From his place near the gaming table, Crowley smiled his polite, distant smile, tugged at his stiff cuffs, and folded his hands in his lap. “After leaving the old duke’s employ,” he began, “I moved to Plymouth, to be near my only daughter.” He looked down at the floor for a moment, then shook his head. “What the others have failed to tell you is that it is not a simple matter for a person of mature years to find employment. Nanny Cole had her flair with the needle; Gash, his mechanical skills; Hallard, his God-given gift with words; and Newland ...” He squinted at the tight-lipped security man. “Well, I’m not at all sure what Newland got up to, but I do know that his talents are in demand in many places.
“But what did I have to offer?” Crowley sighed. “Thirty years of loyal service counts for very little in the modem world, it seems. You can imagine my relief when I eventually won a post at a bank, entering check numbers on a computer. It was a very low-level position and tedious to the extreme. Sheer boredom led me to read up on computers and to explore my little machine’s capabilities.”
“Crowley was to the keyboard born,” the duke declared. “He took to programming like a duck to water, and he’s a dab hand at code-cracking, too. He’s had the best trackers after him, and they’ve yet to find a single broken blade of grass. Only one came within shouting distance, but he backed off.”
“Tut, tut,” Crowley murmured, accepting the tribute with a self-effacing wave of the hand.
“He salted records with facts about Lex’s alleged background,” said Kate, “and he managed every pound of Lex’s income.”
“He managed to make it disappear,” the duke put in. “Crowley tied Lex’s money-trail in so many knots that it would have taken a magician to unravel it. He made it appear as though Lex had frittered away his fortune on playthings.” The duke clucked his tongue. “Just another self-indulgent pop star.”
Emma pictured Crowley’s storklike figure hunched over the keyboard of a computer late at night, after the bank had closed, sailing freely through the electronic networks, and she was filled with awe. It wasn’t every day that she got to meet a natural-born hacker who’d discovered computers at such an advanced age.
Derek rubbed his jaw. “I don’t know, Grayson. This doesn’t sound like you. I find it difficult to believe that you could be quite so cynical.”
“Of course I was cynical, dear chap,” the duke acknowledged easily. “But you must admit that it was a healthy sort of cynicism. Lex Rex did not wish to be loved—he wished only to be paid. It kept his ego in check, kept his mind focused—it kept him from drink, drugs, and all the other slings and arrows that had slain so many before him. He never promoted such things, either. My alter ego’s only sins were poor taste and a severely limited vocabulary—”
“Which you enjoyed to the hilt,” Nanny Cole reminded him.
“Well ... yes,” the duke admitted, with a shame-faced grin. “It was rather ... liberating.” He tugged on an earlobe, then settled back in his chair, businesslike once more. “At the end of the second year, we’d earned enough to replace the roof and begin restoring the hall’s interior. In four more years, we’d amassed a fortune, which Crowley invested with good results. Computers were not the only thing he studied at the bank.”
Derek nodded. “Then you decided that it was time for Lex’s abrupt departure from the world of rock music.”
“Poor old Lex,” the duke agreed, with mock sadness. “He never was much of a sailor, was he, Tom?”
“No, indeed, Your Grace.” The chief constable chuckled. “It were the Tregallis boys that fixed that up. Born fishermen, they are, and want nothin’ more’n to carry on as their father had done. The Tharbys at the Bright Lady felt the same way, and so did old Jonah Pengully and my mother. So we worked it all out with Hallard and watched the weather maps, waitin’ for a storm. When it looked as if a likely one was brewin’, His Grace hightailed it for France—”
“I was traveling a great deal by then,” the duke added, “recovering my family’s scattered treasures.”
“Me and the boys went aboard His Grace’s yacht,” the chief constable continued, “and had a fine old time, smashing it to bits. Ted and Jack steered it onto the shoals, and James picked them up in a dinghy.”
“Only expert sailors could’ve managed that trick,” Derek commented. He looked thoughtfully at the fire, then frowned. “But why go to all that trouble? Wouldn’t it have been safer to stage his death somewhere else, to make it a bit less spectacular?”
Kate shook her head. “Lex’s death would’ve attracted attention no matter where it took place,” she said flatly. “This way, we could control the situation and make the best use of the resources we had at hand.”
“Taciturn Cornish villagers make very credible eyewitnesses, really,” Hallard explained. “Lots of practice at it, I suppose, with all the smuggling that used to go on.”
“But what about the press?” Derek asked.
“A temporary nuisance,” Grayson said dismissively.
“Still,” Derek persisted, “you were taking an awfully big risk, weren’t you? How many people were involved? Fourteen? Fifteen? And now you’ll have to add me and Emma to the list. I’ve no doubt that Newland knows his stuff, but how can you be sure there’ll be no leaks?”