It wasn’t a close friendship; one founded on a commonality of association, clubs, and political interests, rather than on personal affection. Still, if Hal had been looking for a discreet man to put on O’Connell’s trail, it would have been necessary to look outside the army—for who knew what alliances O’Connell had formed, both within the regiment and outside it? And so, evidently, Hal had spoken to his friend Trevelyan, who had recommended his own footman . . . and it was simply a matter of dreadful irony that he, Grey, should now be obliged to interfere in Trevelyan’s personal life.
Outside the Beefsteak, the doorman had procured a commercial carriage; Quarry was already into it, beckoning Grey impatiently.
“Come along, come along! I’m starving. We’ll go up to Kettrick’s, shall we? They do an excellent eel pie there. I could relish an eel pie, and perhaps a bucket or two of stout to go along. Wash the smoke down, what?”
Grey nodded, setting his hat on the seat beside him where it wouldn’t be crushed. Quarry stuck his head out the window and shouted up to the driver, then pulled it in and relapsed back onto the grimy squabs with a sigh.
“So,” Quarry went on, raising his voice slightly to be heard over the rattle and squeak of the carriage, “this man, Trevelyan’s footman—Byrd, his name is, Jack Byrd—he took up rooms across from the slammerkin O’Connell lived with. Been following the Sergeant to and fro, up and down London, for the past six weeks.”
Grey glanced out of the window; the weather had kept fine for several days, but was about to break. Thunder growled in the distance, and he could feel the coming rain in the air that chilled his face and freshened his lungs.
“What does this Byrd say occurred, then, the night that O’Connell was killed?”
“Nothing.” Quarry settled his wig more firmly on his head as a gust of moisture-laden wind swept through the carriage.
“He lost O’Connell?”
Quarry’s blunt features twisted wryly.
“No, we’ve lost Jack Byrd. Man hasn’t been seen or heard of since the night O’Connell was killed.”
The carriage was slowing, the driver chirruping to his team as they made the turn into the Strand. Grey settled his cloak about his shoulders and picked up his hat, in anticipation of their arrival.
“No sign of his body?”
“None. Which rather suggests that whatever happened to O’Connell, it wasn’t a simple brawl.”
Grey rubbed at his face, rasping the bristles on his jaw. He was hungry, and his linen was grimy after the day’s exertions. The clammy feel of it made him feel seedy and irritable.
“Which rather suggests that whatever happened wasn’t the fault of Scanlon, then—for why should he be concerned with Byrd?” He wasn’t sure whether to be pleased at this deduction or not. He knewthe apothecary had been lying to him in some way—but at the same time, he felt some sympathy for Mrs. O’Connell. She would be in a bad way if Scanlon was taken up for murder and hanged or transported—and a worse one, were she to be accused of conspiracy in the affair.
The opposite bench was harlequined with light and shadow as they clopped slowly past a group of flambeaux-men, lighting a party home. He saw Quarry shrug, obviously as irritable as he was himself from lack of food.
“If Scanlon had spotted Byrd following O’Connell, he might have put Byrd out of the way, as well—but why bother to hide it? A brawl might produce multiple bodies, easy as one. They often do, God knows.”
“But if it was someone else,” Grey said slowly, “someone who wanted O’Connell out of the way, either because he asked too much or because they feared he might give them away? . . .”
“The spymaster? Or his representative, at least. Could be. Again, though—why hide the body, if he did for Byrd, too?”
The alternative was obvious.
“He didn’t kill Byrd. He bought him off.”
“Damn likely. Directly I heard of O’Connell’s death, I sent a man to search the place he was living, but he didn’t find a thing. And Stubbs had a good look round the widow’s place, as well, while you were there—but not a bean, he says. Not a paper in the place.”
He’d seen Stubbs poking round as he made arrangements for the payment of O’Connell’s pension to his widow, but had paid no particular attention at the time. It was true, though; Mrs. O’Connell’s room was spartan in its furnishing, completely lacking in books or papers of any kind.
“What were they searching for?”
The bearlike growl that emerged from the shadows in reply might have been Quarry, or merely his stomach giving voice to its hunger.
“Don’t know for sure what it might look like,” Quarry admitted reluctantly. “It will be writing of some kind, though.”
“You don’t know? What sort of thing is it—or am I not allowed to know that?”
Quarry eyed him, fingers drumming slowly on the seat beside him. Then he shrugged; official discretion be damned, evidently.
“Just before we came back from France, O’Connell took the ordnance requisitions into Calais. He was late—all the other regiments had turned in their papers days before. The damn fool clerk had left the lot just sitting on his desk, if you can believe it! Granted, the office was locked, but still . . .”
Returning from a leisurely luncheon, the clerk had discovered the door forced, the desk ransacked—and every scrap of paper in the office gone.
“I shouldn’t have thought one man could carry the amount of paper to be found in an office of that sort,” Grey said, half-joking.
Quarry flipped one hand, impatient.
“It was a clerk’s hole, not the office proper. Nothing else there was important—but the quarterly ordnance requisitions for every British regiment between Calais and Prague! . . .”
Grey pursed his lips, nodding in acknowledgment. It was a serious matter. Information on troop movements and disposition was highly sensitive, but such plans could be changed, if it became known that the intelligence had fallen into the wrong hands. The munitions requirements for a regiment could not be altered—and the sum total of that information would tell an enemy almost to the gun what strength and what weaponry each regiment possessed.
“Even so,” he objected. “It must have been a massive amount of paper. Not the sort of thing a man could easily conceal about his person.”
“No, it would have taken a large rucksack, or a sail bag—something of that sort—to cart it all away. But cart it away someone did.”
The alarm had been raised promptly, of course, and a search instigated, but Calais was a medieval warren of a place, and nothing had been found.
“Meanwhile, O’Connell disappeared—quite properly; he was given three days’ leave when he took the requisitions in. We hunted for him; found him on the second day, smelling of drink and looking as though he hadn’t slept for the whole of the time.”
“Which would be quite as usual.”
“Yes, it would. But that’s also what you’d expect a man to look like who’d sat up for two days and nights in a hired room, making a prйcis of that mass of paper and turning it into something a good bit smaller and more portable—feeding the requisitions into the fire as he went.”
“So they weren’t ever found? The originals?”
“No. We watched O’Connell carefully; he had no chance to pass on the information to anyone after that—and we think it unlikely that he handed it on before we found him.”
“Because now he’s dead—and because Jack Byrd has disappeared.”