The Lost Empress Read online

  Other books in this series:

  In the Blood

  To the Grave

  The Last Queen of England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2014 Steve Robinson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477825839

  ISBN-10: 1477825835

  Designer: bürosüdo München, www.buerosued.de

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014940222

  For my wife Karen

  Contents

  Preface

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Preface

  On 20 June 1908, Anglo-French journalist and diplomat William Le Queux returned from his travels to Berlin with report of an alleged secret speech delivered by Kaiser Wilhelm II at a Council held at Potsdam Palace on 2 June 1908. Below is a transcript of an article as it was published in The Dominion, volume 8, issue 2558, on 4 September 1915.

  The speech took over three hours to deliver, and for five hours afterwards was discussed. The report he brought home was placed before the meeting of the British Cabinet, and discussed. At first some little suspicion was cast upon it—had the speech ever been delivered? So further inquiry was made, and there was no doubt it was perfectly genuine. The gentleman who handed it to him (the lecturer) was a high official, very near to the Kaiser’s person, an official to whom we should all be very deeply grateful, for he had furnished us with much important information. He was friendly disposed towards England and had no sympathy with the present war. If his name were revealed he would be arrested, and probably shot. In the course of the speech, the Kaiser said: ‘We shall strike as soon as I have a sufficiently large fleet of Zeppelins at my disposal. I have given orders for the hurried construction of more airships of the Zeppelin type. When these are ready, we shall destroy England’s North Sea, Channel, and Atlantic fleets, after which nothing on earth can prevent the landing of our army on British soil and its triumphant march to London.’ He went on to say: ‘You will desire to know how the outbreak of hostilities will be brought about. I can assure you on this point. Certainly we shall not have to go far to find a cause for war. My army of spies scattered over Great Britain and France, as it is over North and South America as well as all the other parts of the world, will take good care of that. I have issued already secret orders that will at the proper moment accomplish what we desire.’ The concluding sentence was: ‘With Great Britain and France in the dust, with Russia and the United States at my mercy, I shall set a new course to the destinies of the world, a course that will ensure to Germany for all time to come the leading power among nations of the globe.’

  Fact or fiction?

  There is much speculation as to the authenticity of William Le Queux’s report, which was not taken seriously by the newspaper editors Le Queux initially took his report to. Mr Le Queux later went on record to say that he had handed the report to the British government for its consideration, where it remained in confidential archives for several years. Further research has shown what some might consider to be an opportunistic publication of the report in newspapers around the world, several months after the outbreak of the First World War, to coincide with the publication of Le Queux’s book, German Spies in England. Or was the timing simply good marketing sense?

  Prologue

  Kent, England. Three weeks ago.

  This would be his first murder, and he hoped it would be his last. His mouth felt dry despite having just been sick. He could still feel the gastric acid burning his throat—still smell the sweet bile that now stained his clothes. He wanted nothing more than to withdraw back into the shadows where he’d been waiting for the right moment, psyching himself up. But he knew he had to do it. There was no turning back now. He put on a pair of thin gloves and pulled a grey ski mask over his head as he continued across the moonlit yard, checking to his left and right as he went. It was quiet—no one else around. The owner of the workshop-cum-warehouse he was heading for didn’t even have a guard dog, which would have complicated things because he liked dogs.

  There was a light on inside, just a single lamp by his reckoning. That was where his victim would be, working late for the last time. He reached the door and pulled from his jacket a sleek carving knife, which he’d bought from the local supermarket that afternoon. He’d thought long and hard about how he would do it, concluding that a knife would be quick and quiet and easy to obtain, even if it did mean getting closer to his victim than he wanted to.

  He went around to the side of the building, heading away from the light, and began to prise the tip of his knife beneath each window frame as he passed, waiting for one to pop open. It was an old building, as old as the antiques the man inside liked to restore, for all he knew. The windows were covered in a film of dirt, their old metal frames chipped and rusty. The fourth window he came to lifted easily, and he stopped beneath it. It was time. He took a deep breath to calm his nerves as he eased it open. Then he pulled himself up and slipped inside.

  He could just make out the shapes of crates and boxes in the dim moonlight, and he cursed himself for not thinking to bring a torch. You’re such an amateur, he thought as he fought the dry cough that was rising in his throat from all the dust he’d kicked up. He stepped further in, feeling his way around the crates, looking for the door. Then he heard music, classical music that was faint and tinny, as though coming from a small radio. The sound guided him, and as his eyes adjusted, he began to make out the glow beneath the door from the room beyond.

  The heady smell of polish and linseed oil hit him as he teased the door open. The man he had gone there to kill had his back to him. He was bent over an old pedestal desk twenty feet away, rubbing the surface with a cloth in smo
oth, even strokes that seemed to keep time with the string section that was playing on the radio. That was good. He thought it would help to mask his approach as he crept up behind the man, but after taking two steps, his nerves got the better of him, and he ran to the desk, knife in hand. He grabbed the man by the collar of his overalls and pushed him back onto the desk, quickly showing him the knife so there was no mistaking his intention.

  ‘The notebook!’ he shouted. ‘Where is it?’

  The man’s eyes were wide with fear. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Just tell me where the notebook is, or you’re dead!’

  The man shook his head only slightly at first, and then more emphatically. ‘I—I don’t have it.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me. I know you’ve got it.’

  The man continued to shake his head. ‘No, I swear. I thought I was close, that’s all. I can’t get to it.’

  ‘Really?’

  The man in the ski mask flicked the tip of his knife across the other man’s jaw line, drawing blood. ‘You’ve got one last chance to change your mind. Now, do you have it, or don’t you?’

  ‘No, but I’ll find a way to get it. It’s just a matter of time. Please!’

  ‘It’s too late for all that.’

  The man in the ski mask drew the knife back, ready for the kill. Whether this man had the notebook or not, he knew he had to do this. But he hesitated. The knife began to shake in his hand as he fought with his conscience, one voice in his head screaming, ‘Do it! Do it!’ while the other promised an eternity of damnation if he did.

  He hesitated too long.

  The man beneath him shifted suddenly, unbalancing him. A heavy blow caught him below his left ear, and he felt the heel of the man’s shoe kick into his chest, pushing him away. He staggered back, and as he put his hands out to soften his fall, he dropped the knife, and it clattered away from him, out of sight and out of reach. Before he could get to his feet again, the man he had gone there to kill now came at him with an antique short-sword, which he seemed to produce out of nowhere, the polished brass hand guard glinting in the lamplight. He cut the air with the blade, and the air whistled around it.

  ‘Tell me who you are. How do you know about the notebook?’

  The man in the ski mask gave no reply. His heart was thumping hard, and all he could think about was where his knife was. He scrabbled across the floor to where he thought it had fallen, but as he reached into the shadows to feel for it, the sword cut him off, hacking into the floorboards ahead of him. He kicked his legs to push himself away, heels slipping and sliding until he was backed up against a sideboard. Then the other man swiped the blade at him again, narrowly missing him.

  ‘Tell me how you know!’

  Unrelenting, the man swung the sword for a third time, and now it cut into the sideboard, lodging deep into the wood. The man in the ski mask grabbed the hand guard and used it to pull himself up, dislodging the blade as he rose. Their hands locked around the antique weapon, each man pulling and twisting as he fought to gain control, but the masked man knew he was the stronger of the two. He bent the other’s wrist back until the man was forced to let go. Then, in the midst of his kill-or-be-killed frenzy, he shoved the man away and ran the blade clean through his chest.

  Chapter One

  Quebec, Canada. Present day.

  Jefferson Tayte was standing in a stiff breeze at Pointe-au-Père, Rimouski, 157 nautical miles northeast of Quebec City, on the south bank of the wide St Lawrence River. It was a Sunday, and he was visiting an exhibition at the Site historique maritime, which commemorated the centenary of the sinking of the RMS Empress of Ireland and—according to the Canadian Pacific Railway index he’d found online—the loss of 1,015 passengers and crew.

  The man Tayte had gone to see was a local historian who also worked part-time at the centre on a voluntary basis. His name was Emile Girard. He was a thin, grey-haired man with a weathered, perennially tanned face and a gently spoken French-Canadian accent, whom Tayte thought looked several years past retirement age. He wore a thick, cable-knit jumper over his shirt despite the sunny June afternoon that had Tayte feeling hot in his shirtsleeves. Girard was proving to be very knowledgeable in his specialist field, which came as no surprise to Tayte given that Girard had already informed him that he was a descendant of one of the survivors who had sailed aboard the Empress of Ireland on its fateful ninety-sixth voyage to Liverpool on 28 May 1914.

  ‘It could be said that Father Time was her ultimate enemy,’ Girard continued as they crossed the quiet Rue du Phare outside the museum, ambling into the breeze towards a white and red painted lighthouse that stood close to the rocky riverbank. ‘The fog on the St Lawrence River that night was undoubtedly the catalyst for the disaster, but it was the lack of time that ultimately caused the loss of so many souls. The Empress of Ireland sank just fourteen minutes after the Norwegian collier Storstad rammed into her starboard side, tearing a four-metre-wide hole in her hull that was over seven metres deep. With around sixty thousand gallons of water pouring into her every second, there was only time to launch a few of the forty-two lifeboats she carried.’

  The detailed manner of Girard’s account made Tayte feel as if he were on a guided tour. ‘And the time of day, or night in this case, would no doubt have contributed to that.’

  Tayte had done his homework before leaving DC, covering the basics. He might have talked himself out of the visit altogether, sparing himself the personal trauma of the flight, were it not for his need to prove the information he’d found. The assignment that had brought him to Rimouski concerned a woman who, according to every record he could find, had drowned one hundred years ago, and yet his client’s very existence seemed evidence to the contrary. He had to be sure about his findings before going any further, and he knew from experience that visiting locations and talking to local experts such as Girard often yielded more clues than could be found on the Internet alone.

  ‘No doubt at all,’ Girard said. ‘She was struck soon after one thirty on the morning after she set sail, when most of the passengers and many of the crew would have been asleep in their cabins.’

  Girard stopped beside the base of the lighthouse and pointed out across the expansive river to the northeast. ‘She lies four miles off land in forty metres of water. Her loss has been greatly overshadowed by that of the Titanic two years earlier and of the sinking of the Lusitania a year later, and indeed by the outbreak of the First World War a few months after she sank, but she deserves an equal place in our memories. Including the crew, more lives were lost when the Titanic went down, but did you know that more passengers lost their lives when the Empress of Ireland sank than on either the Titanic or the Lusitania?’

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ Tayte said, thinking that he hadn’t even heard of the Empress of Ireland until he’d taken the assignment, which was clearly the point Girard was making. In comparative terms the disaster had been all but forgotten.

  ‘You’ll see many items at the exhibition that have been recovered from the wreck over the years,’ Girard continued. ‘But of course, that’s not why you’re here, is it?’

  ‘No,’ Tayte said again, swapping the heavy briefcase he was holding in one hand with the tan suit jacket he had in the other, to give his arm a rest. ‘But I’ll be sure to take everything in before I leave. As I explained on the phone, I’d like to find out what I can about one of the passengers.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Mrs Stilwell.’

  Tayte nodded. ‘According to the CPR passenger list I found, the woman I believe to be my client’s grandmother, Alice Maria Stilwell, was aboard the Empress when she sank. Her death record tells me she died on May 29th, 1914, which tallies, but the problem I have with that is that my client’s mother wasn’t born until 1925, eleven years after Alice Stilwell is supposed to have died.’

  ‘I see,’ Girard said. ‘But what then makes you so sure that your client is descended fro
m Alice Stilwell at all?’

  Tayte’s thoughts skipped back to that first meeting with his client a few weeks ago. She was a wealthy entrepreneur called Kathleen Olson, who had contacted him barely a week after he’d started running advertisements for work again, because after several months of trying to break down the latest brick wall in his own ancestry, his reserve funds had almost run dry.

  ‘Spare no expense,’ Kathleen had told him as they were leaving her offices in Downtown DC. ‘Grandma Alice was a wonderful, caring woman, but I always sensed there was a sadness about her. Perhaps you can find out why, Mr Tayte.’ She had stopped walking then, and she’d turned to him and squeezed his forearm. ‘I want to know the truth,’ she’d added, the intensity in her expression growing with every word she spoke. ‘I want to know everything there is to know about Alice Stilwell.’

  Returning to his conversation with Girard, Tayte said, ‘My client’s father, her last remaining parent, died recently. The house and belongings were left to her, and when it came to getting the place ready to sell, she came across a gold locket she recalled her grandmother always used to wear. She knew her grandmother as Alice Dixon, no middle name, and I’ve confirmed that’s what it says on my client’s mother’s birth record, yet on the back of that locket there’s an inscription bearing the name Alice Stilwell.’

  Girard looked unconvinced. ‘But it could have been bought second-hand.’

  ‘Yes, it could have, and the fact that they shared the same given name could be pure coincidence, but it’s also interesting that I’ve been unable to find a single record that I could positively match to this particular Alice Dixon prior to 1925. No census entries, no birth record, and no record of marriage to the man she’s supposed to have been married to.’

  ‘And so you suppose that Alice Dixon and Alice Stilwell are, or were, one and the same person? That she was harbouring a secret past?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ Tayte said, wondering, as he had wondered many times since taking the assignment, why Alice might have felt the need to leave her past behind. ‘You see, that’s not all. Inside the locket there’s an old photograph of two small children, and that begs the question of why anyone who bought a second-hand locket, and who was known to have always worn that locket, would carry pictures of someone else’s children inside it?’