Chapter 351: Poland? Russia?
Chapter 348 – Poland? RUSSIA?
Hearing this, Arthur fished out of his pocket the pocket watch that the murderer had kept close to him.
He stared at the portrait of the woman on the inside of the pocket watch for a while before he could make out a few similarities between the portrait’s eyebrows.
“That’s a terrible hand at painting, and if you hadn’t told me, I wouldn’t have been able to tell that the subject of the portrait, Mrs. Agnieszka, was Defina, the Polish schoolmistress employed by Mr. Harrison.”
Arthur closed the cover of the table, suddenly spoke up and asked, “However, if Ms. Defina is Agnieszka, then …… Fiona, shouldn’t you explain to me properly why she has two names? Are you being deceived by her, or am I being deceived by you?”
Fiona opened the document in her hand and spoke, “This matter can’t be called who was cheated by whom. It’s normal to have an alias in this business. Not everyone can carry on using their real identity to do the flesh business, many of the girls I have here hold the idea of saving up some money while they are young and then returning to their real identity to live a normal life. I respect their thoughts and generally don’t easily pry into their pasts, which is why the girls are willing to work for me.”
Arthur leaned back in his chair with his glass propped up, “Fiona, I don’t mean to pry into your trade secrets. But out of curiosity, I’d like to ask, as wonderful as their ideas are, do many of them end up successfully realizing them?”
“You’re actually asking me that? I would have thought you would know better than me. Among Scotland Yard’s statistics, are London’s stray warblers increasing, or decreasing?”
Arthur took a sip of his wine and looked into the clear liquid and spoke, “Perhaps you should change your career to journalism. Or, if Scotland Yard is willing to recruit women to the staff, I might consider hiring you as a press secretary. Answering questions with questions is a pretty good language habit.”
Fiona rolled her eyes, “Yeah! At least I’m going to be much more honest than you guys, I even think I could go to the Foreign Office. If I were to go as Foreign Minister, I’d tell the Poles bluntly to stop daydreaming, that Britannia won’t be of any help to you. Instead of sending diplomats privately to the Russian Embassy to communicate, and after the assassination of the commissioner, sending someone over to sympathize with our Superintendent Hastings under false pretenses.”
“Hm?” Arthur’s eyes suddenly locked on Fiona’s as he heard this, “How do you know the Foreign Office sent someone to Liverpool?”
Fiona huffed back, “I’m not a blind man, that guy who just walked out of the hotel, I met him when I was a maid at the Russian Embassy. Only the fellow has evidently forgotten me, and he must hardly associate a beautiful lady with a lowly servant.”
“He’s been to the Russian Embassy?” Arthur pondered slightly, “When?”
Fiona didn’t take it well, “It does seem that you are more interested in diplomats than beautiful ladies.”
Arthur spoke up, “Fiona, while I don’t mean to be rude, I still have to say that the reason diplomats and I talk to each other more is due to the fact that we communicate in a similar language. So, it’s not as much of a chore to deal with each other.”
“Whoa?” Fiona held her tongue, “Don’t I speak English? Or are you looking down on the Russian blood in me.”
“No, no, no, Fiona, don’t misunderstand. Russian girls are beautiful, at least much more beautiful than German girls. But the language of the girls is, indeed, different from that of diplomats.”
Fiona asked with her head full of anger, “Wouldn’t you rather deal with a diplomat full of lies than communicate with the girls?”
Arthur asked, “Why do you find diplomats untrustworthy?”
“Quite simply, it’s all I observed while working as a maid at the embassy.”
Fiona spoke, “When diplomats say ‘yes’, it means ‘maybe’. When they say ‘maybe’, it means ‘no’. If they say ‘no’ outright, then he’s not a diplomat.”
Arthur heard this and nodded in relief, “Fiona, I knew I was right to send you to work at the embassy, not all girls are capable of being as perceptive as you. You’re absolutely right, though you obviously haven’t noticed that the girls’ speech habits are almost the exact opposite of a diplomat’s, when the girls say ‘no’, they mean ‘maybe’. When they say ‘may’, they mean ‘is’. If they do say ‘yes’, then she is not a woman. While I know it’s difficult, I would hope that at work, the least you could do is use diplomatic language to communicate with me.”
“Not a chance!”
“Why?”
“Because you’re totally right too.” Fiona glared at Arthur, “If I did say that, then I wouldn’t be a woman.”
“Okay then.” Arthur lifted the bottle and filled her glass, “It seems that asking you to accommodate me is not going to work, so let me try to accommodate you. After all, I’m quite interested in quite a few of your secrets, and it’s almost always a seller’s market when it comes to important information.”
After a few words back and forth, Fiona just felt as if she had vented her emotions about as much as she could.
As her mind returned to calm, she finally began to activate her logic program again.
Whether it was on a practical level, or on a future planning level, her interests were highly tied to Arthur, and Ms. Fiona wasn’t going to stand by and watch the hill that had the potential to grow into the Alps be flattened with dynamite.
She spoke up, “That diplomat hasn’t come to the Russian Embassy too often, but not too infrequently either. I saw him once before I resigned from the embassy in December.”
Arthur suddenly frowned when he heard this, “Wait …… you resigned from the embassy? So who’s working there now?”
Fiona just said resentfully when she heard this, “You may not believe this, but it’s just such a coincidence that I sent three girls to the embassy before I resigned, and one of them was Agnieszka, or rather, Defina.”
“You sent her to the Russian Embassy?” Arthur just felt his scalp tingle, “Don’t you tell me she’s gone now in person.”
Fiona defended herself sheepishly, “My dear, you do realize that girls who speak Russian are not that easy to find, and even fewer work under me. And since Delfina is another Polish girl, and Scotland Yard provided legal assistance for her lawsuit against Harrison earlier, I would have thought she would have been a reliable informant.”
Arthur took a deep breath, “Why didn’t you ask me before you did this?”
Fiona sniffed and cried out, “Of course I questioned you, but when I went to find you, the only person in your house was the newly recruited laundry maid, and she ended up telling me that you left for Liverpool first thing in the morning.”
“Wow. ……”
Agareth pulled out a fan from somewhere to fan Arthur, and while doing so, he also laughed evilly and said, “This chick is too much for my liking. No wonder she’s been trying to seduce you since the moment she walked in the door. Arthur, if you can’t hold back, I guess you can’t be too harsh on her now, right?”
Arthur didn’t rush to anger, he just covered his head and thought carefully for a while.
Although he was indeed angry with Fiona for giving him this preemptive hand, if Fiona really asked him for instructions on the embassy’s mobilization, he would more than likely approve it as well. After all, judging from De Fiona’s origins, it was indeed unlikely that she would voluntarily defect and confess her identity to the Russians.
After all, the Russians’ treatment of these Polish exiles was well known to the group.
However, if the worst was to be expected and Delfina really did fall to the Russians’ side and also told the embassy all her secrets, then the situation for Arthur and Scotland Yard could become infinitely more perilous.
If De Fina is willing to come out and identify Scotland Yard as having fairy-trapped the MP, although the Tory leader, Sir Peel, has decided to draw a line in the sand with Mr. Harrison over the recordings.
But on the surface, in order to maintain party unity, the Tories will certainly still pursue Scotland Yard in the House of Commons. Even if they don’t capitalize on the issue, at least Arthur, the mastermind of the fairy tale, is surely not to be blamed.
However, the Russian Embassy is not sending De Fina out to make accusations at the moment, and they haven’t even put out half a whisper about this.
So that leaves only three possibilities.
Either De Fina had not defected to the Russians at all, and the Russians were unaware of the bent of the Harrison affair, and they had just happened to hire De Fina’s husband to carry out the assassination of Arthur.
Either De Fina had already defected to Russia and the Russians knew who she was, as evidenced by the pocket watch the killer left at the crime scene. The Russians knew that Arthur would have noticed it and followed the clues up the line of investigation until they got to the Russian Embassy side.
The Russians don’t let De Fina make the accusation as a backhanded way of warning Arthur not to mess around. They didn’t want to target Scotland Yard, but simply to give the British government enough reason not to stay involved in the Polish issue.
Of course, there is a third possibility, which is that Defina did indeed defect to someone. And that the real culprits behind it left such clear clues in order to get Arthur to look into the Russians’ heads, and thus plant them in order to disguise their true agenda.
Arthur thought left and right, and suddenly turned his eyes to the jittery Fiona: “Ma’am, where’s your aura just now? Successful people don’t get scared over this little thing. That said, even though you stabbed a basket, at least you didn’t hide your mistake, thus causing me to form a bigger miscalculation, which is still quite praiseworthy.”
Fiona bowed her head and blushed, “Are you telling the truth?”
“What are you being shy about? Your skirt is still attached to your ass. Pretending to be girlishly clueless here won’t work on me, what I need is for you to remedy the situation afterward.”
Arthur leaned back in his chair and asked, “I’m sure that with your intelligence you must have checked out Defina’s background early on, right?”
“Well ……,” Fiona asked kindly as she stood up next to Arthur holding the document, “Do you need me to read it to you?”
“You’re much better behaved now than you were before.”
Arthur glanced at her, “Keep it up, and if you can keep up this high standard of service, maybe I’ll consider setting up a health care fee for the Criminal Investigation Department.”
Fiona was finally relieved to hear this, though the fact that the performance had been recognized still caused her to develop a slight sense of frustration.
She gritted her teeth in resignation and read, “Actually, Delfina had disappeared long before you were attacked. Only because she was working as a maid at the Russian Embassy, I didn’t dare to casually go to Scotland Yard to report the case, and instead watched to see if the embassy would report it for her. But after two days of waiting, the embassy still hadn’t moved, so I asked the other two girls who worked at the embassy to make inquiries.
As it turned out, they told me that the housekeeper had told them that Delfina had resigned and gone back home. But we all knew in our hearts that Delfina’s hometown was in Poland. So, the housekeeper’s mouth was full of shit, something must have happened to her. So that night I sent the ‘locksmith’ under my hand to De Fina’s residence.
The bedroom was a mess, the table and cupboards were in disarray. The whole room looked as if it belonged to a family that had been given short notice to grab and go on the run. Apart from a few changes of clothes, we found almost nothing there. But a little rummaging still led us to something interesting.”
Arthur asked, “What was it?”
Fiona gave a full account, “A dozen or so pawnbroker’s mortgage tickets for gold and silver jewelry, books, and all sorts of odds and ends that could be exchanged for money. The ‘locksmith’ was worried that not bringing back the items would make me angry, so he brought back all of these notes for me.”
“Pawnshop bills, that would be right up there with the official findings ……”
Arthur mused for a while and spoke up, “You didn’t throw them away, did you?”
“Darling.” Fiona snapped, “I’m not that stupid, the first time you sent someone to tell me I was going to investigate Defina, I redeemed everything from the pawn shop out of my own pocket. However, you most likely won’t be able to look at those ladies’ beloved jewelry, and as I know, you love books, so I brought them to you.”
Arthur pointed to the corner of his eye and asked, “Can reading a book cure a dangling eye?”
“That’s certainly not true, but books might open up some of the clues to the dangling eye.”
Fiona turned and took the book from her bag that had Napoleon’s Biography on the cover, carefully opened the title page, pointed to a passage on it and said, “Look at this, my dear.”
Arthur glanced down and saw that at Fiona’s fingertips it was written in French:
For my friend Mr. Cheslav Kovalchik.
–Alexander Kolona Walewski.
It was a very typical Polish name, and Arthur briefly recalled it in his mind, realizing that it didn’t ring a bell.
He opened his mouth and asked, “So who is this Waleski?”
Fiona pursed her lips and whispered in Arthur’s ear, “My dear, he is a member of the Bonaparte family, the illegitimate son of Napoleon and the Polish Countess, just like the male secretary next to you. Are you sure that Officer Louis Bonaparte beside you is really reliable?”
(End of chapter)