This Side of Murder Read online

  “But what if Walter is the one doing all this,” I whispered, glancing around to be certain we weren’t overheard. “He owns this house. He invited us all here. And he easily could have been the officer who arranged to have those men framed for desertion, as well as Ben and Sidney killed.” I choked on the last, hating that I had to maintain this ruse that my husband was dead, especially with Max. But I knew it was necessary.

  “Then he already knows the lines are cut. And it will only look suspicious if he finds out we were outside examining them and yet didn’t tell him what we’d discovered. Any number of servants saw us. We weren’t exactly furtive.”

  I pressed a hand to my temple, having to concede his point. In any case, we couldn’t very well keep this to ourselves if we wanted to have any hope of getting someone over to the mainland to fetch the authorities before the wind let up. The servants and yacht crew might attempt to return, but the later the hour grew, the less likely that became. After all, Walter had sent them home early the day before out of concern for their safety. Or so he said. It seemed only natural the servants would assume their employer expected the same of them today, and that they would receive a telephone call summoning them to the island if anything had changed. They couldn’t know we were effectively stranded.

  “Let’s see if he’s returned to his study,” Max suggested.

  However, we did not find him alone. We exchanged a look at the sound of raised voices within. One was Walter’s, and the other we quickly learned belonged to Felix, as he snapped back a sneering retort.

  “Well, it’s evident, as usual, that you have no grasp of what’s going on. And no control over it either.”

  I reached out to halt Max a few steps from the open doorway, curious to hear Walter’s reply, but it was already too late. Felix had whirled toward the door, catching sight of us. He didn’t bother to hide the glittering derision in his eyes.

  “We’ve news,” Max remarked, explaining our presence. “And I think you’ll both want to hear it.”

  I studied Felix’s face for any sign of uneasiness, but contempt seemed to have settled permanently over his features.

  Walter, on the other hand, gripped the edge of his desk, as if bracing for a blow. “Not another body?”

  Max’s mouth flattened. “No, but the telephone lines running into the house have been cut. And I suspect those at the church have also.”

  Walter’s brow furrowed. “Cut? Do you mean a tree limb or something has fallen on them?”

  “No, this was definitely deliberate,” Max assured him.

  I was so focused on Walter’s puzzled reaction that I almost missed Felix’s. He rolled his eyes as if Max and I were a pair of old pensioners complaining about the price of tea instead of two perfectly rational people informing of something for which he should be truly alarmed. Someone had purposely severed those lines, cutting off our ability to contact the mainland, and yet he didn’t seem the least concerned. Was that because he had already known about it because he was the saboteur? Or was he truly unconcerned for his safety? If so, how could he be so certain he was safe?

  Walter stared down at his desk, his eyes clouded with worry, but not shock. “I suppose Tom and Sam should be informed.”

  “And the women?”

  The three men glanced up at me blankly.

  I frowned in annoyance. “Don’t you think it’s time to tell them?”

  “No!” Walter replied with such force that I drew back. He flushed. “That is”—he cleared his throat—“definitely not.”

  “I agree,” Felix said, scowling at our host in displeasure. “You know how women can be.” His eyes flicked to me as he added disingenuously, “Present company excluded, of course. They’ll only imagine the worst. And I don’t know about you, but I would rather not have to deal with a lot of female hysterics.”

  I arched my eyebrows in reproof. “Actually, in my experience, most women are rather better at keeping their heads than many of the men I know. But regardless, it seems to me that matters have progressed far beyond the point where we can continue to hide all of this from them. One of them is bound to start asking questions about why Jimmy and Charlie have not seen fit to join the rest of us downstairs. And what if they wish to use the telephone? Honestly, I’m surprised one of them hasn’t already tried to do so. Are you going to continue to blame the weather?”

  “Yes,” Walter replied, as if there was no question about what we should do. “And . . . and we’ll continue to explain that Jimmy and Charlie are ill.”

  “But ill with what?”

  “We needn’t be specific. None of us are doctors, after all.”

  “But Mabel—”

  “Already knows about Jimmy, and I’m sure Sam has told her about Charlie.”

  I was somewhat surprised Walter had deduced this, but then again he’d known Sam and Mabel longer than I had.

  “And what if the other women start asking her questions about this illness, what then?” I persisted. “You can’t expect her to lie for the lot of you.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we have to.”

  “Yes, when Nellie suddenly takes it into her head that both men have contracted the dreaded Spanish flu and we’re keeping it from her,” I retorted. After all, the last outbreak of the deadly virus, which had killed hundreds of thousands of British since it first appeared a year ago, had only just subsided in late April. Everyone was still bracing for its possible return for a fourth round.

  “Well, don’t give her any ideas,” Walter protested.

  I glared at him, frustrated by the men’s refusal to listen to me. The women had as much a right to know what was going on as the rest of us. The men’s insistence on keeping them in the dark was both offensive and dangerous.

  What was Walter really so anxious to hide? He was the person each time who had been most insistent we keep the matter quiet. Why? Who was he apprehensive about discovering the truth? His fiancée? She seemed the obvious choice, but I supposed it could be one of the other women.

  “Well, what’s to be done?” Max asked, dismissing the matter of informing the women. He leaned his hip against the corner of Walter’s desk. “Do you think you can repair your boat’s motor?”

  Walter’s brow crinkled in affront. “I’ll just have to now, won’t I?” He opened a drawer in his desk and extracted what looked to be a key before slamming it shut again. “I’ll work late into the night if I have to,” he muttered, hobbling angrily around his desk to the door. “Tell Helen where I’ve gone if I don’t appear for dinner.”

  We all stood silently, listening as his uneven footsteps receded down the hall.

  Then Max turned to Felix. “In the meantime, I think we should find Sam and Tom, and pair up to search the island for any other boats that might be scattered about the place.”

  Felix’s nose wrinkled. “I don’t want to go out in this.” He nodded in the direction our host had retreated. “Let Walter fix his cursed boat.”

  “And if he can’t?” Max demanded, losing his patience. “No, it’s best if we search while we still have daylight. And I need all of the men to help. Including you. We’ll recruit whatever male servants we can find to our effort as well.”

  Max’s tone brooked no argument and Felix relented, though not graciously.

  “Fine. I’ll just go change then, shall I?” he jeered, exiting the room.

  Watching him disappear from sight, I remembered how Max and I had seen him returning from the pier late the afternoon before, just as the rain was beginning. He’d told us he’d merely wanted a bit of fresh air, but Felix had never struck me as the type to take constitutionals. It had seemed a flimsy excuse at the time, and now I had to wonder what he’d really been doing at the pier. Damaging Walter’s boat engine, perhaps?

  I turned to Max, who had finally deigned to shift his glance to me. Though I would have liked to discuss my theory with him, I was still too aggravated at him. So instead I arched a single eyebrow mockingly. “And I’ll just
stay here, shall I? Along with the other womenfolk.”

  He frowned as I brushed past him and out of the room. I had better things to do than to go traipsing about the island in this biting wind looking for a boat anyway. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t furious he hadn’t spoken up to agree with me that the other women should be told. I’d supposed he had more common sense than that.

  Undoubtedly, the best thing I could do to help us all was to break the code on that missive Sidney had given me. If the winds persisted and Walter couldn’t get his yacht engine working or the other men couldn’t locate another boat, then we were going to be stuck on this island for another night. Too much could go wrong between now and tomorrow morning. Too much I didn’t want to contemplate.

  That meant I needed to double down on my efforts to crack this cipher. Besides, something one of the men had said in the parlor had triggered something in my brain. It had been wiggling around in my neurons for the past few hours, and I thought I might be on to something.

  I opened the door to my room, eager to set my notions to paper, and halted in my tracks.

  My chamber had been ransacked. The sheets and counterpane had nearly been ripped from the bed, and the mattress was askew. Half of the clothes in my wardrobe had been pulled from their hangers, and the contents of the drawers had either been rifled through or discarded on the floor. The papers from the drawers in my desk had been unceremoniously dumped on top, and even the cushions had been yanked from their chairs.

  For a moment, all I could do was stand there staring at it all, such was my shock. But surprise gradually gave rise to anger and trepidation. Whoever had done this had obviously been looking for something. And I had a very good idea what it was.

  I began to rush forward, but then whirled around to lock my door. It wouldn’t do for the perpetrator or anyone else to surprise me. Then I hurried over to the wardrobe, ignoring the rest of the mess, and shifted the remainder of the clothes cascading from the drawers so that I could close the top one and open the bottom. I thrust a hand past the back of the drawer, scraping my knuckles in my haste, and felt around behind it until my hand closed around a book.

  Extracting it, I breathed a sigh of relief as the now-familiar cover of The Pilgrim’s Progress met my gaze. I flipped through the pages, grateful to discover nothing was missing. Sidney’s letter drawing me here, the coded missive, and the papers I’d scrawled with my previous attempts to decipher the code were all accounted for. Thank heavens I’d hidden them well.

  Pressing the book and its extra pages to my chest, I glanced about me at the disarray, contemplating for the first time who might have done such a thing. As far as I knew, no one knew they existed except for me and Sidney.

  I considered for a moment that my husband might have done this. After all, I’d refused to tell him where I’d hidden them the night before. But that made no sense. Sidney had lured me here for the sole purpose of decrypting this missive. Why would he then steal it back from me?

  Unless he’d found the key to the code.

  No, that still didn’t seem right. If he’d needed the missive back, he could have sent me another letter through the butler as he had his warning not to trust anyone. Or at the very least he could have left me a note here in my room after he’d failed to find what he was looking for.

  Rising to my feet, I searched through the papers scattered about the desk and on the floor, but none contained any writing.

  So that meant the culprit was someone else. Someone who was also aware that I possessed this coded missive. My breath tightened in my chest at the thought, and I glanced toward the locked door.

  It only made sense for that person to also be the traitor Sidney was so desperate to expose. For who else would even be cognizant of the missive’s existence and what it meant? How they knew I had it, I didn’t know, but I was all of a sudden very conscious of the danger I was in. If the traitor and killer were one and the same, as I felt they must be, then they had already killed twice to keep their secrets. What would stop them from doing so again?

  Inhaling deeply, I struggled to settle my nerves, and push my worries and fears aside. Nothing had changed. I still needed to decrypt this code. And I couldn’t do that if I couldn’t concentrate.

  Tidying the stationery on the top of my desk as I wanted to tidy my mind, I pushed it to the corner and sat down to set to work.

  It was Felix who I believed had uttered the words “retreat and panic,” and though I was certain he hadn’t been referencing a cipher at the time, it had prompted something in my brain nonetheless. My friend George, the decryption expert, had mentioned more than one transposition cipher I had never had cause to use. One of which had been called a route cipher.

  When creating a route cipher, the plaintext was written out in columns of a given dimension and then converted to code using a predetermined pattern. The pattern could be as simple or elaborate as one wished, and depending on the complexity, make the algorithm challenging to decipher. With so much text, I could spend months searching for the right configuration, but there was something about the lettering near the middle of the missive that made me suspect some sort of spiral pattern had been used. And not just any spiral pattern, but a backward one. Probably more than one, dividing the missive into sections.

  Setting pencil to paper, I began to try to translate it back to plaintext. It took me several faulty starts, but my heart quickened as I realized I’d finally stumbled onto the correct pattern. I worked as rapidly as I could at the painstaking work, though it still took me the better part of an hour to finish the task.

  But when at last I could sit back and read the missive in its entirety, my elation swiftly faded to confusion and alarm. The information contained within didn’t merely talk of troop movements or the position of artillery. It referenced events in London. Political policy, propaganda efforts, and broad, sweeping battle strategies. This data could have only come from a prominent politician of some standing, or someone close to him.

  My deliberations immediately turned to Max. His father had been a great political force, a member of the Prime Minister’s inner circle, and a man whom many believed would one day be Prime Minister himself until his sudden death seven months earlier. Could Max have been sharing with the enemy secrets his father had revealed to him? Was he the traitor?

  I didn’t want to consider such a thing was possible. Not Max. But I had to face the facts.

  However, that didn’t mean that I wasn’t also going to explore other options. Helen’s father had also been a politician, though not one of nearly as great a standing as the former Earl of Ryde. I wasn’t certain he would have been privy to some of the information contained in this missive. As for the others, I knew Tom and Nellie’s backgrounds and families fairly well, but I was almost completely unfamiliar with some of the others’. I would have to remedy that.

  Glancing at the clock on the mantel, I decided it was time I sought out Sidney while I still had the chance. The skies were still leaden, so night would fall fast, and it was only a matter of time before the men searching for another boat would return, if they hadn’t already.

  I grabbed my Donegal tweed coat and its matching forest green Torin-style side cap, and made my way as stealthily as possible down to the conservatory and out the French doors Max and I had used the night before. There I could skirt along the perimeter of the house and into the gardens, hopefully without being seen from any of the windows that looked out on the terrace. The ground was saturated and muddy in spots, but I decided I had less of a chance of being seen on the garden paths than on the roads. I figured there must be a trail that cut away from the gardens to the west and the farm beyond, and was pleased when after only a few wrong turns, I was able to find it.

  The wind whipped at me fiercely as I stumbled downhill across an open field toward the buildings I could see in the distance. After the labyrinth of shrubberies in the garden, I felt horribly exposed with nothing but tufts of grass and heath for cover. To the north, a s
tone wall tangled with overgrowth stretched along the perimeter of the meadow, separating it from the main road. I only hoped no one traveling that lane looked south and caught sight of me.

  I inched cautiously around to the front of the first row of buildings, relieved to see that the gravel yard beyond was empty. At this time of day, I supposed most of the gardeners and laborers would be at their duties, even with the wind and damp hindering them. Sidney had told me his lodgings were the farthest to the left when facing the front of the building, so I glided as silently as I could around the corner and down to the first door.

  As I’d suspected, it was locked. But I was prepared for just such an eventuality. Pulling my set of lock picks from my pocket, I set to work and had managed to open the rather rudimentary lock within a minute and a half. The smell of Sidney’s Turkish cigarettes washed over me as I entered the room, and I knew I had the correct chamber. I closed the door behind me and reached out to twitch the simple curtains covering the room’s lone window aside just far enough to provide me with a sufficient amount of light to see.

  The space was tiny, no larger than a ten-by-ten square. In one corner stood a sink next to a low cupboard and a small table with two chairs. In the opposite corner sat a narrow bed, scarcely more than a cot, and a two-drawer dresser. The floors were swept clean, the bedding pulled tight. Everything seemed to be in its precise place. Even the rag draped over the sink’s edge was positioned just so. Except for the papers scattered across the surface of the small table next to a typewriter.

  I moved closer, curiosity outweighing any consideration I might have felt about invading Sidney’s privacy. Some of the papers were organized in crude stacks—though I could not immediately discern the order—while others were spread open and jumbled together at the center of the work space. There were pages of notes; letters from varied correspondents—some addressed to him, some not—maps; charts; newspaper clippings; even photographs of people and places both familiar and unknown to me.

  There was too much to make sense of it all—not in such a short time—apart from the fact that Sidney seemed obsessed. I wanted to call it mere determination, a firm resolve to right the wrong and justify his desertion, but this had clearly become the sole purpose of his existence. There was nothing else in the room, save the spare necessities. Not a book, or a deck of cards, or a chessboard, or a memento from his past was stored in any of the drawers, or cupboards, or tucked up under the thin mattress. Nothing but the small photograph of me and the button from my wedding dress I’d forgotten he’d taken with him to the front as a sort of amulet, which I found rolled up in one of his shirts.