by Angela Misri
“How do you know her?”
His hand hesitated over the notepad and then he wrote: “The Major and I had dealings during the uprisings and afterwards.”
“Dealings? Good or bad?”
Lancaster put down the pen, a steeliness coming over his face in his clenched jaw and the way his shoulders stiffened.
“Is she capable of the bombings?” I asked, changing tacks.
He shook his head immediately, making me suspect that the dealings had had as much to do with the Mrs. as the Major. An affair, perhaps?
“What of her daughter?”
“The Collinses had no children,” Lancaster wrote back. “And Heddy never remarried. Heddy has no motive, no skills in bomb-making, and the only link you have for her is seeing her at Downing Street where she had all the reason to be.”
I didn’t share my information about the gun in her purse or the young girl at the college who hadn’t flinched at the explosion that dropped everyone around her to the ground. Her resemblance to Heddy might have been a coincidence, but eliminating Heddy as a suspect did not eliminate the girl. Also, I had this niggling idea about the queen’s lady-in-waiting and her hands. I doubted her injuries were specifically related to this case and the bombings, but something about her made me suspicious. And my brain wouldn’t let it go.
Lancaster had meanwhile returned to his circuit, so it was by pure luck that I saw the figure steal into the library because I surely would not have heard them if he didn’t.
Even if I hadn’t recognized the person through their disguise of a borrowed coat and covered hair, the bloodhound tugging at its leash gave them away. Plus, I recognized the gait — slightly favouring the left foot because the heel of the right boot was wobbly and needed to be replaced. I waved at Lancaster, but his back was turned as he walked in the opposite direction from our visitors, who were ducking behind bookcases as they made their way to my table.
Despite the slapstick humour of this approach, I did not want to trigger a replay of the knife-to-the-throat introduction Lancaster seemed to favour, so I wrote a seven word note, wrapped it around the pencil and with the use of one of the rubber bands on the table, launched it at the bookcase our visitor was hiding behind.
My aim must have been decent because less than a minute later, Annie stepped out from behind the bookcase, pulling the hat off her head. “Who the devil is Lancaster?”
The devil himself stepped from the shadows behind Annie, causing her to jump back. Nerissa, who was at Annie’s feet, showed her teeth. Annie backed up to my table, pulling Nerissa with her, keeping her eyes on the spy, a steady stream of conversation evident in the way his lips were moving. Neither of them were looking at me so they couldn’t see my smile. I was hearing more and more of their words. Still quieter in volume than usual, but actual words.
I didn’t know how she found us until she pulled a familiar piece of paper out of her pocket. She had intercepted the note I had meant to get to Brian. The question (which I scrawled down quickly) was why?
Lancaster seemed to accept whatever verbal explanation Annie had provided for her arrival and slipped back between the bookshelves. For a tall man, he moved like a trained dancer, fluid and smooth. Only then did Nerissa drop her suspicious stance and hurl herself into my arms to cover my face in slurpy kisses.
“He … be sure I … followed,” Annie said, her face finally turned my way, her lips enunciating each word carefully for me before taking my notepad from me to frown down at my question about Brian.
“Brian was still abed when I left Baker Street,” she wrote as I gave Nerissa as much love as I could. “A late night, according to his mother.”
The unsettled feeling in my stomach bubbled to a higher intensity boil and I wrote back, “Pursuing a new lead at the Yard?”
“I couldn’t get a decent word out of him, to be honest,” she wrote. “He’s no help to either of us.”
“Either of us? Your father?”
Annie blinked tears from her eyes before writing with a slightly shakier hand. “I still haven’t heard directly from him, but his landlord in Sandwell said he hadn’t been home in a week. I couldn’t get a clearer answer from the man before I ran out of money for the call.”
I pushed aside my growing unease about my partner, scratching behind Nerissa’s ears to reassure us both. “We’ll go to the bank right now and get enough money to make all the calls you need.”
“You can’t go out in public,” she replied, then pulled out a crumpled-up piece of paper and put it on the desk in front of me. I straightened out the poster paper to read the words “People of Interest” in bold above a photo of Ian Lancaster and Portia Constance Adams. A phone number I didn’t recognize was listed below and Nerissa picked her head off my lap to growl at the stacks. Lancaster was back to drag us out of the library building.
CHAPTER 17
“FORTY QUID SHOULD BE enough,” Lancaster said, his arm buried elbow-deep in a wall cavity just outside Barrows Cemetery.
Annie shook her head at me and spoke, “How can I think of leaving you with a … spy?”
I didn’t catch whatever adjective she was using to describe the spy a few feet away from where we hid, but I wrote her an answer. “You’ve already been taken in for questioning by Box 850 once, plus I need you to check on Beans and Brian. And you have to think of your family — your father and your brothers.”
She grasped me by the shoulders. “You’re my family as much as them, Portia.”
I felt like I could almost hear the words she said, and I hugged her to me, surprising her because I was not one for hugging. She meant what she said, of course. She had done her best to locate my grandmother before meeting me at the library, anticipating my worry for her. What Annie did not know was that no one needed to worry about Irene Adler. If there was one thing she was an expert at, it was evading the law. She would find me before the Yard or Box 850 found her, of that much I was sure.
“Can you tell me anything else about the weapons stockpiling?” I wrote. “Did you learn anything from the diplomats?”
Annie pulled me a little further away as if Lancaster would read over our shoulder and wrote, “Only that there is some backdoor trading happening and the Germans and Austrians are not pleased. Someone is trying to keep them out of the room when talks are happening. Austria sent a delegation of negotiators to try to keep the peace.”
“Who is selling the arms?”
“I don’t know that it’s a government,” Annie wrote. “Henry thinks it’s a private sale rather than a country. But we’re talking millions of pounds of weapons. That’s too much for one person to have. It’s like our government thinks we’re going to war again.”
“Looking at the state of nationalism and the kinds of men being elected to the east of us, I think anything is possible,” I wrote back, the uneasy feeling settling in my stomach for what felt like a long stay.
“And meanwhile, I’m leaving you with,” Annie wrote, followed by a large arrow pointing to the man smoking a few feet away.
“I have Nerissa and we have a plan,” I wrote. “We will meet at Charing Cross Station two days hence and if either of us does not show up, we go straight to Scotland Yard, regardless of who knows what or who is threatened with arrest. If one of us is unreachable for whatever reason, we put an ad in The Lady for a nanny with the code I taught you.”
Annie’s mouth formed an “O” of surprise and she reached into her voluminous borrowed coat to pull out a large packet. Speaking, she said, “Your pills. They were … on the downstairs side table, outside the Dawes’ flat. I … them … way out the door.”
She held them out to me and then thought better of it, pushing the packet back into the coat pocket, shaking the coat off her shoulders and throwing it around me instead.
As I had been deprived of my coat since being accosted at The Trifle, this was especially app
reciated and made me squeeze her again.
“Here,” said Lancaster, pressing the cash into Annie’s hands. “We should be on our way as well.”
That hole in the wall held more than just money; the spy was now wearing a newsboy hat and he placed a pair of clear cat-eye-shaped glasses on my face. I looked around him at the brick wall that he had restored to its previously plain facade and decided this was a trick I could learn from Box 850 — hiding disguises and aids in different spots all over London.
Annie did not look ready to leave, even when Lancaster gifted her with one of his “trust me, I’m too pretty to be bad” smiles. She responded by jabbing a finger into his chest, saying something to him that made the smile slide off his face like a slick of oil off a shiny hubcap, and stalking off down the alleyway. She glanced back once, meeting my gaze, before stepping out onto the sidewalk and then she was gone.
“Loyal friend,” he remarked, sliding his arm around my waist as if we were lovers looking for a quiet spot and pushing the glasses up the bridge of my nose with his other hand. “Where to now, Detective?”
I was ready for that question, having already answered it in an earlier conversation with Annie. I raised my notebook between us and pointed to it on my page. “Now we find the bomber.”
* * *
“JUST BECAUSE WE CAN’T see them, doesn’t mean they’re not staking out the place,” Lancaster wrote, forced to resort to the pad because he was whispering and refused to stop chain smoking. I pulled the packet out of my pocket, noting its size. The nurse had delivered at least a month’s worth of pills. Perhaps they had gotten tired of the daily deliveries. Or perhaps they had given up on my recovery and this was just my life now. Medicated to the gills. I slipped four pills under my tongue, observing they tasted slightly more bitter than usual, and noticed the smaller pills in another package. These weren’t mine. These were Brian’s, damnit. Now he was without his medication, which he could neither afford to replace nor afford to miss.
Lancaster reached for one of Brian’s pills and said something I couldn’t decipher. He pulled out his cigarette to say it again, “Opium.” I looked back down at the small pill, not liking the quick identification, but also running through Brian’s symptoms in my head, comparing those to this treatment plan. I wished I had access to Watson’s myriad medical notebooks on the bookshelves of my flat. Or Gavin’s quick mind when it came to chemicals. He had been a boon to Scotland Yard as a coroner, specializing in poisons and unexplainable deaths. It’s one of the things that had first attracted me to him — that quick mind.
Dragging my attention back to the present was difficult. We were hiding in a train car near where all my recent troubles had begun, the police cordon still wrapped around trees and rubble, the darkness almost absolute because no one had administered to the streetlamps since the explosion. Nerissa and Lancaster had reached a détente that required that the bloodhound place her body between ours. Her level of trust in the spy mimicked mine and, as always, I appreciated our synergy, but I could still feel Lancaster’s breath on my neck and the smell of his cigarettes combined with his natural scent into something wholly unique to him. I wanted to label it unpleasant, but couldn’t quite manage it.
Meanwhile, three cases wrestled for position in my mind: Brian’s withdrawal since his injury, Annie’s missing father, and this ruddy bomber who, by remaining at large, was keeping me from dealing with the other two cases. Annie was chasing the weapons-stockpiling angle, but it really didn’t help that I was unable to operate out in the open.
“This is the bomber’s first and most amateur target and therefore is likely to hold the most clues,” I wrote, handing the notebook to Lancaster before leaning over to look through the slightly open door of the train car.
Lancaster was watching for Kell’s men or patrolling constables from the Yard. His declared motivation was much plainer — to clear our names so he could return to his nefarious day job — and that required getting a hold of Kell or one of his men and convincing them of our innocence on our turf rather than theirs.
I was watching for someone altogether different. Nerissa was curled on her side, fast asleep. Until she wasn’t. She picked up her head, her ears rotating like sonars.
“There,” I said, tugging on Lancaster’s arm and pointing at the thickset body that had stolen into the train yard. If he was surprised, it didn’t show on his face as he slid the door open an inch wider for us to see out. I whispered to Nerissa to stay quiet and we lay flat on our bellies, side by side, watching as the person snuck closer to us, sliding between train cars demonstrating a familiarity with the scene that identified them before I saw their face.
“Oy,” the man squawked as Lancaster hopped up from his prone position to grab him by the lapels. Nerissa leapt out of the train car, growling up at the man.
“He’s the driver,” I said, recognizing the man trying to wriggle out of his grasp. This was a remarkably tidy presentation, his pants mended but pressed, his hair neat as a pin. Not the sot I was expecting at all.
Lancaster said something, surprise registering on his face, but I couldn’t understand his words. He pulled the man into the train car, and turned to me, enunciating carefully. “You spoke.”
I shrugged, but he grasped me by the shoulders, “You said ‘He’s the driver.’”
My mouth fell open in surprise. I had been expecting that my words were their usual jumble of randomness, it seemed too much to hope that my speech would return at the same time as my hearing. The driver had scrambled to his knees, but Nerissa’s growling kept him from attempting to escape his situation.
Lancaster was not playing the nice cop in this scenario, keeping a strong hold on the man, and badgering him with minimally worded questions that generated minimal responses like “Gerroff me,” or something like that, perhaps with the addition of a cuss word that slandered the spy’s ethnicity. Lancaster drew back a fist and that seemed to be enough hardball for this man. I had my hand on Nerissa’s back so I could feel when she stopped growling, the vibrations receding along her lean body. I grabbed for my notebook.
The man licked his lips. “I work here … explain nothing … you two.”
“This station is closed,” I said, hoping I was still understood. “You’re not here to fix the trains dressed up like you are. Why are you here this late?”
The man’s eyes darted around the darkened space outside our train car and I figured out the reason for his combination of skittishness and immaculate dress. He was meeting someone of the female persuasion. Someone he was not supposed to be meeting at all.
“How long have you been stepping out on your wife, Digby?” I said.
He practically leapt out of Lancaster’s grasp then, demonstrating that my words were still coming out as planned. The men scuffled for control, but Nerissa had turned her attention to someone else entering our vicinity. Someone was walking around the train cars in the darkness. At least, that’s what Nerissa’s reaction was telling me.
I didn’t want to scare the new arrival, but my bloodhound had no such forethought, darting out of the train car, nose pointed right at the intruder.
With a curse, I took off after her. Nerissa’s barks were sharper sounds to my ears than human voices, but in the darkness, I could neither visually follow her lithe body nor hear her barks to follow her as she chased the person around the damaged train yard. Still at a full run, I rummaged in my satchel for my torch and tripped over some rail tracks, landing on my elbows with a yelp of pain. That’s where Nerissa found me, choosing to abandon her quarry at the fear her mistress was in trouble.
“Sorry, girl,” I said as she wrapped herself around me, checking for injuries. She dropped a piece of fabric at my feet as she licked my face, and I picked it up, flashing my torch on it. Unless I was very mistaken, it was from a woman’s thin cotton dress. Cheap and worn, like the clothing I had worn for my first two decades when I
lived in Toronto, and much too thin for the weather.
Lancaster’s torch came bobbing along the tracks, locating us at last. He was dragging a very reluctant Harold Digby by the arm.
“Whoever she is, you were unwise to keep this as your rendezvous spot after the explosion,” I said up at the two men. Lancaster nodded, a small smile on his face, having understood my words. “Is she also married?”
Digby’s eyes searched for the woman who had evaded Nerissa and she turned to growl up at him menacingly, as if warning him not to try to run because she would not let another escape.
“Or is she perhaps not a paramour,” I mused aloud, struggling to my feet, my torch light aimed at Digby’s clean clothes, “but a long-lost daughter?”
CHAPTER 18
DIGBY’S PLACE IN BAYSWATER was a run-down townhouse that presented far too much physical evidence of hoarding and solitary drinking to be lived in by anyone but a bachelor. Digby pulled two mismatched chairs up to his kitchen table and poured us all a small glass of homebrew. I had to force myself to turn away from the clues to the man’s life laid starkly before me: the former wife, the unpaid bills, the mother who had lived here before him, their relationship that had soured his marriage.
I shook my head, downing the drink down in a single swallow and grimacing. It needed sugar, but that was an expensive luxury Digby obviously couldn’t afford.
“My wife left with my wee girl when I was at my worst,” Harold explained, knitting and unknitting his hands as he spoke. “The drink got to me. I was the last one left amongst my mates with a job, and my mum, well, she …,” he trailed off here, as if used to being stopped at this point. Finding no one to interrupt him, “My mum, she died. And I just took it up again. And Val, she had it. She left with our little girl, Ilsa.”
I was able to understand most of what Digby said and Lancaster was good enough to answer my few questions directly.
“But that must have been several years ago,” I said in response. Lancaster frowned at me, shaking his head, so I wrote it down, swallowing past my resentment that my speech issues persisted.
