“Four down. Eleven letters.” Nell Ainsworth, 9th Duchess of Belward, taps her pencil against the newsprint. “‘Inappropriate use of a national landmark before six a.m.’”
“Wellingtons,” says a voice from the rafters.
Nell is perched, in pink silk pyjamas and green rubber wellingtons, on center stage near a violin soloist’s empty chair, still in its spotlight, with a hundred‑pound German Shepherd who is not, technically, supposed to be in here.
She smooths the crossword over her knee and does not look up.
A concert hall before dawn is full of ghosts but Nell cares about only two of them: the world‑famous violinist who walked off‑stage mid‑concerto last night, and the one who lured her here with a text this morning. The same phantom now speaking to her from high in the Rausing Circle.
“Splendid pyjamas, Nell. Are we expecting rain?”
The Royal Albert Hall has 5,272 seats and, at this hour on Sunday morning, every one of them is empty and dark.
“If you are referring to my wellingtons, Mr. Templeton, I was in the garden with Lewis,” she says. “In the herb bed. He was aligning my chakras. It was going very well. Then you texted at four‑thirty‑seven and said bring the dog, in that text‑voice you use when there is a body.”
“There isn’t a body,” he says. “Do I have a text‑voice?”
“Of course. And that one is reserved for bodies, Mr. Templeton. We have an arrangement.”
“Your Grace, we have an arrangement, but not about bodies.” He clears his throat. “Not about dead bodies.”
“We have an implied one. Implications are how civilised people communicate.”
“Hm,” says the voice from the blackness.
She breathes out through her nose, as Aunt Gilda taught her on a balcony in Lisbon at seven. According to Gilda, an Ambassador, such is the art of international relations—breathing—rather than pushing foreign diplomats off things. When the breath goes, the self‑pity and homicidal thoughts go with it.
What is left is a stage, a dog, a husband‑shaped man in a tuxedo somewhere in the gods, and a music stand with sheet music open to bar thirty‑eight of a Schumann concerto.
Roger, in the perceptive way he does, leans against her stool and licks the toe of her boot.
“You’re quite right,” she says, talking to the top of Roger’s head. “These are the right wellingtons for the mews and the wrong wellingtons for the Royal Albert Hall.”
“Mr. Templeton.”
“My lady.”
“Why am I here?”
The torch beam, which has been sliding along the rail, stops, then the sound of a notebook closing.
“It’s a sightline problem,” he says. “I needed to see the stage from where the chair is, with someone the right height standing on it, while my memory of Saturday night is still fresh.”
“Mr. Templeton.”
“Yes.”
“Sebastian Vane is six foot two.”
“Yes.”
“I am five foot two.”
“Five foot two and a half,” he says, automatically.
“And,” she says, “you looked at your options and thought, what this moment requires is a small duchess and a large dog.”
“The arithmetic was approximate,” he says. “You were the available approximation, Your Grace.”
There is the smallest pause.
“And,” he adds, “you answered.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your phone,” he says. “You answered it. That is not your usual practice.”
“You texted,” she says. “I answer texts.”
“You have twenty‑nine thousand three hundred ninety‑two unread emails and only slightly fewer unread texts,” he says. “You do not answer anything. In principle, as your valet, that is what I am paid for.”
“Exactly,” she says. “But you weren’t in the herb bed at four‑thirty‑seven, were you? So I was forced to act alone and answer my own text. That is on you.”
“I see,” he says at last. “I shall make a note not to abandon my post in future… herb beds.”
“Or any beds.” Nell adds.
“From your report, My Lady,” he says, “I gather your chakras are… aligned.”
Nell waves the idea away and looks down at the square of rosin near the chair. It is very neat, and exactly where the feet were. Men like the dashing Sebastian Vane do everything neatly: bow arm, phrasing, scandals, exits. She looks at the music, opened at bar thirty‑eight.
“That,” she says, mostly to herself, “would have pinched.”
“Your Grace?” Henry asks.
“Bar thirty‑eight,” she says. “If your shoes were wrong, that’s when you would leave. Up to then you’ve committed to the opening and the audience has feelings. You can’t just stop at bar twelve of Schumann. Bar thirty‑eight is obviously the first polite opportunity to flee.”
“I see,” Henry says. “You believe Sebastian left because his shoes were… inappropriate?”
“Of course not,” she says. “He left because his shoes were too tight. No one leaves a stage for ideology; they leave for blisters. Something was wrong in the shoes, or the socks, or both.” She shakes her head. “It always comes down to textiles.”
There is silence.
Then she hears the controlled descent of Henry Templeton, valet, crisis manager, all-around handyman, and part-time MI5 analyst. Roger’s ears track him all the way; the rest of Roger remains decorously still.
“Right,” she says briskly. “Why have you been here all night studying sightlines and angles?”
“As far as the authorities are concerned,” Henry says, when he reaches the front of the stalls, “there has been no crime. The soloist walked off. Odd. But not criminal.”
“Sebastian Vane?”
“Yes.”
“But you think there is something more to it. Mr. Templeton, I was in the King’s Box,” she says. “With Lady Octavia Fairleigh and Miss Marsh. We all watched him walk off. He’s striking, you know. I believe Miss Marsh was quite taken with him. We could see him perfectly well.”
“I know.”
“He did the tuck.” She tucks an imaginary violin under her arm and hops off her stool, crossing the stage in the head‑bobbing way Sebastian Vane does when he has finished owning it. Roger trots along beside her bobbing his head too. “He did the little nod. The shoulder thing.”
Henry watches them and looks like he is trying not to smile. “Yes. The walking‑off was excellent.”
“But you still don’t know why?”
“No,” he says. “Not why he left. Only that something was wrong.”
“Wrong how?”
He hesitates, which she does not like at all.
“You were there,” she says.
“I was.”
“You were sitting in the stalls.”
“Yes.”
“With your… ‘cousin.’”
There is a pause. She watches him stop dead between the front row and the center aisle.
“With Vanessa,” he says eventually. “Yes.”
She files this beside Approximate Arithmetic and Available Approximation under Items To Weaponise Later, and smiles without showing any teeth. “When did you know?”
“That I was going to the concert with my cousin?” Henry says.
“That something was wrong,” Nell says and crosses her arms. “With Sebastian. With the… situation.”
“Not at the beginning of the Schumann.” Henry avoids her eyes.
“No one knows anything at the beginning of Schumann,” Nell says. “Even Sebastian Vane.”
“But he does,” Henry says. “He has known things at the beginning of Schumann since he was eleven. Child prodigy, international competitions, prodigy documentaries, major celebrity. By twenty he’d played this hall more often than most of the orchestra.”
“So he does not get stage fright and walk off because of the acoustics,” Nell says.
“No,” Henry says. “He does not.”
“Then what?”
Henry looks back at the single chair, the music stand, the square of rosin.
“When he turned, in the light,” he says at last. “When he lifted the violin. It was off by half an inch.”
“Half an inch is a very small quantity of wrong.”
“It is enough,” Henry says. “Not for who he was. For what he was holding.”
She frowns. “The Strad.”
“Lady Aurelia,” Henry says. “Sebastian has been playing her since he was sixteen. People fly across continents to hear Sebastian Vane on Lady Aurelia in the Albert Hall. You don’t have to look at his face to know when she’s on his shoulder. You can see it in the way his hand sits on the neck, the way his shoulders settle. He’s not so much playing her as...”
“As?” Nell raises an eyebrow.
“Well,” Henry says, “as making love to her.”
“Oh,” says Nell. It is her turn to say “Hm.”
“On Saturday,” Henry says, “the man on this stage walked off like Sebastian Vane. But for thirty-eight bars, under that light, Lady Aurelia might as well have been a broomstick.”
Nell looks at him.
“So, as far as the authorities are concerned,” she says slowly, “Sebastian Vane walked off the stage taking his priceless Lady Aurelia with him, and has not been seen since.”
“Yes.”
“And as far as you are concerned?”
He looks at her. Fully emerged from the gloom. It is the same suit he was in last night, and at four forty‑seven, and now. The shirt is still ironed. The collar is still shut, the bow tie still tied. Henry tired is, to everyone except Nell and Mrs Patterson, indistinguishable from Henry rested. Only the eyes give him away. That, and the way he looks at her: as though the looking is something he has decided not to do and is doing anyway. She decides not to notice aloud.
Henry shrugs. “I don’t want to jump to conclusions.”
Roger stands and gives himself a shake. A cloud of German Shepherd moves through the stage light.
“Roger,” Nell says, pointing to the chair. “Find.”
Roger sniffs the chair. He circles the rosin square, nose busy. Then he trots to the edge of the stage and disappears down the shallow steps into the artists’ corridor without a backward glance. He has accepted the case, Nell supposes.
The corridor smells of varnish and something else Nell can’t put her finger on. Saturday’s performance order is still pinned up.
At least, she thinks, no one tried to add an encore.
At the third door on the right, Roger sits and looks at Henry.
“Yes,” Henry says to him. “Thank you.”
He produces a key with a Royal Albert Hall tag from an inside pocket of his jacket.
The dressing room is, apparently, as it was left last night: a bottle of water, three‑quarters full; a program folded back; a tuning fork in a velvet pouch; tails thrown over a chair; shoes tucked under the dressing table.
Roger does a slow perimeter, then comes back to the center, changes direction and starts over. Nell watches Henry watching Roger. Roger stops at the tails, notes them, moves on. Stops at the water, notes it, moves on. Stops at the dressing table and lifts his nose to the velvet pouch.
Then he does the face.
He lowers his head. He draws in a long, deliberate breath, half closes his mouth, holds the breath a fraction too long, and lets it go with bureaucratic finality.
“Mr. Templeton.”
“Yes.”
“What is he doing with his face.”
“He’s using his vomeronasal organ,” Henry says, as if this clears matters up.
“His what?”
“A secondary olfactory structure in the roof of the mouth. He’s pulling scent across it for analysis. Pheromones. Individual identification. Fear.”
She stares at Roger, who is now visibly thinking with his mouth.
“Are you telling me Roger has two noses and you neglected to mention it?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“In what manner is that not urgent information for one’s—“ she catches herself—”colleague.”
“It hadn’t seemed operationally critical.”
“Mr. Templeton, this is precisely the sort of thing one mentions before dragging a noblewoman in pyjamas to a concert hall. I write best‑selling romances. I would have made excellent use of a two‑nosed dog.”
“I’ll add it to the briefing pack,” he says.
Roger finishes his long, thoughtful inhalation and crosses to the shoes.
He looks at them for a moment.
Then he crouches and puts his whole head under the dressing table and emerges with the left shoe in his mouth.
“Roger,” Nell says. “No.”
Roger gives the shoe a small experimental shake, then another, and then, appearing to confirm its structural integrity, flicks his head and throws the shoe into the air.
The shoe arcs gracefully, narrowly misses the mirror, and lands with a slap on the dressing table.
“Absolutely not,” Nell says. “Put it down.”
Roger collects the shoe again, delighted, and begins to work the room: a hundred pounds of German Shepherd and leather in low orbit. He trots a tight circuit faster and faster, and flings the shoe. It bounces off the armchair, he catches it on the rebound; drops it, pounces, shakes until his shoulders blur, then sends it up again.
“He may be attempting to recreate events,” Henry says, flattening himself against the wall as the shoe goes past his head at speed.
“He’s having a psychotic break,” Nell says.
On the third or fourth violent shake there is a dry, papery crack from inside the shoe. Roger snaps his head sideways. A folded rectangle of paper flies out from under the insole, skims across the room and comes to rest by Nell’s boot.
All three of them look at it.
Roger sets the shoe down neatly, steps over it, and sits bolt upright beside the paper with the air of a total professional.
“Forced confession under interrogation,” Nell says.
Henry produces nitrile gloves and a small evidence bag from the same pocket as the key, lifts the paper between two fingers, unfolds it, and reads.
“Well,” he says. “That’s interesting.”
“Tell me it’s a reminder to wear socks,” she says.
“A customs form,” he shows it to Nell. “and an insurance document. Valuation and cover note for a 1698 Stradivarius, Lady Aurelia. Owner: Tristan Vane.”
“Tristan,” she says, looking up. “The brother. So Sebastian’s violin is not, in point of fact, Sebastian’s.”
“So it would appear.” Henry says mildly, sliding the papers into the bag and the bag into That Pocket. She notes the new bulge. Keys, insurance. There will need to be dividers.
Nell takes Roger’s lead out of her pocket, but doesn’t clip it on. Roger rises and heads for the corridor. Nell and Henry turn left toward the stage, but Roger turns right.
“Roger, come,” she says.
He doesn’t so much as flick an ear. For a dog who would cross a desert for a digestive biscuit, this is insubordination on a constitutional level.
“Roger.” A little sharper.
He keeps going. Nell looks at Henry and shrugs. They follow until there is only the buzz of strip lights, and the sound of their footsteps and Roger’s nails as they move from carpet to lino to bare concrete.
Roger turns right again. His hackles are up now. The lights are dead at this end of the corridor; only a grudging green above each door stains the walls, leaving long slabs of darkness between. The air is colder here, carrying a thin, electric hum of the extractor fans. Nell shivers. Something wordless and primitive inside her starts to count shadows and doorways, convinced there is danger here that her eyes have not found yet.
At the far end of the corridor he stops at a fire‑door with LOADING BAY stencilled on a metal plate. The fur along his shoulders is raised in a narrow line. His head is low. He is looking at the bottom of the door, not at her.
She does not call him again, and he does not look back.
Henry comes up beside him and tests the handle. His voice remains level, but she can see the tendons in his wrist.
“It’s not locked,” he says. The door moves an inch and catches on something. “It’s wedged,” he says. There is a bolt half‑shot on the inside; he flicks it back with the end of the keyring, puts his shoulder to it and eases it open. The door gives with a rubber‑gasket sigh. Roger slides through the gap the instant there is room.
Cold air spills around their ankles: wet concrete, diesel, the sharp, coin‑edge tang large buildings get at the places where they meet the weather.
The loading bay is dark under the metal awning. Puddles bloom where last night’s rain hasn’t found a drain. A pallet truck has been abandoned on its side like a toppled beetle. By the nearest steel pillar, something is hunched low against the ground, a loop of blue rope running from the pillar to its neck. For one useless heartbeat her mind supplies “coat” and “bag.” Then the shape shifts, the rope tightens, and it resolves.
It is a dog.
He has the square‑headed, wrong‑sized look of a large mutt who was nobody’s idea of a good idea to begin with. His coat might once have been grey and black and brown; now it is an uneven catalogue of mud, oil and dirty water. His ribs show under it in hard, clean lines. One ear is torn. He is soaked to the skin. Someone has tied him short so that when he tries to stand he can only get halfway there before the rope bites. He doesn’t bark. He is standing very still, shivering in economical movements as if trying not to waste whatever is left.
“Oh, sweetheart,” Nell whispers and steps forward.
Roger moves in front of her, body low, tail neither up nor down. He curves in, sideways on, offering his shoulder rather than his teeth, with the wag he reserves for toddlers and the elderly. He stops just out of reach, lowers his head, and breathes along the rope, the pillar, and the dog. His mouth half‑opens; his tongue flickers once.
“Two noses again?” Nell says.
“Two noses.” Henry says.
Up close, the stray’s eyes are the wrong color for his body, one is almost blue, the other amber. He looks at Roger, then at Nell, and does not move. Waiting.
“Claude,” she decides. “You look like Claude.”
Henry drops to a crouch hard enough that his shoes skid on the wet concrete and takes the rope in both hands.
“Cheap nylon,” he says. “Somebody found a rope and the least imaginative cruelty.”
It is the cruelty that does it; the word lands like a slap. His voice is controlled, but flatter than usual, stripped of all its usual politeness. His fingers move fast on the knots with a speed that looks very much like temper.
“And we are cutting it,” Nell says.
“We are cutting it,” Henry agrees. He produces a knife from a pocket that did not, until this moment, appear to contain a knife, flips it one‑handed, and drives the blade into the nylon with more force than necessary. The rope parts with a dry, high snap that sounds far too loud in the concrete hush.
Claude flinches, then goes very, very still as the tension loosens around his neck, like someone waiting to see if this is a trick.
“There,” Nell says softly. “All right. That’s over.”
It isn’t, of course, but it’s something.
Henry stays crouched where he is, folds the knife, and puts it away. One still on the loose end of the rope, knuckles white, as if a part of him does not accept it’s not attached anymore. The hard line of his shoulders eases a fraction; the fury has nowhere left to go.
Claude takes a staggering step forward. Those improbable eyes look from Roger to Nell and then settle, decisively, on Henry. He walks straight into Henry’s space and leans, solid and damp, against his side.
Nell tilts her head, fascinated.
Henry’s free hand comes up automatically, fingers sliding into the wet fur at Claude’s neck. For a moment he just holds on, eyes half‑shut, jaw working once as if there is a word he has abandoned midway. When he opens them again, the anger has burned down to more remote, and much more dangerous.
Nell has not seen him like this since the night in the shower room at Ainsworth Manor when Roger saved her life. The emotion showing under the armor before he slams the plates back into place.
“Inside,” Henry says at last, and stands. His voice is back under control, but it has to fight its way there. “We don’t know who left him here.”
“Then we’ll make sure he isn’t here when they come back,” Nell says.
Between the three of them they get Claude into the corridor: Roger trotting on Nell’s left; Claude hulking in the middle; Nell’s hand on a piece of leather meant to pass for a collar; Henry at his flank, one palm flat against damp fur. The loading‑bay door swings shut behind them with a hollow metal bang and latches, cutting off the gray light.
They walk a dozen paces before Nell uncurls her fingers from Claude’s collar, shaking feeling back into them. She runs her hand along his neck. Claude glances up at her, blinks, and doesn’t move away.
“Right,” she says. “Let’s go have breakfast.”
“Good plan,” Henry says.
Roger’s head snaps round so fast it clips her knee. His ears stand up, sharp as quotation marks, every muscle gone from loose to wired in an instant.
“Mr. Templeton,” Nell says. “What is—”
The gunshot cracks the air from the direction of the hall.