No answer.
She glanced back at Scarbright, who nodded, gave a strained smile, and motioned for her to enter. She turned the handle and stepped over the threshold, peering around for any sign of Newbury.
She couldn’t see him. She stepped further into the room and was assaulted by the cloying odour of stale smoke. She wrinkled her nose in distaste. She had to admit, however, that the place looked tidier than it had in months. Scarbright had obviously managed to get inside long enough to tidy away the spoiled food and crockery, the empty teapots, the overflowing ashtrays and abandoned wine bottles. He’d even managed to run a duster around the mantelpiece and draw back the curtains, allowing natural light to spill into the room for the first time in as long as Veronica could remember.
The room still bore the overbearing mark of its owner, however. Clutter filled every available nook and cranny. Books threatened to burst from the overstuffed shelves, and indeed had spilled out into piles on the armchairs and heaps upon the floor. Weird and wonderful objects lay scattered about the place: the cat skull on the mantel; an idol the size of a small child, with a staring, vacant expression on its stone face, a hole in its chest where its gemstone heart had once been; the clockwork owl he had inherited after one of his cases, silently regarding her from its perch above the dresser.
She moved over to peer at the divan where Newbury could often be found reclining in a state of repose during his opium-saturated episodes. Again, there was no sign of him.
Behind her, Scarbright pointedly cleared his throat. “If you’d like to take a seat, Miss Veronica? Sir Maurice is at work in his study. His instructions are such that he must not be disturbed under any circumstances. However, I will take steps to make him aware of your arrival, and I shall warm a pot of tea in the meanwhile.”
With a sigh of resignation, Veronica nodded, then dropped into one of the Chesterfields beside the fireplace, being careful not to upset a heap of papers by her feet. Scarbright slipped away, disappearing along the hallway towards the kitchen.
It was cold, and no flame burned in the grate. For a moment Veronica considered starting a fire, but then thought twice. Not because she was incapable-far from it-but because she didn’t want to disturb the heaped piles of ash and soot still in the grate and run the risk of covering herself and her dress in oily residue. Besides, with the amount of rare tomes piled up in the vicinity, she was wary of inadvertently destroying a precious relic with a stray ember, or worse, making a bonfire of Newbury’s entire collection. Most of them were irreplaceable. Indeed, the book of rituals stolen from the Cabal of the Horned Beast was not the only volume he’d gone to extreme lengths to obtain.
Veronica leaned back in her chair. The only sounds were the ticking of the carriage clock on the mantelpiece and Scarbright’s receding footsteps in the hall. She didn’t often find herself alone in Newbury’s habitat. This room, she thought, gave a measure of the man: intriguing, complicated, unpredictable. One never knew what one was going to discover.
She searched the coffee table for anything of interest. What had Newbury been busying himself with? Days-old newspapers with articles circled in heavy black ink; a notepad covered in his indecipherable scrawl; an ancient grimoire, two hundred years old at least, handwritten on vellum, with woodcuts depicting complex geometric patterns and the aspect of a goat-headed devil.
Close to these was another of Newbury’s particularly macabre totems-a human skull, hewn into a mask and covered in elaborate engravings, runes, and glyphs. Some of them were familiar to Veronica, but she had no idea of their actual meaning or purpose. The empty sockets stared back at her, and she felt herself shudder in dismay. Who had it once belonged to? How had Newbury acquired it? She supposed it was best not to know.
She reached for one of the newspapers, opened it, and dropped it across the skull mask so that she wouldn’t have to look at it any longer. The thing gave her the creeps.
Clearly Newbury wasn’t expecting her-and there was no reason he should be. His note, received earlier that morning, had suggested the three of them-Newbury, Sir Charles, and Veronica-should convene at Chelsea later that afternoon, but she had wanted to catch him early, to talk about Sir Charles and the Secret Service.
Ever since the business at the Crystal Palace the previous afternoon, she’d been mulling things over. The Prince of Wales had evidently been wrong about the Germans, or at least wrong in his suggestion that they were responsible for the gruesome series of killings that Newbury and Sir Charles-and, by extension, Veronica-were charged with investigating.
She’d considered that it was still possible the German agents were behind it, but she doubted they would have shown their hand so openly at the exhibition if this were the case. It was one thing to attempt to seize a search lamp from an exhibition hall. It was quite another to implicate themselves in the murder of four of the monarch’s personal agents. The Kaiser would fear the Queen’s reprisals and war they might precede. If he truly were waging a clandestine campaign against his grandmother, he would most likely have forgone his attempted acquisition of the weapon to avoid calling attention to his other interests in London.
Who did that leave? Well, they had very little left to go on. Someone who knew the Queen’s agents-or at least some of them-and someone who had a vested interest in undermining her power and weakening her grip. A rival organisation, perhaps, making a play for control? Veronica couldn’t help thinking that perhaps Newbury had been too hasty in his dismissal of the Queen’s assertion that the Secret Service was involved, too trusting of Angelchrist and his followers. What if he was wrong, and the Queen was right? The very thought of that spiteful woman being right made her cringe.
Sir Charles’s crime may only have been one of naivete, but his new associates might not have the same excuse.
She needed to discuss the matter with Newbury, to put her ideas, as well as his assumptions, to the test.
Veronica rubbed unconsciously at her bruised chin. She was aching all over. Her encounter with the giant birds the previous day had left her smarting and sore. They’d been able to despatch the second creature swiftly and efficiently once they’d convinced the driver of the steam-powered elephant to corner it with his machine. Following this, the two of them had made a swift exit from the scene. They might not have been able to disguise their presence at the exhibition, but hopefully they could disassociate themselves from the events that had taken place there for the prying eyes that were even now filing reports to the Queen.
Newbury had insisted that Bainbridge could look after himself, and reported that he’d seen both Bainbridge and Angelchrist making a hasty retreat in the aftermath of the firefight. Of course, it would be down to Bainbridge in his role as chief inspector to attend to the scene and attempt to explain what had occurred. How he planned to extricate himself from the situation if challenged by the Queen was anyone’s guess.
Veronica glanced at the clock. It was nearing quarter to twelve. Could she risk disturbing Newbury? Surely, for her, he would make an exception?
She made a decision. While Scarbright was busy making tea in the kitchen, she would make her presence known to Newbury. She would not stand for being dismissed. Not this time. There were questions that needed answering.
She stood, crossed to the door, and glanced along the hall. There was no sign of Scarbright. She dashed across the hallway and took the stairs two at a time, running on her tiptoes so as not to alert the valet. He would follow his master’s word to the letter and attempt to keep her at bay while Newbury finished whatever it was he was up to in the study. Well, poppycock to that, she thought.