‘Not yet — but I will be, if I cannot catch this clerk-killer and locate the King’s stolen statue.’
Barbara was thoughtful. ‘There is all manner of gossip about both, but no one has any idea who the culprits might be. However, I can tell you one place to go for clues: to Temperance North.’
Chaloner was puzzled. Temperance — a friend of his — ran a stylish ‘gentlemen’s club’ in Hercules’ Pillars Alley, near The Strand. ‘What does she have to do with dead clerks and missing art?’
‘My husband patronises her establishment, and he was waxing lyrical about an evening he enjoyed there a couple of weeks ago, when he said something odd. Apparently, Temperance had quizzed him about Bernini — the sculptor who carved the bust. She had never expressed an interest in art before, and he was delighted with himself for feeding her a lot of bogus information.’
‘I do not understand.’
‘He told her Bernini is a Swedish hermaphrodite, whose hobbies include rope-dancing and keeping hedgehogs. But that is beside the point — which is, what prompted her questions in the first place?’
‘Perhaps she heard a Bernini masterpiece was stolen from the King,’ suggested Chaloner, still not sure what she was trying to tell him.
‘But this discussion occurred before the statue went missing. Of course, it may mean nothing, but that is for you to decide. Have you heard the news this morning? Poor Edward Jones is drowned.’
‘What about Williamson’s clerk, Swaddell?’ asked Chaloner. ‘Is he drowned, too?’
Barbara raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘No, but he is missing. I shall not ask whether you had anything to do with it, but I hope not, for your sake. Williamson is livid.’
‘Why? What does Swaddell do that his other spies cannot?’
Barbara’s eyebrows went up a second time. ‘You do not know? Swaddell is his assassin, the man who wields knives in dark alleys. Williamson is by the gate, look, interrogating people about the fellow’s whereabouts as they pass. He is speaking to Lady Muskerry at the moment, although he should not expect sensible answers from her, poor lamb. She is far too silly.’
Chaloner watched the Spymaster grab the woman by the arm and shake her. She looked frightened, and when she started to cry, he was tempted to intervene. Barbara stopped him.
‘Your gallantry is commendable but misguided. Do not worry about Muskerry — she will have forgotten Williamson exists by the time she reaches the other side of the courtyard, while he will not appreciate being berated for ungentlemanly behaviour. Damn it! Now he is coming towards us.’
‘I hoped I might run into you, Chaloner,’ said Williamson unpleasantly. ‘Swaddell is missing, and I am told you and he dined together in Hell on Tuesday — the night he disappeared. Where is he?’
Chaloner shrugged. ‘I really have no idea,’ he answered truthfully. ‘And we did not dine together — we sat at opposite ends of a table, separated by a dozen clerks.’
‘I have been told that, too,’ said Williamson. ‘By Neale and Matthias Lea, who were also there.’
It was not a good idea to make free with the names of informants, and once again, Chaloner was unimpressed by the man’s approach to intelligencing; his loose tongue was likely to see people killed. But he said nothing, and it was Barbara who broke the uncomfortable silence that followed.
‘Swaddell is a loathsome fellow, and he will not be missed by decent folk.’
‘He will be missed by me,’ declared Williamson.
‘Point proven,’ said Barbara coldly. ‘But Thomas has an alibi for Tuesday, so leave him alone.’
Williamson sneered at her. ‘What alibi? You have not entertained a man in your bed for decades, so do not expect me to believe you made an exception for him.’
Chaloner regarded him with dislike. ‘Such vile remarks are hardly appropriate for a government minister to-’
But Barbara put a hand on his shoulder, to stop him. ‘His alibi is the Queen, if you must know,’ she said, addressing the angry Spymaster. ‘She told me she met him on a matter of business. Ask her, if you do not believe me.’
Williamson regarded her icily. ‘Oh, I shall. But he cannot have been with her all night, and it takes but a moment to slip a dagger in a man’s gizzard and toss his body in the river — and I should know.’
‘Then perhaps your time would be better spent questioning your own people,’ said Barbara tartly. ‘You hire some very disreputable villains, so ask them what has happened to your assassin.’
Williamson ignored her, and fixed Chaloner with glittering eyes. ‘Bring me Swaddell, or I shall assume the obvious — that you killed him.’
‘But I barely knew him,’ objected Chaloner indignantly. ‘Why would I mean him harm?’
‘So you say,’ snarled Williamson. ‘Find him, or suffer the consequences.’
‘Take no notice,’ said Barbara, as the Spymaster stalked away to interrogate someone else. ‘He is so agitated by Swaddell’s disappearance that he is threatening anyone and everyone. Of course, he is not so much afraid that Swaddell is dead, as that he might still be alive.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean that Swaddell is said to have undertaken some very dark tasks for our Spymaster, tasks that Williamson will not want revealed to anyone else. He will relax when Swaddell’s corpse appears.’
‘And if it does not?’
‘Then I suspect the uncertainty will render him unpredictable and dangerous.’
Edward Jones, courtier and gourmand, was in the charnel house, awaiting collection by his next of kin. Unfortunately, his next of kin took one look at the mammoth cadaver and decided it could not be safely toted around the city, and asked Kersey to care for it until the funeral. Surgeon Wiseman offered to reduce the scale of the problem, but his services were rejected in no uncertain terms — Jones had sons, and although they had not been close to their father, they still took their filial duties seriously.
The mortuary boasted two reception rooms, as well as the long, low hall in which bodies were stored. One was Kersey’s office, and the other was a surprisingly tastefully decorated chamber used for explaining formalities to grieving relatives. Kersey introduced Jones’s sons to Chaloner in the latter, when the spy said he had come to convey the Lord Chancellor’s sympathy to them. They had just arrived from the country, and it did not take many minutes for Chaloner to ascertain that they knew virtually nothing about their father or his life in London.
‘I would not accept the post of Yeoman of the Household Kitchen for a kingdom,’ said one with a shudder. ‘I hope to God it is not hereditary, because I could never live in White Hall.’
‘It is full of rogues,’ agreed the other, blithely oblivious to the fact that such an opinion might be construed as treason. ‘All they do is eat and enjoy orgies. Father was never so fat when he lived at home.’
‘I see,’ said Chaloner, although he suspected that such a monstrous girth was a lot more than three years in the making, so the Royalist government could not be held solely responsible for its development. ‘I do not suppose you know if he owned any rings, do you?’
‘Oh, lots,’ replied the eldest carelessly. ‘Most are in a box at home, but Mr Kersey has just given us the ones he was wearing when he died. He had a particular penchant for green ones.’
‘They were all green,’ added his brother. ‘Except for the ones that were red.’
‘His sons cannot be suspects for pushing him in the river,’ said Kersey to Chaloner, after he had shown them out. He started to gnaw on something that looked like a stick of dried meat, although the spy could not bring himself to study it too closely. ‘They told me earlier that they have recently inherited a fortune from an uncle, which means they have no need to pick off a father.’