As Ruby had hoped, but hadn’t dared to presume, Vanessa’s reaction was comforting, loving, and entirely lacking in judgment. She was also angrier than Ruby had ever seen her over the incivility of the arresting officials.
“I feel ill thinking about what might have happened. What if we hadn’t been friends with Bennett? You’d still be stuck with those awful men and we’d be completely in the dark.”
“To be honest, I feel guilty about it,” Ruby said. “No—don’t say I shouldn’t feel that way. I do. I ought to. I did break the law, even though it wasn’t for the reasons they said.”
“But the way they treated you—”
“That’s why I’m feeling guilty—I had a friend who intervened. What about people who don’t have a Bennett? People who are dragged off in the night and interrogated, and if they don’t supply the right answers are sent to an internment camp or put on a ship to Canada or Australia. What happens to them?”
“I think you’ve worried enough for tonight, and for many nights to come,” Vanessa stated. “Now you ought to have a bath. Make it as long and hot as you like, and I’ll fix you something to eat. Then off to bed.”
“You’re right. And I do need to get to work early so I can speak with Kaz. I’ve no idea how much Bennett will have told him. I can’t stand the idea of him worrying the whole night through.”
“Well, don’t. It’s just gone two o’clock in the morning, my dear—you’ll be speaking with him in no time at all.”
RATHER TO HER surprise, Ruby slept well and awoke without much difficulty at seven the next morning. After dressing hurriedly, she wolfed down her breakfast and was running up the road to the Underground only a quarter hour later, arriving at the office a few minutes before eight.
Evelyn had just hung up her coat when Ruby walked in. “Good morning, Ruby.”
“Good morning. Is Kaz in yet?”
“Do I even need to answer?”
He was there, his mane of sandy hair even more disheveled than usual, his back hunched low over the desk as he concentrated on the notes he was writing. When did the man sleep? Vanessa hadn’t said how she’d run him to ground last night—had he been at home, or still at the office? She very much hoped it had not been the latter.
“Kaz?” she whispered, not wishing to startle him. “Kaz? May I come in?”
“Yes, and shut the door,” he said, not looking up. “Just let me finish this thought.”
He scribbled away for another minute, perhaps the longest minute of Ruby’s life, and then he capped his pen, set it on the desk, and stared at her owlishly.
“You’re alive, then. That’s good.”
“Thank you for your help last night. Did Bennett . . . did he tell you what happened?”
“He rang me from his flat last night, after he’d seen you home. He said he’d fixed the problem, and that you would tell me the rest. So . . . ?”
“I was detained because I used a false birth certificate to obtain my passport,” she said, praying that her nerve wouldn’t fail before she was finished. “I then used the passport to gain entry to Britain, and the reason I did it was because of a lie, or a set of lies, that had helped me get a job at The American. My true last name is Schreiber, not Sutton, and I don’t have a university degree. I finished school at fourteen and did a secretarial course at night school, but that’s all.”
He said nothing, so she plowed on, desperate to get to the last of her confession and so learn what her penance might be. “I am so sorry. To the bottom of my heart I am sorry. You, and everyone else here, have been so kind to me—but especially you, and to deceive you in such a fashion was inexcusable.”
Still he said nothing, and with that, the last of her resolve drained away. “I guess I’ll just go and collect my things . . .”
He shook his head, rather like a lion might do when awakening, and jabbed a forefinger in her direction. “Stay where you are. Have I said anything about your leaving?”
“Well, no, but when you were silent for so long—”
“I was simply trying to make sense of all this. You changed your name from Schreiber to Sutton, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Presumably because you thought you might be more employable with a run-of-the-mill name?”
“Yes.”
“Well, that I understand,” he said. “I’m probably the only person in England who knows how to spell my surname properly. And what else? Oh, right—you fudged your credentials. Said you’d been to university.”
“Yes. I planned to go one day, but I had to save up first. And to do that, I needed a better-paying job.”
He nodded, his fingers steepled under his chin, his gaze fixed on the desktop between them. “And is that the sum of it?”
“Not quite. The worst part is that I used a forged birth certificate to obtain my passport. I went to a man who’d been at the orphanage with me. Danny was good at things like that. I . . . I may be prosecuted for it when I return home.”
“I doubt it. Bennett will make sure you aren’t bothered again.”
“Do you have any idea how they found out? I’ve been think—”
“I do,” he said wearily. “I’m fairly certain it was Peter Drury.”
“Peter? But I thought . . . I mean, we were always friendly. This doesn’t make any sense. Why would he do such a thing?”
“I’m not sure. When Bennett rang last night, he asked if there were anyone here who might bear you a grudge. Anyone who might be unhappy at your presence at PW. It made no sense to me, but then I recalled something Peter had said a few weeks ago. He came in one morning, shut the door, and asked why you’d been chosen to come here. Of all the staff writers at The American, why had it been you, since you were so young and inexperienced, at least compared to others there who might have been interested. It seemed an odd thing for him to ask, not least because he’d never shown any interest in the subject when you first came to England.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I said I’d specifically asked for a woman, and that obviously they had chosen you because you were the best of the female staff writers they had.”
“It was actually because I was the only one without a husband or family that needed—”
“Ruby. Another day I shall take you to lunch and set you straight on a few things. At any rate, I thought that was the end of it, but he kept on at me. Wanted to know why you’d been given the chance to interview Mrs. Roosevelt, for example.”
“It was an accident—a miracle, really. I just ended up in her car.”
“That’s what I told him. So then he . . . what is going on out there?”
The office was always a noisy place, but the voices outside were louder than normal; angrier, too. The door burst open. Peter all but tumbled into the room, struggling free of Emil’s restraining arms, his own limbs flailing wildly.
“I knew it! I knew you’d be here, telling Kaz your side of things, making him believe your lies.”
“Why, Peter?” Ruby asked. “Why did you do this? I thought we were friends. You were so nice to me when I first arrived.”
“And look what that earned me. Before you came, I was the one Kaz took to lunch. I was the one he confided in. I was his friend here at PW—not you.”
“No,” Kaz insisted, shaking his head. “Nothing changed when Ruby came here. If I was kind to her, it was because she was on her own. She was new here, and she needed friends.”
“Everything changed,” Peter went on, his voice rising steadily, “and there was nothing I could do. I just had to stand there and take it as she got all the best stories, all the best chances. And when I tried to be friends with her, to get to know her better, she acted like she was too good for me. Like she’d rather do anything than spend a few minutes with me after work. But then I ran into Dan Mazur, and—”
“Who?” Kaz asked perplexedly.
“A staff writer at The American,” Ruby broke in. “Remember? I met up with him just after he was posted here. I wouldn’t say we’re friends, but we’re not exactly enemies.”
“You should have heard what he had to say about her,” Peter sneered. “He told me he couldn’t understand how Ruby had landed a job at The American in the first place. He said he’d noticed that her accent would slip sometimes, just enough to make him curious. No college girl he knew would talk like that, he said. He said he figured she was hiding something.
“It was easy to unravel,” Peter went on, not noticing, or perhaps not caring, that his colleagues had begun to regard him as they might do an earwig. “I wrote to The American and asked them to send me a copy of Ruby’s bio. It said she’d gone to Sarah Lawrence College. So I checked, good reporter that I am, and they had no record of her attending.
“That made me wonder what else she was hiding, so I decided to find out where she was born. It turned out there were no records of a Roberta Anne Sutton, birth date July twelfth, 1916, in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Rhode Island, or any other neighboring state.”
“This is demented,” Kaz observed bitterly.
Peter ignored him. “So I wrote back to the state registrars, and asked if anyone with a similar name had been born on the same date. That’s when I discovered a Roberta Anne Schreiber had been born in Newark, New Jersey, on that date, to a woman named Annie Schreiber. There wasn’t a name for the father on her birth certificate, which didn’t surprise me one—”
“Enough!” Kaz roared.
“She grew up in an orphanage. She lied about her name, her education, everything, and you welcomed her like a long-lost sister. You even gave her the best stories—”
“She thought up those stories,” Emil interrupted. “If her ideas were better than yours, you have only yourself to blame.”
“Every time I turned around she was there, worming her way in. She even sat next to you at Mary’s funeral. And where was I? Standing at the back of the church like some nobody. How could you do that to me?”
“Get out,” Kaz said. “Collect your things and get out.”
“She’s the one who has to go! I told the police everything. They said it was a grave offense—they said she’d be deported.”
“Nothing is happening to Ruby. Emil? Can you help Peter clear out his desk?”
“With pleasure,” Emil said, and went to grasp Peter’s arm.
“You can’t do this,” Peter shouted, twisting free. “I’ll go to the papers. I’ll tell them everything.”
Kaz rounded the desk with astonishing speed for such a big man. Looming over Peter, cold fury in his eyes, he was a daunting sight. “You will say nothing.”
“You can’t stop me,” Peter squeaked, marshaling the last of his bravado.
“Perhaps not, but I’ve friends who can. And I’m not above pulling them into this to ensure you keep quiet. I’ll not let you ruin Ruby’s life because of your wounded pride.”
Peter turned to Ruby, his face so twisted by loathing that she could see little of the affable colleague she’d once known. “It was Bennett, wasn’t it? Of course it was. He’s up to his neck in—”
“One. More. Word,” Kaz enunciated, his words dropping like stones into a soundless lake. “One more word from you, and I will pick up this telephone and call him. Is that what you want? Is it? You have to know what the consequences will be.”
“No,” Peter mumbled, his face sweaty and pale. “I’ll go.” He shambled from the room. At a nod from Kaz, Emil followed.
Ruby lingered, not wanting to see Peter again. And she still had so many questions. “I thought you’d be angrier,” she said once they were alone.
“Last night I was, a bit. Only at first. Apart from your name, though, you didn’t lie to me. Your first day here, when we were at lunch, you told me you grew up in New Jersey and that you went to secretarial college. You didn’t say anything about going to university.”
“You remember that? Even three years on?”
“I remember everything,” he said, his pale eyes meeting hers. “Now, off you go. We still have a magazine to get out, and we’re down a staff writer. Time we got back to work.”