confess to missing it at times."
Malcolm met his friend’s gaze. "So will I. Mostly out of Mel's hearing. Because I know how much she's missing it herself."
"You held on to more of your integrity than most of us, Malcolm."
Malcolm shifted his position on the bench. "Or, in other words, I wasn't as good an agent."
"You were a brilliant agent. But I don't think you could have supported it without losing your humanity. We all came dangerously close to losing our humanity. Perhaps O'Roarke more than any of us."
"And he's still an agent." Malcolm stared at the shifting leaves overhead. "Which, I suppose, means it's an active question how much of his humanity he's managed to hold on to."
"It's different now."
Malcolm swung round to look at Harry. The confirmed cynic. Who Malcolm sometimes thought was the greatest romantic of all of them. "Is it? Or does it just seem that way because we’re off the front lines?"
"O’Roarke isn’t hiding behind a pose of detachment anymore."
"No. We know how much that detachment was a smokescreen." Malcolm had called his father a fraud in his attempts to appear uncaring. "And I’ve tired of people telling me I don’t know him and can’t trust him. But it doesn’t change the fact that he’s facing muddied decisions every day."
Harry scraped a boot toe over the gound with uncharacteristic discomfort. "There’s something else about the Martinez business. Martinez was working with the Cantabrian guerrilleros. From some of the dispatches Annabel copied, and I decoded, it seems his handler was working with that band of guerrilleros as well."
Malcolm stared at his friend. "You think Martinez was reporting to O’Roarke."
"I didn’t at the time. I didn’t know Raoul was a French agent at the time. But putting together the pieces in retrospect, I’m quite sure."
Jessica’s voice, singing her own version of the Queen of the Night’s aria, carried on the breeze. Some things seemed so inevitable, why did he never expect to confront them? "I’ve known Carfax to get rid of troublesome assets without a blink," Malcolm said. "I’d be a fool not to think O’Roarke did the same."
"I’d say you’d be a fool not to realize there’s a lot Carfax would do that O’Roarke wouldn’t, based on what we know now. Still, if O’Roarke had learned we were on to Martinez, he’d have had to realize Martinez would pose a danger to his other assets."
"To Mel."
"Quite. And to the cause. I could imagine O’Roarke moving against him. It doesn’t mean he did. Though, if he was behind Martinez’s death, I can’t see his being behind the attack on Annabel."
"Nor can I," Malcolm said. He could be almost certain of that. Almost. "And then we have Raimundo O’Roarke's showing up right after she was attacked."
"That hardly casts suspicion on Raoul. As I understand it, he hasn’t been on speaking terms with his family for years."
"No. But it’s part of a puzzle I’m damned if I can make sense of."
"How much does Mrs. Ashford know?" Harry asked, voice carefully neutral.
"About Annabel? More than she’s telling, I think. She’s never really explained her source for Annabel's having information about the Goshawk. But I think she’s telling the truth that she didn’t know Annabel well. She wanted Mel’s and my help talking to her."
Harry watched him for a moment. "It goes without saying that I’m here to listen if you ever need it. I confess, though, that for all the experiences we’ve shared, it’s uncharted territory for me."
"What?"
"Confronting the ghost of a first love. No, I suppose that’s not true. I did, in Brussels. But I didn’t have to worry about what my wife thought. Given that my wife and my first love are one and the same."
Chapter 11
Kitty, Mélanie had to admit, was excellent with the children. She pulled out a book of fairy tales and read to them and had even Catherine laughing as she did various voices and added fanciful embroidered details.
"Children are resilient," Roth said, as he and Mélanie left the schoolroom where the children were with Kitty and Miss Bentley.
"Wonderfully so. They'll manage if their mother recovers. If she doesn't—" Mélanie frowned down the passage. Scenes from her own childhood danced in her memory. "One learns to cope. But the scars remain."
Roth nodded. He was raising his own sons without their mother. But losing both parents was very different from losing one.
"There's little more to be learned here today, I think," he said. "I've questioned all the household, and we've searched thoroughly. But I'll stay until the guards Malcolm engaged arrive." He hesitated a moment, gaze going to the door of Annabel's bedchamber. "One gets to know a victim in the course of an investigation. So often I'm filled with regret that I couldn't do more. To have the victim alive, and in danger, gives one hope. And adds to the fear of failing."
"You're not the sort who fails, Jeremy."
"We all do, sometimes. Difficult to untangle the threads of an investigation. Sometimes the pieces aren't there."
They moved to the stairhead and started down the stairs to hear voices from the passage below. Bridget and Gregory and a woman's voice Mélanie didn't recognize. Mélanie and Roth reached the first-floor landing to find a tall woman in a lavender traveling pelisse and bonnet standing with Bridget and Gregory. "But I don't understand. Annabel just—"
She broke off and looked up at Mélanie and Roth as they descended the last of the stairs. She had blue eyes and light brown hair and delicate features that bore a marked resemblance to Annabel's own. "Who are you and what's happened to my sister?"
Bridget's gaze darted to Mélanie. "Mrs. Durbridge. Mrs. Larimer's sister. " It wasn't usual for servants to introduce the upper orders to each other, but convention had fallen by the wayside, as so often happened in investigations. "Mrs. Rannoch and Inspector Roth."
"I've just come from Shropshire," Mrs. Durbridge said. "I hear my sister is ill? There's a doctor here?"
"I'm afraid your sister was attacked," Mélanie said. "I'm so sorry, there's no way to say this easily, but we have every hope she will recover. Perhaps we could go into the sitting room. Bridget—"
"I'll make more tea," Bridget said.
"The children—" Mrs. Durbridge took a step towards the stairs.
"They're fine," Mélanie assured her. "They're upstairs with Miss Bentley."
As they moved to the sitting room, Roth exchanged a quick look with Mélanie, ceding it to her to tell the story. A matter of both class and gender, perhaps. Mrs. Durbridge sat bolt upright on the edge of the settee and listened in silence, blue eyes wide with shock, straight brows knotted with concentration. "Dear God. Someone broke into the house—"
"Your sister may have let the attacker in," Roth said. "Though he—we believe it to be a man—appears to have jumped from the sitting room window."
"So you think it was someone she knew." Mrs. Durbridge gripped her hands, still gloved, tightly together in her lap. Her voice held a note of horror, but not, somehow, the shock Mélanie would have expected.
"Do you know if your sister had any enemies?" Mélanie said.
It was a usual question of relatives in an investigation and usually met with flat denial, even if the person in question had in fact had a number of enemies. But Mrs. Durbridge's brows drew tighter together. She pulled off her gloves and then reached up to tug loose the ribbons on her bonnet. "I came to London because I had a letter from Annabel. I don't make the journey often. My husband is a vicar, and there are so many things to be done in the parish, fêtes and bazaars and visits to the hospital. And if it's not that, one of our four children always seems to be recovering from an illness or sprains an ankle or breaks an arm."
"I only have two," Mélanie said. "But I know precisely what you mean."
Mrs. Durbridge lifted her bonnet from her head. She had honey brown hair, several shades paler than Annabel's, and smooth where Annabel's was wavy. "Our youngest is getting over the mumps, but my husband insisted I come when I got Annabel's letter last week. She asked me to promise Tom and I would look after the children should anything happen to her."
Mélanie exchanged a quick glance with Roth. "Did she say why?"
"No. It was so odd. Annabel was always a very sensible person, for all she's much more adventurous than I am. When Philip died she didn't seem particularly concerned about the children only having one parent left. I couldn't make out if she was ill or feared some danger, but Tom and I agreed something was wrong and I needed to talk to her. If I'd come sooner—"
"People always say that when there's a tragedy." Mélanie leaned across the tea table to put a hand on Mrs. Durbridge's arm. "One can never know what might have happened. The important thing is you're here now. And we have every hope that your sister will recover. We need to learn who did this to prevent any further danger to her or her children."
"Yes, but—"
Mrs. Durbridge broke off as Bridget came in with the tea. She asked Mélanie to pour and then took a grateful sip of the sugar-laced tea Mélanie gave her. "Annabel could always take care of herself. I used to tell myself that, which was reassuring because she would take risks I never would, from climbing the trees in Mr. McTavish's orchard to slipping into one of the squire's parties uninvited to going off to Lisbon in the midst of a war. I always suspected more than half the reason she married Philip was because he was a soldier and offered a life of adventure." She bit her lip.
"It's all right," Mélanie said. "It's the sort of detail we need to know. And you must know your sister better than anyone."
"Not really." Mrs. Durbridge curled her hands round her cup. "I mean, when we were girls I suppose we were confidantes, in a way. We were the only two in the nursery and schoolroom, after all. But it's more than ten years since she married Philip and went to live abroad. And even when they returned to England, we didn't see them that much. They were in London and we were in Shropshire. We wrote regularly, but our lives were so different. Annabel and I were always so different. I used to think it was because our mothers —" She broke off.
"Mrs. Larimer is your half-sister?" Mélanie said in the silence that followed.
"No." Mrs. Durbridge set her cup down, as though suddenly afraid it might burn her. "From my earliest memories she was my sister. We shared a nursery, the world knew us as sisters. We called our parents Mama and Papa. I was fifteen before I learned the truth, and I've trained myself not to speak of it. And in truth, I told myself it didn't matter. That Annabel was my sister in every way that counted. But I think you need to know. Because it could have something to do with whatever's happened to her." She clasped her hands in her lap. "Mama told us when I was fifteen and Annabel fourteen. Annabel was actually the daughter of my mother's cousin Catherine. Neither of us had ever met Catherine, because she had died young, but we knew she and my mother had been very close, almost like sisters. She always referred to her cousin as our Aunt Cathy. Aunt Cathy had made a very advantageous marriage to a young barrister with prospects. He received a knighthood before they had been long married. She died only a few years later. What we didn't know was that she had died in childbirth." Mrs. Durbridge hesitated a moment. "She already had three children, but this baby was not her husband's."
Mrs. Durbridge clasped her hands together. Her fingers closed on her own wedding band. "It's a common enough story. She had an unfortunate indiscretion and the baby could not possibly be her husband's. She went away to have the baby in secret. My mother went with her, with the plan for Mama to bring back the baby as her own. Which she did. She said Papa knew about the plan, and they both thought of Annabel as their daughter from the moment she was born."
"Did your mother know who Annabel's biological father was?" Mélanie asked.
"No. At least she told Annabel and me she didn't know, though there was money he had provided for her, which Annabel came into on her twenty-first birthday. When Mama told us the story, Annabel was quite grown up about it and said his identity didn't matter because she knew who her father was. Later I asked her if she really meant that. She said she knew who her real parents were and she hoped I didn't mind sharing them. To which I said, 'Rot, of course you're my sister.' Then Annabel said she was sorry she hadn't met the woman who gave birth to her, but she didn't think much of a man who got a young woman with child and abandoned her, so perhaps it was as well she didn't know the man who had fathered her. We didn't talk about it much after that. Mama made it clear we weren't to speak of it outside the family. She didn't want gossip to hurt Annabel's prospects. Once, a couple of years later, when Annabel was having one of her rebellious moments, Annabel said perhaps she was more like her biological parents than anyone credited. But even then I don't think she really was trying to find her father. She never asked any questions that I knew of."
"What about her mother's husband?" Mélanie asked. "How much did he know?"
"According to my mother, he didn't know any of it," Mrs. Durbridge said. She drew a sharp breath. "She said he was busy with his work and thought Aunt Cathy and Mama had gone off to the country. He went on to a very distinguished career. He's chief justice of the common pleas now."
"Sir William Collingwood," Mélanie said. "I didn't realize."
"He's in London and moves in different circles from us, but we saw him occasionally growing up. He remarried after Aunt Cathy died and has quite a large family, but his three older children are our cousins." Mrs. Durbridge drew a breath. "Though, of course, they're actually Annabel's brothers and sister."
"Do they know the truth?" Mélanie asked.
"No. At least Mama said they didn't, and they've never given any indication that they do. Annabel said she couldn't think of them as anything but cousins."
"Was anyone in your aunt's biological family left who might know about Mrs. Larimer's parentage?" Roth asked. "Parents, siblings?"
Mrs. Durbridge reached for her tea. "Aunt Cathy's mother—Annabel's grandmother—had died when Aunt Cathy was young. Her father was still alive when Annabel was born, but not by the time Annabel learned the truth. Aunt Cathy had one brother, our Uncle Clarence. Mama said he didn't know about Annabel. Annabel said he already felt like our uncle so it didn't really make a difference. I did once or twice catch her asking him more about Aunt Cathy. But from his manner on answering her, I'd swear he didn't know. Doesn't know."
"Do you have any reason to think she might have been wondering about her father more recently?" Mélanie asked.
Mrs. Durbridge's brows drew together. "No. She hasn't said anything about it. But then, I hadn't seen her since July. Do you think her parentage has something to do with why she was attacked?"
"You did," Mélanie said. "It's why you told us."
Mrs. Durbridge took a quick sip of tea. "It's a secret. The one secret I knew Annabel had."
"Were there others you suspected but weren't sure of?" Mélanie asked.
Mrs. Durbridge's shoulders straightened, pulling at the seams of her pelisse. "That's an odd question. Why should I suspect my sister had secrets?'
