The Illusion of Murder (20 page)

“What type of item?”

“A Persian rug.”

“I suspect Aden isn’t the best place to find Persian rugs—Egyptian ports have a better selection—but if you do make a selection, you can store it in the Passenger Luggage Compartment.”

“Where is that?”

“On the utility deck below the last passenger deck.”

“I’d like to take a look at the facility, to make sure it’s secure.”

“Oh, it’s secure all right.” He nods back at a key on a large ring hanging on the wall behind the counter. “That’s the key.”

“May I borrow it to look over the area?”

“No, ma’am, we can’t let passengers go down there; they might get hurt in the working area of the ship. Also, you know, some passengers have been known to rummage through the stored luggage of others. Not that you would do that, of course.”

“Of course not.”

“When you bring your purchase back, just give it to your steward. He will get the key and stow it for you.”

In a pig’s eye he will.

Trust the steward, poppycock! He has already been bought and paid for by Lord Warton. Offering him money would only whet his appetite to get more from others.

So how will I get my hands on the key if I can’t enlist the steward’s help?

Speaking of the devil, on my way back to my cabin I find the steward at my door with a written message.

“A chit from Mr. Selous. The gentleman requests a response.”

The note is an invitation to join him in an hour to see the British colony.

It is signed, “Your Devoted Admirer.”

The steward holds out a pencil. “Does Madam wish to reply?”

“Yes.” And “Yes” is what I write on the chit.

Interesting. An invitation from a man who I left on sudden—and no uncertain—terms after he tried to keep me from the Ismailia cable office. My suspicious nature doesn’t fail to register that the ship’s bulletin says there is a cable office in Aden.

Frederick Selous isn’t a stupid man or a crude one. He would hardly try the same trick twice, at least not one I had flung in his face.

The excursion will offer me the opportunity to see what I can discover from him, and to find out if he is trying to get information for Lord Warton. Besides, while I find my attitude morally weak, I admit that I find Frederick Selous very attractive.

When I am not angry at him.

*   *   *

A
S
I
COME ONTO THE DECK
, I find the heat very strong and am glad I have selected my silk bodice rather than my heavy wool waist. With my hat and umbrella, I feel ready to risk the sun. It feels even hotter than in the canal area, perhaps because we have travelled fifteen hundred miles closer to the equator since we left Port Said.

I hesitate as I see the Wartons approaching Frederick Selous at the accommodation ladder. I’m behind them and they haven’t noticed me yet.

“Going ashore, too?” Lord Warton asks Frederick.

Frederick looks past them at me and says, “Yes, I have offered to show Nellie a bit of Aden. I’ve been here several times.”

Both Wartons turn at my approach. Lady Warton gives me a crocodile smile from behind her mesh veil. “Would you two mind if we shared a carriage? That way we can all benefit from Frederick’s wealth of knowledge.”

“Of course not,” both of us mumble, and I flash her a smile that I hope doesn’t reveal too plainly that I’d rather take a pair of Egyptian cobras as companions than her sour personality and her arrogant arse of a husband.

Frederick gives me an I-didn’t-plan-this look and I smile forgiveness because I don’t think he did. The luck of the draw, the boys in the newsroom would say, and we had drawn the black queen and the knave for this hand.

As we await our turn down the temporary gangplank strapped to the side of the ship, her ladyship gives me a sweet-and-sour smile—a poor attempt at showing a friendly disposition toward me. His lordship is gravely neutral, almost as if he expects some gesture from me.

Perhaps he thinks a peasant like me should kneel and kiss his signet ring.

*   *   *

N
EAR THE PIER
where we land are shops, a hotel, a post office, and a cable office. The actual town of Aden is five miles distant.

Lord Warton tells us that Aden was first occupied by his country to halt piracy, some of it from Somalia, in Africa across the Gulf. “It is now an important station to take on coal and water for the steam engines of ships.”

Not able to prevent a display of childish behavior, I give a good stare at the cable office as we pass across the street from it.

Frederick pulls me away toward a row of street vendors selling everything from ivory trinkets to salted fish. I already know why he has drawn me away from the others—to chasten me for my cable-office antic.

“You are an impertinent young woman.” He says it with a smile, in a tone that hints if not of approval, at least of respect.

“And you, sir, are a scoundrel. Your last invitation was a bald-faced scheme to keep me from a cable office.”

“Guilty as charged. But the fact that you had the opportunity to send a cable, and did not, clearly shows that you have no motive to stir up trouble for my country. I apologize for my rudeness.”

“I accept your apology. And since this is a free country, you won’t attempt to stop me from going over to that cable office and sending one off, will you?”

“Of course not. It’s a free country, as you say, and I would exercise my freedom to inform the local authorities that you are an agent provocateur stirring up a revolt against the crown. And you can spend the balance of your eighty days pacing around a prison cell.”

“Mr. Selous—”

“Frederick.”

“Mr. Selous, the more I am around you, the more I discover what it is about you that I like.”

“Which is?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You have no redeeming social graces that appeal to me.”

He takes my arm and steers me toward a table of books.

“Actually, knowing your feelings toward me, I was hesitant to offer an invitation. I worried that you would return my invitation with a well-deserved slap to my face.”

“I’m taking a rain check on the slap.”

“Of course, there is that one comment you made that cut me to the bone.” He gives me a narrow look.

“Ah…” I know exactly what he is referring to—the accusation of being Lord Warton’s lackey. “Well, was it the truth?”

He purses his lips for a moment. “Yes, I was urged on by his lordship, but I also felt it was the right thing to do at the time.”

“Then I owe you no apology.”

He takes my arm in a gentlemanly fashion. “Do you know what I like about you, Nellie?”

“I’m afraid to ask.”

“Everything. Your smile, your wit, your courage, the way you start throwing punches to protect yourself. But if you will forgive a man who has spent his adult life battling the worst that Mother Nature and the animal world can throw at one, you have a fault.”

“A fault? No!”

“Nellie, you only know how to throw punches. You have to learn how to duck once in a while, even run when the odds are too great.”

“Mr. Selous—”

“Please call me Frederick.” He shakes his index finger in my face. “If you argue with me, I will be forced to tell Lady Warton that you are in deep need of her maternal ministration and wish to spend the rest of the voyage at her side.”

“Ouch! I would rather swim with the sharks in the bay.” I immediately regret my unladylike comment but he merely nods and mutters, “Amen to that.”

I buy a back-scratcher, a stick with a carved hand on the end, not for a keepsake from Aden but because it occurs to me that I would have a use for it later, something that whoever carved it never dreamed of.

He suddenly reaches for a book. “What’s this?”

The title is
Handbook on Aden.

“Interesting,” he says. He gives the vendor a coin and we walk away, ignoring the man’s jabber in Arabic, no doubt an insistence that the book was a family heirloom worth many times more. He tucks the book into an inside pocket.

“A guidebook?” I ask.

“In a way.”

“A spy manual?”

It was a shot in the dark, based on the book I saw in Mr. Cleveland’s effects.

He stops and gives me a grave look. “As I said, you don’t know when to duck. You’re right, it is a book prepared by the Intelligence Branch at the War Office. There is a handbook for every country and colony detailing the political, economic, and military state of the country.”

“Does it contain secret information? For spies?” I ask.

“Not the stuff of troop movements and war plans, if that’s what you mean, but the information in the books is considered confidential, to be read only by high-ranking Colonial and Foreign Office officials. And spies, I suppose, to gain familiarity with a country.” He locks eyes with me. “I am not a spy, if that’s what you’re wondering, but I do have friends in the Colonial and Foreign Offices and they have made references to the books.”

Leafing through the book, he says, “I doubt that there is anything in here that would blow the lid off of Aden, but nonetheless it belongs in the hands of our administrators, not the locals.”

“How do you think it got into a pile of odds and ends?”

He raises his eyebrows and shrugs. “Theft by a servant? A wife disposing of household items when packing for a return to Britain not realizing it’s confidential? Quite the thing that would ruin a man’s career if discovered.” He smiles. “Or even cause the loss of the kingdom. Do you remember what Richard III said after his horse fell in battle? My kingdom for a horse?” He chimes:

Because of the nail, the shoe was lost.

Because of the shoe, the horse was lost

Because of the horse, the rider was lost

Because of the rider, the battle was lost

Because of the battle, the kingdom was lost

All because of a horseshoe nail!

“All because a housewife discarded an old book,” I add.

“Quite. So you saw a
Handbook of Egypt
when you searched Cleveland’s room, making you believe he was a British agent.”

The casual remark by Frederick catches me off guard and I take a moment to respond.

“Actually, the fact that he sneaked off the ship in the wee hours, ran around Port Said with a brown stain on his face, and tangled with Mahdi killers in the marketplace made it rather obvious that he was on a secret assignment.”

“What else did you discover in his room that you haven’t told me about?”

I raise my eyebrows. “I’m sure you know better than I do the contents of his cabin. I had only the briefest moment to look through his things and saw nothing of consequence.” A lie, but necessary.

“I never saw his personal effects.”

“Ahh…”

“There’s that revelation from the gods again.”

“So Lord Warton has not shared his booty with you?”

Frederick gives me a twisted grin. “No, he hasn’t. The
Handbook of Egypt
was a guess on my part. His lordship acts as if the survival of the British Empire itself has been placed upon his shoulders. Frankly, he strikes me as a rather small man who has stumbled into a rather big mess and who sees himself as the general leading a charge to rout the enemy.”

Lady Warton approaches, raising a curious eye as she sees me and Frederick strolling arm in arm, no doubt her way of showing she’s aware of a romantic interest between the two of us, but she reminds me more of a grinning shark than a matchmaker.

Lady Warton and I wander away from the two men, walking next to the edge of a cliff that provides a view of our ship in the bay below. When we are out of hearing range of the men, she pauses and eyes native women coming down the road.

“He married one, you know,” she says.

“Who?”

“Selous. He married an African native woman and had a child by her.”

“Really?” It’s all I can think to say. I’m not sure why she is sharing this personal information with me.

“He’s not really British, you know.”

“He isn’t? He sounds like it.”

“He was born in England, but his great-grandfather was a French Protestant, a Huguenot who fled persecution in Catholic France.”

By my calculation that made Frederick at the minimum third- or fourth-generation British, depending on how one counted. He might be British going back centuries on the side of one parent.

Lady Warton gives me a sympathetic look but my impression is that of a vulture eyeing a piece of meat.

“You poor dear, you must still be suffering from that terrible incident at the marketplace.”