The Hellfire Club

'I'm taking you to someone who'll be able to answer most of your questions, and I don't want to say anything first. I can tell you about me, though, if you're interested, but I'm not very important.'

'Who are you taking me to?' An entirely unforeseen possibility occurred to her. 'Katherine Mannheim?'

He smiled. 'No, not Katherine Mannheim.'

'Did she write Night Journey?'

'To tell you the truth, I hope she didn't. I'm one of the few who can resist that book.'

'I never even gave it a serious try until a couple of hours ago.'

'And?'

'Jeffrey, I'm not going to say any more until you tell me about yourself. You've always been such an enigma. How can someone like you be happy working for Alden and Daisy? Did you really go to Harvard? What's your story?'

'My story, well.' He looked more self-conscious than she had ever seen him. 'It's a lot less interesting than you make out. My mother wasn't prepared to raise a child after my father died, so I was raised by my father's relatives, all those Deodatos on Long Island. For a couple of years, I was moved around a lot - Hempstead, Babylon, Rockville Centre, Valley Stream, Bay Shore. I saw my real mother on her holidays, but I had plenty of other mothers, and they all doted on me. Went to Uniondale High School. Got a scholarship to Harvard, which was a big deal, majored in Asian studies, got halfway proficient in Chinese and Japanese, graduated magma cum laude. Instead of going to graduate school, I disappointed everybody and enlisted in the army. After I got through officers' training and the Vietnamese course in Texas, I pulled a lot of strings and got into the military police in Saigon. I did some good there, and the work was interesting. Continued the karate lessons I started in Cambridge.'

'When I came back, I took the test for the Long Beach police and got in despite being ridiculously overqualified. One of my uncles was a detective in Suffolk County, and that helped. For three years I did that, took more Japanese at Hofstra, private calligraphy lessons got my black belt, took a lot of cooking classes, and then I sort of fell apart. Quit the force. Did nothing but kill time on the boardwalk and sit in my apartment. After six or seven months, I took all my money out of the bank and went to Japan to polish up my Japanese and live in a Zen monastery. It took two years, but I was accepted into a monastery - long story -and stayed there about eighteen months. Very satisfying, but I had this problem: I wasn't Japanese and never would be. I came back so broke that I had to teach karate on a cruise liner for my passage. No idea what I was going to do. I decided to take the first job anyone offered me and devote myself to it as selflessly as possible. When my aunt told me the Chancels wanted to hire a male housekeeper, I moved to Connecticut and tried to do the best job I could.'

Nora was gaping at him in unambiguous astonishment. 'And you say that's not interesting? My God, Jeffrey.'

'It's just a series of anecdotes. Spiritually I never got anywhere until I moved in with the Chancels. I have no actual ambitions, obviously, apart from that, and helping the Chancels was a lot more satisfying than a lot of other things I could have done.'

Nora, who had been marveling at the disparity between her fantasies about Jeffrey and his reality, suddenly heard what the announcer was talking about and turned up the volume on the radio. 'I have to hear this.'

Jeffrey seemed startled but not at all offended. 'Certainly.'

What had snagged in her ear was an account of a fire in Springfield. '… as we have been informed, no fatalities have been reported as yet, though according to our most recent reports, the blaze has spread to several other houses in the exclusive Oak Street residential area.'

'It's him,' Nora said.

'Him?'

'Shh.'

'To repeat, arson is now assumed to be the cause of the fire in Springfield's Oak Street region first reported shortly after five o'clock this evening by neighbors of Dr Mark Foil, in whose residence the blaze originated. Area residents are advised to keep in touch with the Fire Department's emergency hotline, which is providing minute- by-minute-'

Nora turned off the radio. 'Do you know who Mark Foil is?'

'I'm completely in the dark.'

'Mark Foil is the man who called Merle Marvell.' Jeffrey still did not quite seem to take it all in. 'Which was why Marvell called Alden.' The appalled expression on Jeffrey's face made it clear that he understood what had happened.

'You're convinced it was Dart who torched that house.'

'Of course it was him.'

Jeffrey looked at his watch, made some rapid mental calculations, then hauled down on the steering wheel and without bothering to signal rocketed across two lanes of moderately heavy traffic. Horns blared. He spun the car into Exit 18 at the last possible second. The MG squealed down the ramp and blasted through a stop sign to turn right on King Street in Northampton.

Nora unclenched her hands from the door handle. 'What the hell was that all about?'

Jeffrey pulled over to the side of the road and stopped the car. 'I want you to explain why Dick Dart is willing to murder people and burn down houses in order to protect Hugo Driver's reputation. Start at the beginning and end at the end.'

'Yes, sir,' Nora said.67

Once Nora began, she found that talking to Jeffrey Deodato was very different from telling the same story to Harwich. Jeffrey was listening to her. By the time she finished, she felt as if her story, initially as confused as Daisy's novel, had in the act of telling reshaped itself into a coherent pattern, at least within Jeffrey.

'I see,' he said, with the sense of having seen more than she had. 'So now that Dick Dart has done what he could to hurt Dr Foil, he'll move on to Everett Tidy. And he probably has a car.'

'Cars sort of give themselves to him.'

'We'd better see Professor Tidy. All I need is a telephone.'

'You're going to call him?'

Jeffrey pulled away from the curb. 'I'm going to call a friend of his.'

'You know him?'

'I've known him forever.' Jeffrey turned right at the end of the block and rolled up to a telephone. 'I'll just be a minute,' he said, and jumped out of the car, fishing in his pocket for change.

Nora watched him dial a number and speak a few sentences into the receiver. He turned his back on her and spoke another few inaudible sentences. He hung up and came back.

'Who was that?' Nora asked, and Jeffrey smiled but did not answer. He spun the MG around in a tight circle and zipped back out onto King Street. 'How do you know Bill Tidy's son?'

'I met him a long time ago.'

'Now where are we going?'

'Amherst, where else?' Jeffrey turned right into a parking lot and continued straight through it into another parking lot, from which he emerged onto Bridge Street and accelerated back toward the distant parade of cars and trucks; on the highway. 'Just out of curiosity,' he said, 'do you remember if Davey told you the name of that girl who was so interested in Hugo Driver? The one who did or did not work for Chancel House, and was or was not a member of something called the Hellfire Club?'

'Paddi Mann.'

'I was afraid of that.'

It took her a moment to gather herself. 'You know Paddi Mann, too?'

'Paddi's dead now, but I used to know her. Her real name was Patricia, but she turned into Paddi after she fell in love with Hugo Driver. The person we're going to see in Amherst, the one who knows Everett Tidy, is Sabina Mann, her mother.'

'How do you know Sabina Mann? Why do you know Sabina Mann?' Nora wailed. 'What is going on?'

Jeffrey would not answer.

Davey had not made up the whole story. It had really happened, but five years earlier, in New Haven. Or it