Hither Page

by Cat Sebastian

  “Right,” James said. “But what do you think she found out?”

  “Colonel Armstrong could have any number of secrets,” he said vaguely. “Or perhaps she found out what skeletons Mr. Norris has in his closet. She might have discovered the truth of Wendy’s background. Could Mrs. Hoggett have found out that Wendy’s natural father is walking around the village? Say, the colonel himself? Or the vicar?”

  James had been poised to tell Page what he had seen in the nursing home that afternoon, but the mention of Wendy brought him up short. “Griffiths? Come now.”

  “It would explain why he and his wife brought the girl here. And surely you’re aware that the Griffiths children look rather like Wendy.”

  James had noticed the resemblance only the other day. But surely pale, freckled skin and unruly dark hair were common enough characteristics. He pushed the thought from his mind. “I can’t see Griffiths or Mary committing murder to conceal the existence of an illegitimate child. All right, which other of my friends has sinister secrets?” He aimed for a jesting tone and failed miserably.

  “Mildred Hoggett’s father was the chauffeur for the Pickering family. She may have known something about Miss Pickering or even Miss Delacourt. The two of them seem to have been thick as thieves for decades.”

  James did not know whether Page spoke these last words with particular emphasis or if he only imagined it. He had long assumed that the ladies at Little Briars were more than old companions, but the idea of them being blackmailed over the nature of their friendship was outrageous. “They’re both past seventy. What kind of secrets would they bother killing for at this point in their lives? Cora was notorious in her youth. I can’t imagine anyone being surprised at any scandal she had been tied up in. If one of them had a secret baby or a married lover, it wouldn’t matter.”

  Page blinked. “You’re assuming that sexual scandal is the only kind of secret a woman can have.” He took a long sip of his ale. “Another possibility is that Mrs. Hoggett wasn’t the intended victim. Perhaps the Veronal was intended for someone else, and Mrs. Hoggett simply had to be killed because otherwise, she’d be able to say whose glass she drank from.”

  James shook his head. “Are you certain you aren’t reading too much into this? Maybe your, ah, training has made you look for explanations more elaborate than the situation calls for.”

  “Are you certain your own background hasn’t led you to hide important details from me?” Page asked levelly. “I’m not holding it against you,” he added magnanimously. Before James could object, Page broke into a broad smile. “I do like you despite your vast innocence.”

  James felt the tips of his ears heat. “There is something I ought to tell you,” he admitted. “But I don’t want to.”

  “Ah,” Page said, his gaze flicking away over James’s shoulder, his smile cooling by several degrees.

  “Not because I mistrust you or because I want to thwart your enquiries,” James added hastily. “But because I’d rather—oh blast it. Can’t we have supper and spend a couple of hours together without thinking of horrible things? I just...I want that, Page. Leo. I promise that I’ll tell you later. Or, um, tomorrow?” Now his entire face was hot as he blushed at his own obviousness—he might as well have announced his intentions to go to bed with Page that night.

  But Page only gave him a small smile. “A difficulty in my line of work is that it’s difficult to have a proper getting-to-know-you conversation without invoking the Official Secrets Act. For instance, right now I’d like to ask you where you went to school and whether you lost anyone in the war, but I wouldn’t be able to give you anything honest in return.”

  James furrowed his brow. “Don’t you think there’s more to who we are than what we do? I think I could tell you who I am without giving any actual details about my life.”

  “Give it a try,” Page said, plainly skeptical.

  “I’m a—no, wait.” He had been about to say that he was a doctor, that he lived in a small village, but those were the sorts of details that Page couldn’t reciprocate. He tried to think of what was at the core of who he was, the drive that led him to make the choices he had made. Why was he a doctor? Why did he live in this village? “I like being useful.” The words sounded incredibly small, so much less but also so much more than I’m a doctor. “I like having a place where I belong. I see the same people every day, and we have endless iterations of the same conversations, and I don’t find it boring in the least. It’s soothing.”

  An odd expression stole across Page’s face, and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Here, let me try. I was born near the French border.” James noticed he didn’t say which border, an omission that could only be deliberate. “I—oh, devil take it, I’m very bad at honesty. Sommers, I cannot think of a single damned thing to say that isn’t either a lie or a felony.” His voice was low, and James leaned close to hear him. “I like birds. I like this ugly muffler. I like you and I keep catching myself daydreaming that I’m somebody else, somebody who could spend time with you. There. How’s that?”

  James swallowed. “That’s very good indeed.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, James faintly dazed and Page with barely contained energy. James knew that look. He saw it in patients sometimes, both in the village and in London, that urge to confess, to lay bare your soul. He guessed Leo Page had plenty to confess, and for a moment James wanted to hear it all, even though anything Page had to confess would have to be very bad indeed.

  Then they were interrupted. “Dr. Sommers!” A young woman James recognized as the housemaid at Wych Hall approached their table. “Come quick. Colonel Armstrong has been shot!”

  Chapter 11

  Hell and bother. There went the simplest explanation for what had been going on at Wych Hall. Sally Bright, very competently playing the part of a frightened girl, confirmed that an ambulance and the police had already been summoned. She had come to the Rising Sun to tell Leo of the murder, but when she saw him with James, she thought fast, making it seem like she had come for the doctor. Leo resolved to commend her to Templeton.

  “Do you have a car?” Leo asked James, who seemed to be having a hard time shrugging into his overcoat. Leo held the coat to make it easier for the doctor to put on, and noticed that the man’s hands were shaking. “I’ll drive you,” Leo offered. James was in no condition to drive, and Leo wanted an excuse to go to Wych Hall and see what happened.

  They got there in five minutes, Sally in the back seat, and Leo going as fast as James’s little car could take them. While they had been at the Rising Sun, the snow Leo had seen in London had finally reached Worcestershire, but it wasn’t falling heavily enough yet to slow his progress on the road. On the gravel drive of Wych Hall, he brought the car to a skidding halt. There was no sign yet of an ambulance or the police, for which Leo was grateful. He wanted to see the state of things before they were interfered with.

  Inside, the housekeeper led them to the library. Colonel Armstrong sat at his desk, his cheek resting on the blotting paper in a small pool of blood. His eyes were open, staring vacantly in the direction of the door, and in the center of his forehead was a neat red hole.

  “Damnation,” Leo said. “I don’t think we need the ambulance after all.”

  But James went to the body all the same and checked for a surely nonexistent pulse. “Nothing to be done. He’s still warm,” James said, sounding far away. “Dead less than an hour, I’d say, but the medical examiner will have to confirm.”

  “Did you hear the shot?” Leo asked the housekeeper.

  “Certainly not.”

  “Did you hear anything at all? You might have thought it was a car having trouble or a poacher in the wood.”

  “I heard nothing,” Mrs. Clemens repeated, then pursed her lips. “You may ask Sally Bright whether she heard any odd noises, but she and I were the only ones in the house.”

  “Where’s Norris?” Leo asked.

  “He went to London this
morning. I expected him back for dinner, but he wired this afternoon and said not to expect him back until tomorrow,” the housekeeper said.

  Leo had to suppress a hysterical laugh. If this murder had been done to demolish his favorite explanation, it couldn’t have been more thorough. He went to James, seeing that the man looked a bit unsteady. He put a hand on the doctor’s shoulder. “Why don’t we get out of this room,” he suggested. There was nothing to be gained by staying with the body. “We’ll have to tell the police what we saw, but then you can go home.”

  There would be no getting rid of the police this time. A man shot clean in the middle of his forehead was not something that could be dismissed as an accidental death. He was struck by the idea that Mrs. Hoggett’s death had been caused by two events that separately could have been chalked up as accidents—an overdose of sleeping powder followed by a tumble down the stairs. Armstrong’s death, on the other hand, was arranged in a way that could only be murder. Leo didn’t know if that meant the killer had changed tactics or if there were two different minds at work. But if one thing was clear, it was that the local police, and likely Scotland Yard, were going to be all over the place. Templeton would be furious.

  James gave a quick nod of his head, his jaw clenched. Leo steered him out of the room to the great hall and almost pushed him bodily onto a bench. Then he went back into the library and examined it more thoroughly than he had before. Everything looked much as it had when he had visited a few days earlier. The windows were locked, but the french doors weren’t. Using his handkerchief, he gingerly opened the doors. The snow was now an inch deep and the body had been dead for probably an hour. There was no hope of finding any footprints, even though the murder had almost certainly been committed after the snow had begun falling. He noticed a few drops of water on the wood floor between the french doors and the desk. It could be melted snow, but too little to be explained by a person entering through the french doors with snow stuck to the soles of their shoes. Then he left the library, shutting the door and turning the key in the lock behind him.

  “Is there anything I can get you?” He sat beside James, who was still white-faced and ragged looking. “Could you manage some tea?” The bench was hard, one of those decorative bits of furniture that get shoved against empty walls. He wished there was somewhere more comfortable he could take James, but right now he needed to keep an eye on the door to the library.

  “I could smell the blood.” James’s voice was ragged.

  Leo nodded. He had smelled it too. There hadn’t been that much of it, at least, because the colonel had died quickly. “Bad memories?” he asked.

  James shuddered. “Something like that. Awful reaction for a doctor to have. Rather hard to do surgery when you can’t abide the sight of blood.”

  Oh, damn. Leo hadn’t realized. “Is that what sets you off? Blood?”

  “Blood always sets me off. It’s not the blood itself so much as the sense of people being...flesh.”

  Leo didn’t understand, and his face must have shown it because James continued.

  “I think of how the war changed people into bodies. Flesh that had to be stitched together, meat that had to be dug through to find bullets. Anything that reminds me of that sets me off. Makes my brain play an infinite newsreel of my most gruesome memories.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t talk much about it. Most people wouldn’t understand. They’d think I was off my head.”

  He heard the police cars on the gravel drive; otherwise, he might have been tempted to take James in his arms. As that wasn’t an option, he patted James’s leg and went to answer the door.

  BY THE TIME THE POLICE were done questioning them repeatedly about the events of that evening, the clock had struck two, the housekeeper had produced innumerable cups of tea, and James felt like something inside him had broken into a thousand pieces. He knew he was fragile, dammit; he knew things like blood and violence were all too liable to set him off. But he was usually able to put himself back together again, or at least to produce a reasonable simulacrum of sanity. Now he just wanted to go home, lock the door behind him, and barricade himself against the foul truth of what evils people could do to one another.

  This summer an elderly patient of his died. He had been sad, he had been sorry, and he had experienced a small shudder of horror at the sight of the lifeless body. But that had been a natural death. Colonel Armstrong had died in a grossly unnatural way, not from disease, or time, or even a motor accident, but by the hand of another person. It was too similar to the many deaths he had witnessed during the war, a realization that set off another round of dizziness and nausea.

  He closed his eyes and tried to fill his lungs with air, tried to root his body in the present, but he thought he could still make out the metallic scent of blood even though the body had long since been removed.

  Except for a few minutes when Leo had quietly spoken to the chief constable, he hadn’t left James’s side since the police arrived. He had even given James a few pats on the leg, such an awkward attempt at consolation that James might have laughed at any other time. But he had stayed, and he hadn’t said anything awful—he hadn’t urged James to buck up or get on with it or any of the other things people were wont to say to a man in the middle of one of these episodes. James had heard doctors and nurses at the nursing home say that sort of thing to patients, and had vowed never to inflict such a load of bollocks on anyone in his care. And now he was unspeakably grateful that Leo, whoever he was, whatever he was, whatever deceitful intrigue he was up to, had the kind of tact or instinct that saw him through this kind of situation.

  “I’m going to take the doctor home now,” Leo announced with an air of authority that ought to have clued anyone in to the fact that he wasn't a shipping clerk on holiday. “He has to do his rounds in the morning.” James, through the foggy jumble of his brain, gathered that Leo had let his disguise drop, but before he could consider the implications, Leo was casually steering him out the door and into the car.

  “What usually helps?” Leo asked, after they were on the road, Leo once again driving. “Do you have pills or powders or something?”

  Of course, he did. He had all those things in his surgery. “Nothing that’ll leave me fit for my duties tomorrow.”

  “Do the pills help?”

  “They...end it. Temporarily.” The mention of pills reminded him of something, but his mind was too wooly to remember what. “But they won’t do me any good right now. The initial shock is over, and I only need time and peace to get my head on straight.” That wasn’t the entire truth. Barbiturates were a godsend for putting one out of one’s misery on a temporary basis. Of course, a miscalculation in dose could end one’s troubles rather too permanently. And the unwanted effects—torpor, nausea, tremor, confusion—were often just as bad as the episode itself. Moreover, they didn’t prevent the next occurrence. It was dread of the next time, the knowledge that he’d be dealing with these recurrences for years or forever, that depressed James the most.

  He had wondered if that was why his father had ended his own life. When his uncle spoke of it, he simply said James’s father wasn’t right in the head, poor man. That had seemed an adequate explanation to James as a child; surely, a man would only commit suicide if he wasn’t right in his head. And he still agreed, more or less. But now he had known and treated so many people who weren’t right in their head—and at the moment he had to admit he wasn’t quite right in his head himself—who hadn’t had the faintest interest in suicide. And he had seen otherwise rational people die by their own hand. He thought, though, that he now understood the grinding, never ending cycle of trauma that could make death seem like the only option.

  “I’m not going to shoot myself,” he said, and only realized he had said it aloud when Leo responded.

  “Good thing, that,” Leo said easily, as if they were talking about the weather or horse races or something equally inconsequential. “Thank you for letting me know.”

 
; “I didn’t mean to say that aloud.”

  “Glad you did. I was working up to asking you delicately and you’ve saved me the trouble.” He turned the car into James’s drive and parked it expertly.

  “What did you tell them?” James asked, as Leo took the latchkey from his hand and unlocked the front door. “The police, I mean. What did you say to make them listen to you?”

  “I told them I was a visiting specialist from the Home Office.”

  “Oh, the Home Office. I hadn’t realized.” He had thought military, but Home Office made sense as well.

  “I’m not,” Page said tightly. But his hand was gentle on the small of James’s back as he ushered him inside.

  “How does it work?” James asked as Leo helped him out of his coat. Really, he could manage this on his own. He wasn’t that far gone. But it felt nice to have someone’s hands on him. “Aren’t you afraid that you’ll be exposing Irish bombers next month and someone will recognize you as the Home Office, church window fellow from Wychcomb St. Mary?”

  “No, that’s not how it works. First, I don’t spend much time in any single place. Second, I’m rather average looking—”

  James snorted, and was surprised he was capable of even the faintest display of mirth.

  “No, I am. I’m well aware of my own charms,” he added with a wry smile, “but there’s nothing about me that stands out. If I put on a sailor’s uniform, then I’m a sailor. If I wear a tweed jacket and shabby corduroy trousers—” he gestured to his current ensemble “—then I’m a London clerk spending a holiday in the country.”

  James didn’t like the idea that the Leo he saw before him wasn’t authentic, but he had always known that. He was distracted by Leo’s hands on his arms, turning him toward the wall. Leo pulled the overcoat from James’ shoulders and hung it on a hook near the door. Then, after a moment of hesitation, he took off his own coat and hung it beside James’s.