THE HOURS BEFORE: A Story of Mystery and Suspense from the Belle Époque (3 page)

‘Mr Beezley!’ she declares. ‘It seems your presence has almost overtaken your message. You had better join us. I have only just learned of your coming, and here you are, and so quickly. May I offer you some coffee?’

But Beezley does not reply. With a look of puzzlement upon his face, he draws up a chair only with the greatest reluctance, glancing uneasily at the woman in Deborah’s company as if he would prefer she were not present - which makes Deborah herself even more resolute that Sylvia should stay.

‘This really is most unfortunate,’ Beezley finally begins as he takes his seat, ‘and I must say, Mrs Peters, for all the harsh words between us in the past, I do extend my sincerest condolences to you at this awful time.’

‘What?’ Deborah murmurs, perplexed. ‘What do you mean,
condolences?
’

‘Your daughter ...’ the voice of Beezley repeats, sounding surprised himself that Deborah should ask. ‘As per my earlier telegram, it is, indeed, suicide. I can tell you no more at this stage, except that Mr. Peters has already journeyed to Munich and identified the body.’

Deborah can only respond with a stunned silence - a look of disbelief and confusion - at which Beezley clutches his hand to his mouth, as if in shock. ‘Oh dear! I - I really must apologise,’ he stammers, his voice clearly emotional. ‘I had foolishly assumed you already knew. My earlier telegram of this morning, announcing the awful tragedy, has evidently failed to reach you. This must all come as a terrible shock. And I have been most indelicate …’

‘No, wait. Tell me again,’ Deborah interrupts. ‘You’re right. I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Tell me again.’

‘Your daughter, Penelope - Poppy - she has died,’ Beezley murmurs, already far more sombre as Deborah gasps for air, for her voice cannot escape her throat - and all at once the world around her vanishes - all the bustle of the streets, Sylvia’s plaintive cry and squeezing of her hand, and even the words of apology continuing to tumble from Beezley’s trembling lips. There is nothing but a vast chasm of dark grief and confusion opening up inside of her. And the wretched little man is still talking - something to the effect that the body was not found at her rooms in Heidelberg, but in a remote chalet on the Austrian border where there has been a fire. It was not a normal incident, moreover, and the police in Munich have cordoned off the vicinity pending further investigation.

But by this time Deborah has heard enough, too much to absorb or comprehend. She bites her lip in a vain attempt to stem the flow of tears, while Sylvia, equally flustered, eventually comes to appear somewhat embarrassed. After all,
grief
- it isn’t what one does in a place like this. People at the other tables are beginning to stare. And then, absurdity upon absurdity, the same boy from reception is standing before her again, with yet another telegram. This is, as everyone well understands, the one sent earlier and which had somehow failed to reach its destination in a timely fashion.

‘Will you look up departures for the next train to Munich?’ she asks the boy, taking the telegram in her gloved hand, ‘and I would like you to order a carriage also to convey me to the station in good time.’

The boy nods his understanding and after inquiring if there is anything more he might do, as he can well perceive the distress on the faces of everyone concerned, he hurries away - and within moments Deborah, too, is on her feet, taking leave of the sorrowful face of Mr Beezley and the all-at-once utterly inconsequential Sylvia and hastening alone inside to her room, her heart crushed, and pursued by the most dreadful sense of despair she has ever known.

Hugh Peters, with a grunt of derision and a turning down of the corners of his thin, bloodless lips, folds the newspaper slowly between his hands - folds it once, twice and, by the time he has realised what he is doing, a third and a fourth time into a crumpled mass. This he hurls upon the table, and with slow, measured steps upon the carpeted floor advances steadily to the window of his hotel suite overlooking the Munich skyline and begins once more to contemplate the headline he has just read.

‘Millionaire’s Daughter in Cult Suicide.’

He looks up and allows his gaze to settle upon the rooftops and the more distant wooded horizon where the slopes of distant hills and mountains rise beneath the clouds - until both mountains and clouds become indistinguishable in their awful, chilling beauty. How, he asks himself, could anyone make such a rash assumption? Even the chief of police he spoke to only an hour ago had been unable to speculate on what lay behind the death of five young people in a remote chalet up in the mountains, the place burnt to the ground without a single occupant having escaped. Surely it’s just too early to say why.

Immaculate as ever, his dark hair tightly ordered, brushed smoothly close to his scalp, his tailoring impeccable, even down to the buttonhole flower - today’s choice being an expensive purple orchid - he knows he must speak, must react in some way.

‘This is not good, Joseph, not good at all,’ he observes, not bothering much to look at his companion, Joseph Beezley, a man of prodigious legal expertise and administrative skills who usually accompanies him everywhere, but who just this morning has returned from Bayreuth on an overnight train. ‘Suspicious circumstances, yes - I’ll grant them that,’ he continues in the typically grave voice he has when deliberating. ‘But where did they get all this nonsense about cults; about suicide pacts; about some group of anarchists or millennialists? They are jumping to conclusions here. Poor journalism - exceedingly poor.’

The observation is a strange one, especially at a time like this. He realises that. But for a man who runs an empire of newspapers and publishing houses on both sides of the Atlantic, looking at it with the critical eye of a trained professional is his way of dealing with the pain, helping him to stay in control.

‘Most tragic, sir,’ Beezley replies, approaching his master in the fashion of an obedient spaniel who might, at any moment, be honoured with some crumb of attention.

‘My daughter … she just wouldn’t have been mixed up in that kind of foolishness,’ Peters states, turning at last to his secretary - and, even as he does so, his eyes clouding over with disappointment, as inevitably they do whenever he beholds the man, even after all these years. So very dull. ‘Her mother - yes. Nothing would surprise me about that crazy witch-on-a-broomstick. But not Penelope, not my dear Penny.’

He raises finger and thumb to the corners of his eyes, to control some unwonted tears from forming there - his eyelids closing as he tries to find relief by looking into darkness; but all he can see is the awful sight of the shroud being rolled back in the mortuary yesterday and the charred little body that was virtually indistinguishable from the other four he had been asked to examine. Mercifully, there were some articles of jewellery found upon her wrist and fingers he knew were hers, so identification was just about possible … at length.

‘The bodies, Joseph ...’ he begins again and holds out his palms in the air as if taking the measure of something. ‘Those bodies, they were so small! They shrink in the heat, you see. That’s what the police told me. But suicide? Collective suicide? Maybe it is true - seduced by some group of fanatics. Where did I go wrong, Joseph? Where did I go wrong?’

Beezley coughs in his typically decorous manner and directs his gaze to the floor, confident from years of experience that he is not expected to respond to such a leading question - though he
could
have responded. He could have drawn his employer’s attention to the cold, aloof manner he consistently presents even to those closest to him. He could have mentioned that in all the twenty-one years of his daughter’s short life she would scarcely have spent more than a few hours at a time with her busy father. He might also have suggested that the forging of empires of commerce and mass communications is not really at all conducive to a normal, balanced family life. But he does not. To venture such a personal observation would be the ultimate folly. It is not part of his brief to do so, nor that of anyone else who might wish to keep their job amid the ruthlessly commanded kingdom of Peters Associated Publishing.

‘I am given to understand, sir, there is an organisation already under suspicion and which might have been involved in something similar before,’ he says, endeavouring to be helpful.

‘Oh, really?’ Peters responds, his urbane Canadian accent resurfacing as he lifts himself from his rare moment of introspection.

‘Yes - a Millennialist group,’ Beezley continues. ‘The Society for the Teachings of Redemptive Mercies.’

‘Ah, English, then?’

‘No, not at all, sir. In fact they seem to be an Austro-Hungarian-based organisation, despite the use of an English title. There was a similar incident three years ago in Vienna. Twelve months ago near Berlin. These philosophies are quite prevalent here on the continent, especially as the end of the millennium approaches. They say there shall be no twentieth century. That the world will end before we reach it - and this, considering there is only a few months remaining, is viewed with increasing alarm in some quarters.’

‘Quite so,’ Peters remarks, his narrow eyes scrutinising the other man’s face more deeply now. ‘But tell me, Joseph, by what means did you come by this - and so quickly?’ he inquires, marvelling as he so often does at the other man’s prodigious memory: an innate curiosity that devours the newswires each and every day with unfailing enthusiasm and stores everything away in some vast internal filing system: a veritable library of a brain.

‘Oh, just something I happened to recall,’ Beezley replies with modesty. ‘I shall, of course, do a proper library search once we return to London if ...’

‘Do,’ Peters interrupts, almost with admiration. ‘In fact, Joseph, I want you to find out everything you can about them: where they come from; where they get their funding; and - most importantly - the name of whatever mad bastard is in charge of it all.’

Beezley nods his understanding, albeit a little warily upon the receipt of such a tall order. ‘I shall endeavour to do my utmost, sir,’ he replies.

To which Peters, after adjusting the knot in his black silk tie, reaches down to cast a quick glance at his fob watch. The departure time of their train is nearing, and Beezley hurries to fetch his master’s overcoat.

‘May I ask, sir, if Mrs Peters has arrived here in Munich yet?’ Beezley inquires with polite formality, taking up a clothes brush and applying this to his master’s collar and shoulders - it being his duty also to act as a running valet much of the time.

‘No, not yet. I don’t suppose she took the tidings all that well, did she, when you spoke with her yesterday?’

‘Er - no sir,’ Beezley replies, remembering with some displeasure, his own faux pas in having broken the news to Mrs Peters so indelicately - the fiasco of his misplaced telegrams.

‘Well … we certainly beat her to it, this time,’ Peters remarks, not without some intimation of satisfaction to his voice, as if he had just pipped a rival to some trivial newspaper scoop. Ever competitive in his ways, his own paper, the News Chronicle is renowned for being at the forefront of technology, especially in the pioneering field of photographic journalism. And the allure of being first to capture the news is something he can never quite resist, not even now. ‘Oh, I guess she will probably be expecting to see me - to have a word,’ he adds, a little more conciliatory. ‘But really, I can’t be doing with all that, Joseph. It is way too soon to start apportioning blame - and that is exactly what would happen, were we to meet.’

‘Indeed, sir,’ Beezley confirms as his master takes up his top hat and they leave the room.

With their luggage already transferred downstairs to the waiting carriage, the two men enter the elevator of the hotel and stand shoulder to shoulder in silence for a moment, embarrassed by each other’s proximity in such a small space. The journey, which will take them to the railway station, to the waiting coffin and thence to London, occupies their thoughts. What can one say? But then a most untypical grin spreads itself across Peters’s face, accompanied by a curious guffaw that cuts right through his otherwise dour and impassive countenance.

‘Seems kind of weird - taking the poor kid home for burial when she’s half-way cremated already,’ he observes, albeit without real mirth.

‘Perhaps we should be grateful the police have released the body so soon,’ Beezley observes, those indefinite dark eyes behind the pince-nez spectacles unblinking as he continues to stare ahead.

‘Don’t worry: I made damn sure of
that
,’ Peters replies, this one curt remark being sufficient to satisfy Beezley that any obstacles to this purpose would have almost certainly been swept aside; for among the lofty circles in which his master moves, the usual rules and regulations governing society would rarely hold sway for long. They would simply dissolve beneath the searing gaze of rank and eminence, the gaze long-since perfected by Hubert Peters himself.

And as Beezley studies his sharp, hawk-like profile out of the corner of his eye it is with a private blend of respect and trepidation - tempered just a little by amusement as the great man, ever-restless, completes for the umpteenth time that morning an adjustment of his cufflinks accompanied by a nervous and habitual flexing of the wrists, as if squaring up for a boxing match - a not altogether inappropriate gesture on this occasion, since as the elevator doors open and as they stride out across the foyer, it is to be delivered straight into a melee of eager pressmen. So noisy! There is, they notice, even somebody outside, down on the pavement with a camera and flashgun set up in readiness, no doubt hoping his target might remain immobile for long enough to get a shot.

Without hesitation, they barge their way past, moving far too quickly for the photographer to be able to do his work despite the extra illumination provided by the acrid, smoky flash that cuts the air. They have almost made it through to the bottom of the steps and to the carriage and its opened door when without warning a young journalist steps directly into their path, notebook and pencil in hand.

‘And what exactly are your feelings at this present time, Mr. Peters?’ he demands loudly in words that come like a hail of bullets. The idiot.

Peters, furious, grabs the man by the lapels and pushes him back against the marble pillar of the portico, almost lifting him from the ground as he does so. A gasp of astonishment, an ugly scuffle and scraping of feet can be heard.

‘I’m taking my dead daughter home to be buried. How the hell do you think I’m feeling, you son of a bitch!’ he growls.

Upon which, for just one brief moment, it all seems inordinately quiet.

‘Please, this way, sir,’ Beezley urges his master guiding him down the final step towards the carriage as the cacophony of astonished voices rises again.

Plunging into the dark, relatively silent space within the vehicle, they secure the doors and the horses are given their rein, speeding off at a fast canter. They are safe, but it takes Peters some time to regain his composure.

‘Make sure this incident is not carried by any of our papers,’ he orders in a still trembling voice. ‘Damn it! I should not have lost my temper. But we must prevent it becoming public back home. Ask our man on the desk to speak with our rivals, too, would you, Joseph? Their goodwill is something we should be able to rely on in this instance.’

And solemnly, making a memo of the command in a small black pocket book he always carries with him, the ever-dutiful Beezley also notes that he should telegraph the editors desk as soon as they reach the station. The incident will not make the papers, therefore, at least not in London or New York. Those are Beezley’s orders. The matter will be smoothed over. And Peters, for his part, knows it is as good as done.