Leo dug his fingers into the coarse fabric of his seat and shut his eyes as the airplane flew through a pocket of rough air over the Channel. Less than an hour and he’d be on British soil. A few hours after that and he’d be in Wychcomb St. Mary.
That was what he needed to think about: a warm cup of tea and whatever tin of soup James decided to heat up. He needed to think about going to sleep with James by his side and knowing that when he woke up, James would still be there. He could spend all of tomorrow in the pair of James’s pajamas that Leo had claimed as his own, watching James grumble over the cryptic crossword as they drank milky tea. There would be nobody shooting anybody else and certainly no question of whether Leo thought they ought to be doing so.
And there his thoughts went, skittering away from Wychcomb St. Mary and into the usual swamp.
Leo was used to jobs going sideways. During the war, he had been reasonably pleased with himself if half his missions yielded anything close to success, and even those tended to end with somebody trying to shoot him.
By any standards Leo was familiar with, this job had been an unqualified success. He had done what he was sent to do and nobody had shot him, not even once. He had even managed to wrap things up days ahead of schedule. He ought to feel good about it, all things considered.
So what if there were two more dead bodies somewhere in Vienna. One had unquestionably been a Soviet spy, the other an American agent, and Leo hadn’t killed either of them. But the spy had been barely more than a kid, and Leo didn’t like it.
Kids got caught up in this business all the time. Nobody paid them much attention and they were good at lying and brilliant at holding their lives cheap: they made natural spies. That was how Leo had started out himself.
But during the war it had been easy to cultivate a flexible understanding of good and evil. And even when that flexibility was stretched to the utmost, Leo trusted his handler. That trust had turned out to be a bad idea, as trust usually was, but it had smoothed over a lot of things his sad excuse for a conscience might otherwise have got tripped up on.
Now Leo didn’t have his old handler and he didn’t have a war. And he didn’t have any good reason why that kid and that American weren’t breathing anymore. Was a strategically placed radio worth it? Leo didn’t know and he was vaguely embarrassed to even care. He ought to have got over this sort of silliness years ago.
For the hundredth time in the past couple of months, he decided that he needed to get out of this business. He was no good at being a peacetime spy; this entire line of thought was proof enough of that. But Vienna had been his third mission since Christmas, his third mission since his handler retired and Leo found himself absorbed into MI6. His third mission since James had given Leo the spare key to his house and space in his wardrobe. Every time he told himself it would be his last mission.
And he also told James it would be the last. He never meant for it to be a lie, but somehow even Leo’s attempts at honesty twisted their way into untruth. James deserved better. Christ, Leo was beginning to think that he deserved better too, and wasn’t that an alarming thought.
When the plane landed, Leo couldn’t scramble down the stairs fast enough. He ought to go in for a debriefing, but that could wait until Monday, protocol be damned. Instead, he hired a car to take him all the way to Wychcomb St. Mary. It was a frightful expense, but he thought that if he had to wait a single minute pacing the platform at Paddington, he would work himself into a frenzy.
When the car pulled up in front of James’s house, though, all the windows were dark and there were no signs of life inside, despite this being Friday, a day James ordinarily had clinic. He paid the driver and knocked on the door anyway, but nobody answered. Leo’s own key hung on a hook inside; he could hardly have taken it to Vienna. He considered picking the lock, but the odds of getting something good to eat were much higher at Little Gables than they were in James’s kitchen, so to Little Gables he went.
Edith Pickering answered the door and gave Leo a disapproving once-over that Leo was beginning to suspect signaled concern. “James isn’t here,” she said by way of greeting.
“I figured he was out seeing a patient,” Leo said, handing Edith his coat. It was the same coat he had put on early that morning in Vienna, with a spot of blood still on the cuff, and seeing it in Edith’s clean hands made him want to snatch it away.
“I wish he were doing anything so sensible,” Edith said briskly, leading the way into the sitting room. “James has gone to Cornwall.” She said this as if announcing that James had taken up a life of crime and perversion. “Some uncle of his died and he’s gone for the reading of the will.”
Leo bent to kiss Cora Delacourt on the cheek. She looked smaller and frailer every time he saw her, even though her mind was still sharp when she wanted it to be. “I didn’t know James had any relations,” Leo said, “let alone one who would leave him anything.”
“James was surprised as well,” Edith said. “The letter from the solicitor said the uncle’s will stipulated that all legatees attend the reading at the family home in Cornwall or forfeit their bequest.”
Leo’s eyebrows shot straight up. “Was it his uncle’s dying wish to reenact a radio drama?”
“That is precisely what I asked,” Edith said, handing Leo a cup of tea, “but James said his uncle had been entirely sane and not at all given to theatrics.”
“Quite right,” said Cora from the sofa. “James’s uncle was Rupert Bellamy. You remember him, Edith. He was a few years older than us. He could make no conversation unless it was about golf, tennis, or banking. I shouldn’t have said he had a fanciful bone in his body, but I haven’t seen him since 1910 and I daresay people change.” She spoke these last words with a heavy dose of skepticism that Leo wholeheartedly shared.
The more Leo thought about it, the less he liked it. Leo had read this detective story and he had seen the film and knew that when you made the heirs gather together, they immediately started putting exotic poisons into one another’s tea. They simply couldn’t help themselves.
Leo had been awake for over thirty hours and was aware that he had perhaps reached the point at which his thoughts became slightly less reliable than usual. He knew that he was inclined to be overly suspicious, but that inclination had kept him alive this long. And where James was concerned, he saw no reason not to let every spark of worry kindle itself into a full-blown conflagration.
Cora’s rheumy blue eyes drifted away from Edith and settled on Leo. “You look ghastly,” she told him, not unkindly.
“I feel ghastly,” he agreed. “Tell me more about this Rupert Bellamy.” He knew that Cora and Edith would know he was asking, more or less, for a dossier. It was easy to forget that Cora, for all she was now a pink-cheeked old lady, once had a job not so different from Leo’s. She had retired and now spent her days by a warm fire with the person she loved. Leo didn’t know how she had done it. That sort of transformation seemed about as probable as a bat transforming into a pigeon.
“He married Charlotte Sommers, James’s father’s sister,” said Cora.
“She had twelve bridesmaids at her wedding. Quite a foolish woman,” said Edith. “Sickly, I believe. Died ages ago. As for Rupert, Cora’s quite right. A very boring man.”
“The only interesting thing that happened to him wasn’t even his doing,” Cora said. “What was his daughter’s name?” she asked, turning to Edith. “Not Lady Marchand, but the one who disappeared. Rosalind? Rosalie?”
“Rose. Must be twenty years now. 1927 or so. And she didn’t disappear, Cora. She had a swimming accident.”
“Is that right? I always hoped she ran off with the chauffeur,” Cora sighed.
“Yes, well the papers could hardly have run the story for two straight weeks without some romantic angle. But it turned out that the chauffeur—you know, Cora, I think he might have been a gardener or a groom, not a chauffeur.”
“It was always one of those three, when a girl ran away with a servant,” Cora observed. “I do wonder who girls run away with these days.”
The women paused, as if observing a moment of silence for modern girls who had to make do in unknown ways.
“In any event,” Edith said, “I believe they said the chauffeur or gardener or groom ran off because he got a girl in trouble and it had nothing at all to do with Rose. Sadly prosaic.”
“What a good memory you have, dear. All I can really recall is Reverend Sommers having to leave in the middle of the village fete in order to fetch James. The curate had to step in and man the coconut shy.”
“And what a sorry affair that was,” Edith agreed.
What had been a slight sense of unease now developed into alarm. “Fetch James from where?” Leo asked. “James was there when this girl died? And he’s been summoned back?” Now Leo was worried about something far more probable than poisoned tea. Sometimes even the thought of violent death stirred up memories of war that James couldn’t quite shake off. James was a grown man and could handle his own mind’s idiosyncrasies, but if Leo could do anything to help, then he’d make it his business to do so.