“One reason is that he has less than we think he does—he must have exaggerated the richness of his find,” Lady Kingsley whispered to Vere, after a three-hour examination of Douglas’s papers in the latter’s study. “The rumor was that the vein was so extraordinary, any bucket of dirt yielded the fortune of a lifetime. But the reality, not quite.”
Vere hefted a box of documents back to its proper cabinet. “Perhaps there has been theft by the management.”
“There is always that possibility. But if he thought so, he has not gone back in person to check. At least the foreman and the accountants never referenced a visit from him.” Lady Kingsley lifted her lantern high so that Vere could better see where the next box should go. “What about the household accounts?”
Lady Kingsley had a special facility for business documents; Vere had come as her valet this night, his main purpose to stand guard and lift heavy items. But she had needed a rest from reading in the scant light they dared, and Vere had taken the opportunity and checked the household records.
“There is not much land attached to the estate: very little income, and a great many expenses,” he reported. “But still, normal expenses. Nothing that would give him a motive for engaging in criminal activities.”
“Some do it for the thrill.”
“And most don’t.” Vere adjusted the boxes to sit flush with one another, the way he’d found them. “Did you see anything at all that mentioned artificial diamonds?”
“No, nothing.”
The case against Edmund Douglas had begun quite by chance: A suspect the Belgian police arrested for an unrelated matter had boasted of fleecing the diamond dealers of Antwerp on behalf of an Englishman. It had not ranked as a top priority for the Belgian police to investigate what they’d considered an instance of bald braggadocio, though Vere suspected that their lack of concern also had something to do with the fact that the diamond dealers of Antwerp were a community of Jews.
Notwithstanding the apathy of the Belgian police, the equal indifference of Scotland Yard, and the resolute silence of Douglas’s supposed victims, the case had somehow managed to pluck Holbrook’s notice and subsequently found a champion in Lady Kingsley, whose father had committed suicide when he could no longer keep his extortionist happy.
She’d been doggedly on the case for months, compiling an extensive dossier. And one thing in the dossier that had puzzled Vere from the beginning was the reason the Belgian criminal had given for extorting from the diamond dealers: that they passed off artificial diamonds as the real thing.
As far as Vere knew, while the French chemist Henri Moissan had published on his successful synthesis using an electric arc furnace, no one else had been able to duplicate his results. Synthetic diamonds were not yet a reality. And even if they were, the world was in no danger of running out of real diamonds. The diamond dealers of Antwerp and London had no reason to traffic in man-made ones.
Lady Kingsley left the study first. Vere waited several minutes before heading up the service stairs. The door from the stair landing led out to the eastern end of the house, where the master’s and the mistress’s apartments were located.
He listened at the door of the master’s apartment, then slipped inside. A man’s bedroom saw a steady stream of servants to make the bed, clean the grate, brush his clothes, and dust the furniture. It was unlikely Douglas would leave anything particularly important there, but Vere hoped for some insight into Douglas’s character.
He retrieved a fountain pen from his pocket and carefully unscrewed it from the middle. The pen held a small amount of ink and could write a few paragraphs, but its true purpose was in the dry cell battery and the tiny lightbulb mounted where the ink chamber should have been.
He swept the apartment quickly with the small stream of light—much neater than carrying a candlestick or a lantern, although the light did not last long and the battery always needed rest. His light came to a stop at the framed photograph on Douglas’s nightstand, the only photograph Vere had thus far encountered in the house. He crouched down for a closer look.
It was a wedding photograph of an exceptionally handsome couple. The woman possessed an ethereal, dreamlike beauty; the man, of medium height and slender build, had a similarly refined appearance. On the frame were engraved the words How do I love thee; Let me count the ways.
There was something half-familiar about the woman’s face. He’d seen it somewhere, and rather recently. But where? And when? He had a good faculty for faces and names. But even if he hadn’t, he would not have forgotten a woman with a face like that.
It came to him: the strange painting in the dining room. The angel’s face.
Was the bride Mrs. Douglas? If so, it would imply the bridegroom was Edmund Douglas. Of course, it would be ridiculous for a man to display another man’s wedding picture on his nightstand. But Vere had trouble reconciling the sleekly, almost delicately handsome man in the photograph with what he knew of Edmund Douglas.
Shouldn’t he be heftier in size? If Vere wasn’t mistaken, Douglas had been a boxer. And even if he had been a wiry fighter, where were his scars and his crooked nose?
In Mrs. Douglas’s room the smell of laudanum was strong and distinct in the air. Mrs. Douglas slept, her breaths laggard, her person so thin as to be almost two-dimensional.
He shone a little light next to her face. Beauty was a commodity of notoriously unreliable endurance. Still, Mrs. Douglas’s appearance shocked him. She was a mummified parody of her former self, her hair scant, her eyes sunken, her mouth half-open in her laudanum-induced torpor—a face that would frighten small children were they to come upon her unawares.
But such was the nature of life. All the diamonds in Africa could not guarantee a man a wife who wouldn’t turn into a scarecrow in time.
On her nightstand there was also a photograph. A portrait of a very young baby in a tiny coffin, surrounded by flowers and pale lace: a death memento. At the bottom was written Our Beloved Christabel Eugenia Douglas.
Vere put down the photograph and raised his light. The next thing he saw gave him a long pause. It was the third iteration of The Betrayal of the Angel, painted from a vantage point halfway between the other two. The man lying inert in the snow occupied most of the canvas; at his side, where his blood would have pooled, the dark rose bloomed furiously. Of the angel there was only the sweep of a black wing and the point of a bloody blade at the upper-right corner.
With the tips of his gloved fingers, Vere felt against and under the edge of the frame. There, the release latch. The painting swung outward to reveal a wall safe. It made sense: Mrs. Douglas’s ill health gave a legitimate excuse for keeping the servants out, and therefore her room was a better place to hide things.
He pulled out his lock picks from the inside pocket of his waistcoat. Holding the light between his teeth, he set to work, feeling for the pins. After a few minutes or so, the lock clicked and he opened the door of the safe—only to find a second door with an American combination lock inside.
Footsteps pattered in the passage outside. Vere closed the safe, pushed the painting back until it latched, then retreated to the farther side of the bed, stuffing the pen into his pocket as he went.
The door opened. The footsteps headed directly for the bed. He flattened himself against the wall, behind half-drawn bed curtains, willing the woman—the light footsteps belonged to a woman—to come no closer.
She stopped at the opposite edge of the bed. There she stood a long minute. He found it difficult to breathe quietly. Her presence agitated him.