by Anna Elliott
It was such an improbable, even obscene sound to hear inside the library’s silent decorum that it took my frozen brain a moment to process what it was. But it had definitely been the sound of a gun being fired—and as I ran towards the entrance to the stacks through which Eric and the old woman had gone, another shot echoed through the room.
All around, scholars were standing up at their tables with exclamations of shock and alarm, but I barely glanced at any of them.
I burst into the stacks and found Eric on the floor between two of the iron racks for books. The elderly woman stood over him, a pistol in her hand.
Eric’s hand was clamped over his right shoulder, and blood seeped through his fingers. His face was an ashen mask of both terror and disbelief, staring up at the old woman—who was raising the gun, about to fire another shot.
I lunged for her, seizing her elbow and giving her arm a sharp yank. The gun fell to the floor with a clatter, and I kicked it away.
For a moment, I thought the old woman would struggle or try to run away. But others besides me were now crowding the entrance to the library stacks, scholars and students and one of the librarians who had run to investigate the sound of the gunshot.
The old woman looked around at the gathering crowd, then her muscles went slack and she blinked up at me with very wide china-blue eyes.
“You shouldna’ have stopped me from shooting him, lassie.” She spoke in a broad Scottish brogue, sounding as though she were a teacher giving her pupil a mild reprimand for breaking a slate pencil. “It was the Lord’s work I was doin’.”
She nodded towards Eric, who was on the floor, clutching his arm and moaning. The old woman studied him a moment, then looked back up at me, lowering her voice and still speaking with the same unshakable, matter-of-fact calm.
“He has the devil in him, ye ken.”
CHAPTER 6: LUCY
“I thought you said there wouldn’t be any danger,” Jack said.
We were standing together in the street outside of the British Museum. He had followed Günter back to Lovejoy & Sons, seen all the police wagons assembled outside—and probably felt his heart stop beating until I had come out of the museum unharmed. He hadn’t told me the last part, but I knew how I would have felt if our places had been reversed.
“I promised that neither Eric nor Mr. Meyer would try to murder me,” I told Jack. “You should have specified if you wanted to insist on an absence of elderly ladies with religious mania taking pot shots at one of our suspects.”
Eric Brown had already been carried away to the hospital. The wound in his arm was nasty, but not life threatening. And at the moment, the elderly woman—who had given her name as Mrs. Arabella Arden—was being helped by two constables into a police wagon. She seemed entirely docile and harmless, now. Eyes still wide with the same slightly fixed but mild stare, she nodded to the police constable on her right, and said, “Thank ye verra much, lad.”
Before Jack could answer me, Inspector Lestrade approached. His narrow face looked, if possible, even more gloomy than usual.
“I suppose you’re here because of the Adolph Meyer case?”
I nodded. “Mr. Meyer is apparently a frequent customer at Lovejoy & Sons, across the road.”
“And you thought he might have a contact there?”
“It’s possible. That’s why we followed the two assistants tonight,” I said. “Have you spoken to Mrs. Arden?”
Lestrade snorted. “She’s either genuinely barmy or a first-class actress. Hard to see her as a German spy, though.”
I looked over to where Mrs. Arden had settled herself in the back of the police wagon, surveying her surroundings with the regal calm of a queen about to address her subjects. “Will you let me speak to her?” I asked.
If Lestrade tended to view Holmes as an eccentric but necessary annoyance, his opinion of my involvement in criminal cases was even less enthusiastic. Higher on the scale of annoyance, lower on the qualifying necessary.
At the moment, he looked as though he would have liked to refuse. But he gave a grudging nod. “Fine. But just don’t let anything about Mr. Meyer or any potential deals with Germany slip.” He lowered his voice. “You understand that the three of us here are the only ones who know about Adolph Meyer, or that this shooting could have been anything but a random attack by a lunatic who ought to be shut up in Colney Hatch.”
“I promise that the name of Adolph Meyer won’t even cross my lips. But I want to try something.”
With Jack beside me, I walked over to the police wagon. Even though Mrs. Arden had already been searched and found to be free of any more weapons, I could feel my muscles tense up as we approached. Jack had fallen into the calm, deceptively casual stance that meant he was ready to face an attack at any moment.
“Hello,” I said, as Mrs. Arden’s gaze fell on the two of us.
“Och, hello there yourself, lassie.” She nodded to me, then regarded Jack with interest. “And who’s this then?”
“My husband.”
Mrs. Arden blinked slowly, appearing to digest this bit of information, then said to Jack, “Ye’ve married yerself a quick-witted woman, ye have. Fast to act and strong, too, even if she did stop me from doin’ the Good Lord’s work for Him. But there, no hard feelings, lassie.” She turned back to me, setting the jet beads on her bonnet clinking. “I suppose it’s difficult for anyone not guided by the Spirit to understand.”
I studied her. She had a small, heart-shaped face and had probably been quite pretty when she was young. Even now, her features had a crumpled-rose leaf kind of loveliness. Inspector Lestrade was perfectly right; it was very difficult to see Arabella Arden in the role of German spy.
“That’s why you shot at Eric Brown?” I said. “Because the Spirit told you to?”
Mrs. Arden nodded again, as though the statement were the most reasonable thing in the world. “Exactly. I didna’ know his name, ye ken. I’d never seen him before tonight. But as soon as I laid eyes on him, I knew he had the devil in him, and that he needed to be destroyed. Let him rain coals on the wicked; fire and sulphur and a scorching wind shall be the portion of their cup. That’s what the Bible has to say about it.”
“Yes, but fire and sulphur and scorching wind aren’t exactly the same thing as a loaded gun, are they?”
Among those things I was most curious about was where an elderly Scottish lady would have come to have a weapon of that kind in her possession.
Mrs. Arden waved that away. “Och, the Lord takes His instruments and puts them in the path of those He has called to His service.”
“And that’s how you got hold of an army revolver?” I asked.
Mrs. Arden smiled, the beaming, unclouded smile of a child opening gifts on Christmas morning. “The Lord provides. I was walking in Hyde park just this afternoon, and I found the weapon lyin’ on a bench. I knew at once what I must do with it. So I put it in my bag with my knitting and brought it along with me tonight.”
Lestrade, watching our exchange, muttered, “Mad as a hatter,” under his breath.
I tended to agree with Lestrade: if Mrs. Arden was putting on an act, it was a supremely good one.
“So you came to the Museum Reading Room tonight in order to … carry out your plan of exterminating evil?” I asked.
Mrs. Arden’s eyes met mine. She was no longer smiling, and her gaze was no longer quite so mild; something fierce flickered briefly at the back of her blue eyes. “Yer young, lassie, and maybe ye haven’t found it out yet, but there’s a terrible lot of wickedness in the world.”
“Yes, I do know that.” I waited a moment, then drew in a sharp breath, widening my eyes, “An deinem hals kriecht eine spinne!”
Mrs. Arden’s brows knitted together in a frown, her china-blue gaze regarding me with perplexity.
“What’s that ye say, lassie? I dinna understand.”
Lestrade had come up to join us. I glanced at him with a slight shake of my head, and he heaved a sigh.
&n
bsp; “All right, lads.” He spoke to the constables driving the wagon. “Take her down to the Yard. We can question her further there.”
Mrs. Arden gave me another beatific smile and a regal inclination of her head. “You take care of yourself, lassie. It’s been verra nice to make your acquaintance.”
The police wagon drove away. Lestrade sighed again. By this point in our acquaintance I was something of an authority on his sighs, and this one seemed to come straight up from the soles of his boots. “She says her address is a boarding house in Cheapside. We’ll go into all of that, of course. Make sure that she really is who she says she is.” He glanced at me. “I don’t suppose you saw her give anything to Eric Brown, before she shot at him?”
“You think she might have given him the anthrax packet to give to Meyer? But if that were the case, why should she shoot him?”
Lestrade’s already gloomy face lengthened. “I know. But Meyer might have sent her to collect the anthrax from Brown. Assuming that Brown is Meyer’s contact. And she thought she’d put him out of the way before he could tell anyone about it. I suppose there wasn’t time for her to have hidden the packet somewhere in the library?”
“Not after she shot at Eric, at any rate. I wasn’t watching her closely before that. I can tell you where Eric was working tonight, though. In case he is involved and left the anthrax for someone to find.”
“We’ll get our men to make a search of the place, though it’ll be needles in a haystack.” Lestrade cast a doleful look up at the museum’s dome. “And we’ll search the both of them, of course. Brown and Mrs. Arden, for any sign of the anthrax packet on them. But if that woman’s an agent of the Kaiser, I’ll eat my hat.” He gave a final sigh and turned to Jack. “You have permission to keep on with this investigation, Sergeant, in an unofficial capacity.”
“Yes, sir.”
Lestrade glanced back at me, with less disapproval than usual in his gaze. “But for now, I think you’d better get your wife home. She looks a bit shaken up.”
“Poor Inspector Lestrade. He’s always hoping that one of these days I’ll start conforming to his ideas of properly fragile womanhood,” I murmured as the inspector walked away.
In this case, he wasn’t entirely wrong. I did feel shaken, as though a greasy smudge of uneasiness was coating my skin. But I wasn’t going to admit it out loud.
With the departure of the police wagons, the crowd of onlookers that had gathered was starting to disperse. Newspaper boys and street vendors selling everything from hot meat pies to match sticks once more returned to their businesses. Pedestrians resumed their interrupted progress towards wherever they were in a hurry to be.
London street life might be temporarily disrupted, but it would always resume its natural flow before long—like the tide rushing in to fill and smooth out a hole in the sand.
I turned to look up at Jack. “What did you think about Mrs. Arden’s story of finding the revolver in Hyde Park?”
“I suppose it’s no crazier than anything else about her.”
“Just crazy enough to be true, do you think? It is quite a coincidence, though, that she should have happened to find an old army revolver and bring it along with her to the British Museum Library so that she could happen to shoot at one of our suspects.”
“Not when you’re the one keeping an eye on the suspect. Then it’s just an average day,” Jack said. “I’m surprised any part of the museum’s still standing.”
I made a face at him. Jack grinned. “What did you say to her, when you spoke to her in German?” he asked. “I didn’t even know you spoke the language.”
“I don’t, not really, only enough that I could understand Mozart’s operas when we studied them in music class at school. My grammar was probably terrible. But I said that there was a spider crawling on her neck.”
“Simple but effective.”
“Yes. If she were a German agent, she would be trained not to answer to anything spoken in that language. But she’d have to be very, very good not to react even a little bit, and she didn’t so much as twitch or bat an eyelash. I’d swear that she genuinely didn’t understand a word of what I said.”
“Makes it hard to see where she fits in to all of this.”
“I know.”
I was about to ask Jack whether he had found out anything by following Günter, when a voice spoke behind me.
“Gott im Himmel, what has been happening here?”
CHAPTER 7: LUCY
Turning, I found myself face to face with Günter Richt.
Naturally. Because our luck tonight hadn’t already been disastrous enough, of course I would have to be spotted by the other one of our suspects.
Although at least Jack had the sense to give me a polite but distant nod and then walk away—as though we were merely two strangers who had happened to fall into conversation while observing the spectacle of the police and ambulance wagons.
“Your pardon, Fräulein, but I recall seeing you at Mr. Lovejoy’s shop. You are still searching for Mr. Meyer?”
Beneath his shock of straight, very light blond hair, Günter Richt’s eyes were a pale, intense blue. And at the moment, they were regarding me with searching, wary intelligence.
Whatever else he might be, Günter Richt was not a fool.
“Was Mr. Meyer involved somehow in whatever has gone on here?” Günter gestured, indicating the uniformed constables who were urging the lingering spectators to move along.
Had Günter’s inflection changed very slightly at the mention of Meyer’s name? On the whole, I thought that it had. Although what that meant was still to be determined.
“No, I simply had an errand at the British Museum, and as long as I was in the neighbourhood, I thought I would carry it out,” I said.
I had found that the best policy when dealing with a suspect of any intelligence was to minimise lies and to stick as closely to the exact truth as possible.
“But I’m afraid that your colleague at Mr. Lovejoy’s Shop—Mr. Eric Brown, I think his name is?—has met with an accident, of a sort.”
“An accident?” Günter’s eyes darted briefly to the steps of the museum and then back to mine, and a furrow appeared between his brows.
“Yes. An elderly woman reader in the library shot him in the arm. He’ll recover, but he’s been taken to hospital to have the bullet extracted.”
For a moment, Günter stared at me, his expression changing from focused study to speculation—as though he were wondering whether I was in fact in my right mind.
I could sympathise. If I hadn’t witnessed the attack on Eric myself, it would have sounded improbable to the point of absurdity.
“An elderly woman shot him?” Günter repeated at last. “But that is unmöglich. That is to say, impossible. It does not make any sense.”
A man in a brown suit passed by our section of the pavement. He didn’t come near enough to Günter to bump into him, but Günter still stepped back instantly, flinching a little.
“This woman,” he asked after a moment’s pause. “She was perhaps eine große Frau? That is to say, she was large—tall?”
“No. Quite small, actually. Why? Do you have any idea who she was?”
“No, no.” Günter shook his head quickly. “I thought perhaps—that is, there was a tall woman who came into the shop the other day and … and spoke quite rudely to Eric. I thought that it might have been she. But of course it was not. If we were shot at by every customer who was unsatisfied with the service they received, we poor shop assistants would not live long.”
He gave a remarkably unconvincing laugh, pushing his hair back from his forehead. His hand shook slightly, I noticed.
“You can’t think of anyone else who might have wished Eric harm?”
For a moment as Günter regarded me, I thought he might be hesitating, making up his mind about whether to speak. But then the rattle of a passing coach made him startle again and seemed to shatter the moment.
“None at all,” h
e said. “And now you will excuse me, Fräulein, but I must return to the bookshop. I have left it too long unattended as it is.”
Wheeling about, he plunged across the street, weaving his way through the passing carts and carriages, and fetched up at the door to Lovejoy & Sons.
I didn’t want to risk watching for too long, so I turned and strolled away casually down the street.
I had gone about half a block when Jack caught up and joined me.
“Is anyone following us?” I asked.
“Not that I saw.”
That meant that we were reasonably safe talking together again. If Günter or anyone else associated with Lovejoy & Sons or the museum had tried to follow me, Jack would have noticed them.
“He’s on edge, though,” Jack said. “Even if he didn’t try to follow. He was jumpy the whole time he was talking to you.”
“He was,” I agreed. “Although to be fair, he’d just learned that his colleague had been shot. Even an innocent man might have been upset.”
“It’s more than that.” Jack paused to toss a coin to the muddy-looking street sweeper who’d just darted out into traffic to sweep the crossing in front of us. “Did you see how he was always watching the distance between you, and keeping track of how close anyone else got to him? He hasn’t been a bookshop assistant for his whole life. I’d say he’s been in places where he’s had to fight to survive.”
Jack would know about that better than anyone.
“He asked about the woman who shot at Eric—he wanted to know whether she was tall.”
“Sounds like he thought that she might have been a man in disguise.”
“That was what I thought, too. Although he had a story about a rude female customer that wouldn’t have deceived Becky.”
Actually, a child even younger and far less astute than Becky could have seen through Günter’s story.
“He may be acquainted first hand with violence, but he’s not very good at coming up with spur of the moment lies,” I said. “And he was definitely curious about me. I’m not sure he believes my story about searching for Meyer on account of an inheritance. I thought he seemed to know Meyer’s name—know him as more than just a shop customer, that is.”
