Joe thanked him. “Probably a note from Inspector Orford. He’d expect me to be back here this evening.”
Joe glanced at the typed address on the outer cover and was intrigued. Not from the inspector. Orford would have had to scrawl his own letters on any envelope he was sending to Joe. Secretarial assistance was at a premium these days, the few girls who remained overburdened with work. Even Assistant Commissioners had to wait a day on occasion before general typing came through from the pool. Urgent notes were invariably handwritten. He even addressed his own envelopes to save Miss Snow, his personal secretary, the time. He opened it and took out the inner envelope. He looked again, startled.
Too late, he noticed that Kingstone had seen it too. The senator shivered but it wasn’t the dank, chill atmosphere and the presence of the corpse that were affecting him, Joe guessed.
“My God!” Kingstone’s voice was a stunned whisper. “Someone’s watching me. I’m being—what’s that phrase they have in witchcraft?—overlooked. He knows where I’m going … what I’ll do next. He’s got into my hotel room and now he’s here with me in the morgue.” He rubbed the back of his neck between his shoulder blades. “I know what it feels like to have a sniper take aim at you. But this one’s targeting the inside of my head. Let me see that, Sandilands.”
Joe held it out. An inoffensive enough address: For the attention of Assistant Commissioner Sandilands.
In elegant black calligrapher’s handwriting.
A LABORATORY ATTENDANT tapped on the door and entered without waiting for a response. He seemed agitated.
“Doctor Rippon, sir. Urgent message from the river.” He glanced at a note in his hand. “Telephone just now. Redirected from HQ. From Inspector Orford for Commissioner Sandilands. They said he might be here.”
“You’ve come to the right shop then,” Rippon replied. “Here’s Commissioner Sandilands.”
“Sir! He’s found a body. Another one, on the riverbank. He’s having it brought in now.”
Joe and the doctor exchanged glances. “Lucky to have caught us,” Joe commented. “Were you planning to sleep tonight, Rippon? Do you have an assistant who could …”
“Same as you, Sandilands, I reckon. I learned to do without sleep years ago. All the same …” He turned to the attendant. “Thank you for that, Harper. Look—better ring Doctor Simmons and tell him I need to speak to him. And can you stay on? What about Richardson? He can type. Have him paged, will you?”
“You’ll be needing all hands on deck if the Commissioner’s planning a gathering of the sheeted dead,” Kingstone said bitterly. “Who’re you expecting now, Sandilands, to turn up for your weekend come-as-a-corpse party? Male or female?” he asked anxiously. “And—that envelope—do I have to snatch it from your hand and open it myself?”
Joe bit back a spirited reply, reading the man’s mood.
“Psychological projection,” he’d learned to call this reaction. Dorcas would have explained that Kingstone, unable to bear the strain, was resorting unconsciously to a defence mechanism in order to maintain his stability. Blame someone else and ease the load. Not quite so primitive as an outright denial of events but disturbing. Inevitably, the man must now be conjuring with the idea of a second dancer’s body coming to light in the same place. Natalia this time? Kingstone was right—why the hell couldn’t the inspector have said—“a male body” or “a female body”? The awful thought that perhaps he’d been unable to make a judgement occurred to Joe. They were always the worst cases: the indistinguishables.
Kingstone had suffered three shocks to the system within the last hour and now, Joe feared, a fourth blow was about to be delivered. Nothing good was going to come out of the envelope all had their eyes on.
He ran a finger under the flap.
JOE READ THE few lines quickly and looked up at his audience. He was carried back for an uncomfortable moment to a time long-distant when he’d been staying with his elderly uncles in London. Unusually, there had arrived, addressed to the eight-year-old Master Joseph Sandilands, a letter which bore a stranger’s handwriting. To Joe’s fury, Uncle George had, without thought, opened it and read it before revealing the contents to Joe. The sender and the message were so innocent and so unimportant—an invitation to tea and a children’s play at the theatre—Joe could barely now recall them. But, with the indignant and pleading eyes of his audience on him at this moment, he could relive the urge to snatch it from his uncle’s hand. And now, he could also understand the old man’s concern to protect and act as a buffer between his nephew and the unknown.
How to defuse this explosive piece of nonsense he was holding? Impossible. The shell had been launched and, one way or another, it would reach its target. Joe could not deflect it.
“More of the same,” he said, dismissively. “Medieval writing, medieval thoughts from a medieval mind! I’d say—chuck it in the bin, if I weren’t obliged to keep it in evidence. I’m not going to pass it over to anyone—it will have to be examined—so I’ll read it out then show it to you.
“Darest thou die?
The sense of death is most in apprehension,
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.
“That’s Measure for Measure, I think.” Joe steadied his voice. “There’s one more line. Not the Bard’s words. He adds: The beetle suffered.”
Kingstone appeared drained of colour and his voice, when he could find it, seemed lifeless. “That’s it. A message for me. They’ve killed her and I’m next. That’s what all that means. I ignored them for a while. Like you, Sandilands, I scorned their mumbo-jumbo. I didn’t ring the number they gave me. They said they had her and the only way I could save her was by hearing them and doing what they told me. I refused.”
“Would this have anything to do with your role at the conference?”
“Of course it darned well would! Everything to do with it. They wanted me to make a speech at the meeting this afternoon—”
“To the Pilgrims?”
“That’s right. To the world’s policy makers. The Pilgrims. A speech advocating a very particular political and economic direction. Delivered straight to the listening ears of influential men and all reported in tomorrow’s Times. Yes, they’d arranged for a reporter to be there. But he never got to write up the script they fed me. I heard my cue and let it go by.”
Even in his distress, Kingstone was choosing his words, Joe noted.
“I fouled up their schemes. I guess they sent the toe to indicate their displeasure.”
“And have they contacted you subsequently to question your non-performance?” Joe asked carefully, remembering Bacchus’s account of the Nine Men’s meeting.
“I’ve just told you. The toe. That was their communication. Speaks volumes, wouldn’t you say? I didn’t expect a bunch of flowers. And now this damn-fool note.”
“And is that it? One demand denied and retribution extracted? If you’re still dangling from a hook they’ve set up for you, I should very much like to be told.”
“I think you know I am. The speech was only to have been the first step in a progression. Their ultimate aim is that I should give words of advice directly to the president. Not necessarily advice I would normally give.”
Joe’s fingers were clenching with the raw urge to seize the man and shake him until he spat out the truth. The worst possible approach in these circumstances, he knew, and he calmed himself to ask, “Is your influence so great that the president would listen to you and act according to your suggestions?” He thought he’d better get this straight at least.