Sir Horace sent him a worried look; he knew the bottle could get hold of Tom Bushell rather than the other way round. Bushell looked back, smiling, open, innocent, bland - with the slightest devilment in his eyes to make sure no one took the rest too seriously. Bragg recognized that look not just from their time in the RAMs but from their army days. He threw his hands in the air, turned to one of the officers who’d sat down to let him pass. “Felix, fix Tom here an Irish over ice, if you’d be so kind.”
“Happy to, Sir Horace, Colonel Bushell.” The officer - like Bragg, he was in dress uniform, with the crown and pip of a lieutenant-colonel on his shoulder boards - went down to the other end of the car, scooped ice from a silver bucket into a highball glass, and poured from a crystal decanter. He brought the glass back to Bushell, presented it with a flourish.
“Thanks very much, Lieutenant-Colonel, ah - ” Bushell glanced to Sir Horace Bragg.
“I beg your pardon,” Bragg said. “I forgot Felix was up in Boston while you were back at the capital; he got in the day after you left. Tom, let me present to you Lieutenant-Colonel Felix Crooke. Felix, my old friend Colonel Thomas Bushell.”
The two men shook hands. Crooke was stocky, pale, clean-shaven, with hair black as a Spaniard’s and eyes so blue they put Bushell in mind of a Siamese cat. He had a powerful grip. “Pleased to meet you at last, Colonel,” he said. “Lieutenant General Sir Horace often speaks of you.”
“I deny everything,” Bushell declared, sipping his drink. Crooke laughed. Sir Horace Bragg said, “Felix is one of our leading students of the Sons of Liberty in Victoria these days. He took over when Thaddeus Bishop retired a couple of years ago.”
“Ah, Thad,” Bushell said. “I remember him from my days at the capital.” He drank again; not all his memories of Victoria were as pleasant as those of Thaddeus Bishop. “I’m sure he enjoys going after trout more than he ever did, going after the Sons.” He nodded to Crooke. “Boston, eh? Find anything you could pin on Common Sense and make it stick?”
“Damn all,” Felix Crooke said glumly. “Their solicitors have kept them just this side of the line for years, and there’s no proof they give money to the Sons. Lord, how I wish there were. That would really hurt the Sons of Liberty, more than arresting some of the bastards every now and again ever could.”
“You know, they may have shot themselves in the foot, stealing The Two Georges,” Bushell said. “The whole NAU loves that painting.”
Sir Horace Bragg chuckled. “Anyone would think you’d been writing Sir Martin’s speeches for him, Tom. That’s one of the things he’s been doing all the way across the Union: saying that whatever people who do things like that want, it can’t be any good, because only people who do things like that could want it.” The commandant of the Royal American Mounted Police nodded in grudging admiration. “He’s clever, you have to give him that.”
“Who, Sir Martin? I should say so,” Bushell answered. “And when you add in a voice he plays like a church organ - ” He shrugged. “It didn’t surprise me when the King-Emperor named him governor-general.” He knocked back the rest of his drink. He wanted another one, but the look Sir Horace had given him made him hold his peace.
“The King-Emperor, yes,” Bragg said slowly. Then he brightened, as much as any man with a countenance two parts basset hound could brighten. “Here, Tom, let me introduce you to some of the other men I’ve brought to Upper California. You won’t have met all of them when you were in Victoria.”
Bushell wished he could whip out a notebook and jot down names and ranks, as if the RAMS were suspects; that would have helped him keep them straight. Except for Felix Crooke, Bragg had left most of his top people behind in the capital, and had with him captains and majors who probably had more recent active-duty experience than their superiors.
Major Michael Foster would be in charge of forensics investigation. He looked too young to be in charge of anything: he looked too young to be anything more than a university undergraduate. But he had two service hashmarks on the left sleeve of his dress tunic, so he’d been a RAM at least ten years. Bushell said, “You’ll need to talk with Sergeant Singh of the New Liverpool constabulary. He did the first workup of the crime scene.”
“I’ll talk with him,” Foster said, “but I’ll go over the site myself, too.” That could have meant he was eager to inspect it personally. From his tone, though, he sounded more condescending, as if wondering whether someone named Singh could possibly have done an adequate job. Looking around the car, Bushell saw that everyone in it was white. He’d lived in New Liverpool long enough to find that noteworthy, as he had at Independence Party headquarters. Victoria didn’t have the large concentrations of Nuevespaftolans and East Indians that New Liverpool did, but it had a great many Negroes: with so many of them in clerical and bureaucratic positions, only natural for the capital to draw them like a lodestone.
But just because they lived in and around Victoria, Bushell reminded himself, didn’t mean they had to join the RAMs in any significant numbers. Though a lot of police work was bureaucratic in nature, the RAMs were not the sort of bureaucracy to which people of cautious, conservative bent often aspired. Sir Horace Bragg said, “And here is Captain Patricia Oliver, whose area of expertise is handwriting and typewriter analysis.”
“Captain.” Since this was business, Bushell stuck out his hand as he would have for a man. Smiling in approval, Patricia Oliver pumped it briskly. She was somewhere not far from forty, her light brown hair touched with gray, her skin pale under powder and rouge: like a lot of RAMs with specializations such as hers, she didn’t spend much time in the sun.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Colonel Bushell,” she said. “I’ll want to see that note you recovered from the phonogram, match it to others we have from the Sons. I’ve brought along several dozen samples for comparisons. With luck, I’ll be able to identify the typewriter.” Her voice showed the same no-nonsense attitude as her handshake.
“I’ll take care of that for you.” Bushell promised, pleased with her. Few women reached captain’s rank in the RAMs. She filled out her uniform tunic in a different and pleasant way. Beneath it, instead of trousers, she wore an ankle-length skirt of black wool.
He glanced at her left hand. The fourth finger bore a slim gold band with a sparkling diamond. I might have known, he thought. The good ones are mostly taken. Kathleen Flannery wasn’t, but she would have been had Kyril Lozovsky proved himself something other than a bounder. Or was she not taken because she wasn’t a good one? He’d have to think about that.
“Captain Oliver’s husband is one of the prosecuting attorneys for the province of Virginia,” Sir Horace said.
“Is he?” Bushell murmured. He wondered if Captain Oliver had met her husband while they were both involved with the same case. Or had she got her interest in police work from him? It wasn’t any of Bushell’s business. Politely, he said, “A prominent man.”
“A busy man,” she answered, looking him straight in the eye. “And because I’m also busy, I don’t see him nearly as much as I’d like.” After a second or two, he recognized the way she was studying him with much the same hopeful speculation he’d used when he met Kathleen Flannery. Under other circumstances, that would have been flattering, perhaps delightfully so. As things were, he found it disturbing.