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Since Mrs. Lloyd was convinced that her husband meant to eat a midday meal at Barker’s Club in St. James, Solomon elected to beard him there rather than kick his heels at the house for several hours.

At first glance, there was little to make it stand out from the surrounding buildings. Solomon was surprised that Lloyd was not a member of some more imposing club, such as the Athenaeum or White’s. Until he considered the fees and Lloyd’s apparent shortage of funds.

“Good morning, sir,” the porter greeted him with frosty politeness. “May I help you?”

“I hope so. I’m looking for Mr. Barnabas Lloyd.”

“If you will take a seat here, sir, I shall inquire.”

“You needn’t trouble,” Solomon said. “If you don’t know where he is, I shall find him myself.”

The man’s eyebrows flew up. He had clearly perfected the art of gazing down upon undesirables in a superior manner that drove them from the door.

In this case, the effect was spoiled somewhat by the fact that he had to tilt his head backward to do so, Solomon being several inches taller than he was. “Are you a member, sir?”

“Yes,” Solomon said, meeting the glacial stare.

“Your name, if you please, sir.”

Solomon sighed and produced one of his cards.

The porter made a fuss of checking through his membership book under the letter G.

Quite clearly, he did not expect to find the name in front of him, but in fact, although he had never before set foot in the place, Solomon had been elected a member more than a year ago, having been proposed for membership by a gentleman he had once done lucrative business with, and seconded by Sir Nicholas Swan.

Flummoxed by this discovery, it took the porter some time to lift his gaze from the name written quite clearly on the page.

“You needn’t take my coat,” Solomon said pleasantly, already pushing open the inner door to the hallowed halls. “I shan’t be long.”

The club held few surprises for him. He discovered several men snoozing over newspapers in one room, a few more silently poring over worthy tomes in the library, and an enthusiastic group having a political argument in one of the meeting rooms. It was in the next door meeting room that he finally found Barnabas Lloyd.

Lloyd had clearly been holding court about his adventures to several interested gentlemen of all ages, a few of whom were studying the photographs on the table.

Lloyd, in the middle of answering a question, noticed Solomon immediately and broke off to exclaim, “Grey! Excuse me, gentlemen.” He strode straight toward him, hand held out. “What brings you here? Have you news? Have you found it?”

“I have not,” Solomon said, briefly shaking the man’s hand. “I do, however, have questions.”

Lloyd glanced around the room, clearly reluctant to leave. “Come, then, we can speak undisturbed for a few minutes…” He led Solomon to the far corner of the room, dragging a couple of chairs with him.

“What is on your mind?” he asked, as they sat.

“First of all, that if you actually expect us to have any chance of finding your treasure, you must be completely honest and clear in the information you give us.”

Lloyd sat up. His nostrils flared. “In what way have I ever been dishonest?”

Solomon met his haughty gaze without difficulty. “You led us to believe that you had shown your family the treasure on the night you came home. Instead, you allowed them to stare at a closed chest for several hours before you locked it away.”

Something like chagrin might have flickered in Lloyd’s eyes. But he remained outwardly offended. “Whatever you might have interpreted from my words does not make me a liar, sir.”

“Technically not, but frankly, if we cannot take your words at face value, it makes you damned difficult to do business with.”

Redness suffused Lloyd’s weather-beaten cheeks—temper, not shame. Interestingly, he wrestled it back. “I fail to see how this makes a blind bit of difference to your task of locating my property.”

Was he really so lacking in imagination? Or merely pointlessly defensive?

“Why did you not open the chest for them?” Solomon asked bluntly.

Lloyd jerked his arm in an instinctive gesture of dismissal. “I assure you it is of no account.”

“From what I hear, they were all eager to see it. Were you teasing them? Or was there some other reason?”

“Oh, teasing them, of course,” Lloyd said with impatience. “It was my little joke, which rather turned against me—against all of us—when everything was stolen.”

“You must see that this throws up several possibilities.”

Lloyd scowled. “Such as?”

“Such as the treasure never left the ship, only the chest full of the rubbish you found in it the next morning. Such as one of your own family was irritated enough—or just as teasing in nature as yourself—to play a trick on you.”

“Oh for the love of—” Lloyd scrubbed at the back of his neck and dropped his hand, glaring at Solomon. “Of course it left the damned ship! The weight alone told my son, my seamen, and my servants that. Secondly, none of my family would ever do such a thing.”

“Why not?” Solomon pressed. “From what I have seen of them, all three of your children are spirited and intelligent and could easily learn from your example.”

“I have their respect, sir! They would not dare. Besides which, no one could have taken the strong room keys without waking me.”

“Why is that?” Solomon asked. “Did you not spend all night in your wife’s room?”

He was being deliberately provocative because it seemed the only way to get to the truth, but he more than half expected an explosion that would not only dismiss Silver and Grey from the case, but force him to defend himself.

Lloyd stared at him, as if flabbergasted. Then a boyishly proud grin spread over his face. “I might have done. I’d been away from home for a long time.”

Solomon took a slow breath. “So, in effect, any member of your household who knew where to look could have taken the keys from your bedside drawer, opened and closed the strong room, and returned the keys, all without your hearing a thing.”

Lloyd’s smile faded.

“You take my point about telling us the whole truth,” Solomon said. “It makes a difference.”

“Oh, pshaw! My family would not steal from me! It would be stealing from themselves.”

Solomon did not mention Sydney’s photographic ambitions or his daughter’s possible marital ones. “As I say, they might play a joke on you, although I’ll grant you, it has gone rather far for that. Who would steal from you? Mark Terrance?”

Lloyd blinked. “Don’t be ridiculous. Silly old windbag hasn’t got it in him.”

Oddly, it didn’t sound like a compliment. “Then who? Who dislikes you enough, or is desperate enough to steal? It has to be someone acquainted with you or your family, who would know where the strong room and the keys were located.”

Lloyd did him the courtesy of appearing to think about it. “I honestly don’t know anyone that… ungentlemanly . If I had suspected anyone, I would have acted already without consulting you.”

“What did lead you to consult us?” Solomon asked, genuinely curious.

“Impulse.”

Lloyd sounded so rueful that Solomon said, “Do you wish us to continue with the case?”

The client’s lip twitched, his eyes suddenly direct. “Would you end your inquiries if I did?”

“No,” Solomon admitted. “Once begun, I follow a puzzle to the end.”

“Then I am glad I employed you. Find my treasure, Grey. I need it, and so does the rest of my family.”

Solomon took Juliet’s list from his pocket once more. “Are you acquainted with any of these gentlemen? Or their families?”

Lloyd took the folded paper and cast his gaze down it. “We know the Graftons. Can’t think of the others.”

“Not Arthur Fenwick?” Solomon said, pointing to the name Sydney had picked out earlier.

“Not to my knowledge, no. Who is he?”

“A collector of antiquities. Tell me, who knew the purpose of your expedition? Everyone in the club here?”

“And several others. All my friends. It wasn’t a secret.”

“And who was this sailor who gave you the map in the first place?”

“Old Cauley? He sailed with me often in the early days, before I had my own ship. Arthritis got him in the end, though—he couldn’t work, so he never could get back to his treasure. He asked me to do it for him.”

“Then the treasure is his?”

“It would have been, but he died long before I sailed. No family.”

“Why did it take you so long to sail? Were you collecting subscriptions?”

“Lord, no. To be honest, though I thanked old Cauley for his map, I thought it was a load of old rubbish and had no intention of taking it further until I came across another old salt in a Bristol alehouse. When we discovered Cauley was a mutual acquaintance, he asked me if Cauley had ever gone back to collect his treasure. ‘What treasure?’ I asked. And the answer came back, ‘The stuff he found in the West Indies and buried on a deserted island when their ship was wrecked.’ He was ill when he was rescued, so he couldn’t dig it up and he didn’t trust his surviving shipmates.

“Anyway,” Lloyd continued, “It was enough to send me back to old Cauley for more details, but he had, sadly, died in the interim. All I knew was that the island was off East Africa, so we sailed round the Horn of Africa and anchored at every island that looked remotely the same shape as Cauley’s map.

We found the right one eventually, some two hundred miles north of Madagascar. ”

“It must have been like finding a needle in a haystack.”

“It was,” Lloyd said fervently. “But I needed something big like this, to cover not only the huge costs of the expedition, but also to replenish the family coffers. Expensive business, adventuring, and I can’t let my family go short.”

He would let them, though, Solomon felt, rather than give up the adventuring and take to farming the acres of his ancestral home instead.

“Do you still have the map?” Solomon asked.

“It’s on the table, with the photographs.”

Showing just how clever he had been, Solomon thought cynically, though he rose and followed Lloyd with some interest.

The map was aged, creased, and frail through being folded so often, but its shape seemed to have been drawn with attention to detail.

Nothing was named, but pictures identified trees, pools, reedy grounds, and hills.

A chest marked, presumably, the burial place of the treasure, with feet shapes drawn from a crooked tree through the reeds.

“Here’s the spot,” Lloyd said, picking up a photograph and pushing it in front of him.

It showed the tree in the background, a lot of reeds, and several people, including Lloyd and Sydney, clustered about an open chest. Solomon thought he could make out a coin at the top of what appeared to be a sizable heap inside.

“Keep it,” Lloyd said generously. “In fact, if everyone’s finished looking, take any you like. I have several copies at home.”

This caused another stir of interest among the other men present, many of whom seemed very interested in the processes of photography.

Solomon chose a few that were similar to others and promised to return them.

“Join us for luncheon,” Lloyd said amiably, apparently forgetting his earlier annoyance.

Solomon glanced at his watch. “Sadly, I have another appointment. My thanks, sir. Gentlemen, good day.”