30
The sun was high and bright when I left the museum, but dark clouds had started to take over patches of the sky and the air had a chill reminiscent of autumn. It felt more like England than it had in weeks. I hailed a cab and went straight to Mr. Barnes’s office, feeling my best hope was to appeal to someone who’d lived in the West Indies.
“I have a strange question for you,” I said as soon as I was seated in a comfortable leather-backed chair. “Do you know anything about voodoo?”
“Voodoo?” he asked, straightening a pile of papers on his desk.
“I found something I have reason to believe may be related to it,” I said, pulling it out of the bag in which I’d been carrying the bottle and handed it to him.
He removed it from the bag and touched the glass. “This isn’t voodoo,” he said, his voice soft and soothing. “It’s Obeah, a religion common amongst the natives in the West Indies. The Europeans were often terrified by it.”
“Why?” I asked.
“They didn’t understand it,” he said. “It’s all spells and shamans and things unfamiliar to them.” He turned the bottle over in his hands and half smiled, his lips closed. “I never expected to see this again.”
“You recognize it?”
“I made it,” he said. His voice, rich and smooth, was softer than usual. “Not the bottle itself, but I put the contents together. Are you horrified?”
“Should I be?” I asked.
“It’s not as if I practice black magic,” he said. “But I do remember the spells my nanny swore worked. Mr. Dillman came to me one night—I assume you found this with his possessions?”
“Yes,” I said.
“We didn’t start off as terribly close friends,” he said. “But I saw him on a fairly regular basis at political functions and we realized we shared very similar values. He had progressive ideas about business, and I thought he could offer excellent advice to those making pertinent policy decisions. We came to trust each other very much.”
He sat back down, holding the bottle. “One night, he came to see me unexpectedly. He was agitated and desperate. He wouldn’t tell me what was going on, but was obviously in need of some friendly comfort. All I could get out of him was that he was terrified someone was trying to destroy him. Without knowing additional details, there was not much I could do for him that would be of real help.”
“What a terrible situation to be in,” I said.
“It was, but I managed to console him with rather too much claret. Before long, he was saying that he wished there was some way he could strike back at someone—I don’t know whom—who had crossed him in a business deal. He became angry and frustrated and fixated on bringing this man, or these men, down. At that point, I thought it best to find some way to distract him from his troubles, and island superstition seemed as good a way as any.”
“So you put this together for him?” I asked.
“As I said, there had been rather too much claret consumed,” he said. “I found an old empty bottle and we set off to fill it in an appropriate manner. By the end of the evening, his spirits had been restored. He took the bottle, telling me he was going to give it to the man causing his grief.”
“He didn’t tell you anything at all about what specifically was troubling him?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “And I didn’t see a need to press him on the subject at the time. You can imagine how this has haunted me since his death. I should have pushed him harder.”
“So what, exactly, does one do with something like this?” I asked, reaching for the bottle.
“You put it near your enemy’s door and it will bring to him just a touch of trouble,” he said.
“Who was he going to use it on?” I asked.
“He wouldn’t tell me,” he said. “When I heard what had happened to Dillman, I felt ill. I went to Scotland Yard at once and told them everything. They were decent to me, but I could tell they thought I was a little crazy. Still, it seemed the right thing to have informed them, even if it came to naught.”
I thanked him for his candor, but was not quite trusting enough to take him at his word. After I left his office, I stopped at Scotland Yard to corroborate Mr. Barnes’s story. The detectives were less than pleased to see me, but showed signs of amusement when I asked them my question.
“Right,” one of them said, thumbing through a file. “I do remember something like that. Yes, here it is.” He held up a paper to show me. “All documented, black magic and everything. Mr. Barnes was half mortified telling us, the poor man. Did the right thing, though, coming forward, even if it didn’t prove significant to the case. Wish more people were as concerned with justice as he is.”
Satisfied, I continued home, where I found Ivy and Jeremy waiting for me in my Impressionist-filled drawing room.
“We asked Davis if we could wait for you,” Ivy said. “Jeremy said the two of you have quite a story for me. He refused to breathe a word of it until you got back.”
“Indeed we do,” I said. “But first, I have some information about our bottle.”
“It makes perfect sense, doesn’t it?” Ivy said, after I’d filled them in on everything I’d learned. “Instead of leaving the bottle for his nemesis, Mr. Dillman used it to protect the papers.”
“Would the charm bring to harm whoever found it?” Jeremy asked.
“I hope not,” Ivy said. “Do you think we should be worried?”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t believe in magic and evil spells. But this does make me want to take a much closer look at the papers we found with it.”
“Let’s do that,” Jeremy said.
“We can’t,” I said. “Colin has them. So I suppose we should tell Ivy what happened to us last night.” We recounted for her all that had happened in the park.
“I’ve never heard anything so terrible!” Ivy said, leaning so far forward in her chair I feared she would fall over. “Are you all right?”
“Perfectly,” I said. “My head is fine today.”
“And you?” she asked Jeremy.
“I’m only thankful the ingrate hit the back of my head,” he said. “It would have been much worse if he’d mangled my face.”
“Vanity will be the end of you,” Ivy said.
“I think we should go back to Hyde Park,” I said. “Scotland Yard insist they found nothing significant in the lodge, but I don’t think they looked hard enough. Are you two game? We cannot let Lady Glover suffer the same fate as Cordelia.”
“I certainly wouldn’t let you go alone, not even in broad daylight,” Jeremy said. “I never would have dragged you there last night if I had thought I’d be putting you in danger.”
“I don’t believe we were in much danger,” I said. “And now I feel even more secure. If they’d wanted to kill
