Warriors

CHAPTER 44

Going down to Cambridge?” Congreve’s fiancée, Lady Diana Mars, exclaimed, yawning extravagantly. “Are you really? Have you finally and at long last gone full barking mad, darling?”

She cracked a solitary eye. It was still dark beyond the tall windows, just a faint rosy glow on the charcoal hilltops stretching to the horizon. “Cambridge? Is that what you said?”

“Yes, dear,” Ambrose replied. “Back to Cambridge, I’m afraid.”

“But you’ve only just come back from London. And you were just there in Cambridge a few days ago, darling. Did Professor Hobdale call with news of Dr. Watanabe after I went to bed? Have they been able to identify the wretched body found in the Master’s Garden?”

“I’m afraid so, yes, they have. Professor Hobdale was able to re-create the victim’s face. Modeling, you know. All this three-dimensional computer imaging or something like that. He e-mailed me the resulting photographic portrait.”

“And?”

“Professor Watanabe was the victim, just as I had feared.”

“I’m so very sorry. I know how much you loved him.”

“Thank you. So sorry am I that I don’t know quite what to do. Go down there and search his little cottage on the Fens. See what I can find.”

“What’s that in your hand?”

“This? Just my murder bag. Tools of the trade, my dear, nothing more.”

“So. You’re off, then?”

“Indeed. Someone’s got to do it. Might as well be a hardened and canny professional, don’t you think? The Yard’s very own much-vaunted Demon of Deduction?”

“Is Alex Hawke going with you?”

“No. No need to disturb Alex. He’s got enough on his plate right now. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of this little matter on my own, I assure you, Diana.”

“Taking care of what, precisely? I simply do not for the life of me understand why on earth you feel the need to—”

“May I quote Holmes, my dear?”

“If you can’t stop yourself, I suppose.”

“Sherlock Holmes said, ‘Genius is an infinite capacity for taking pains… It’s a very bad definition, but it does apply to detective work.’ From A Study in Scarlet, as you’ll recall.”

“I don’t recall, and frankly I don’t care!”

“Please, please, my darling, don’t worry yourself over nothing. There is no need to fret for my safety, I promise you. I’m simply going out to the professor’s cottage and see if I can find anything the Cambridge Police may have overlooked. The local constabulary sometimes has a habit of leaving more than a few highly suspicious stones left unturned.”

“I suppose there’s nothing I can say, is there?”

“You can promise your future husband love everlasting.”

“Oh, Lord, come over here, you big old bear, and give us a kiss.”

He went to her bedside and bent to embrace her. The warm scent rising from her neck and deep bosom was very nearly overpowering. Most wet mornings like this he would have crawled in with her; on this particular morning, his blood was up.

“Good-bye, my dearest love. Back for cocktails and supper, don’t worry.”

“The weather’s awfully dirty. Don’t forget Mary Poppins.”

“Brilliant notion!”

“Mary Poppins” was what he called his fiftieth birthday present from Alex Hawke. A sturdy and fairly standard-looking British black umbrella, but with a plethora of fiendish bells and whistles the lads at MI6’s tech squad had come up with. You couldn’t fly with it or anything, but it was pouring out and it was a perfectly serviceable brolly in any event — he snatched it from the stand.

“Good,” Diana said. “And, do listen, why don’t you take my Range Rover, darling? Four-wheel drive. The roads are like black ice out there, I’m sure.”

“Thank you, but the Yellow Peril stands in need of a bit of exercise. Stretch her legs. Besides, nothing beats the old girl in the twisty bits on the icy back roads, even in the wet.”

He looked at those sleepy brown eyes, gazing up at him with their heartful of concern. And realized once more just how deeply he loved her.

He was off.

Cold grey dawn. The weather had changed again overnight. A backing wind had brought forth a granite sky and a drizzling rain with it. The pallor of late winter had closed upon the hills, cloaking them in mist. The air was clammy cold as Congreve climbed behind the wheel and pushed the starter button.

The leather seats felt damp to the touch. The cold drafts, for all the tightly closed windows, had penetrated the interior of the small sports car. There must have been a perforation or two in the top because now and again little drips of rain fell softly through, smudging the leather of the passenger seat, leaving a stain like a splotch of ink.

Congreve, muffled in a greatcoat to his ears, waved a gloved hand of farewell at the estate’s gatekeeper as he rumbled through the great wrought-iron gates of Brixden House. He engaged second gear and accelerated out onto the Taplow Common Road, bound for the Fens in the countryside just beyond Cambridge.

He had roughly a two-hour journey ahead of him and he tried to get comfortable, as much as the little yellow Morgan would allow at any rate.

The Morgan’s minuscule wiper blades were such that whatever view there might have been of the countryside was hopelessly obscured. Not that it mattered. He was far too preoccupied with the chase at hand. He had long ago trained his agile brain to do his bidding. He turned to it now, feeding it facts, inferences, deductions, and suppositions, pausing sensibly now and then to allow digestion to take place.

He found driving a good place to work. One could rejoice in the solitude of it, the joy of a fine machine at one’s fingertips, the whizzing hum of the tyres, the pleasure of keeping one’s course arrow straight and true. If only the heater worked.

And so the hours passed.

He’d lost track of time and space. He was surprised to find himself arrived in such a bleak and barren landscape. The country on either side of the high road had somehow grown rough and untilled. Trees were sparse, hedges were nonexistent, and still the wind blew and the rain came down with the wind. He pressed on, occasionally glancing at his road map, looking for the turning.

There were no trees at all here, save one or two that thrust bare branches to the four winds, bent and twisted from centuries of storm, so blackened by time and tempest, he thought, that even if spring should ever breathe upon this place, no buds would dare come to leaf for fear a late frost might kill them.

It was a scrubby, Martian land. He saw a hillside town off to his right, many roofs and spires; its broad cobbled streets, glowing streetlamps, and warm tea shops beckoned, but he pushed on. The wind tore at his poor roof and the showers of rain, increasing in violence now that there was no shelter from the hills, spat against his windscreen with renewed venom.

He topped the breast of a hill at a furious gallop, saw the shiny black road snaking up yet another incline, while on either side of the road was rough moorland, looming up ink black in the mist and rain. Ahead of him and to the left, at the end of a long and twisting causeway through the moorland, was the silhouette of a thatched-roof cottage with tall chimneys at either end. It stood on another crest quite far back from the primary road. He braked, geared down, and took the first turning he came to. A narrow dirt causeway that led through the Fens to the cottage.

Professor Watanabe had always lived on a desolate island in the midst of this forlorn and lonely bog. He said once that the terrain out here spoke to something in his soul. But it was an overwhelming desire for solitude that drew him here; his soul was neither barren nor bleak. All men are islands, however, and Watanabe was no exception.

There was a jumble of deep tire tracks rutted into the raised mound of the causeway. Odd, but he supposed there’d been no end of police traffic to and fro out here in recent days. Police, the press, and even morbid curiosity seekers. The disappearance of one of Cambridge’s preeminent scholars had not gone unnoticed on the local telly live at five or the papers either, for that matter. An ongoing murder or disappearance investigation always drew the attention of a concerned local citizenry.

It was the thatched cottage that had drawn the old Japanese scholar out here. His was a lovely little seventeenth-century abode, with a warren of tiny rooms on the ground floor and two or three cramped rooms upstairs, one for his bed and the other for his work desk and bookcases. In the spring, multiflora roses would surmount the rooftops of a house desperate for off-season charm.

But now it looked foreboding and even, he hated to admit it, malevolent. One winter evening over a quiet supper in the cottage, this was years ago, Congreve recalled, Watanabe-san had actually referred to this domicile as his own “Bleak House.”

Bleak enough at the moment, certainly, Congreve thought, slowing the Yellow Peril to a crawl. Something nagged at him, told him it wouldn’t do to simply drive across the winding causeway up into the muddy yard that lay at the far end. One never really knew in a murder investigation, but one could never be too cautious.

He doused his headlamps and coasted another few yards before coming to a halt just shy of a rise in the road.

He switched off the engine, grabbed his tightly wound umbrella, and got out, closing the car door silently. He gazed at the lowering skies, deciding there was no necessity in raising his umbrella; for the moment he had to contend only with the fine mist. Besides, his tweeds were already damp to the point of wetness.

He made the balance of the ten-minute journey on foot, his head lowered against the cold wind, peeking up occasionally for a flash of light in a window, a wisp of chimney smoke, or any sign at all of life from within the cottage. None. He stepped very carefully here. To either side of him lay the marsh, black and sodden from the heavy rains, a good four feet below the path he trod.

He entered the muddy cottage yard feeling confident he was alone. The cottage and two small outbuildings formed three sides of the little square that was the yard. In the center was a drinking trough, the water cold and peaty when he tasted it. He turned and looked behind him, taking a deep breath.

The air was strong and sweet-smelling, cold as mountain air and strangely pure. His automobile was blotted by the incline, the black hills lay beyond, sinister and obscure. But no one had followed him, of that he was certain.

Large puddles of standing water now lay between him and the front door in the shadow of the eaves. He walked as quickly as he dared, but the mud was sucking deep out here and he despaired of not thinking to wear his Wellies. A good pair of Lobb walking shoes would die this day, but there was nothing for it. Duty, as it so often did, called.

As he started across the soupy terrain, an odd sight caught his eye. Perched atop the pitch line of the sodden thatched roof was a very large black raven. Odd, because birds instinctively took cover during foul weather. And also odd because the bird’s beady black eyes seemed to be tracking him as he slogged forward toward the house. For reasons he could not fathom, the raven gave him a distinctly uneasy feeling. But he shrugged it off, pulled his tweed cap lower on his brow, and continued on.

The front door, surprisingly, was unlocked.

There was evidence of tattered crime scene tape, of course, but it had all been ripped away.

He pushed and the weathered and seamed oak door swung inward with a loud creak. He stepped inside, ducking to avoid banging his head as he crossed the threshold.

He smiled upon gaining entry. There was and always had been a demon of curiosity inside Ambrose that could not be stilled.

It was dark and bitterly cold inside as well, what with the vaporous and invasive air intruding. The famous detective shivered, pulling his great woolen coat tighter around his girth. He turned his flash on, beaming the torch up the narrow staircase. The pale green stair carpet climbing up into the darkness was worn and stained and gave off an unpleasant odor of age and dirt.

He was about to climb it, then paused as finer instincts took over. His pupils dilated in the dim light, and his nostrils flared as he processed the myriad odors inhabiting the place. It was tobacco, primarily, for Watanabe had been a lifelong pipe smoker like himself.

And there was, too, the smell of dusty furniture and draperies, of boiled beef and cabbage and pungent brussels sprouts from the rear of the cottage, where the kitchen would be; a trace of peat smoke came from the rear as well. Yes, and what else? There’d been a cat or two at one point, perhaps more, and even a canary if the moldy scent of soggy Hartz Mountain seed was any indication.

The detective found none of this surprising or troublesome, really. No coppery scent of blood, at any rate. Nothing to indicate odd gases or poisonous chemicals. No obvious death or decay, nothing evident but the remains of the day.

He bent and stepped carefully through to the low-ceilinged front parlor.

Here was oak paneling and hideous Victorian sconces on all four walls, the balance presenting an inappropriate, tortured, Gothic decor despite Watanabe’s best attempts at style. Congreve found a switch plate and flipped all three brass toggles. Nothing. The electricity had surely been turned off by the police, as well as the gas. He turned his attention to the hearth, to a smattering of half-burned pages in the grate and—

There was something else in the air.

He put his murder bag on the floor beside his feet, closed his eyes, and inhaled deeply once more.

Yes.

A scent now came to him, one most startling to his highly developed and attuned olfactory systems.

A very faint trace of very expensive perfume. How very odd, indeed, but there it was. A female visitor? One sophisticated and of sufficient means to afford… yes, he had it now… Les Parfums de Saint Laurent? A memorably musky scent. Diana had dabbed it on her wrist for him a month or so ago at Harrods. Not the one perfume he adored, the Chanel No. 5, but something unfamiliar called… Shalimar. A portrait of the wearer gradually formed in his mind. She was a somewhat younger, rather than older, woman, a fashionable young thirties perhaps. And well heeled to boot.

He tried to imagine just such a woman traveling out to the back of beyond to visit an elderly, brooding loner like Watanabe-san. A man for whom books and Brahms were life’s sole companions. He couldn’t do it. He’d be more than surprised if Watanabe had ever had a visitor out here in all those decades. He’d had a woman look in once or twice a week to make sure he was still breathing and had something in the larder to eat, but—

A noise.

A slight scraping sound from the floor above.

And then the squeak of a door hinge.