Armstrong was a rich man and might very well leave a legacy to his sister’s child. He remembered what Mrs. Griffiths had said about how there weren’t a lot of rich men who didn’t have someone who wanted to kill them.
One thing was clear, and it was that Mrs. Hoggett had been too old to be Mrs. Owen’s daughter. Mrs. Hoggett had been forty, and her maiden name had been Abernathy, not Owen.
When he left Somerset House, snow was beginning to fall. He wondered if the storm would reach Worcestershire this evening. He wrapped the muffler tightly around his neck and breathed in the scent of Sommers as he made his way back to Paddington Station. But the damp and cold were too much even for Sommers’ muffler.
He passed a Woolworth’s, its window display filled with brightly colored and foolishly festive Christmas paraphernalia. There were china figurines of Father Christmas, a couple of cards showing happy families gathered around hearths and pine trees, and packages of Christmas crackers. Without examining his thoughts, he went into the store and bought a package of a dozen crackers. He told himself that this was what Leonard Page would do. But the truth was that he had never held one in his hand, and now he wanted to. He could never know what life felt like for an ordinary person, but he could run his fingers over the same cardboard, hear the same songs, taste the same sweets. He could pretend to be the sort of person who had a life, a future, people he cared about and who cared for him in return.
He sat in his train compartment, the package of crackers on his lap, mocking him with their bright colors. He wanted to know what was inside them. He knew there would be a paper hat, and maybe a toy or a boiled sweet. He wasn’t entirely certain, and that uncertainty bothered him. How had he reached nearly thirty years of age without knowing what was in Christmas crackers? That, he thought in bitter amusement, was the logical end of spycraft: needing to open the Christmas cracker a week too early.
The conductor rushed to the door of his compartment at the sound of the first cracker being opened.
“Oh, sir, you gave me a fright,” the man panted. “But I suppose you’re just getting a bit of a head start on the festivities?” he asked dubiously.
“Something like that.” Leo pulled apart the next cracker, not flinching at the popping noise. “Care for a paper hat?”
“You ought to stop, or you’ll have none left for Christmas dinner. Besides, you’re supposed to open them with the person next to you.”
“Oh, of course.” Leo supposed he had known that, but forgotten. “Here, this’ll be yours and we’ll open it properly,” he said, handing the remaining cracker to the conductor, who after a moment of baffled hesitation took one of the ends and pulled.
By the next station, Leo was left with a lapful of shiny foil paper, gimcrack toys, and zero intact crackers. He had unraveled his mystery and was left with nothing but trash.
WHEN JAMES GOT ON THE train, it was already nearly full of passengers coming home from London. He rejected several compartments on the grounds that they were partly occupied by noisy small children or elderly ladies who looked eager for conversation. He was about to shut the door on yet another compartment due to its occupant being apparently engaged in the process of shredding bits of foil when he realized the gentleman in question was Leo Page.
“Mr. Page? What in the name of creation are you doing?” James hadn’t ever expected to see Page at a loss for words, but that was evidently the case, for Page stared at him in plain embarrassment. James peered closer at the mess on Page’s lap. “Are those Christmas crackers?” To his delight, Page turned pink.
“Never mind me. I’m staging a one-man production of The Little Match Girl.” He swept the bits of paper into a neat pile and crammed them into his attaché case. “Terribly self-indulgent. But what are you doing?”
“Heading back to Wychcomb St. Mary, same as you.”
Of course, that wasn’t a good enough answer for Page. “This is one of your London days. But if you were coming from London, you wouldn’t be getting on the train now. You’d have gotten on at Paddington, like me, or you would have switched to this train at Oxford. But you just got on now, at—” He looked out the window as if the passing countryside would give him any indication of the name of the station they had just left.
“Bourton on the Water,” James supplied helpfully.
“The point is, not London.”
“Indeed, it isn’t.”
Page’s eyes narrowed on him with hawk like intensity. “Everyone in the village is under the impression that you go to London twice a week.”
James shrugged. “Not much I can do about that.”
“Are you telling me that when your patients ask where you go on Tuesdays and Thursdays, you lie to them? I can hardly credit it.”
“No, I tell them the truth, which is that I have business that takes me out of town.”
“And then you don’t tell them why? They likely think you’re up to no good.”
James smiled wryly. “Nobody ever thinks I’m up to no good. I let them think whatever they want and they fill in the gaps themselves.”
Page regarded him with something like admiration. “And then, eventually, they give up asking?”
“Exactly.”
“And you’re not going to tell me either, are you?”
James considered it. “I think if you wanted to know, you could find out in half an hour. I bet you could do it in two telephone calls.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to assume you go to Barton on the Pond or whatever for a haircut twice a week.”
James laughed. “Like Frank Churchill? I wouldn’t have taken you for a Jane Austen enthusiast.”
“Nobody dies in Austen,” Page said, as if that were reason enough to read and enjoy something. “Nobody who appears on page, that is. She keeps all her tragedy off page,” he said approvingly. “On page, it’s all very much like this,” he said, gesturing out the window once again at the rolling hills of the Cotswolds.
“I think that’s why I came back,” James said, faintly embarrassed to admit this to a man who, a week ago, had been a stranger. “I had read too much Austen and Trollope. They sold me a bill of goods.”
“You ought to try Middlemarch. It’s filled with ghastly people who still manage not to murder one another.”
Page glanced down at a stray bit of shiny rubbish in his lap with a look James had often seen in field hospitals and the convalescent homes, and even more often in his own mirror. It was the look of a child who was lost at the fair and wanted nothing more than to go home, sometimes to a home that no longer existed, or never had existed in the first place.
“Do you have a family?” James asked. Page let out a grim little laugh, which James took to mean no. “Where will you be spending Christmas? We have hardly a week left. If you’re still in the village, you’re welcome to—”
“I’ll be gone by then,” Page cut in, a newly sharp tone in his voice. “Two more days at the outside.”
“I see. I suppose you learned something of interest in London today?”
“Do you really want to know? Wouldn’t you rather I tidy things up? Sweep all the nastier bits out of sight? It’ll be like I was never here in the first place.”
“No, it won’t,” James said.
“I suppose I’ve already ruined things, then?”
James shook his head. “It’s true that things can’t go back to how they were. There’s a murderer in my village and nobody will be safe until that’s dealt with. Even though I know it won’t be pleasant.” Saying the words aloud brought home their truth to him. “Figuring this out is important. You’re doing something important.”
Page stared at him, motionless except for where he rubbed the fringe of his muffler—James’s muffler—between thumb and forefinger.
Chapter 9
It was high time that Leo spoke with Wendy Smythe, but the girl seemed to be in a state of perpetual motion. The gardener at Wych Hall said she had been at the kitchen door before dawn with a parcel fo
r the housekeeper, but that he hadn’t seen her since. Agnes at the Rising Sun said she had seen Wendy helping with the girl guides. The postmistress saw Wendy bringing old magazines to the vicarage for the sick children to make into garlands to festoon their tree. A rather feverish looking Mrs. Griffiths sent Wendy to the chemist, but the chemist said she had left twenty minutes earlier to bring sweets to the children at Murphy Farm. So round and round the village Leo went, chasing after a girl who apparently never sat still. Finally, he decided to go to Little Briars and wait her out. Surely she had to return home sooner or later.
Miss Pickering opened the door. “Oh. It’s you.” She did not look overly thrilled to find Leo on her doorstep.
“I don’t suppose Wendy is here?” he asked with as charming a smile as he could manage.
The woman snorted. “She only comes home when she’s on the verge of starvation or exhaustion. Like an outdoor cat, really. What did you want with her?”
Leo had come prepared with a lie. “It’s about Christmas. I thought she might need an extra pair of hands to cut down trees or tack up tinsel.” Is that even what one did with tinsel? Did one tack it up or simply strew it about and hope for the best?
“She does have a bee in her bonnet about Christmas,” called Miss Delacourt from the sitting room. “Come in here, Mr. Page. I have more of those ginger biscuits you liked so much the other day. And Wendy sometimes stops in for tea, so you may catch her.”
Leo found Miss Delacourt sitting on the same settee she had occupied the last time he had visited. Around her shoulders was a shawl knit from fluffy wool and on her feet were a pair of embroidered slippers. He had the impression that she didn’t get out much. Apart from the funeral, when she had been leaning heavily on Miss Pickering’s arm, he had never seen her walk.
“I’m not sure why she’s been going on about Christmas this year,” Miss Pickering grumbled, sitting in the chair beside her friend. “We never made much of a production about it. Got her a new doll or a pair of ice skates.”
“It was Mildred, dear. Mildred told her about the sort of Christmases your family used to have, where all the children would put on their Sunday best and go up to Wych Hall for a visit with Father Christmas and the whole pageant.”
“It was ghastly,” Miss Pickering said with a shudder. Leo was inclined to agree. “Some traditions are best left by the wayside.”
“More honored in the breach,” Miss Delacourt murmured vaguely.
“Mrs. Hoggett came from Wychcomb St. Mary?” Leo asked. That piece of information hadn’t been in the dossier.
“Not exactly. Mildred was the chauffeur’s daughter,” said Miss Pickering. “I hadn’t seen her since she was knee high. Her flat was bombed and then she was at loose ends for a number of years, so she looked me up to see if I knew of someone who needed a cleaner. I gathered she was quite desperate.”
Miss Delacourt sighed. “I suppose no good deed goes unpunished.” Miss Pickering shot her a quelling glance.
“Her mother was the cook,” Miss Pickering reminisced. “Mildred lived here until her father died, and then her mother ran off with the under butler. Goodness, it’s lowering to remember how grand a place Little Briars was.”
“No place is grand anymore,” Miss Delacourt said, inexpertly winding a ball of yarn. “Unless it’s owned by an actor, in which case it’s floor to ceiling gilt. Oh, but back in our day, which wasn’t so very long ago, even the most modest establishment had a dozen servants at least. And they all had uniforms, like that girl up at Wych Hall.” She looked directly at Leo. “I thought that was a very nice touch,” she added, dropping her voice to a confiding tone. “Exactly what that sort of man would want. I do hope he doesn’t bother her. That, I’m afraid, is a risk of the job.”
Miss Delacourt looked on the verge of continuing, but Miss Pickering cut her off. “Cora,” she said, a note of warning in her voice. “Mr. Page doesn’t want to hear about the perils of being a parlor maid.”
“I do wander,” Miss Delacourt admitted. “But now you have me thinking of the old days. Mr. Page, would you like to hear about a very large hat?”
Leo suspected this was a maneuver to distract him from asking about Mildred Hoggett. But he couldn’t very well insist that they cough up whatever secrets they were hiding. So he made a murmur of interest.
“Oh, no, Cora,” Miss Pickering said, grabbing the lumpy mass of yarn out of the other lady’s hands and regarding it balefully. “Not that story.”
Leo had the sense that even in this overheated sitting room, they were surrounded by secrets, that any conversational gambit was straying into forbidden territory. He felt at once disoriented and oddly at home. He knew the rules of this game, where both parties jealously guarded their secrets while simultaneously pretending they had none. And with two elderly ladies, the secrets couldn’t be so bad.
“I insist,” Miss Delacourt said. “This is just the sort of story to amuse Mr. Page. It was at a house party, one of those things people did before the war. Before the first war, I mean. A house filled with guests and servants, four changes of clothing a day. I had to go to immense trouble with scarves and bits of trim to disguise the fact that I only had fourteen dresses, although now looking back fourteen is a frightful lot, isn’t it, Edith?”
“Frightful,” Miss Pickering agreed. “I believe I brought four trunks of clothing for that party. And two French maids, one to attend to my wardrobe and the other to do my hair. But Mr. Page doesn’t want to hear about your dresses. If you’re going to tell this awful story, you might as well get to the part about the shooting.”
Leo’s ears pricked up at the word shooting. He had expected a meandering tale about cats or horses or whatever it was old ladies talked about. He hadn’t realized firearms were to be involved.
“Oh dear. I told you, I’m too inclined to ramble. It happens at my age. So, this party was at Lord Listerdale’s place in Kent and it rained five days straight. The gentlemen went out riding, but of course the ladies had to stay indoors, which was very tedious. In the evenings, we played charades and all those parlor games that are nothing but excuses for young people to grope one another. I don’t mind telling you that by the end I was quite bored of being pawed at and proposed to.”
“And rightly so,” Miss Pickering said firmly, but she was smiling down at her yarn.
“Well, on the sixth day, there was sun and we all went a bit mad. We had a picnic and the champagne flowed quite freely. Of course, at the time one knew these parties were expensive but looking back I quite shudder at what the wine alone must have cost. It’s probably indecent, what with starving children and so forth. But that’s neither here nor there. One of the gentlemen—I think it was the youngest son of the Duke of Somerset—was very rich and wild and nobody dared say ‘what is wrong with you, Harold, waving a pistol around at a picnic with ladies about,’ but we were all thinking it, I assure you. So, not wanting to get shot, I dared him to shoot an apple off the fence post. The idea, you see, was to have him shoot in quite another direction,” the old lady said. “Away from people.”
“Very clever of you,” Leo said. And it was clever. It’s what he would have done in the same situation. Again, he had the disorienting sense of being in his element—that despite the bric-a-brac and the chintz, he was as at home here as he would be in a safe house in Minsk or an armaments warehouse in Toulouse.
“Of course, he fired quite wide of the mark. But the other gentlemen felt compelled as a matter of honor to try as well, gentlemen being what they are, and drunken gentlemen even more so. The trouble was that now at least three gentlemen had pistols waving about in the breeze. Thinking quickly, I said that I bet I could shoot the apple myself. I insisted that they all lay their weapons on the grass so nobody could say one of the gentlemen had shot the apple for me in a fit of gallantry. And of course, they all did, thinking they were humoring me.”
“Men did whatever Cora told them to, the idiots,” Miss Pickering muttered.
�
��I shot the apple, and then I shot a lime, then a conker, and I’m afraid I got a bit carried away with my own skill. The rest of the story does me no credit.”
Miss Pickering snorted as Miss Delacourt’s crepey cheeks blushed pink.
“Well, Edith had on the most magnificent hat. Birds in a nest, flowers on the vine, positively teeming with flora and fauna. And somebody bet five crowns that I could shoot one of the birds perched on the top of her hat. And, well, that’s exactly what I did!” She ended her narrative with a sheepish smile.
“It was my favorite hat,” Miss Pickering remarked.
“You shot at your friend?” Leo was very nearly aghast. He hadn’t known he was still capable of shock, but the idea of Miss Delacourt with her fluffy white hair and badly wound wool engaging in this lunatic behavior was too outrageous. This story, for all it had been dressed up with champagne and dukes and elaborate hats, did not belong in a polite drawing room any more than he did. Either this story was a fabrication or Miss Delacourt had been an absolute bedlamite as a girl. Leo had more than decent aim and he wouldn’t have risked shooting anywhere near an innocent person unless it was a matter of necessity.
“Oh dear, now I’ve scandalized our guest. It was most imprudent of me, I know, but there was no real risk—you young people cannot imagine how massive hats were in those days—-which of course Edith knew, which was why she agreed to it.”
“Nonsense. I agreed to it because I wanted you to put those men in their places.”
“I ought to have held out for more than five crowns, though. I did have to eat. Impecunious ladies couldn’t simply get a job in those days. And I was not cut out to be a governess.”
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