The Other Side of Midnight

by Simone St. James

  “I checked with Scotland Yard,” Sutter said. “I was told that Mr. Hawley here”—he nodded briefly toward James—“had been taken for questioning by the chief inspector due to an inquiry he made at the War Office, and that the questioning had ended when Inspector Merriken took over. That both men had disappeared from the Yard shortly after. That the inspector had made a request to send manpower to Kent, and the request was delayed. I’m rather good at educated guesses.”

  James broke in. “Are you alone?”

  “Yes.”

  The shadows were falling now, and I felt an unreasonable grip of fear. “Why did my dog stop barking? Did you hurt him?”

  Now Sutter looked puzzled. “No, of course not. I surprised him when I came through the house, but I patted him on the head and told him to go back to sleep.”

  I sighed. So much for Pickwick the guard dog. I ran a hand through my hair, which felt thick and tangled despite its short length. “Your man is dead,” I said bluntly. “Your brother Colin killed him.”

  George Sutter’s expression fell. He gave a long sigh, one of such worldly sadness that I wondered why he had never shown such emotion over the death of his own sister. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said. “He was a good man.”

  “So it is your brother, then,” said James. “Colin is alive.”

  George turned his gaze to the trees, seeing nothing, his mind working, turning something over. “Put down the rifle,” he said at last, “and I’ll answer your questions.”

  Reluctantly, James moved his thumb over the safety and lowered the rifle from his shoulder.

  “Very good,” said George, letting his hands fall. “Shall we talk inside?”

  “No,” I said, wanting to stay near the pond. I could feel Gloria close by, just a whisper of her. It was fanciful, perhaps, but I didn’t want to leave. “We can talk here.”

  George shrugged. “Where would you like to start?”

  “With the Black Dog,” I said.

  Surprise rippled over his expression, settling into the same wonder I’d seen when I’d found his long-lost toy soldiers. “You never cease to amaze me, Miss Winter. Where did you get that name?”

  “Where do you think?”

  He looked avid with burning curiosity for a moment, but he quickly tamped it down. “The Black Dog,” he said, “is a terrorist and saboteur who has been operating since just before the Armistice. We’ve known from the first that he was British, and that he was very, very good. He was recruited, initially, by the Kaiser’s government before it fell. Afterward, he was dormant for so long that my intelligence contacts believed him dead. But he resurfaced in Spain in 1922 and has been active ever since.”

  “How did you know he was your brother?” James asked.

  “Truthfully,” George said slowly, “I didn’t, not until Miss Winter told me just now. I only suspected. One of our agents saw him in Spain, and although there is no photograph, he managed to make a reasonably detailed sketch. It was all we had before that particular agent was killed. The sketch looks . . . uncannily like my brother, and the records at the War Office align with the dates.” He gave us a bleak look. “Colin was always an idealist, thinking he could change things. It made him fragile. I don’t like to think of my brother as a madman, but he wouldn’t be the only one whose mind was unbalanced by war.”

  “He murdered his own sister,” I said. “He killed Ramona in her own flat in the middle of the day with a garrote. He shot at me like I was a piece of game.”

  “Colin is very intelligent, Miss Winter. Intelligent men, in the right hands, are always the most dangerous. Take an intelligent man and find a way to mold him, and you have an extremely effective weapon.”

  I thought of the woman with the dark eyes, the razor blade, the shrill of the telephone.

  “So who’s molding him now?” James asked.

  “As far as we can tell, anyone with money. The Black Dog has become a free agent, as it were, working for anyone who will arm him, pay him, and give him papers. His only agenda seems to be that he’s willing to do whatever harms his home country. He’s been working on the Continent for the past few years, damaging embassies and making attempts on visiting dignitaries. He nearly killed our ambassador in Greece when he shot at his motorcar; it was a very near thing, and we had a hard time keeping it quiet. And then I received intelligence that the Black Dog was on his way to England.”

  “What for?” said James.

  George shook his head. “Our information was incomplete. We’d had warning of his movement, but that was all. Presumably someone had hired him to do damage on home ground, since he’s a born Englishman and can blend in more perfectly here than he can on the Continent. It would have taken some time to get him false papers that would stand up, but they must have come through. And then I read an article in the newspaper about my sister, and I found myself making one of my educated guesses. The wildest one I’ve ever made in my career.”

  Beside me, James stiffened perceptibly. “My report.”

  “Yes. Dissected in the newspaper, for the public to read. I usually avoided the gossip coverage of Gloria, but that article was impossible to overlook. I admit, the first thing I thought when I read it was, Does she have the power to find Colin? And then I thought, if it had occurred to me, why couldn’t it have occurred to him?”

  “You think—you think he came here because of the article?” My throat had gone dry, my fingers cold. “To kill her before she could discover him?”

  “I had no idea. I only knew that if Colin was here—if he was in fact the Black Dog and she had the power to expose him—then she may have been in danger. I contacted Gloria by telegram. I told her to be careful, and I gave her my telephone exchange. I said I wanted to meet.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “She was not agreeable.”

  George sighed. “She telephoned the exchange, which was more than I expected. The message she left was not repeatable and nearly caused my assistant to resign.”

  “You didn’t exactly treat her well over the years.”

  “I realize that now,” he said to me. “If I had played my part differently, if I had communicated with Gloria regularly, I would have had more influence.” He looked at my face. “I suppose that seems cold to you, Miss Winter, as she was my sister. I assure you, I deal with issues on a daily basis that have much larger consequences than whether or not my family is offended.”

  “Fine,” I said. “What did you do when she refused you?”

  “I wanted to leave it. I did. It was more fanciful than a hunch—it was a wild guess. But it kept coming back to me. If there was even the faintest chance that her powers were as real as the tests seemed to reveal . . . If she could be persuaded to help us, to find the Black Dog and prevent more deaths . . . If there was even a chance that Colin had read that article and had her in his sights . . . I had to get to her before he did.”

  The wind picked up again, as if in response. It was cold now, and the sun was almost gone, making George Sutter hard to see against the background of the trees. “Why here?” I said. “Why the elaborate ruse to bring her here?”

  “She would never have agreed if I’d approached her directly,” George said. He stood unmoving, and I could not tell whether the cold affected him. “I’d seen that already. I made contact with that odious drug-peddling lover of hers, and had him set it up. I wanted her to come here because this is a safe house, Miss Winter. It is set up for the use of any of our agents who need it. Agents who have come back from assignment and require debriefing, agents whose cover has been compromised, agents who have been . . . injured in the line of duty. We’ve had this house in place for years.”

  “Who are the Dubbses?” James asked.

  “Agents, of course,” was the reply. “We use a man and a woman, we give them a cover story that keeps them frequently in London, and we have them come and go from tim
e to time so the neighborhood and the few live-out servants we hire don’t get suspicious. The location gives us the utmost secrecy without appearing out of place. The cover doesn’t hold up well under expert investigation, which was part of the reason I read Inspector Merriken’s reports so closely. He missed it at first glance, probably because there were so many other potential suspects to sift through. But I think he would have figured it out rather rapidly, even if Miss Winter hadn’t prompted him, and then I would have had to decide how to keep him under control.”

  “He wouldn’t have liked that,” I observed.

  “He wouldn’t have had a choice. In any case, I thought Gloria would be safe if she came here. The agents were to collect her from the train station, and I’d arrive myself, and then Gloria would have no choice but to talk to me. I’d persuade her to help, to become one of us—after she’d come under our protection, of course. If my wild hunch was anywhere close to being correct, I did not want her to go home.” He shook his head. “That was when everything went wrong. My motorcar broke down, and I was delayed. At the train station, my agents discovered that Fitzroy Todd and that odious fortune-teller had decided to tag along and wouldn’t leave. All of them were drinking, and Gloria was in an uncontrollable mood. Before my agents could handle the situation, Gloria was dead.”

  James’s hands were clenched into fists at his sides. My own bewilderment was turning to anger, swift and heated. “You knew from the very beginning,” I said to George. “You knew who killed her, and you knew why. Why in the world did you recruit me and bring me into this? Why did you set him on me?”

  “Miss Winter, I’m telling you, I didn’t know. Even after she was killed, I had only a paper-thin theory. I’d had to improvise the entire meeting, because my superiors would have had none of it. I’d have been locked up in Bedlam. I told them I wanted to interview Gloria as a potential recruit because of her client list—nothing about the Black Dog at all. It was an incredible risk. And when it all went wrong, I still didn’t know. Fitzroy Todd could have killed her, or that drug addict he brought along, or someone else entirely—a lover or a customer. I needed you, Miss Winter, to go where I couldn’t go, and ask questions. To find out if my gamble was correct.”

  “And if Colin came after her next, so much the better.” James’s voice was rough, furious.

  “What do you want me to say?” George’s composure cracked finally, and he let loose a flare of pure anger. “It was a possibility. I met with Miss Winter in the middle of Trafalgar Square so that if Colin was watching, he could easily see us without being seen. Then I had one of my men tail her everywhere she went.”

  “Oh, my God.” My headache throbbed again. It had all been a lie, even that meeting in London. “And I lost your man right before I stumbled on Colin murdering Ramona.”

  “We could have had him then.” George’s voice still simmered with anger. “We were that close. My methods may not meet with your approval, but they work. I don’t know if Colin knew how close he came, not then. I’d lay my bets that he knows now.”

  Something twigged at me, something not quite right. James’s paper had listed my powers as unproven, and the newspaper article, obsessed with Gloria, had not mentioned me at all. Why would Colin pursue me if he thought my powers were fake? What interest could I possibly be to him? I opened my mouth to ask the question, but I never got the chance.

  Far off to the west, past the pond and the trees, a single shot sounded.

  I flinched, but James only turned. “That’s a rifle,” he said.

  Two more shots followed, echoing in quick succession.

  “And that’s a handgun,” James said. “Merriken.”

  Twilight had fallen now, the line of trees like charcoal in the darkness, and a breeze came off the pond, bringing a smell of green dampness. Gloria, is that you? I thought wildly before I turned to see James shouldering his rifle.

  “Stay here,” he said to me.

  “Wait.”

  It was George. He came closer, and I could see the urgency in his face. “Don’t do it,” he said to James. “It’s what he wants—for you to come to him, so he can pick the vantage point. Make him come to you—he will, if you have what he wants. Pick your ground, Mr. Hawley. What is the best place to meet the enemy?”

  “The house,” I said.

  George raised his eyebrows at me. “And what if he throws a bomb through the window, or a grenade, or a stick of dynamite? Colin is very well armed.”

  The motorcycle sidecar, I thought. And the glimmer I’d traced through Colin’s mind: No reason to look in the sidecar. None at all.

  James glanced around. “The trees,” he said finally. “They provide the best cover, if I know which way he’s coming.” He glanced at me, and my heart broke by a sliver. James’s eyes were dead, his emotions gone. This was the officer who had led his men into those woods in France, watched them die in the space of a moment. The man who had lain next to Fenton’s ripped-apart body, smelling the blood, listening to the agony. Some days I wonder if I’m going to wake from a dream and find myself in the trenches again.

  I swallowed. I could not touch this man before me, could not reach him. There was no way, but I had to try. “What about Inspector Merriken?” I asked. “What if he’s shot, injured?”

  “Merriken is a soldier,” said James. “He’ll understand.” He turned to George. “The shots came from the east, but there’s no guarantee he’ll come that way.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were him,” George replied, his words fast and clipped. “The ground is wet between there and here—it became waterlogged when they put in the pond. He’ll have to skirt it, and the best way that doesn’t lead him blind is from the south.”

  Over the treetops came two more shots, a fast staccato.

  “This way.” James took my wrist, his grip icy, and pulled me toward the trees. He still wore his jacket, though he had left his hat in the house, and as I followed I could see the bulk of his shoulders beneath the fabric, the strong, graceful line of his body as he pulled me. I could not have removed myself from his grip if I had tried; I could do nothing but stumble along behind him on my sore, exhausted legs, trying to keep stride in my low heels. I thought of James sprawled on his sofa only this morning, laughing. I don’t intend to go around shooting people, he had said.

  Behind me, I could hear George’s footsteps following us. “James, please,” I said.

  “Ellie, be quiet. This is the only way.”

  He stopped us at the bottom of a rise, motioned us to silence, and climbed it slowly in the darkness, peering through the trees. My head was throbbing. I blinked soddenly, panicked and terrified. Someone was going to be shot, killed, if Inspector Merriken wasn’t dead already. It wasn’t the only way; it wasn’t. It couldn’t be. Darling, came a voice in my head, and I caught a whiff of perfume.

  There was one thing I could do, and suddenly I knew how to do it.

  I turned to George Sutter, who stood nearby watching James and waiting. He saw me turn and raised his eyebrows.

  “I’d apologize for this,” I whispered to him, “but I don’t think you’ve earned it.”

  He frowned. “Apologize for what, Miss Winter?”

  I reached out, grasped his bare hand, and held it between mine. “Hang on,” I said into the darkness.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Cold and wet. Darkness. She wondered whether she looked beautiful, suspended in the murky water, whether her hair flowed and her skirt pressed against her thighs like a siren of the sea. I’m finally a mermaid, she thought, though I have no tail.

  It had been wrong from the beginning, and she’d known it. She should never have come, except that she didn’t care anymore, aside from a hardened, cynical curiosity. She told herself she’d said yes for the money, but almost from the first she’d known there was something wrong. Fitz had been sweating, his handsome face almost gray, and
he was in deep with that drug-addled girlfriend of his. Besides, when had she ever trusted Fitz?

  The headaches were explosive, like shells landing in her brain, and she’d begun to wake in the night, her hands on her scalp, moaning. Gin killed them only for an hour or so. The sessions, which had always come so easily, came harder and harder. She’d spent months under waves of anger and euphoria and denial and an abject terror that held her in a grip so hard she could barely breathe, but deep down she’d known it was almost over and the shade was being pulled down over the window. She got sentimental, which she never did, and she wanted to see her brothers one last time.

  What a humiliation to discover that she couldn’t summon them by herself, that she needed that fool Octavia to help her. After Ellie was gone—Ellie, with her blond hair and innocent-wise eyes, who missed nothing, who asked questions of everything, whose emotions played across her face so easily—Octavia had seemed like a replacement, but she’d been nothing except a disappointment. You couldn’t replace Ellie with a girl like that. It turned out you couldn’t replace Ellie with anyone.

  But she’d swallowed it and called Octavia, squeezing money from her at the same time—it was ridiculously easy—and at first the session hadn’t worked. She’d faced the possibility that that was it, she would never see her brothers again, and then—and then she saw Tommy. He was just there, not some shambling semblance of him but the real man, wearing his army uniform with his hair cut short and combed down, so unlike his usual unruly self. He’d seen her, and she’d felt a swell of pain in her head that was unlike anything she’d ever felt before, and then Harry was there, making it worth it. Harry was in uniform, too, and she heard a rasping cough (gas—my brother was gassed before they patched him up and sent him back to the front), but she’d been able to inhale him in, his handsomeness and sweetness and confidence. Seeing them was worth everything. Octavia had been saying something shrill, and through the fog she had summoned Colin, looking for his serious face.

  She saw Colin all right, but he wasn’t in the room. He was standing outside across Harriet Walk, watching the windows of Octavia’s apartments with an intent look on his face, as if he could see through the drawn blinds. Colin and yet not Colin, not really, because his near-comical seriousness had turned to cold and hatred. He moved away and disappeared, vanishing into the streets of London, and Gloria remembered George sending her a telegram—a bloody telegram—telling her to be careful, that he wanted to speak to her. And suddenly she understood. Colin wasn’t even dead. They’d all been fooled, all these years—even all-knowing George.