Bushell made himself turn away from the horridly compelling sight. He waved the barrel of his revolver toward the open door to the back room. “We’d better see if we’ve missed anyone,” he said, adding, “It would be nice if we had someone left alive to question, don’t you think?”
“Could be useful, yes,” Stanley answered, matching him dry for dry. “Shall I go first this time?”
“I’m still shorter than you are,” Bushell said. “One, two ...” They ran through the doorway one after the other.
Instead of powder and blood and the latrine stink of bowels loosed in sudden death, the back room smelled of sawdust and varnish and turpentine - clean, friendly odors that grated on Bushell’s keyed-up senses. He spun wildly, looking for an enemy who was not there. Sam Stanley kicked over what was going to be a tabletop that leaned against the wall. No one crouched behind it. Bushell went to the door leading to the alley. He opened it and peered outside. No one waited with a gun or another grenade. The alley was as empty as it might have been at midnight.
“I think that’s everybody,” Bushell sounded disbelieving, even to himself. He closed the alley door again and locked it.
“I think you’re right.” Stanley shook his head. “Dear sweet Lord, what a mess we have here.” With a soldier’s practicality and a baring of teeth that was not a grin, he added, “We came out on the right end of it this time, too.”
Bushell was about to nod when voices came from the front of the store. He and Stanley stared at each other. Neither Kilbride nor his chum could possibly be breathing - could he? One thing Bushell remembered from his army days was that human beings could be devilishly hard to kill. Even so “Impossible,” he mouthed to Stanley. His adjutant nodded, but then waggled his hand back and forth, downgrading the word to something like damned unlikely.
Moving quietly as they could, they went back to the door that had admitted them to the room on the alley. Bushell’s gun barrel went into the doorway before he stuck out his head.
“Major, you’re very brave, but you’re also very foolish,” he said, standing straight and showing himself. George Harris had just come into the shop by the street entrance, a constabulary truncheon clutched in his right fist. Bushell pointed the index finger of his left hand at the RAM. “Bang! You’re dead.”
Harris shrugged. “The chance one takes in this business now and again.” Bushell admired his nonchalance, if not his good sense.
Behind Harris crowded a couple of other RAMs, a couple of uniformed constables, and Kathleen Flannery. One corner of Bushell’s mouth turned down. As he’d told her, mixing it with villains was not her business. Then his expression cleared, to be replaced by one of mild surprise. Villains might not be her business, but after last night he definitely was.
She pushed her way up to stand at Major Harris’s elbow. None of the police officers seemed to have the nerve to stop her. Bushell understood that down to the ground. “Are you all right?” she demanded, and started to shove past Harris.
“Not a scratch on me or Sam, except from where we hit the pavement,” Bushell assured her. He held up a hand. “You don’t want to come any farther, Kathleen. It’s - not pretty back of the counter there.”
For a wonder, she heeded him. Major Harris did come up to look at the carnage. He went faintly green.
“Good heavens,” he murmured. “We’ve not seen anything like this in a good many years.” He ran a finger under his collar, as if to loosen it. “I tell you frankly, I could have gone a good many more years without it, too.”
“There is that,” Bushell agreed. “Here we have the late Mr. Kilbride.” Nodding at the other corpse, he added, “Could Constable McGinnity tell us if this is - or rather, was - the proprietor of the establishment here?”
Major Harris looked at that body, then averted his eyes. “At the moment, I doubt whether his mother could tell who he was. McGinnity may perhaps know him by his clothing, though, so we’ll find out about that.”
“Careful there!” someone out on the sidewalk exclaimed, at the same time as someone else was going, “Watch out!” That sounded interesting - and alarming - enough to send Bushell and Stanley out to see what was going on. The RAMs had been searching the pockets of the fat man. One of them held in the palm of his hand a khaki-painted metal spheroid a bit bigger than a cricket ball. “Grenade,” he said unnecessarily.
“Russian Army model,” Samuel Stanley put in.
“If you say so,” the Boston RAM answered with a shrug. “Far as I’m concerned, it’s bad enough no matter who made it.” For him it was just evidence of depravity, not evidence in a case. His colleague had found a wallet in the fat man’s left hip pocket. He opened it. “Here’s his permit to operate a motorcar,” he said, drawing forth one of the documents within. “Gives his name as Eustace Venable; his home address is in Georgestown, province of Maryland.” He pawed through the wallet. “A little stack of business cards in here, too: Eustace Venable, Fine Cabinetry, and another Georgestown address, with a telephone number.”
“Georgestown.” Bushell tasted the word. “Right next door to Victoria. Why does that not surprise me?”
He glanced up to the heavens, as if expecting a choir of angels to come down and announce he ought to be surprised.
Instead, Sam Stanley said quietly, “We should have known the trail would lead us there sooner or later.”
“That’s true,” Bushell said. The King-Emperor was coming to Victoria - coming all too soon now. Bushell still had no idea whether The Two Georges was in or around the capital, but it seemed inevitable that some of the people who had stolen it would be there.
“Begging your pardon, sir,” someone said behind him. He turned. It was Senior Constable McGinnity. The big Irishman went on, “Sir, I think that’s Mr. Cavendish in there, though with him so torn up and all I’ve the devil’s own time being sure.”
“His papers and his fingerprints will identify him for certain,” Bushell said. “Do you know whether he’s got a wife or children?”
“Neither the one nor t’other,” McGinnity answered. “He lived by his lonesome, Mr. Cavendish did. I’ve heard tell he was - you know” - a delicate shrug of the shoulders conveyed what Bushell was supposed to know - “but I can’t say for a fact that that’s so.”
“If he was, he won’t have let the other Sons find out,” Bushell said. “They’re harder on that sort of thing that the Crown’s law courts ever dreamt of being.”
A couple of constables came toward the cabinetmaker’s shop along with a red-faced, gray-haired man with broad shoulders. One of them said to Bushell, “Sir, here’s Mr. Yawkey from the tea shop back yonder. Reckoned you might be interested in having a word or two with him.”
“Why, so I might,” Bushell said, as if the notion hadn’t crossed his mind till that moment. But his air of nonchalance fell away like a discarded cloak when he rounded on Yawkey. “So - you and Joseph Kilbride were friends, eh?”
“You might say so,” Yawkey answered. “We’ve always got on well, anyway.”
Bushell rubbed at his mustache. He hadn’t expected such a forthright admission. Maybe Yawkey would sing like a crooner on the wireless. “And what did your friend” - he fought hard to keep an ironic twist off the word - “talk about when he dropped in on you today?”
“Why, tea, of course,” Yawkey exclaimed, his shaggy eyebrows rising in surprise at the question. “What else?”
“Tea?” Bushell echoed, taken aback.
“Sir, if a man comes into a tea shop to ask after shoe-blacking, wouldn’t you say he’s in the wrong place?” Yawkey inquired with exaggerated patience; he’d evidently decided Bushell was on the slow side. “I’ve been selling tea to Joseph Kilbride for more than twenty years. He came in to ask after some Orange Pekoe.”