Hither Page

by Cat Sebastian

  Hither Page

  Cat Sebastian

  Published by Cat Sebastian, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  HITHER PAGE

  First edition. June 18, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Cat Sebastian.

  ISBN: 978-1386666929

  Written by Cat Sebastian.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  The one thing everyone in Wychcomb St. Mary agreed on was that Mildred Hoggett was up to no good.

  “I caught her snooping in the mailbag,” whispered the postmistress, scooting to a seat nearer the other ladies in the doctor’s waiting room.

  “I heard she looked at Mrs. MacArthur’s bankbook,” confided the schoolteacher in tones of scandalous delight.

  “Why couldn’t she have found some other village to settle in?” lamented the president of the Women’s Institute. “I do understand that it’s been all but impossible to get good help since the war, but surely Miss Pickering could have found somebody else. There’s no reason to bring that element into our midst.”

  Dr. James Sommers, overhearing this conversation as he left the examination room and prepared to call in his next patient, privately thought that if this Mrs. Hoggett were such a menace, the good people of Wychcomb St. Mary could very well hire somebody else to sweep their parlors and dust their bric-a-brac. But tradition mandated that the maid employed by ornery old Miss Pickering also serve as “daily woman” for several other households in the village. This was generally considered an eminently sensible arrangement, and even if it hadn’t been, there were few people with the temerity to contravene Edith Pickering. Miss Pickering did exactly as she pleased, and if that entailed importing trouble-making charwomen from parts unknown, then so be it. James himself had dutifully hired Mrs. Hoggett to clean the surgery three mornings a week.

  James cleared his throat but the three women in his waiting room didn’t seem to notice him.

  “I do wish there was someone we could speak to. In an ordinary village, one might ask the vicar’s wife to intervene,” the postmistress said mournfully. She blew her nose, and James recognized the incipient signs of a winter cold sweeping through the village. Well, that would keep him busy, at least.

  “Ha! Mrs. Griffiths barely manages to keep herself alive,” said the schoolteacher, rapping her cane on the green linoleum floor for emphasis. “One never wants to ask her anything. The poor vicar.”

  “And those children. Perfectly feral, they are.”

  “If not Mary Griffiths, then who? Somebody has to do something.”

  All at once, the three ladies’ heads swiveled to where James stood in the doorway. “Dr. Sommers,” exclaimed the postmistress, clapping her hands together. “You’re just the man—”

  “Next patient!” he said quickly. He had not come to this village to serve as a mediator in internecine quarrels. He set broken limbs, prescribed ointments, and took temperatures. He kept regular hours, avoided any human interaction more complicated than afternoon tea, and read for exactly thirty minutes before bed. This was the closest thing to a rest cure he had been able to cobble together during the frantic sense of disbelief that had accompanied the end of the war—he was alive, England was still England, surely everything else would sort itself out in time. All that remained was to hang on to his fragile scraps of sanity—and by God, he was not letting them go in order to get knee deep in village squabbles.

  However, when the next week he caught Mrs. Hoggett riffling through patient records when she ought to have been sweeping the waiting room, he realized with a sense of gathering doom that he could not let this go. That had made him very cross indeed, because all James wanted to do was keep his head down and avert his eyes from any unpleasantness, and here she was practically forcing him into action. With the gritted teeth of a man throwing himself into the breach, he asked the cleaning woman to come into the consulting room.

  “Shut the door, if you please,” he said.

  “Oh my, I’m to be sent to Coventry, am I?” she asked, an expression of schoolgirl naughtiness out of place on her ordinary, middle-aged countenance.

  “Nothing of the sort,” he said. “I can’t have you looking at patient records, so while I applaud your efforts to clean the room thoroughly, there’s no need to clean within the file cabinet.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Mrs. Hoggett. “You keep that cabinet locked.”

  Now James was thoroughly exasperated. He had deliberately chosen his words to avoid making the sort of direct accusation that would only mortify both of them. He assumed that she’d admit to overzealous cleaning efforts, promise not to open the cabinet again, and be grateful that he had spared her an embarrassment. This was not fair play on her part. “I do keep that cabinet locked,” he said levelly. “I suppose the mechanism is faulty. I’ll see to having it repaired.” He resolved to keep the cabinet key safely in his pocket from then on.

  He took a steadying breath and went on. “I know you come from London, but in a small village, it’s important that people keep what little privacy they can manage. We’re all in one another’s business as it is,” he said, feeling like an impostor in saying we, as if he belonged more than she did, when the truth was that he was almost as much a newcomer as Mrs. Hoggett. They had both come to Wychcomb St. Mary like animals scrabbling for shelter after a storm—she, after her London flat was bombed; he, after the war left him unfit for much else. “We need to keep one another at arm’s length in whatever small ways we can manage. It keeps things peaceful, you understand.” James knew well that everyone had secrets that ought to stay covered up. A stone in the prettiest, best-kept garden hid things one was better off not knowing—best for everyone not to lift that stone at all. “You understand?” he repeated. She made no response, but he hoped his words would serve as a warning.

  They did not. Shortly thereafter he noticed that the contents of his medicine cupboard—not the one in the surgery, but the one upstairs in the washroom next to his bedroom, where Mrs. Hoggett had no business being—had been subtly rearranged. He fabricated a barely plausible excuse and informed the charwoman that he no longer required her services. She didn’t deserve that polite fiction, but James was dedicated to preserving the illusion that there was nothing amiss in the village.

  Yet he was uncomfortably aware of the fact that while Mrs. Hoggett might no longer be snooping in his own cabinets, she was almost definitely snooping in somebody else’s. He briefly considered that he might have a duty to tell her other employers, but came to the conclusion that it was best to let sleeping dogs lie. Besides, that conversation he had overheard in the waiting room suggested that everyone was well aware of the cleaning woman’s tendencies. Perhaps this wasn’t a problem at all. Perhaps all the more troubling secrets would remain hidden from view. James did not think he had the mental wherewithal to cope with any mishap more dramatic than a chipped teacup.

  So it was that when James learned that Mrs. Hoggett had been found dead at the bottom of the stairs at Wych Hall, he felt that his carefully constructed illusion of peace was in tatters. He dreamt, as usual, of the war. But t
his time the smell of mortars and blood infiltrated his quiet home, strips of flesh and lifeless bodies littered the streets of Wychcomb St. Mary. When he woke he wished he had not slept at all.

  AFTER NEARLY A DECADE of living out of suitcases, Leo Page had it down to a science. He knew that his spare revolver fit neatly inside his shaving case, and that if he rolled his clothes up tightly, he could fit four shirts and a pair of trousers into a single valise with room for a book that he’d never get time to read. He’d carried the same copy of Middlemarch to Vienna, then Cairo, and back to England without getting past the first chapter. Maybe that would change now that he was in London, although it was hard to imagine a future that involved time to read anything other than a dossier.

  When he received the telegram calling him back, he wondered if it was time to get a flat and whatever it was one put in a flat. Bedsheets. A kettle. Maybe a cat. He was vague on the details of how people lived during peacetime. It was December 1946, and he hadn’t spent more than a month in the same place since the beginning of 1937.

  He emerged from Victoria Station to find the city blanketed with a thick, filthy fog that obscured the gaps in the skyline where buildings had been hit by German bombs. Walking even the short distance to his destination in this weather was an unappetizing prospect, so he hailed a cab and in due course was deposited in an unremarkable street. The only thing distinguishing number 27 from the buildings that flanked it was a brass plaque by the door reading “Malvern Shipping and Surety.” Leo tipped his hat to the porter and climbed into the decrepit old lift. On the sixth floor, he got out and began wending his way through semi-abandoned corridors until he reached the suite of rooms that was his destination.

  A dark-skinned brunette a few years his junior looked up at his approach. She sat at a desk that held nothing but a black Bakelite phone, a pen, an inkwell, and a calendar. She regarded him blandly before forming her thin lips into something it took him a moment to interpret as a smile.

  “He’s waiting for you, Mr. Page.”

  This was a new agent playacting as secretary. He briefly wondered what had become of the last one—was she in the field? Dead? Compromised? He dismissed the thought. Thinking about the fate of people in his line of work was too dismal for a brisk autumn afternoon.

  “Shut the door, Page.” Sir Alexander Templeton barely glanced up from the stack of papers on his desk. He was a large man with a hairline that crept further back on his head each time Leo saw him. He looked like he ought to be dandling grandchildren on his knee and giving out butterscotch sweeties rather than organizing international espionage, but Leo knew Templeton worked hard to cultivate that appearance. “Well done in Cairo.”

  “Thank you, sir.” He had foiled one assassination and instigated quite another one, then made the whole affair look like a lovers’ spat, which anyone had to admit was a nice touch. He resisted the urge to buff his fingernails on his lapel.

  “Take a seat.”

  Leo sat, his suitcase leaning against the leg of one tatty chair. Somebody had taken care to ensure that even the furniture looked ineffably like it belonged in the headquarters of a modest shipping firm. The battered desk, the mismatched chairs, the photographs—undoubtedly of strangers—in cheap tin frames, sooty windows still half covered by blackout curtains: nobody would guess that Templeton was a man of importance or power. Leo would have bet fifty quid that Templeton had amused himself greatly in outfitting this room.

  Templeton finally looked up. “One of the fellows we’ve been keeping an eye on had a dead charwoman turn up at the bottom of his stairs. Dashed nuisance, police everywhere, had to scramble to make them think it was an accident. I don’t like dead bodies turning up when we’re trying to keep a low profile.”

  “No, sir.”

  “According to the medical examiner, she’d taken enough Veronal to fell a stallion and washed it down with neat gin. Then, for good measure, she took a header down a flight of stairs onto a marble floor.”

  Leo winced at the clumsiness of it all. “Not a professional job, then.”

  Templeton snorted. “Could be that an operative amused himself by making it look a bloody mess.”

  “Whose house?”

  “Colonel Bertram Armstrong. One of the fellows we suspected of giving the Germans a helping hand in Dieppe. He’s taken a fancy to playing the country gentleman at his ancestral pile, but he’s still on the board of the steelworks his father owned. Confidential information about British steel production has turned up in some very unsavory places, and I’d damned well like to know how. Have it narrowed down to a couple of suspects, and I’ll be honest that Armstrong seems the least likely—lazy old bastard. If it weren’t for Dieppe, I’d ignore him. I’d like Armstrong to have enough rope to hang himself with, which is damned unlikely if he’s got Scotland Yard crawling everywhere.”

  “I see,” Leo said. Presumably one of Armstrong’s men had planted false information with Armstrong and other suspects. It was a common strategy: several people suspected of leaking secrets were given information that differed only slightly, sometimes by as little as a single digit or differing typeface. Then intelligence services waited to see which version started to pop up where it didn’t belong. It wasn’t a tactic that worked well on professional spies, but it fooled amateurs—starry-eyed idealists without proper guidance, greedy profiteers, and other assorted fools.

  Templeton let out a long-suffering sigh. “It might not even be Armstrong himself. Could be anyone with access to his papers. Could be the secretary, could be the housekeeper, and in a little village like that it could be damned near anybody, what with people in and out of one another’s houses willy-nilly.” The man squeezed the bridge of his nose. “Wretched places, villages. I have an agent posing as his maid, but if bodies are turning up hither and thither, we need to nip that in the bud. Draws too much attention.”

  Leo was brought up short. “You already have somebody there?” The situation as Templeton had described it hardly merited one agent, let alone two. Leo usually worked alone, and overseas. This was a far cry from the type of job he liked to think of as his specialty, and it was for this that he had been called back? “What exactly do you need me to do?” he asked slowly.

  “Make sure there isn’t some kind of serial killer or murderous cat burglar on the loose in the Cotswolds. Do whatever it takes to make Armstrong think he isn’t going to have the police looking into his business.” He paused and looked Leo directly in the eye. “It’s a watching brief.”

  Templeton knew perfectly well that “do whatever it takes” and “watching brief” were pretty damned contradictory instructions. During the war they had all turned a blind eye, but the war was over. “A watching brief,” Leo repeated.

  “Settle down, Page. I’m not asking you to assassinate Englishmen on British soil.” Templeton stroked his mustache. “Might be a nice change of pace for you after the past few years. Tiny village, right on the edge of the Cotswolds, probably very picturesque or something. Wychcomb St. Mary. Nearly a holiday for you. Don’t you have people in Worcestershire?”

  Leo furrowed his brow. “Sir?” They both knew he had no people whatsoever. No parents, no siblings, not so much as a stray maiden aunt. And then he realized what Templeton meant. “No,” he lied, because that was what he did best.

  “Or did that fellow die?” Templeton murmured, ignoring Leo’s denial.

  That fellow had been a colleague, briefly a lover, currently a skeleton in a graveyard in France. But that wasn’t the point. The point was blackmail, and few people knew how that worked better than Leo Page. Maybe Templeton hadn’t meant to blackmail him, but secrets were Leo’s stock in trade. He ferreted them out, then used them to make people behave in the interests of king and country. And if that required a bit of blackmail and death, a few lives ruined, a few others changed forever, so be it. Being able to care about that sort of thing was a nicety Leo hadn’t ever had the privilege to observe.

  “Wychcomb St. Mary, then,” h
e said with a tight smile.

  “Come, Page, don’t act like that,” Templeton said in a manner that he probably thought was disarming. “All I mean to say is that none of us exactly play by strict adherence to the law.”

  “Understood, sir,” Leo managed, teeth clenched. He didn’t give a fig for strict adherence to the law, or even lax adherence to the law, for that matter. What he cared about was that Templeton clearly had an agenda of his own and wasn’t sharing a tenth of it with Leo.

  “Listen.” Templeton held out a cigarette box to Leo, who took one. “This is how it is. Now that the war is over, they’re talking about merging us with MI6. If that happens, then I’m out. I’m too old to play another man’s tune.”

  Leo didn’t like that one bit. He didn’t have a knack for sentiment, but Templeton had been the one constant in his life since the man had dug him out of a Bristol jail half a lifetime ago. Leo was conscious of harboring vaguely filial feelings for the older man, despite the fact that they likely hadn’t strung together more than a dozen honest words between them in all those years and had rarely seen one another outside this building. He didn’t care for the idea of the old man being cast out on his ear after damned near thirty years of doing the sort of work nobody in their right mind would sign up for. Still, Templeton had enjoyed free rein over this small, dirty corner of international espionage since the last war, and Leo ought to have foreseen that this arrangement couldn’t last forever.

  But there was something else gnawing on the edges of Leo’s consciousness—or conscience, even, if his moth-eaten sense of duty could be called that—a vague uneasiness with the idea of acting on the intelligence of anyone he trusted less than Templeton. Leo was a weapon, and he didn’t care for the idea of being aimed by a stranger.

  Leo lit the cigarette and took a long drag from it. “So, our goal is to make MI6 forget we even exist,” he said. “You want to fly under the radar until the bureaucracy moves onto solving some other problem. Which means that we either make the British steel industry look as if it’s run by choir boys, or we present the entire case to them wrapped up right and tight, and hope they’re too grateful to bother dismantling us.”