Hither Page

by Cat Sebastian

  James nearly asked whether they had thought to mention the missing barbiturates to the police, but then thought better of it. The thought of somebody rifling through Mary’s bag, stealing medicine, and using it to murder Mrs. Hoggett brought home the reality that if Mrs. Hoggett had been murdered, it had been by someone they all knew. “I’ll speak with her,” James managed. “Meanwhile, take the medicine when the chemist delivers it.”

  “I’m telling you,” Mary said when James left the vicar’s room. “He’s harder to nurse than the children. I’m half run off my feet with the lot of them.”

  “Are you feeling poorly?” James eyed her carefully. She didn’t look feverish, but it would be a surprise if she didn't catch what the rest of her family had.

  “I don’t have time to feel poorly,” she grumbled.

  “Do ask Wendy,” James suggested once again. Wendy always seemed happy to function as childminder and general dogsbody at the vicarage. “She loves you and your children.”

  For some reason, this made Mary shift and look away. “I feel badly asking her, if I’m being honest. She does so much here already. All the ivy and holly that’s hanging about the parlor is her doing. And only last week she built a cucumber frame in the kitchen garden.”

  “I didn’t know you had a kitchen garden,” James said.

  “We don’t. Rather, we did a few years ago, but it died because I didn’t know what I was doing and Daniel’s no help. But Wendy says we have a patch of ground with good soil and there’s no reason we shouldn’t grow vegetable marrows the size of our heads and eat like kings. I can’t say I’d want a vegetable marrow the size of my head, but she seemed intent. At any rate, she built the frame and promised to till the soil and plant seeds in the spring.”

  “And so she will. You’ve seen what she did with the garden at Little Briars. They were drowning in courgettes this summer. Speaking of Wendy, would you mind looking through Daniel’s papers and see if you can find anything about Wendy’s parents? I know you said they were missing, but I can’t imagine Daniel throwing out important paperwork. I hate to pester you, but it’s for legal reasons. Something to do with a trust,” he lied, the falsehood sour on his tongue.

  “Oh.” She sounded surprised and dismayed. “I’ll look, but don’t get your hopes up.”

  James had always thought the vicar was the kind of scatterbrained person who saved every scrap of paper, not the type to throw them out. He frowned. “There has to be something showing who she is.”

  She sighed. “The children were babies and I was out of my head, if you recall.”

  James hadn’t been living here at the time and he didn’t remember any of this. “Was that when the old doctor prescribed you Veronal?”

  Mary looked up sharply. “Daniel told you about that, did he?”

  “I don’t suppose you have any ideas of who might have taken it from your handbag?”

  She let out a mirthless laugh. “We both know I leave the thing around the village more days than I remember to keep it by me.”

  He left the vicarage in a much grimmer mood than he had entered it. Mary wasn’t being entirely forthright at the moment, not about the Veronal nor about Wendy’s paperwork. Perhaps she was embarrassed about having lost both the drugs and Wendy’s paperwork. Perhaps she had misgivings about having placed Wendy without the proper documentation. He knew, logically, that there were all kinds of reasons for people to have secrets, most perfectly innocent. In all likelihood, Wendy’s mother had been a disreputable friend of somebody in the village, and everybody thought her better forgotten, for Wendy’s sake.

  But what if Mrs. Hoggett had found out? Was it possible that she, while cleaning at the vicarage, had put her nose where it didn’t belong and found something about Wendy’s mother? Would any secret about Wendy’s origin be enough to incite murder?

  Between this and the missing Veronal, James couldn’t escape the knowledge that there might be a killer nearby, walking among them in the village, as it were. It would be a daily reminder of death, of the fact that people sometimes killed one another on a grand scale, with flags waving and songs in their heart, with the roar of guns and the smell of rot. He had thought that at Wychcomb St. Mary he’d be safe from those memories.

  Scarcely paying attention to where he was going, he made his way from the vicarage to the train station—it was one of his days at the convalescent home, and he was already late—but found himself standing before the church. It was a path he had taken hundreds upon hundreds of times as a boy, running errands for his uncle. He sat in the rearmost pew and let his gaze drift to the window of the three hares. His uncle had argued that it was a symbol of the holy trinity, but also a representation of past, present, and future, all tangled together, infinitely cyclical, and in the end, indistinguishable from one another. As a child, he had found this comforting. No matter what—dead fathers, mothers who abandoned one without so much as a goodbye—the future was always in wait with its promise of hope and renewal. Now he found himself thinking of how if the three hares represented past, present, and future, that meant the future was always touched by the past. Chased by it, even, just as James was pursued by his memories. The hares couldn’t outrun one another.

  It had been childish folly to return to Wychcomb St. Mary. This had been the first home, the only home, he had ever known, but it hadn’t ever been properly his. He had been sent here because he had nowhere else to go. And in the end, he had spent more time away at school than he ever had in the village. When the war ended, and he had nowhere to go, he let the cycle repeat, hoping the village would somehow absorb him but also cleanse him of the memories that dogged him. It was pure fantasy: his ideas about village life came more from books than they did his own experience. In truth, he was playing the role of mild-mannered country doctor as much as Leo Page played any role.

  He felt adrift, unmoored, belonging to no place, belonging to no one. The only thing that was truly his own were the thoughts that plagued him.

  DRESSED IN HIS TOWN clothes and reading a newspaper in an otherwise empty compartment of a London-bound train, Leo thought he might have passed as an ordinary man heading into the city for a day of work selling insurance or something equally benign. Nobody would have guessed that in his commonplace attaché case he carried a revolver, a folding knife, and a discreet capsule of cyanide. The cyanide was likely overkill for a trip to London, but Leo hardly wanted to leave it lying about his room at the Rising Sun.

  When he was honest with himself—and he had long since decided that when your bread and butter was professional grade dishonesty, you had to at least make a habit of telling the truth to yourself—he admitted that he enjoyed the playacting aspect of his job. In another, kinder lifetime, he might have gone on stage. With every new assignment, he conjured a persona out of thin air. The Leonard Page who took the early train to London and dabbled in the study of church architecture might pinch his pennies, but wouldn’t entertain the prospect of traveling third class. His fictional mother (widowed young, now living in someplace like Torquay, he decided) had taught him the importance of keeping up appearances, of having standards. His sister (married, three children, living in Plymouth) grew roses and had strong opinions about horticulture in general. He took his tea milky and sweet, was saving money to buy an automobile, and sometimes went to the pictures with his sweetheart.

  As he looked out the window, the sun rising over the countryside, he decided that this Leonard Page would like what he saw. He’d be proud of whatever he did during the war, and would have put it behind him, or at least pretended to. Now he’d be thinking of what to get his nieces and nephews for Christmas, whether his sweetheart would prefer perfume or earrings, and whether rationing meant he wouldn’t be able to get a Christmas tree.

  For a moment, he had the sense that the real Leo Page might like what he saw out the train window as well, that the real Leo might like coffee rather than tea, that the real Leo might allow himself to get close to a kind-hearted country doc
tor. But the real Leo was a figment of his imagination, perhaps even less real than his adopted persona. He wasn’t entirely sure there ever had been such a figure as the real Leo Page. That person had been left either at the orphanage or on the streets of Bristol, chased away by the mean necessities of survival. Now he was what he had been made, what he had made himself into: a tool, a weapon, a means to an end.

  And yet. After gazing blankly at the newspaper for half an hour, he tossed it onto the empty seat beside him and drew his copy of Middlemarch from his case. Leonard Page would read no such thing. He would read the Times, the New Statesman, possibly a detective story if he were in a particularly fanciful mood. But Leo was at a good part in the book—that old sod Casaubon was finally dead—and he didn’t want to put it down. He read the novel, feeling vaguely that this act of self-indulgence was the fault of Wychcomb St. Mary.

  After two hours on the train, he was too restless to endure either the underground or the stuttering progress of a cab through congested streets, so he walked from Paddington Station to the building in Curzon Street. The skies were leaden gray and drooping with fog as he crossed through Hyde Park. The only other people in sight had their heads down, and scarves wrapped close around their necks as they walked quickly to wherever they had to be. Leo stopped to buy a couple of buns from a street cart, feeling sorry for the vendor who had to be out on a day like this.

  He climbed the steps to the familiar building and took the rickety old lift to Templeton’s floor. “I didn’t catch your name last week,” he said to Templeton’s secretary as he placed the extra bun on her desk. He smiled in a way he imagined affable commuter Leonard Page might.

  She regarded him flatly. “Mrs. Patel,” she said after only the slightest hesitation to let him know that—naturally—this was not her real name, and that he was being absurd by even asking her. She flicked a glance at the bun.

  “It’s not poisoned,” Leo protested. “I’m trying to be cordial.”

  “Why,” she said, not bothering to make it a question. Leo felt Leonard Page disappear, a creation of smoke and mirrors; he hadn’t been there in the first place. This woman likely saw agents come and go by the dozen. Half the agents who walked past this desk probably died, disappeared, or went into deep cover. Templeton had been running this operation for thirty years; surely he had a list of dead agents as long as his arm. This wasn’t a normal office, where a lady in an apron would come around with a tea tray at four. They didn’t even know one another’s real names. It wasn’t a normal office, it wasn’t a normal life, and Leo would do best to remember that.

  “Didn’t expect to see you, Page,” Templeton said when Leo walked in.

  “I had to look into a few matters in town,” Leo said, tamping down his inane disappointment that Templeton wasn’t glad to see him. Why should the man be glad to see him? Leo was a good agent, a valuable asset, but he meant nothing to Templeton personally. Their relationship, such as it was, was entirely one-sided. Templeton had dozens of agents. Leo only had one Templeton, one person who had been a constant for half his life, one person he entrusted with the choice of who got to live and who didn’t. He grew queasy and sank into an empty chair.

  “Eh?” Templeton looked up from his papers and glanced skeptically at Leo. Leo did not know if it was his imagination or if Templeton did a double take when he saw the hand knit muffler he had looped around his neck. For one wild moment he thought Templeton was going to utter the same phrase Leo had heard from Agnes at the Rising Sun that morning, then the postmistress, and finally the stationmaster: Oh, I see you’ve got one of Miss Pickering’s creations. Leo shoved the silly thought aside.

  “You mean to tell me it’s not done yet?” Templeton grumbled, not bothering to hide his irritation. “It’s been nearly a week. You usually work a damned sight faster than that.”

  “I have the suspects narrowed down to a manageable number, sir—”

  “I have MI6 breathing down my neck,” Templeton barked. “Do we at least know whether this murder had anything to do with Armstrong’s steel industry connections? It would be a damned relief if I knew that murder had nothing to do with whatever mischief Armstrong may or may not be up to.”

  “Even odds the victim was either blackmailing someone or near enough to it, which makes her a natural target for murder. But I don’t know yet whether that blackmail had anything to do with Armstrong.” Leo wondered if he had badly bungled the case. Ought he to have started with Armstrong’s steel dealings? Had he been wasting time chatting with old ladies over milky tea?

  Templeton let out an indistinct grumble.

  “But if someone meant to kill her,” Leo went on, mainly to fill the silence, “I can’t see how it was done. How do you get the Veronal into her, I mean. If the Veronal was intended for somebody else, which is to say a guest slipped it into the glass of a dinner companion, then Mrs. Hoggett, who was fond of a tipple, might have drunk from the poisoned glass while clearing away the dinner dishes. Same for the cocktail glasses before dinner. But how would you know she had drunk it? How could you be sure? It’s a bad method of murder.”

  Templeton grunted. “I thought the lab found no barbiturates in any of the glasses, either from the cocktails or the dinner wine.”

  “The glass could have been removed—slipped into a handbag, thrown out the window—and its number made up with a clean glass from the pantry.” He thought of Wendy poking through the shrubbery. “But where do the stairs enter into this muddle? Did our murderer follow her up the stairs and then push her down? Or did they lure her up there? And if so, what on earth was the point of the Veronal? If they wanted her fall to look like an accident, then why do it at a time when she oughtn’t to have been upstairs in the first place? At the moment she died, she ought to have been bringing the dinner dishes to the scullery. The only advantage that moment had was that all the guests and the colonel were in transit between the dining room and the drawing room at that point. Both the elderly ladies used the washroom upstairs. Norris left the room to make a phone call. The vicar went into the library to borrow a book, and Mrs. Griffiths stepped onto the terrace for a cigarette. One person could have slipped upstairs, knocked the victim on the head and shoved her down the stairs, and then run back down before the body was discovered.”

  “The old ladies were upstairs?” Templeton asked, and Leo thought he saw his superior’s gaze dart to the muffler Leo still wore around his neck.

  “They went together.”

  Templeton ran a hand over the bald part of his head. “Could there be two would-be murderers working independently of one another? One aiming to put Veronal in the glass of their dinner companion, the other shoving the charwoman down the stairs?”

  That seemed a bit much for one dinner party, but Leo had seen stranger things, so he shrugged.

  “Can we corroborate the secretary’s phone call?” Templeton asked.

  “There was a call from Wych Hall to London three minutes before the call to the ambulance.”

  “About that secretary.” The older man held out a brown file folder.

  Leo thumbed through the contents, his eyebrows rising steadily as he read. Edward Norris was a decorated lieutenant in the 51st Highland Division until—“Norris was a deserter?”

  “Spent the rest of the war behind bars in Egypt. Armstrong would have known, of course.”

  Leo turned this new information over in his mind. “With a war record like that, he can’t expect to find better employment. He had a solid motive in wanting to keep Armstrong alive because otherwise, he’d be out of a job.” And yet—Leo flipped back through the papers on his lap—Edward Norris had listed his sister, a Lady Borthwick as his next of kin. That sounded like there was money in the family. For Norris to be working a dull job for little compensation sounded like he didn’t have any recourse. Leo wondered if Norris’s family had disowned him after hearing of his desertion.

  Templeton tipped his head and made a skeptical sound. “Could be that Armstrong thought a
deserter might be willing to look the other way while he sold military secrets. Could be that Hoggett threatened to go to the police with what she knew, and Norris didn’t want to be brought up as an accomplice.”

  Leo rose to leave.

  “Do whatever you need to do, Page. Just unpick the knot,” Templeton said as Leo departed. That was what he always said: unpick the knot. As if deadly secrets could be undone in a way that resulted in smooth strands of thread. Leo knew that unpicking secrets meant unraveling a length of fabric or cutting out the secret entirely, creating a tear, a rift, a wound. That gaping absence was the cost of a secret.

  That had been his first lesson. Secrets were a kind of currency. Find out the secrets of this chancellor or that industrialist, and you might be able to stop a war. Later on, he learned that those same secrets could be used to wage a war. Secrets were the invisible skeleton of society. Everything depended on the strength of secrets, and on not being able to see them; like a skeleton, once the secret was visible to the naked eye, something had gone drastically and irretrievably wrong. That was when people started to die.

  Leo shivered as he stepped outside and pulled his coat tightly around him. It wasn’t always Leo who did the actual killing—sometimes he simply passed on information to other people in his chain of command and let them sort out the bloody stuff. Other times he made sure the intelligence got into the hands of those who would make sure the appropriate people were punished or silenced. But after so many years of this, five of them in outright war, Leo no longer put much weight in those distinctions. His was a killing business, so he was a killer.

  He slapped his hat on his head and waded through the cold and the fog to Somerset House. There were a few things he needed to confirm. When he emerged two hours later, he knew that Colonel Armstrong had a sister. Anabelle Owen, nee Armstrong, had been born in 1895. She married a fellow in the foreign service, who later became governor of some small island someplace. In 1918 she had a child, an unnamed girl, in Melbourne, Australia. Shortly thereafter, Owen died. After that, there was no record of either Anabelle or her daughter.