Page 19 of Needs Must
‘I blame myself you see. I always will. I was doing business with characters who proved to be … shall we say, unscrupulous. Times were hard. It was just after the war, taxation had risen to a ridiculously high level and we were all struggling.’ Bagshott wiped his lips on the back of his hand and sighed. ‘I was a damned fool, and that’s a fact. When something seems too good to be true then it almost always is. I knew it but was dragged into the scheme through greed and desperation.’
‘I recall my father lamenting the taxation rate at the time,’ Cal said reflectively.
‘I was not always such a sour-faced recluse,’ Bagshott said, sending Cal a challenging look, as though defying him to dispute the fact. Cal simply nodded.
‘So I have been told.’
‘In fact, I used to be the life and soul of the party. But all that changed when I got pulled into the aforementioned scheme.’
‘Smuggling?’ Jules suggested.
Bagshott shook his head. ‘Nothing so obvious. A plausible chap whom I met one night playing cards in London told me that he represented a group of people anxious to find investors in a thriving gold mine in Africa. I know,’ he added, holding up a hand when Cal rolled his eyes. ‘He was a high-flyer, no question. A gentleman to his fingertips. He’d been living and working in Africa for more than a decade and was about to return to his interests there. He needed a representative in this country to find men willing to invest so that he’d have the necessary funds to expand his enterprise. A man of my stature who knew the right people.’ Bagshott made a disparaging sound. ‘He flattered me, I can quite see that now.’
Cal grunted but said nothing.
‘Anyway, he showed me paperwork that confirmed his ownership of the mine and authenticated its yields. He gave me the names of satisfied customers who were already seeing a high return. I looked into it, spoke to those men, and even though a part of me was still sceptical, I couldn’t see a flaw.’ He pulled a self-denigrating face. ‘Perhaps because I didn’t want to. I was being offered a generous, indeed very generous, commission for each gentleman who chose to become involved.’
‘And let me guess,’ Cal said. ‘The mine didn’t exist.’
‘Oh, it existed right enough. But it was played out. There was virtually no more gold to be had and it would have cost more than it was worth to extract what was left.’ Bagshott looked devastated. ‘The papers I saw – and which my lawyer authenticated, I might add – were very professional forgeries. All the people I spoke to about the mine had invested and then taken their profits out. They were not a part of the deception. Those whom I introduced, some of whom were even more desperate than me, lost everything they’d put in.’
‘I don’t recall hearing anything about it,’ Jules said.
‘It never became common knowledge. No one who’s been duped wants to make a public fool of himself, take it from one who knows, and we preferred to quietly absorb the loss. That’s what was so clever about the scheme. The man behind it all, who told me his name was Rothstein, was well aware that pride goeth before a fall.’
‘I can understand why you might have wanted to withdraw from the world after being so comprehensively taken in,’ Cal said, keeping his thoughts on Bagshott’s desperation, gullibility – call it what you will – to himself, ‘but what I don’t understand is what this has to do with the death of your wife.’
‘I’m getting to it.’ Bagshott picked up his glass, looked surprised when he found it was empty and glanced at Jules, who took the hint, stood up and refilled it. ‘I met with all the people I’d signed up and made my apologies. Needless to say, I never saw a penny of the commission I’d been promised, nor did I see the man who’d drawn me into the scheme. And believe me, I conducted a thorough search.’ Bagshott looked away. ‘One man blew his brains out over it. I shall never forgive myself.’
‘You are not the first to clutch at straws when the going gets tough.’ Cal paused. ‘Am I acquainted with any of the gentlemen whom you recruited?’
‘It’s unlikely,’ Bagshott replied. ‘They are mostly from the middle classes. Men who have made fortunes in these changing times. Rothstein told me to focus on that group of individuals. Now I know why. If men of your ilk were duped, then they would have the power to hunt Rothstein down. Corn merchants and architects are of course not so privileged.’
Cal nodded, able to see the truth in that statement. The upper classes stuck together. They were wary of the middle classes, some of whom were acquiring staggering amounts of wealth, and wouldn’t lift a finger to help them in times of need.
Bagshott, now contrite rather than the bombastic individual he had been when he’d entered Cal’s library, lowered his head in acknowledgement of that particular truth. ‘Some of Rothstein’s victims blamed me for misleading them – which is what I did, I suppose, albeit unintentionally. I was a victim too and did what I could to repay some of the worst affected out of my own funds.’
‘That was generous,’ Jules conceded.
‘Not generous enough. I could only go a small way towards compensating them.’ Bagshott paused to rub the back of his neck. ‘And there were those, of course, who refused to believe that I had not benefited to a greater extent, while I hadn’t seen a penny. One particular individual was especially aggressively disposed towards me, perhaps because he’d lost the most. He made threats against me, my property and … my wife.’
‘Ah, I see.’ And Cal thought that he very probably did. ‘That is why you sent your wife away and pretended that you had been cuckolded. You were attempting to protect her from vindictive victims of Rothstein’s scheme.’
Bagshott nodded. ‘Precisely so. I had fortified as much of my estate as possible to help the victims and was prepared to take my chances if they continued to issue threats. But I was not prepared to risk my darling Esmeralda’s life. My problem was that I couldn’t bear to have her too far away from me, so I suggested Denmead Cottage, and we concocted the rumour about an affair. But it did no good, and my selfishness eventually cost Esmeralda her life.’ He looked away but not so quickly that Cal didn’t see the tears in his eyes.
‘You assume your enemies found her?’
‘I am absolutely sure of it.’ Bagshott, in control of himself again, nodded emphatically.
‘If they took away the person whom you cared about most in the world, how did they imagine that would encourage you to be generous?’ Jules asked. ‘You don’t strike me as the cowardly type.’
‘And you didn’t seek your revenge,’ Cal added.
‘I am no coward, sir. You have got that much right. My difficulty was that several of the men who had lost almost everything had joined forces to revenge themselves upon me. I had no idea which of them ordered my wife to be killed and I could hardly go after them all. After all, what could I, one man alone, possibly do? Besides, part of me felt that I was responsible and deserved to suffer, even if my wife did not.’
‘Which would explain why you became a recluse,’ Jules remarked.
‘I withdrew from the world, through both choice and necessity. I was grieving, disgusted with myself for being such a fool, and was myself almost penniless. I had given most of what I had to recompense Rothstein’s victims, you see.’
