Page 82 of A Ruse of Shadows
Mrs. Watson exhaled. Of course they were the ones Lord Bancroft meant to entrap. They hadn’t always been 100 percent sure what roles Mr. Underwood and Mrs. Claiborne—real and sham—played in the scheme, but about Lord Bancroft’s malice there had never been any doubt.
Mrs. Watson, Miss Charlotte, and Lord Ingram returned to the parlor. Miss Charlotte yawned. Mrs. Watson’s mind still raced, even though her eyes felt gritty and her head woolly.
“My lord,” said Miss Charlotte, rubbing her arm that had been sorely tried in combat with Jessie, “we didn’t have time to discuss this earlier, but you showed the counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne’s picture to your liaison inside De Lacey Industries?”
The dear young man had been keeping strange hours of late. Perhaps for that reason, tonight he looked no worse for wear, clear-eyed and alert. “I did. The counterfeit Mrs. Claiborne—what did the real Mrs. Claiborne call her? Mrs. Kirby? She had been seen there.”
De Lacey Industries belonged to Moriarty’s organization. Mrs. Watson sucked in a breath. “So Lord Bancroft really did form an alliance with Moriarty. But if he must blame someone for his downfall, Moriarty was almost as much at fault as Miss Charlotte here.”
“Holmes, however, would never seek to cultivate my brother,” said Lord Ingram, gathering up used cups and plates from the tea table. “But Moriarty must look upon a disgraced Bancroft as someone potentially useful, a wellspring of highly sensitive intelligence, if nothing else.”
“Does that mean the men holding Miss Bernadine and my staff hostage are Moriarty’s minions?”
Lord Ingram, carrying the dishes on a tray, walked toward thedoor. “I’m inclined to agree with your initial assessment that they are mercenaries. Moriarty and his lieutenants have had to rely on mercenaries of late, since they themselves are short of personnel.”
Miss Charlotte held the door for him to walk through.
“But mercenaries must be expensive,” said Mrs. Watson. “Will Lord Bancroft have to become Moriarty’s minion, too, to pay him back? I hardly think he’d subject himself to the sort of control Moriarty likes to exert over his underlings.”
“Nor do I,” answered the great detective. “Which means Lord Bancroft would have needed to put up something valuable in exchange for Moriarty’s help. One moment, please.”
She, too, left the parlor and came back a minute later with a photograph.
“Do you remember, ma’am, the cache of photographic plates we took from Château Vaudrieu?”
In an effort to save Mrs. Watson’s old friend—and former lover—the Maharani of Ajmer from blackmail, Sherlock Holmes and company had inadvertently burgled none other than Moriarty’s stronghold outside Paris. Mrs. Watson had never examined the loot in detail, but she knew that Miss Charlotte had gone through all the photographic plates to make sure that there had been nothing incriminating concerning the maharani or her family members in those images.
“Lord Bancroft was captured in one of those photographs. I don’t think he was the intended subject of the photograph—which was a group of men I didn’t recognize—but he’d been caught in the periphery.”
Miss Charlotte handed the photograph to Mrs. Watson. The picture was barely half the size of Mrs. Watson’s palm. And there he was, a miniature Lord Bancroft, seated on the terrace of a café, one ankle on his knee.
“By the time I came across this, Lord Bancroft was already confined to Ravensmere. All the same, I alerted Lord Ingram to the existence of the photograph, and he took a look before he committed our entire cache to a safe-deposit box in Paris.”
Miss Charlotte now handed another photograph to Mrs. Watson, this one much larger.
“Why, it’s the exact same place!” exclaimed Mrs. Watson.
Except this photograph had been taken from a higher vantage point, and there was a milliner’s next to the café, rather than a tobacconist’s.
“Being better traveled than I, his lordship immediately recognized the place in the photograph as Bruges. And in January of this year, he traveled there and took this second photograph from a nearby hotel.
“Lord Bancroft, on the other hand, is not much of a traveler. I believe he undertook a standard grand tour in his youth, but did not stray much from these shores in recent years. It’s quite possible he went to Bruges to conduct some of the illicit business that led to his downfall.
“But our dear lord Ingram, being the enterprising gentleman he is, walked around the district in Bruges, located several financial institutions, and inquired at each about the hiring of safe-deposit boxes. One bank didn’t offer such services, but the other two did.
“And as he never ceases to amaze us, he broke into the bank managers’ offices, checked the records, and found one box leased to a name that he recognized. Not Lord Bancroft’s own, of course, but an alias he had used in his youth, when he didn’t want his father to find out that he had opened a line of credit at an expensive establishment.”
Mrs. Watson’s jaw hung open. “So you know what the crown has failed to find out. You know where Lord Bancroft’s ill-begotten gains are.”
“But we don’t have the key to it,” said Lord Ingram, back from the kitchen in the basement and still drying his hands with a handkerchief. “And the bank’s strong room is highly secured, with a steel door that’s quite beyond my lock-picking skills.”
“Which is really too bad. Had we known then what troubles he would create for us, we’d have dug a tunnel under and picked the box clean,” said Miss Charlotte, rather savagely for her.
“And now Moriarty has the loot,” lamented Mrs. Watson.
Certainly they hadn’t found anything remotely resembling a key on Mr. Underwood.
“Well, I don’t think that money was ever meant to be ours,” said Miss Charlotte. “But it’s a shame I can’t show these photographs to Lord Bancroft and taunt him that we already have his hoard.”
