After discovering that Madame Fournier was in the telephone room, Leo realized two things. First, he would have to wait to use the telephone himself. Second, everyone in the house was accounted for, which made this a prime opportunity to do a little bit of poking about. Nothing excessive, he told himself. Just a peek into everybody’s luggage to see if anything was amiss.
A quarter of an hour later, he returned downstairs and found the telephone room empty.
It was a small, windowless room tucked beneath the stairs and made even more claustrophobic by virtue of being paneled in dark wood. He rolled his eyes when he saw that on a little table was an old-fashioned candlestick telephone. The telephone at the lodge was a standard black Bakelite number, but apparently nothing had been done to Blackthorn in twenty years. He picked up the receiver, tapped the switch hook a few times, then gave the operator his number.
A moment later a bored voice was wishing him a good day. At the sound of it he felt a sudden pang of utterly misplaced nostalgia.
“Mrs. Patel! Did you miss me?”
“I spoke to you last night, Mr. Page.”
Mrs. Patel had been the latest of a series of agents to serve as secretary, dogsbody, and general right-hand man to Leo’s former handler. After their bureau had been absorbed into MI6, Mrs. Patel had been absorbed right along with it, but into a corner of the bureaucracy that Leo had nothing to do with.
“Did you find the information I asked for?” The previous night, Leo had discreetly rung Mrs. Patel from the lodge and asked her to look into a few small matters.
“Your last case had nothing to do with Cornwall,” she said instead of answering him.
Leo had long suspected that Mrs. Patel had clearance far above his own and this seemed to prove it. “It’s not for work,” he confirmed. “It’s personal.”
“What’s personal.”
“Ha ha.”
“No, I’m being serious. What’s personal for someone in your line of work?” She said your as if it weren’t her line of work, just because she sat behind a desk. “You’re not a plumber, fixing a pipe for a friend. Are you on a con?”
“Jesus, no. And shut up. The operator might be listening in.”
“Thank you so much for teaching me how to do my job, Mr. Page.”
“I have a friend who stands to inherit something substantial if he can figure out a twenty-year-old mystery.”
“All right,” she said, sounding satisfied. “The body of Rose Bellamy was never recovered. There were no witnesses to her drowning. She was never declared dead.”
Leo raised his eyebrows. If Rose had never been declared dead, that meant her money couldn’t have been touched. Or at least, so he thought. He supposed rich people had ways of working around the rules. He’d have to look into that. “What about Marchand?”
“Harley Street practice. Rich patients. Two days a week at a private sanatorium in Bedfordshire. He has some kind of stake in the sanatorium. He does all the usual rich people things: splashes out on holidays, sent his daughter to exclusive boarding schools. Daughter is a bit of a hellion—got expelled from one school and then ran off from the second, and now is a darling of stage and screen.” She said darling of stage and screen in precisely the same flat tone she’d say Soviet assassin.
“She’s here too. Find anything else on the list of names I gave you?”
“Rupert Bellamy was a banker. Everything very by the book, but he got rich anyway. He married Charlotte Sommers, who was from an old county family that managed to hang on to its money. She died in 1916 of what seems to have been a lingering illness, leaving a packet of money to her daughters, which they came into on their twenty-first birthday.” She paused and Leo heard the rustling of papers. “I won’t point out that Charlotte Sommers was the aunt of the doctor you met during the passport incident.”
Leo sighed. During the case that had first brought him to Wychcomb St. Mary, Leo had resolved matters by giving his passport to a man who needed to flee the country. He still didn’t know how Mrs. Patel had found out about it, but a few days later three new passports, all with different identities, had arrived at James’s house, wrapped in cheerful paper and tied with a red ribbon. “Now you’re just showing off,” he said.
She sniffed. “Both Martha Dauntsey’s parents died of influenza in 1918. Without a first name, I can’t do anything about Madame Fournier.”
“Never mind her. It’s an alias. Thank you, Mrs. Patel.”
Next, he asked the operator to connect him with Little Gables in Wychcomb St. Mary. The phone rang six times before it was answered by a breathless Wendy, the teenaged ward of Edith and Cora.
“Leo!” she cried. “Did you come home only to run off to Cornwall with James?”
“That’s about the size of it. Are Edith and Cora about?” Leo had hoped that the elderly ladies might have remembered more gossip about the Bellamy affair.
Wendy let out a sigh. “No ‘how are you Wendy?’ or ‘how are the piglets, Wendy?’ Rude.”
“How are you, Wendy? How are the piglets, Wendy?”
“Excellent and not quite fat enough to eat. I’ll leave you to decide which is me and which is the piglets. I hope James won’t mind but I put in a few more garden beds behind his shed.”
“It’s February. What can he possibly do with more garden—wait. James doesn’t have a shed.”
“Well, he does now,” Wendy said brightly. “Also, there are a few chickens living in it, but they’re on the run from the law.”
“Wendy, he’s been gone for less than a day. How did you build a—you know what? I don’t want to know how. It’s either black magic or the black market and it’s better to keep me in the dark.” Wendy had an extremely flexible and communitarian approach to rationing, which involved a steady stream of goods changing hands for what Wendy insisted wasn’t technically money or ration tickets. At this point, Leo was pretty sure that subverting the rationing system was the only thing keeping her from running drugs or arms or taking control of the criminal underworld.
“When you get arrested, I shan’t do anything about it,” he lied.
“Tomatoes, Leonard. Tomatoes and roast chicken.”
“That isn’t my name, Gwendolyn.” That was her name.
“I bet you miss me terribly,” Wendy said.
“Do you know, I really do,” Leo said earnestly. It was a little terrifying, how quickly he had let himself get attached to these people. To James’s people. They weren’t his own—they were borrowed, in the same way that his half of James’s bed was borrowed. But they still felt like his own. In reality, Leo didn’t have any people and he would do well to remember it.
He wondered, just for a second, what would happen if he disappeared just as comprehensively as Rose Bellamy had done. He had disappeared before, after all. A solid percentage of his jobs ended with him—or the person he was pretending to be—disappearing. Walking away and never coming back was his bread and butter. How long would it take everybody in Wychcomb St. Mary to forget he had ever been there? How long would it take James?
“You needn’t sound so cut up about it,” Wendy said, breaking into Leo’s thoughts. “Anyway, Cora and Edith are at the vicarage. Shall I take a message or do you want to ring them there?”
“Don’t bother,” Leo said, suddenly eager to end this conversation. “I’ll ring again later if I need their help.”