“Is it?” Bushell said. “Eustace Venable didn’t think so. Do you want to tell me about your dealings with him?”
He hoped Stanage would be furious enough to do just that. But the brewing magnate said, “I wouldn’t tell you my name without my solicitor present.”
“Good to hear someone knows it,” Bushell murmured, which set Stanage spluttering anew. It was not an informative sort of spluttering; after a minute or so, Bushell stopped listening to it. A call came floating down the stairwelclass="underline" “We’ve started up here on the first floor, sir. All sorts of lovely things to take apart and paw through.” Bushell glanced at Phineas Stanage. The man’s cheeks and forehead were noticeably redder than they had been when he first reached his home. Would he fall down in a fit of apoplexy? Bushell wouldn’t have missed him, but he stayed resolutely - and irately - upright. Sure enough, when Bushell went upstairs he found Sam Stanley and a couple of other RAMs tossing clothes out of Stanage’s closets and going through the papers in three tall oak filing cabinets. Kathleen had joined the sport, too. The cabinets had presumably been locked before the RAMs got to them, but any search team brought along someone gifted in the art of making locked things open.
“Anything juicy?” Bushell asked in hopeful tones.
Stanley made a sour face. “We haven’t found anything yet. I don’t care for his politics, I don’t care for the people he associates with” - he gestured toward some of the file folders strewn on the floor to show how he’d drawn his conclusions about those - “but nothing out-and-out illegal, not yet.”
“I don’t know about that.” A local RAM held up a copy of the scurrilous pamphlet about the imperial princesses that Titus Hackett and Franklin Mansfield had printed in New Liverpool - paid for with Russian roubles, Bushell remembered. “If this isn’t obscene, what is?”
Regretfully, Bushell shrugged. “I don’t know, Captain, but a jury decided that it wasn’t.”
The local RAM rolled his eyes. “Juries do strange things sometimes.” Every RAM in the room nodded solemn agreement to that.
Phineas Stanage came clumping up the stairs. He clapped a melodramatic hand to his forehead. “Good God! The minions of the Grand Inquisitor in Madrid couldn’t do worse than this!”
“You’re wrong in two particulars,” Bushell answered. “Inquisitors wouldn’t bother with a warrant, and they’d take you apart at the same time as they would the house.”
“Only a barbarian, a Cossack, would boast that something could be worse,” Stanage retorted. One of the RAMs searching on the ground floor knocked something over with a crash. Stanage groaned and dashed down there to find out what the newest catastrophe was.
Kathleen Flannery pointed to the file cabinets. “Do those drawers come out?” she asked. “He might have hidden something behind one of them.”
“Next item on the agenda, ma’am,” a RAM said, and whipped out a long-shanked screwdriver. He attacked the file cabinets, one after the other. Out came the drawers. He set them on the floor, none too gently. Then he peered into each cabinet, shining a little electric touch to make sure he missed nothing. “If he has stashed anything away, he didn’t do it here,” he said in disappointed tones.
“Who says he didn’t?” Kathleen reached out and plucked free a folded sheet of paper that had been taped to the back of one of the drawers. With a flourish, she presented it to Bushell. The gleam in her eyes said she had a sharp comeback waiting for Lieutenant General Sir Horace Bragg.
“Well, well, what have we here?” Bushell said. The other RAMs and Kathleen crowded round to see what they had there. Bushell unfolded the paper, holding it at arm’s length so he could read whatever message it contained. That message, eight typewritten characters’ worth, did not make immediate sense: HM 1608 DC
“What the devil does that mean?” asked the RAM who’d dismantled the file cabinets.
“I can figure out part of it, I think,” Kathleen said. Everyone looked at her. She colored a little, but went on, “His Majesty is coming to Victoria on the sixteenth of this month - the sixteenth of August - isn’t he?”
“So he is,” Bushell said, nodding approvaclass="underline" three fourths of the riddle solved in one fell swoop.
“Nicely done,” Samuel Stanley agreed, just as quietly. At the praise from him, Kathleen’s face lit up like a sunrise. It brightened even further when the RAM with the screwdriver clapped his hands together twice. She could pull her weight here, and was proving it to everyone. Bushell stared at the last two characters, the ones Kathleen hadn’t deciphered. In a musing voice, he went on, “We have what. We have when. What does that leave?” He often used Sam for a sounding board; now he noticed he was talking to Sam and Kathleen both. Before either of them could speak, he answered his own question: “Who was sending the message, maybe.”
“Who’s DC?” Kathleen asked.
“Haven’t you ever heard of Defore Christ?” asked the RAM with the screwdriver. Kathleen gave him a disgusted look. Bushell didn’t blame her, but saw something she missed: the banter meant the RAMs had accepted her as one of their own.
And, with a light like the sun breaking through on a cloudy day, he knew who DC might be. Without another word, he folded the paper again and put it in his inside coat pocket. He wondered if Captain Patricia Oliver could match the typewriter on which the message had been produced. If she couldn’t, he’d suggest some possible comparisons.
Samuel Stanley nudged him. “You don’t think - ?” He stopped, his eyes widening. “You do think.”
“Do you know what, Sam?” Bushell said. “I hope I’m wrong.” That surprised him. For years, he would have liked nothing better than to see Sir David Clarke held up to public obloquy. Now that the chance appeared before him, he found it was liable to cost more than it was worth. Betraying your sovereign was a much darker business than stealing another man’s wife. He didn’t want to imagine even Clarke capable of it.
Kathleen realized who DC might be a few seconds after Bushell and Stanley. “I hope you’re wrong, too, Tom,” she said, “for - for everyone’s sake.”
“For everyone’s sake, I’m going to arrest Mr. Phineas Stanage,” Bushell said. “We’ll see what questioning him back at RAM headquarters will get us.”
When Stanage found out he would have to go with the RAMs, he put on a display of cursing that made his previous efforts sound uninspired. Bushell showed him the paper that had led to his arrest. “You are an idiot, a cretin, a moron, a one hundred percent unadulterated jackass,” Stanage boomed. “That, if you must know, is the password I have to furnish at the Bank of London, Victoria, and Alexandria to gain access to my safety-deposit box. My solicitor can arrange to prove that for you. He can also arrange a suit for false arrest, and I have no doubt that he shall.”
“You’ll come along with us anyhow,” Bushell answered, which produced more bravura blasphemies from Stanage. Inside, though, Bushell worried. Bank records were hard to alter, and he’d never heard of the Bank of London, Victoria, and Alexandria’s being connected to the Sons of Liberty. On the contrary: it was, so far as he knew, a solid, conservative financial institution.
“Don’t let it bother you, Chief,” Sam Stanley said as they drove back to RAM headquarters. “Let him sue all he likes. There’ll be enough in those papers of his to keep him in hot water for years.” He sounded as if he relished the prospect.
“I know,” Bushell answered. “But there’s one particular kind of hot water I want him to be in.” He looked at the sheet Kathleen had found, then shook his head. “No, no one would believe this didn’t have something to do with The Two Georges, not even a judge ... I hope.”