“WE CAN’T STAY HERE much longer,” read the note Lancaster tossed in front of me as he passed my table. Surrounded by piles of books in the very back room of the oldest library in London, I was going back and forth between old newspapers and the single lip-reading manual to be found on the stacks and Lancaster was orbiting the bookshelves like a caged tiger. He was going to reopen his wound if he didn’t stop that.
I held up the note I’d written a half hour ago in answer, “You’re welcome to leave at any time.”
In our escape from Beans’ home, I could not convince Lancaster to stop at a police box to ring up Scotland Yard, but I did run into one of my Baker Street Irregulars. She goggled at the man I was with and he just grinned down at her, casually putting his arm over my shoulder. I gave her a few coins to pass on this location to Brian.
Thanks to the newspapers, I could confirm that Éamon O’Duffy was well-known to the police, having been brought in for questioning eight times in six years for everything from public nuisance charges to suspicion of terrorist activity. He declared his motives at regular intervals in front of crowds of Londoners: self-rule for Ireland. He had defended brothers-in-arms, marched in protest in front of Scotland Yard, and organized rallies in response to Parliamentary acts. He was all over the British newspapers. But as much as I had postulated that the bomber would stay close to a bomb site to watch the drama unfold, would he actually sit so comfortably above his weapons after they had been placed? I needed more data. I needed Brian to speak to the man. So here I would wait until we could combine our data and figure a way out of this mess. I couldn’t hear Lancaster’s steps on the hardwood floor, but I knocked on the wooden desk where I was seated and once again, had to smile at hearing it so clearly. I was no doctor, but the data seemed to suggest that my ears — my left more than my right — were healing.
Speaking of data, I wrote a note for Lancaster for his next orbital pass.
“Since we’re here till Brian arrives, why don’t you tell me what the Secret Intelligence Service knows about Heddy Collins?”
The spy reluctantly picked up the pencil to write back. “They know nothing because she’s no one. Widow to Major Collins who was killed in Ireland in one of their internal scuffles. She works at Downing Street and seemed to be of interest to you the day we met there.”
He had still been in the crowd when I bumped into Mrs.Collins outside Downing Street. Damnit.
“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.