“That’ll be ten and sixpence, sir,” one of the brothers said. “Half a guinea, if you like.” He laughed. A fish-and-chips shop was hardly the sort of establishment where prices were quoted in guineas. Bushell doused the fish and chips in malt vinegar and spread salt over them from a big tin shaker. They burned his fingers through the newspaper. One of the stories that wrapped his fish was about The Two Georges. He was just as glad when spreading grease made it illegible. He ate quickly, gulped yet another cup of coffee, wiped his hands on a brown paper serviette, and headed for his car, well enough pleased with his luncheon. Had the brothers’ shop been downtown rather than in this backwater, he thought, they would have been well on their way to being wealthy men. The breeze had picked up while Bushell was eating. The Independence Party flag flapped loudly on its pole. He gave it one last scowl as he turned up the burner and headed back toward the office. When he got there, he went straight to Major Gordon Rhodes’s office. As he’d expected, he found Rhodes and Sam Stanley there. The major was a few years younger than Bushell, on the chunky side, with blond hair and a face as florid as Morton Johnston’s, but scholarly rather than bluff. From somewhere, Rhodes had commandeered a big table and spread a sheet of white butcher paper over it, holding the paper down at the corners with knickknacks from his bookshelves. He’d used a yardstick to rule the paper into small squares. As Bushell came in, he was asking Stanley, “Who’s next?”
Stanley turned the page on one of the notebooks he and Bushell had used the night before to interrogate the people at the governor’s mansion. “Malcolm Desmond,” he answered.
“Very good.” Rhodes ran his finger down the names written in the left-hand cells until he came to Desmond’s. “And whom did he see?”
“He was still back in the Drake Room,” Stanley answered, checking his notes. “He saw Gavagan the bartender, three of the four people in the string quartet, and Mrs. Town Councilman Gilbert. Some others, he said, but he’s not sure of them.”
“Very good,” Rhodes repeated. “We have other testimony that Jorkens was by the entranceway, so that leaves Brassman, Cooper, and Campbell, along with Gavagan behind the bar.” He bent over the spread sheet. Bushell saw names at the top of the columns, too. Rhodes put marks in the appropriate columns along Desmond’s row. “And I shan’t forget Mrs. Gilbert, either.”
The chart was already well measled with checks. Bushell studied it with nothing but admiration. “This is splendid, Gordon,” he said. “We should have your sheet here photographed when you’re done, and reproductions furnished to everyone working on the case.”
“You were right, Chief,” Stanley said. “I didn’t see how he’d do it, but he worked out this scheme almost as fast as we’re talking now.”
“You’re too kind, both of you.” Rhodes had a way of taking what he did for granted, not thinking it anything out of the ordinary. Maybe that was one of the reasons he remained a major. He said, “When we’re done here, we’ll make a similar chart showing everyone’s location when the alarm bell began to ring. Between the two of them, they may tell us quite a lot. Or, of course, if no one in the mansion was involved in the plot, they may well tell us nothing.”
“Nothing else had told us anything thus far,” Bushell answered. “Why should this be any different?”
“It’s not so bad as that, Chief,” Samuel Stanley said. “We know a Russian rifle killed Tricky Dick, and we know the Sons of Liberty stole the painting. Put those two together and we have - ”
“Inference,” Bushell said. “Nothing else but.”
“Pretty solid inference, I think,” Gordon Rhodes protested.
“I’d rather have evidence,” Bushell said.
“We are working on it, Chief,” Samuel Stanley reminded him. “The damned painting’s been gone less than a day, after all. You ask me, even having the start of an idea about which way we’re going is one for our side. Oh.” He paused. “Speaking of going, we got a ring this morning from one of those coal miners who were picketing out in front of the governor’s mansion. They’re all booked aboard a train that heads east tonight. He wanted to make sure it’s all right for them to leave. I didn’t see any reason why not, but I told him I’d have to check with you.”
Bushell considered. “I think we can let them go,” he said at last. “As the constable in front of the mansion said, some of them are probably Sons themselves, but they weren’t directly involved in the theft or the shooting, so we can’t in law hold them. We might do well, though, to telegraph lists of their names back to the RAMs in their home provinces.”
“I’ve already taken care of that,” Stanley said without a hint of smugness.
“Have you?” Bushell said. “Well, good. I’m going back to the files, remind myself what the Sons have been up to lately, and pick out a few lovely chaps to question this afternoon - ”
“The press conference,” his adjutant broke in.
“Damnation take the press conference,” Bushell snapped. But damnation would take him if he wasn’t there to give it. Press and politicos would band together to howl for his head. He didn’t need his elbow joggled that way, not now. And so, this afternoon, he would be questionee, not questioner. Sighing, he yielded: “I’ll pick out a few lovely chaps to question tomorrow, then.”
Samuel Stanley nodded approvingly. He and Rhodes went back to work on their butcher-paper chart. Bushell went down to the RAM record room, which took up most of the first floor. The musty smell of old paper wrapped itself around him as he went inside. The record room was nothing but old paper, and cabinets to hold it. It was also the only room in headquarters where smoking was forbidden: one not-quite-extinguished lucifer or a carelessly dropped coal from a cigar or pipe could spark a conflagration.
The Sons of Liberty had a couple of file cabinets all to themselves. Bushell pulled open the top drawer of the wrong one, only to be confronted by yellowing file folders and the old-fashioned typewriter letter styles and copperplate handwriting of the end of the last century. One corner of his mouth twisted. The Sons had a long and dishonorable history.
He got the right cabinet and drawer on his next try. He pulled out the half-dozen most recent folders (which, but for their fresh manila board and the more modern typefaces on their labels, looked all but identical to their centenarian ancestors) and carried them over to a table. When he opened the first one, an unflattering police photograph of a Son of Liberty stared out at him. Peter Jarrold had been arrested the winter before on suspicion of setting fire to a synagogue in the eastern part of New Liverpool. Bushell’s mouth twisted again. Jews were so thin on the ground in the NAU that only a madman could reckon them any sort of threat to anyone. Peter Jarrold didn’t look like a madman, but he didn’t look particularly bright, either. He looked like what he was: a street tough in his early twenties, with a scar over one eye and another on his chin. Like a lot of the younger Sons of Liberty, he wore his hair cropped short. The Roundhead look, they called it, after the followers of Oliver Cromwell the regicide. To the Sons, that made Cromwell a hero. Bushell flipped through the folder. Jarrold was currently starting ten years’ penal servitude, so he hadn’t had anything to do with stealing The Two Georges.