Leo wondered when James’s mattress became the standard against which all other mattresses were to be judged. Objectively, it was a bit lumpy and sagged in the middle, but it felt correct in a way that rendered other mattresses unpleasantly alien.
Long ago, Leo had become used to waking up in strange places. But now when he woke up anywhere that wasn’t James’s bed, he was aware of disappointment before he was even awake enough to form coherent thought.
He was going to stay, this time for good. Eventually this mattress would be his mattress too, and maybe he’d stop feeling vaguely fraudulent when thinking of this house as home.
“I have to go to London,” he groaned.
“Good morning to you, too,” James said from beside him. “Do you have to go right this minute?”
It was Monday morning. He really ought to go today. The powers that be were not going to be pleased that he had bunked on his debrief. “Tomorrow. To give notice.”
“Do spies give notice? How very ordinary.”
“I suppose we’re about to find out.”
“There’s something that’s been bothering me,” James said. “I understand why Camilla adopted Lilah—she and Martha had just lost someone and might not want to see the baby go to strangers. But why did Sir Anthony agree to raise Lilah as his own? He doesn’t strike me as the sort of man to do that.”
Leo rolled over onto his side to face James. “I wonder if he thought he was buying Camilla’s silence. Or maybe he just felt guilty. I think he did care about Camilla, at least at first.”
“Should we have told Lilah what we learned?”
“You’re asking me an ethical question?”
“Why shouldn’t I?”
Leo gave James a look that he hoped conveyed exactly what he thought of that sentiment. “In that case, I think it depends on whether you want anything more to do with them. If you don’t, then it’s not your business. You can leave them to sort out their own secrets. But if you plan to have a relationship with any of them, especially Lilah, I don’t think you can keep that from her.”
“I like Lilah,” James said. “It might be nice to have one blood relation I keep in touch with.”
“Not Camilla and Martha?”
“I’m sure I’ll send Christmas cards,” James said, with more asperity in his voice than Leo was used to hearing there. “I’m glad I saw them, but I’m afraid I don’t feel very kindly about them having, well, abandoned me, not to put too fine a point on it. I already have a family and it’s not them.” Then he frowned. “Leo, do I hear chickens in the garden?”
After they sat down to eat some scrambled eggs, Leo unwrapped the canvas he had bought from Mrs. Carrow. It was an oil painting of a rocky stretch of coastline, a lighthouse barely visible in the distance. It was not one of the pretty watercolors that she sold to tourists, but was instead bleak and unforgiving. It was also, she had told him, a part of the coast that she saw every day when she took a walk.
James stood by Leo’s side and studied the painting. “Why this one?” he finally asked.
Leo swallowed, hoping he could find the words to explain. “She has a way of painting that shows the unvarnished truth. You can see that she knows this place—every craggy rock, every straggly weed. She sees it for what it is, and she doesn’t need to dress it up.” Leo was sure he was making a hash of this, but then James nodded.
“The scales have dropped from her eyes, but in a way that doesn’t stop her from loving what she sees,” James said.
“Yes,” Leo said in relief. “Exactly that.” And when he reached out, James’s hand was already there, waiting for him.
That afternoon they stopped by Little Gables and presented the two ladies with the bare facts of the case.
“What bothers me,” said Cora, idly winding a ball of wool, “is why Gladys ran away.”
“Because the police arrived, of course,” said Edith. “She would have been worried that with her past, she would be blamed for whatever had happened to Rose.”
“I meant why did she run off on Saturday night? That morning she told someone on the telephone that she had ‘given him until tonight’ or something to that effect.” She looked at Leo. “You see that your Mrs. Mudge was quite right that she had precisely the sort of head that one can fill with bad ideas. I’d wager she never thought of blackmailing anyone until she fell in with that man.”
“What man?” James asked.
“The man on the phone, of course,” Cora said. “Possibly a woman, but most likely a man.”
“It so often is,” agreed Edith.
“Too right. In any event, from that telephone call, I can only suppose that Gladys had given Marchand a deadline for paying her. Why run off before she got her money?”
“Perhaps he told her he wasn’t paying,” suggested James.
“I’d have hardly thought Sir Anthony Marchand was the ‘publish and be damned’ sort,” said Edith. “For goodness’ sake, give me that yarn before you tangle it all up, Cora.” Edith snatched the wool away.
“Camilla recognized her at dinner,” said Leo. “She put on her spectacles to examine a photograph James showed her, and she glanced around the table. A few minutes later, when they were discussing the former servants, she said ‘Gladys Button!’ and looked directly at her.” Leo saw that James was giving him a highly reproachful look. “We had other things to think about! It didn’t seem important.”
“Ah. The poor girl thought it was a threat,” said Cora.
“The poor girl was nearly forty,” pointed out Edith.
“And then there was the business with the wine glasses,” said Cora. “If you, James, wondered whether the spill had been engineered to slip something into Gladys’s drink, then you can be sure that Gladys had the same idea.”
The implication, Leo realized, was that James was as unsuspecting as a baby. He smiled into his tea.
“Between Camilla recognizing her and Sir Anthony evidently trying to poison her,” Cora went on, “Gladys must have decided that Anthony Marchand’s money was more trouble than it was worth.”
“I rang the Cornwall constabulary this morning,” said Leo. “There was nothing in those glasses. And nothing in Marchand’s system, either, except for a very small amount of Seconal, consistent with a standard dose.”
“You just rang them up,” James said, looking long-suffering. “And demanded a toxicology report.”
“I may have called in a few favors.” He was going to have to send a lavish flower arrangement to Mrs. Patel. Or possibly a set of throwing knives.
“So he died of a simple heart attack,” James said. “That’s a relief. But then what happened to Camilla’s medicine?” Leo watched as the penny dropped. “Sir Anthony took it himself?”
“He was anxious about being blackmailed,” Leo said. “Anyone would be.”
“But he didn’t tell his wife because he was a giant hypocrite,” James grumbled.
“I daresay he was in quite a state after receiving that blackmail letter,” Edith said. “And then his blackmailer disappears before he can pay up. No wonder he had a heart attack when he heard Gladys had left.”
“I wonder if the henna will wash out of her hair,” mused Cora. “I had to henna my hair once”—she turned to Leo and James—“I needed a quick change of appearance after a job went wrong.”
Edith made a harrumphing sound. “The ambassador! What a swine.”
“It took ages for the henna to wash out. I wound up cutting it all off.”
“And very dashing it was, my dear.”
James leaned forward and poured fresh tea into everyone’s cups.
Maybe it could be as simple as this. Maybe a retired spy could think about jobs gone wrong in terms of the unfortunate hair colors one was forced to adopt. Maybe Leo could be a good person without understanding whether he used to be a bad person, and maybe he didn’t even have to think about any of that right now.
“I think we should go to the seaside this summer,” James said as they walked home. “Maybe for a fortnight? Not anywhere near Blackthorn, of course, but perhaps Lyme Regis? Or maybe Weymouth. Just for a little holiday.”
“A holiday,” Leo repeated.
“Well, yes. If the idea appeals to you, that is.”
Leo imagined ice creams and walks on the beach and bathing trunks. James would freckle and his shoulders would turn pink in the sun. He would make friends with every old lady in the hotel and pet every dog on the beach.
And sometimes James would look at him the way he was doing right now, with affection and an easy possessive confidence, as if he knew how much Leo adored him but wasn’t going to make too big a fuss about it.
“A holiday,” Leo repeated again, like he was trying the word out, trying it on for size.
He had taken holidays, he supposed. There were times between jobs when there was nowhere to report and he had been at loose ends, so he had time to see sights or lounge about. Sometimes there were even people to spend that free time with—colleagues on leave, locals who didn’t know any better—and that had been fine. None of those had been—premeditated holidays, he supposed.
But this—planning a holiday six months in advance, packing suitcases filled with holiday things and probably much less weaponry than usual—that would be new. Going on a holiday with someone because they were the person you went on holidays with and ate supper with and cleaned your teeth beside—that would be new as well.
“If you want,” James said, so casually, as if he didn’t know Leo was standing a few inches away from him slowly losing his mind.
Yes, Leo wanted that. He wanted to see James on a beach with his hair ruined by the wind. He wanted to sit on the sand and eat packed sandwiches and throw crusts to the birds that circled overhead. He wanted a span of empty time filled with nothing but James and bright yellow sunshine.
He cleared his throat and tried to say that yes, he would go on holiday with James, he would go on as many holidays as James saw fit to take, for as long as he was invited. All that came out was “yes.”
“And then when we get back, we can buy a new sofa,” James said.
“What?” Leo wasn’t certain how they had got from the seashore to sofas.
“Our sofa is too small for both of us to fit on comfortably.”
It was true. If one of them tried to stretch out, somebody’s feet were always under the other’s thighs or on their lap. And if they both wanted to lie down, it was a shambles—they had to be on top of one another, Leo’s face tucked into the heat of James’s neck.
“I like the sofa,” Leo said. “I like how it is.”
“I do too. I just thought—”
“If we get another, we should get one just the same size.”
“Then that’s exactly what we’ll do.”
Every we, every our sounded like percussive notes, like a bell ringing out the unlikely truth of the words, and Leo wanted to keep saying them again and again.