‘He loved anything in that line,’ said Julien. ‘It was how he metMaman.’ He stood in the doorway of the music room and scanned it attentively. ‘Funny, doing this is like having him with me again. I can hear him telling me to look,reallylook.’
‘And?’ asked Miss Austen. ‘What do you see?’ Her pencil was poised over her notebook. She evidently found Julien fascinating.
‘On the day they died we’d cleared all the furniture to the side to make way for the guests. We had hired chairs for the concert and those were stacked over there.’ He pointed to a space along one wall. ‘Mamaninsisted we clear the small pictures as well. She said her admirers might steal her likeness– it had happened before, at the height of her fame.’
He was describing a room with many changes and footmen coming and going with the chairs and furniture– not an ideal place to conceal something.
Jacob stepped back into the hallway and considered the paintings. Would the latecomtehide a report behind a canvas? That was too unwieldy to be useful, surely, and taking it on and off the wall cumbersome, requiring other people’s involvement. ‘How about those?’ He pointed to the prints on the side table.
‘Those are relatively new,’ said Julien. ‘Vesuvius and the Fountains of Versailles, my father’s new toys.’
Dora, who had been studying the portraits, came over. ‘A volcano. Could that be a pun on explosive?’
They had stood out as being very dull, Jacob remembered thinking when he’d seen the prints the first time. He then recalled the Battle of Trafalgar of yesternight. The man was passionate about the theatre and theatrical effects…
‘Are those transparencies?’ he asked.
Julien smiled. ‘They are. How clever of you to spot that, DrSandys. I was going to surprise you by holding one up to the light. My father got endless amusement from displaying them to his guests and teasing them that their assumptions about the picture were wrong.’
‘First impressions,’ murmured Miss Austen with a glance at Dora. ‘Please do show us,’ she said more loudly.
Julien took the one of the fountains. ‘It is best with a strong lamp in a darkened room, but this window will do as the sun is coming through it.’ He held it up and the dull dribble of afountain shot into sparkling light. ‘My mother said it was very like the real thing whenle Roietla Reinewere alive. After the revolution’—he took the picture away and the fountain vanished—‘and before!’ The fountains gushed again with the light behind them.
Dora brought him the one of Vesuvius. ‘Will this do the same?’
‘Mais oui. You will see what the poor people of Pompeii experienced in the terrifying moment before death.’ His French accent was becoming stronger as he enjoyed the little show he was putting on, memories of the best times with his parents. ‘My father had a very dramatic speech he would give on that explosion and then,voilà!’ He moved the picture to the window. It did not change. ‘Quoi?’ He turned it over, then stared at it again.
Jacob’s heart thumped with anticipation as it did when he was close to solving a puzzle. ‘May I?’
Julien passed it to him. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘You will. Your father liked his games. He gave you a hint that it was explosive– it would amuse him to use a volcano print to hide it in plain sight as Miss Fitz-Pennington hinted. We’ve all been walking past it without giving it a second look– you because you knew the secret and did not feel like playing; we because we thought it a rather dull etching of the Bay of Naples.’ He slid the tacks securing the frame out of their pinholes. ‘For a transparency to work, there must be a thin layer like gauze over the picture beneath and nothing in between. In this case, something has been placed between the two layers.’ He gently opened the back. ‘I imagine your father was planning a theatrical denouement just as you were doing, handing the lucky winner of the bid for his report the information at the party before the jealous eyes of their rivals.’
Julien grimaced. ‘That does sound like him. Is there something?’
Jacob gently eased out the folded page. ‘Indeed, there is.’
‘Is that what everyone is killing people to get their hands on?’
‘I’m afraid it is.’ Hesitating, Jacob then held it out. ‘It is yours. What do you want done with it?’
Julien took it, unfolded the sheet, and read. ‘Why kill for this?’ With a sigh, he handed it back to Jacob. ‘Such things do not interest me. I don’t even want it in the house. My priority is to stop more deaths and these awful attacks, so I want you to let people know it has been found and handed to the government.’
‘You don’t want to bargain for it? Demand to be paid?’ asked Dora, looking over Jacob’s shoulder as they both read the contents.
‘I have no wish to repeat the mistakes of my parents. My father miscalculated and that’—Julien’s voice hitched—‘that proved fatal.’
Jacob’s admiration for the young man went up many notches.
‘Then we will do what you ask. I’ll take this to my acquaintance at the Foreign Office. I suggest you tell all callers about the game we played and pretend ignorance of the contents. Say we whisked it away before you had a chance to read it and that it was addressed to the Foreign Secretary so you had no business reading it in any case. Make it perfectly clear you are out of the business from which your father earned his reputation.’
‘Make it clear to whom?’ asked Julien, puzzled.
‘Everyone,’ said Dora.
‘Especially the Russians,’ added Jacob.
Chapter Thirty
