Brighton Belle (26 page)

‘You must take the day off now. Will you? It’s Saturday. Treat yourselves.’ The old lady barely stopped for a moment to hear their answers before striding purposefully towards
a first-class carriage to board for the journey.

As one of the porters passed Mirabelle on his way back up the platform, she called him over. ‘Please,’ she said breathlessly, ‘I need your help. It’s that lady. The lady
you were with. Will you go straight away to one of the police officers on the London platform for me?’

‘Yes, Miss,’ the man said uncertainly. ‘You need a police officer?’

A guard was signalling with a flag at the other end of the train.

‘Tell him that Detective Superintendent McGregor has to know – Mirabelle Bevan is on this train. The Southern Coastal Line. He has to come and help. Have you got that? And make sure
he tells Vesta as well – she’ll be worried.’

‘Yes, Miss. But that lady isn’t no Mirabelle Bevan – she’s a French lady, see. Can’t remember the name but it wasn’t that. Pretty fancy, she is.’

‘I know. I can’t explain now. Just tell him, will you?’

The man paused, clearly waiting for a tip. Mirabelle fumbled with her handbag and extracted a sixpence.

‘It’s very important,’ she said. ‘Life or death. I don’t want to lose sight of her until the police know. It’s vital that they tell Detective Superintendent
McGregor.’

The man pocketed the coins, looking unimpressed after the older woman’s generosity. ‘Right, Ma’am,’ he said. ‘Well, I’m going off now, but I’ll tell the
officer before I leave.’

Mirabelle felt flustered. It was an odd request, she knew. ‘Detective Superintendent McGregor,’ she repeated. And I’m Mirabelle Bevan.’

The man paused. ‘Oh, I’m telling him you got on the train, Miss?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Shall I tell him which stop you’re travelling to?’

Mirabelle rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t know which stop. Just tell him I got on the train. This train. He’ll have to figure the rest out for himself.’

The guard blew his whistle.

‘Right then,’ the porter said and opened the nearest door.

Mirabelle climbed aboard. ‘Any of the policemen will do,’ she leaned out towards him. ‘Go now! See that they ring it in. And tell them to let Vesta know. I’m tailing
Madame de Guise, do you see? Oh, dear!’

The door slammed. The porter nodded through the glass and waved half-heartedly as if Mirabelle was completely mad and he was only humouring her. Then the carriage pulled off slowly and she lost
sight of the man as the jerky shuffling of the train accelerated along the track.

Mirabelle hesitated a moment, loitering in the corridor, but realised that going into the compartment was the only way to keep an eye on what the old lady was up to. If she chose another
compartment nearby she would have no way of telling if Madame de Guise changed seats or which stop she might get off along the route. She plucked her new hat out of its box and swapped it with the
one she was wearing. The black veil covered most of her face, so it would be unlikely that Lisabetta would recognise her. Smoothing it into place, she carefully slid back the door, praying that the
porter had delivered her message to the policeman and that the uniformed officer had the good sense to call it in quickly.

The carriage was unoccupied apart from the two of them. Madame de Guise nodded and, Mirabelle noticed, as she took the seat opposite, studiously ignored her, casting her eyes down and then out
of the window.

I just have to sit here and wait, she told herself. That’s all. I just have to stay calm and keep my eyes open until McGregor gets here. It’s my duty. She won’t do anything.
She doesn’t know it’s me.

The houses soon gave way to fields on one side and the sea on the other, flashes of blue as the track followed its course close to the coast. As the last of Brighton’s suburbs disappeared
the old lady cleared her throat and Mirabelle looked up nervously.

‘Would you mind closing the blinds, my dear?’ she asked, gesturing towards the screens that were in place above the door onto the corridor.

‘Oh,’ Mirabelle said, ‘of course.’

The old lady continued speaking. ‘What is your destination?’

‘Oh, end of the line. Plymouth,’ Mirabelle replied without hesitation as she pulled the blinds into place. ‘Where are you going?’ she asked as lightly as she could. She
turned back into the carriage but as she did so her heart leapt.

The old lady had pulled out a revolver and it was pointed towards her.

28

Upon the conduct of each depends the fate of all.

I
t was mayhem at police HQ all afternoon. Willie Walsh from the antique shop in the Twittens had been arrested, sneaking around the back
garden at 22 Second Avenue with a shovel in his hands. The news that there was a missing cache of gold coins was out, and the vultures had moved in fast, seeing if they could find it before the
police recovered the goods.

‘It’s not illegal to do a bit of gardening,’ Walsh chanced his arm. ‘I don’t know what the world’s coming to.’

‘Leave it out,’ groaned Sergeant Simmons.

How these things got out, McGregor wasn’t sure, but he was damn certain that, eventually, he’d find the culprits and indict them. He wasn’t having that kind of corruption in
his department. In the meantime, though, there were bigger fish to fry.

By half past two McGregor realised he had gone about as far as he could with Manni. The toe rag was holding out better than he would have expected. Even when he dropped intriguing names into the
conversation Manni kept his cool.

‘They’re punters. All punters. You got nothing on me, McGregor,’ he sneered, lighting Camel after Camel, ‘and you know it. I’m on the level. Legit.’

McGregor persisted. He’d sent Robinson to search Manni’s lodgings but he wanted to crack him before the team returned to the station – it was a matter of professional
pride.

‘So,’ he said, ‘you know they’ve scarpered then. Your mates, Dr Crichton and the lovely Lisabetta. They’ve gone up to London. They’ve done a runner on you,
Manni.’

‘I thought it was a free country, England,’ Manni retorted. ‘I thought if someone wanted to go to London they were entitled.’

‘Yes, they are. But they aren’t entitled to mint forged currency. They aren’t entitled to launder money through your tote – the racing board, you can imagine, are taking
a particularly gloomy view on that one. Oh, and the insurance fraud and the kidnapping and murder, well, neither they nor you were entitled to any of that. And as it stands, Manni, you’re
going to be carrying the can for the whole shooting match.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Manni smirked.

‘Well, let’s start with Ben McGuigan, shall we?’

‘Not that again. You’ve got nothing on me for that, McGregor, and you know it. If Ben Bloody McGuigan gets pissed and goes missing, it ain’t my concern. I want my solicitor. I
want Mr Peters.’

He wasn’t budging and McGregor decided he’d just have to wing it. He was pretty sure that Vesta and Mirabelle were reliable or at least he hoped so.

‘Thing is,’ McGregor allowed a slice of a smile to pass across his face, ‘we dug him up, Manni. Ben McGuigan.’

‘Dug him up?’ Manni’s voice faltered for the first time in the interview.

‘Yes, in a grave that was marked for your friend Lisabetta’s sister. A bird called Romana Laszlo by all accounts.’

Manni looked considerably less cocky than he had a few seconds before.

‘And seeing how when Ben McGuigan went missing he had been undercover, investigating you for a good fortnight, well, you can see that we’re adding up one and one and getting a very
interesting sum. You like maths, don’t you, Manni? Figures are quite your thing. Oh, and we got the priest, too. We know what happened to him. So things are really coming together.’

It wasn’t, the detective superintendent told himself, entirely untrue to say that. They would dig Ben up and, well, they had the priest, that was certain – he just wasn’t
alive.

A bead of sweat trickled down the side of Manni’s face. ‘None of that was my fault. None of it!’

‘So whose was it, Manni?’ McGregor was getting close now, he could feel it. It would be so easy to get carried away but he had to control himself. Get the information, the confession
and see if Manni knew where they’d gone. He didn’t want to feed Manni too much – it would make it easier for him to lie.

A junior officer knocked on the door of the interview room.

‘Not now,’ McGregor barked.

‘But, sir,’ the officer insisted.

‘I said not now.’

The officer considered a moment. It was only a call from uniform, after all. It hadn’t seemed important – just some woman getting on a train but it definitely wasn’t the woman
the boss was looking for. Only some informant with a foreign-sounding name.

‘Yes, sir,’ he backed out of the interview room. ‘Sorry for disturbing you.’

There was no point pushing it.

‘Now,’ McGregor turned his attention back to Manni, ‘there’s only one way you’re going to get anything less than life here. And you’ll be lucky if
that’s all you get.’ McGregor drew a suggestive finger across his throat. ‘So, you better tell me everything you know. Because I want to find out, Manni, where the hell the others
have gone. And if I don’t, well, it’s all going to get pinned on you, isn’t it? You’re in this thing up to your neck and you’ll swing, Manni, you mark my words. If you
don’t cough up, you’ll swing.’

29

The Black Swan

E
ighteen months before, after Jack died, Mirabelle had wanted to die. She used to lie on the floor of the drawing room at night with all the
lights out, unable to sleep, and will the building to fall in on her. She had been deliberately careless when she crossed the road, waiting for fate to take its chance, just wishing that she could
blot out the whole world forever and hoping that somehow she’d just die and the pain would all be over.

Now she was faced with a dangerous criminal who had an old-style single-action revolver pointed directly at her, she felt strangely calm, and there was one thing of which she was certain: she
wasn’t giving up and she no longer wanted to die. Every sense in her body was heightened – she could smell coffee on the old lady’s breath, feel the cold windowpane beside her as
if it was radiating its chill, and hear the sound of the tracks in minute detail as the train headed west. She knew that Madame de Guise did not intend to shoot her – not immediately, anyway.
The safety catch was still on. Mirabelle was familiar with the specification of this revolver and she knew there had been a lot of problems with it. The firing mechanism was delicate and, if it had
been subjected to abuse over its lifetime, the spring inside could easily shift, making the weapon extremely unreliable. Though it took six bullets it was generally accepted that it was only safe
to load five. One in the first chamber, then a space and four more. Mirabelle had read the firearm manual – she couldn’t remember when, but she knew about it, that was the main thing.
The old lady was wearing thin kid gloves, which would make the whole thing more difficult. Not, Mirabelle knew, that the gun wouldn’t kill her, only that all this might buy her a fraction of
a second or two if it came to the crunch.

After a moment’s silence, Mirabelle decided to speak. ‘Well, the ball’s in your court,’ she said quietly.

‘Who knows that you’re on this train?’

Mirabelle sat up straighter. ‘I left a message,’ she answered honestly. ‘I don’t know if they got it.’

‘You are police?’

Mirabelle shook her head.

‘Raise your veil.’

Mirabelle did so.

The woman looked perplexed. ‘Why are you following me?’

Mirabelle gave an almost imperceptible shrug of the shoulders before she spoke. ‘I was right, though, wasn’t I? I’ll bet you have a stash of gold coins in that luggage of yours
that would put the Royal Mint to shame.’

‘Ah, you want money’ Madame de Guise seemed quite relieved. ‘But, of course, it is far easier just to kill you and fling you out of the train. I’m not sure you have
thought this through, my dear.’

‘That’s all you care about, isn’t it? Money? That’s what I heard about you.’

Madame de Guise hesitated for a moment. She had no qualms about committing murder but she didn’t like to kill someone before she knew who they were or what they were up to.

‘It was you who broke into Crichton’s house last night?’ she hazarded. ‘It’s you that Lisabetta was scared of.’

Mirabelle’s eyes widened. ‘You’re not Lisabetta, then?’ she said, incredulous.

The old lady laughed. ‘I am fifty-eight years of age. Lisabetta was in her twenties. A beautiful girl and quite impressive in her own way. You can’t have met her if you are mistaking
the two of us. It’s quite flattering for me, I think, this mistake of yours.’

Mirabelle’s thoughts tumbled. This old lady, she was a black swan, she thought in a rush. The human error. The thing that couldn’t be accounted for. Was this old woman the mastermind
McGregor had suspected – the brains behind everything? She peered across the carriage, examining her closely.

‘Ah, you think it is a wig? Make-up? Like she used?’ The woman took off her hat with her free hand and pulled her grey hair out of the bun. She tugged on the strands hard.
‘See.’

‘Who are you then?’ Mirabelle asked.

Madame de Guise smiled. ‘I could ask you the same thing, I think. You first?’ She raised the gun.

‘I am Mirabelle Bevan.’

Madame de Guise frowned. ‘I don’t know that name.’

‘And you?’

‘Marguerite de Guise, for the time being at any rate. Now, I don’t know what to do with you, my dear, but I tend not to kill people until I have to. So, we’re going to take a
journey together. Only a little journey. And then, in time, I will decide.’

‘You said “was”,’ Mirabelle pushed. ‘Lisabetta “was”.’

‘My English,’ the old lady dismissed the query.

‘Is Lisabetta dead? Did you kill her?’

‘What do you care? Be quiet. We will be there shortly.’

‘Where?’

Madame de Guise cocked the gun rather expertly and Mirabelle felt her whole body tighten with fear. Those revolvers had been known to go off unexpectedly if you didn’t know they
shouldn’t be fully loaded. For a second she thought she might not be able to breathe but then, with a shallow rhythm, she found that she could take in at least a little air.