Sutherland turned on his flashlight and beamed it up the narrow stairwell. Ambrose watched the beam’s ascent to the dark at the top of the stairs. The flowered stair carpet was worn and stained and gave off an unpleasant scent of age and dirt.
There was heavy oak paneling and hideous Victorian sconces mounted on all four walls of the small foyer. He flicked the three brass toggles on the switchplate. Nothing. The electricity had been turned off. And probably the gas as well, Ambrose imagined. Most likely when the leaseholder had been informed by an MI5 agent investigating Bulling’s disappearance that his tenant was probably not returning to the premises in the foreseeable future.
“There’s the lovely parlor,” Congreve said, swinging his flashlight’s beam to the right. By the cheery tone of his voice Sutherland could tell the clouds had at last lifted. The old bloodhound already had the scent, it seemed. “Why don’t you start in there, Ross? A good lesson in Gothic decor for you. I’ll work the kitchen down there at the rear and then we’ll go up and toss the boudoir as an ensemble. Good hunting. Bonne chance!” he said, and bounded off.
Inspector Sutherland smiled at Congreve’s ironic French usage. Rumors were flying. Something was up with the damnable froggies and it wasn’t good. He began his inspection of the dreary sitting room knowing full well that MI5 had been there many times before him, had vacuumed and bagged and logged every microscopic particle, used black light and Luminol on the walls and furniture looking for blood spatter and done as thorough a job as was humanly possible. That, he thought with a grin, was usually where Ambrose Congreve came in. He was an inhumanly gifted forensic investigator.
It was only a matter of time before Ross heard the familiar telltale exclamation from the kitchen at the rear.
“A-ha!” came Congreve’s jubilant shout.
Sutherland continued with his own search, turning over cushions and probing them with his fingers, tweezering the odd particle or fiber into a glassine envelope, giving Congreve time to relish and contemplate his own discovery, whatever it might be. They had their routines; they had worked side by side long enough to form them.
Ten minutes later he heard the expected summons issued from the kitchen. “Ah, young Sutherland, would you mind joining me back here?”
He found the Chief sitting at the kitchen table. On it were two mugs of tea and a small thin envelope made of silver mylar with a plastic zipper seal. Ambrose was drumming the fingers of his right hand upon the envelope and staring at a mustard-colored prewar ice box standing against the wall beneath the high rain-streaked windows. His mien was one of benign contemplation.
Sutherland sat in the chair opposite and lifted the mug to his lips. It was tepid, as expected, brewed by Congreve with whatever hot water remained in the pipes. But it was welcome and he drank it down. Putting his mug on the table, he looked at Congreve and saw that the man’s gaze remained fixed on the half-century-old appliance.
“What have you got here, sir?” he asked. Congreve turned and looked at him with his bright blue baby’s eyes.
“An enigma,” Congreve said, rolling the end of his waxed mustache between two fingers.
“Ah. One of those.”
“Not an enigma, really. The Enigma. I am considering the Nazi cipher machine your Royal Navy chaps found aboard that sinking U-boat seconds before she went down. The one that saved England’s bacon. You do know how they cracked that one? Figured out the Nazi encryptions embedded in that infernal machine?”
“Crossword puzzle geniuses, wasn’t it, sir? Psychics? Mind readers? Something like that. All gathered down at Bletchley Park, as I recall, trying to crack the code. And we did, too.”
“It wasn’t a code, Sutherland. Codes substitute whole words. The Enigma substituted individual letters. It was a cipher machine.”
“Sorry, sir.”
“And it wasn’t British codebreakers who cracked it, the opinions of assorted dime novelists to the contrary. Polish mathematicians cracked the Enigma, Sutherland. They’d begun intercepting the German Enigma transmissions in Poland in the early twenties. Poles found mathematical techniques could attack the problem of finding the machine’s message key. By exploiting the Nazis’ cryptographic error in repeating the message key at the start of each transmission, they—”
“Fascinating stuff indeed, sir, but—”
“I was just thinking that perhaps one of the reasons I’ve been able to offer some assistance to Alex Hawke all these many years is our complementary skills. On my end, my absolute hatred of mathematics. I like logic well enough, but numbers, no thank you. Alex is quite good with numbers. You have to be, I suppose, to fly an airplane as well as he does. Celestial navigation or what have you.”
“Chief—”
“Warm, hot-blooded mysteries are what ring my bell, Sutherland. Human mysteries. Like that one over there on the floor at the base of the freezer. That puddle of water. The machine started defrosting some time during the early morning hours. So, the electricity was on until then. Just shut off this morning. Which is why your MI5 chaps missed this little silver envelope. Someone pulled the plug about, oh, six and one-half hours ago. Who? Why?”
“You found that envelope in the freezer?”
“I did. Inside a defrosted crown rack of lamb, to be precise. In the center of the thing, under a mess of jellied madrilene. Fairly clever of Henry, if you must give the devil his due.”
“Good work, sir! Let’s have a look.”
“In due time. A man like Henry Bulling has three lives, Sutherland. Many men do, I suppose.”
“Three?”
“Yes. There is his public life, you know, the facade, the persona he dons every morning in his shaving mirror before sloughing off to his sad cubby at the embassy. A chimera. And then there is his private life. Much of that can be adduced by simply observing the artifacts in this house. These chairs, for instance. There is a dark, Gothic cast to that mind, isn’t there, Inspector Sutherland?”
“Indeed, sir.”
“And then there is his third life.”
“Yes?”
“His secret life.”
“You mean the envelope?”
“Yes. Please open it.”
Sutherland picked the thing up with thumb and forefinger and slid the plastic zipper open.
“It’s a DVD disc, sir. Two of them. Unmarked.”
“Yes. That’s what it felt like to the touch. You have one of those laptop computers in your murder bag, I believe.”
“Back in a flash, sir.”
Ambrose sipped his tea, contemplating the enigma that was Henry Bulling, keen with anticipation as to what might be encoded on the discs. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be prize-winning dahlias.
“Here you are, sir. Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Ross inserted the first disc into the small Sony laptop, and Congreve heard the faint whir as the thing spooled up. Both men leaned forward as the screen came to life.
“It appears to be a very large oil refinery, sir,” Sutherland said, disappointed that the image was not salacious or at the very least intriguing.
“Go to the next one,” Ambrose said.
“Same refinery, different angle.”
“An infamous French refinery, Inspector. Can you zoom in on this area here? The small sign above this lorry?”
Sutherland used the cursor to create a small shaded box on the area Congreve had indicated. Then he used the zoom to enlarge it.
“A-ha,” Ambrose said, “the center of the storm. Our Henry may have gotten in a little over his head here. This is juicy stuff indeed. Keep clicking.”