He thanked Nerissa again and left Dorchester Terrace to walk the short distance to Blantyre’s house.
He was admitted by the butler, and Blantyre himself met him in the hall.
“Has something happened?” he asked, searching Pitt’s face. “Some word about Duke Alois?”
“No. It concerns Serafina Montserrat’s death.”
“Oh?” Blantyre looked tired, and his face was deeply lined. He waved the butler away and the man disappeared obediently, leaving them standing alone in the middle of the beautiful hall. “Have you learned something further?”
“I am not certain, but it begins to look like it,” Pitt replied. It was the worst part of his position as head of Special Branch, and he could pass the responsibility to no one else; Blantyre had been more than a friend; he had gone out of his way, even taken professional risks, to help Pitt learn the reality of the threat to Duke Alois and to persuade the prime minister to take the issue seriously. It made this investigation acutely painful, but it did not relieve him of the necessity of pursuing it.
Blantyre frowned. When he spoke his voice was level and perfectly under control. “There’s something I can do? I know nothing about her death at all. Until you told me otherwise, I assumed it was natural. Then when you mentioned the laudanum, I thought perhaps she had dreaded the loss of her mind to the point where suicide had seemed preferable. Is that not the case?”
“Is it possible that Serafina was working for the Austrian monarchy all the time, and that it was she who betrayed Lazar Dragovic to his death?” Pitt asked.
“Dear God!” Blantyre gasped and swayed a little on his feet. Then he turned and strode across the floor to the foot of the stairs. He grasped the banister, hesitated a moment, then started up.
Pitt followed after him, seized by a shadow of fear, but with no idea why he was afraid.
Blantyre increased his speed, taking the steps two at a time. He reached the landing and went to the second door. He knocked, then stood with his hand still raised. He turned to Pitt a couple of yards behind him. There was a terrible silence.
Blantyre lowered his hand and turned the knob. He pushed the door open and walked into the room.
The curtains were still closed but there was sufficient daylight filtering through them to find their way across to the big bed, and to see Adriana’s black hair fanned across the pillow.
“Adriana!” Blantyre choked on the word.
Pitt waited, his heart pounding.
“Adriana!” Blantyre cried out loudly. He lurched forward and grasped her arm where it lay on the coverlet. She did not move.
Pitt looked and saw the empty glass on the bedside table, and the small piece of folded paper, such as holds a medicinal powder. He would not need to taste it to know what it was.
He walked silently over to Blantyre and put his hand on his shoulder.
Blantyre buckled at the knees and collapsed onto the floor, his body racked with pain, his sobs hollow, making barely a sound.
11
Pitt was in his office, looking yet again through the plans for Duke Alois’s visit, when Stoker knocked on the door.
Pitt looked up as he came in.
Stoker’s expression was anxious, and he was clearly uncomfortable.
“Mr. Blantyre’s here, sir. He looks pretty bad, like he hasn’t eaten or slept for a while, but he wants to see you. Sorry, but I couldn’t put him off. I think it’s about Staum.”
“Ask him in,” Pitt replied. There was no way to avoid it. Assassins do not stop for private grief; it might solve at least part of the problem if Staum was connected to Adriana, but there was nothing to suggest it. Adriana had killed Serafina in revenge for her father, and then apparently in remorse or despair, taken her own life. There was no reason to think she had even heard of Duke Alois, who would have been a child, even younger than herself, at the time of the uprising and the betrayal.
“Fetch brandy and a couple of glasses,” he added, then, seeing the look on Stoker’s face, “I know it’s early, but he may well have been awake all night. It’s civil to make the offer. Poor man.”
“I don’t know how he can bear it,” Stoker said grimly. “Wife killing an old lady who was dying anyway, then taking her own life. Mind, he looks as if he’d be better off dead himself, right now.”
“Ask him in, and don’t be long with the brandy,” Pitt told him.
“Yes, sir.”
Blantyre came in a moment later. He looked like a man stumbling blindly through a nightmare.
Pitt stood to greet him. It was impossible to know what to say. Pitt remembered Charlotte’s grief when he had told her about Adriana; she had been stunned, as if his words had made no sense to her. Then as understanding filled her, followed by horror at the torment she imagined Adriana must’ve been feeling, she had wept in Pitt’s arms for what seemed like a long time. Even when they had finally gone to bed, she had cried in the dark. When he touched her, her face had been wet with tears.
She and Adriana had been friends for only a few weeks. What Blantyre must be feeling was a devastation imaginable only to those who had experienced it.
Blantyre eased himself into the chair like an old man with brittle bones. Stoker came in almost on his heels with the brandy, and Blantyre accepted it. He held the glass in both hands as if to warm the bowl and send the aroma up, but his fingers were bloodless and shaking.
“Stoker said you had some news,” Pitt prompted him after a few moments of silence.
Blantyre looked up. “Staum is no longer alone in Dover,” he said quietly. “There is another man called Reibnitz there. Elegant, ineffectual-looking fellow, very tidy, humorless. He looks like an accountant, and you half expect his fingers to be stained with ink. Until he speaks; then he sounds like a gentleman, and you take him for some third son from a decent family, the sort in England who would go into the Church, for the lack of something better to do.”
“Reibnitz,” Pitt repeated.
Blantyre’s face tightened. “Johann Reibnitz, so ordinary as to be almost invisible. Average height, slender build, light brown hair, gray eyes, pale complexion. Could be any one of a million men in Austria or any of the rest of Europe. Speaks English without an accent.”
“Nothing to distinguish him?” Pitt asked with growing alarm.
“Nothing at all. No moles, no scars, no limp or twitch or stutter. As I said, an invisible man.” There was no expression in Blantyre’s eyes; he spoke mechanically.
“So Staum might be a decoy, as we feared?” Pitt said.
“I think so. He would be, if I were planning it.”
“How do you know this?”
The ghost of a smile crossed Blantyre’s face but vanished so completely Pitt wasn’t sure he had actually seen it. “I still have contacts in Vienna. Reibnitz has killed several times before. They know, but they cannot prove it.”
It was Pitt’s turn to smile. “And you expect me to believe that a lack of proof prevents them from removing him? Is Vienna so … squeamish?”
Blantyre sighed. “Of course not. You are quite right. They use him also, as it suits them. He was one of their own originally. They believe that he has gone rogue.” He looked at Pitt with sudden intensity, as if something alive had stirred within him again. “Would you order one of your own shot, simply because you believed he had become unreliable? Would you not want him tried, given a chance to defend himself? How could you be sure the evidence was good? Should he not face his accuser? And would you detail one of your men to do it? Or would you feel that as head of the service, it was your burden to bear?”
Pitt was startled. It was a question he had avoided asking himself since the O’Neil affair. It was one thing to defend yourself in the heat of the moment; it was very different to order an execution, a judicial murder, in cold blood.
