He set the bags down in front of his door. One key opened the cheap lock the landlord had installed. Another drew back the much sturdier deadbolt Bushell had paid for when he moved into the flat. He plopped the bags down by the door, closed it, and locked both locks. Only then did he reach up and yank the chain on the ceiling lamp near the doorway.
The furnished flat was astringently neat: a soldier’s housekeeping, not a woman’s. Everything was exactly and obviously where it belonged, and it belonged where it was for a reason that was practical, not decorative. The coffee table in front of the sofa and the end table by it were bare and clean, as if waiting to be shown to a prospective new tenant.
Only a wireless receiver, a phonogram, and several bookcases gave the room any individuality. They all belonged to Bushell; he’d brought them into the flat. The bookcases were bare of ornamental gewgaws. The books in them were grouped by subject (police work; militaria; history; half a shelf of Greek and Latin classics from his university days; the works of Pope, Swift, Defoe, and Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson filling out that shelf; a few modern historical novels) and alphabetically by author within each subject.
Bushell opened the suitcases. He put soiled clothes in a duffel bag he kept in the hall closet. Tomorrow no, later today, it was - he would take them to the cleaning establishment around the corner. He stripped off his dress uniform, folded tunic and trousers, and set them in the carpetbag he would take to headquarters come the dawn. The RAMs had their own cleaning establishment for such articles of dress. He laid his sword by the bag.
Undershirt, shorts, and socks went into the duffel bag. The pyjamas he pulled from a dresser drawer in his bedroom were folded as precisely as if they, like his dress uniform, were liable to be inspected without warning.
All the patent medicines on the glass shelves below the bathroom mirror also stood in ranks at attention. He reached for his toothbrush and the red-and-white tin of tooth powder, then drew back his hand. Barefoot, he padded back out to the kitchen. The liquor bottles in the pantry above the sink were lined up in a row. He poured a hefty dollop of Jameson into a tumbler, drank it down, replaced the bottle, washed the glass, dried it, and put it away. Then he brushed his teeth, set the loudly ticking alarm clock on the nightstand by the bed, and settled down for three hours’ sleep. The telephone rang. He jerked bolt upright in bed. He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. He did know it hadn’t been long. He groped for the telephone with one hand and the nightstand lamp with the other. A call at this time of night had to be important: Sir Martin Luther King, Sir Horace . . .
“Hullo? Bushell here,” he said in a voice that sounded much like his own.
“Good morning, Colonel Bushell.” Whoever was on the other end of the line, he sounded indecently cheerful for the hour. That meant he was a reporter. Reporters thought they could call anyone at any time for any reason. They had stories to write, after all. “This is Ted McKenzie of the New Liverpool Ledger. I wonder if you could give me a brief statement on the murder of Tricky Dick” - he used the Steamer King’s unflattering nickname with relish - ”and the theft of The Two Georges.”
“I can give you a very brief statement: go to hell.” Bushell slammed the handset down on the hook.
“Newshounds,” he muttered. He turned off the light and lay down on his back, hands clasped behind his head. His heart was still pounding in his chest from being jolted out of exhausted sleep. He breathed slowly and deeply, trying to calm himself. Initial startlement faded, but not the anger at Ted McKenzie’s gall. He wondered how long he would need to fall asleep now.
He was still awake fifteen minutes later when the phone rang again. This time it was a reporter from the North American Broadcasting Corporation. Like McKenzie, she put the accent in Bushell’s name on the first syllable, as if it were bushel. He declined to give her a statement, too, though in more temperate terms than he’d used with the fellow from the Ledger. When he hung up after that second call, he felt more resigned than furious. This was the biggest story in the NAU for years. The bright glow of publicity wouldn’t make investigating any easier, either. He wished he could do something about that, and knew he couldn’t.
The real sun would be rising too soon. Bushell turned out the bedside lamp, flipped over onto his side, and did his best to sleep. In his army days, he’d had a knack for dropping off whenever he got the chance. Somewhere, over the years, he’d mislaid it.
Even had he found it, it wouldn’t have done him much good. The telephone rang twice more in the waning hours of the night: a reporter from the New Liverpool Citizen-Journal and another from the Toronto American. “I’ll schedule a press conference for this afternoon.” Bushell said at last, yielding to the inevitable.
Thanks to the interruptions, he’d had a bit more than an hour’s sleep when the alarm clock went off beside his head like a bomb. Groggily, he picked up the telephone. “Bushell.” Only when the clock kept on clattering did he realize what it was and turn it off.
He got into the bathtub and stood under a cold shower for as long as he could bear it. Emerging with the shivers and chattering teeth, he shaved, dressed, and went into the kitchen. He had tea canisters in the same neat row as his liquor bottles - Earl Grey, Lapsang Souchong, Irish Breakfast, vintage Darjeeling, blackcurrant. He ignored them all and made himself a pot of coffee with twice as much of the ground bean as he normally would have used. While it was brewing, he cut two slices from the loaf of egg bread on the counter by the stove, toasted them, and spread them with orange marmalade. He washed down each slice with a large, black cup of the snarling coffee.
Thus fortified, he picked up the carpetbag and his ceremonial sword and went out to face the day.
III
Long before he got to the RAM headquarters in downtown New Liverpool, Bushell knew what sort of day it would be. Newsboys on every other street corner waved papers with screaming headlines. The big one was always the same, regardless of the daily: TWO GEORGES STOLEN! The number of exclamation points following the head did vary, from none in the staid New Liverpool Tory to four in the Citizen-Journal.
Subheads also varied. SHAME! cried one. Another wailed, MONSTROUS CRIME! And a third declared, THE EMPIRE MOURNS! Some mentioned the Steamer King’s demise (only the Citizen-journal called him Tricky Dick, while the headline man for the Ledger was clever enough to link his murder to the theft of The Two Georges), while others went on talking about the theft itself. The newsboys were doing a land-office business. Men and women crowded round them, pressing shillings into their hands. Several of the boys sold every copy they had and stood disconsolate, waiting for a steam lorry to bring them more from their paper’s printing plant. Bushell stopped and bought a copy of every newspaper. Reporters were detectives of a sort; he’d often heard things from them that he hadn’t been able to find out for himself. But each new inky-smelling daily he tossed onto the front seat of his steamer was also a fresh goad to get the painting back. In spite of his stops, Bushell pulled into the RAM carpark at five minutes to eight, as usual. He nodded to the men coming in to work with him, and to the night workers leaving their shift. Few greeted him in return, and no one seemed to know what to say.