Thirty-three

Animated by anger, Billie Walker strode through the doors of Daking House. Her latest case was closed. The Browns had their boy back, and she hoped they would soon get Margarethe’s necklace back, too. The mystery was solved. She had new clients lining up for the first time. She’d felt that a sense of doing something that mattered wasn’t strictly a thing of the past, wasn’t confined to her career as a wartime reporter. She had been truly optimistic for the first time in months—that was before she got the news from Detective Inspector Cooper that Franz Hessmann had been released from Richmond Police Station and was now who knew where. There were now enough loose ends to keep her mind occupied for months. She would help in whatever way she could in the hunt for Hessmann and his associates, and was determined to take Moretti down, whatever it took. He must have been working for Hessmann, or perhaps Boucher, as she’d first thought.

Yes, there was work to do.

“John, hold the lift?” Billie called and picked up her pace as she crossed the foyer.

The lift operator smiled in his lopsided way through the grille of the outer door and pulled it back, making his other customers, two men, wait. “Of course, Ms. Walker,” he said fondly.

Billie slid inside, noting that one of the two men was familiar—an older man with spectacles and ink-stained fingers, in a striped suit. One of the accountants. A pleasant enough fellow. He tipped his hat to her. The second was taller and had badly dyed brown hair just visible under a fedora. John Wilson pulled the second door closed and worked the lever, the lift starting up with a shuffling hum.

“Second floor, Mr. Peters,” he announced, and the accountant lumbered out with a smile and a thank-you.

Wilson closed the doors again and started the lift. “Both for floor number six.”

Billie swallowed. The little woman in her gut told her something was wrong, very wrong, and in a heartbeat the man in the fedora was behind her left shoulder and she felt the sharp sting of a blade in her lower back, pressing into her shirtwaist dress and pointing at her kidney.

“How is work, Ms. Walker?” Wilson inquired, his back to them as he faced the lift’s controls.

Billie took a steady breath and kept her body still, her voice even. “Work is busy,” she replied, tensing despite her best efforts. “How is your lovely wife, Wendy, doing? She felt rather down very suddenly, didn’t she, after that bout of, what was it?”

The knife dug a touch deeper.

“Ah, just a cold, it was,” Wilson said, after an almost imperceptible pause. Billie’s heart lifted a touch.

“Here we are,” the lift operator said as the carriage slowed. “Sixth floor.”

Billie prepared for what she hoped would happen next, her body tense, her feet firm. When Wilson reversed the controls suddenly and let go of the handle, the dead man switch kicked in, the carriage taking air for a brief moment before jerking violently, and she threw herself forward, turning away from the blade, intentionally falling on her sore open palms and kicking backward like a mule with her heeled oxfords into the man’s stomach. He crumpled against the wall, the knife tumbling out of his grasp, and before she could right herself, Wilson, unarmed and with only one upper extremity to work with, had thrown the man forward and pinned him to the floor with both knees, his left arm pressing against the back of his neck.

“Dear God, I do hope that’s what you wanted me to do,” he said, a little breathless. “When you called June by the wrong name and said what you said, I knew it was a code of sorts.”

“Yes, John,” Billie said. “You did well. Bloody well.” In seconds she had the Colt in her hand, having shamelessly flashed her silk knickers and stocking tops to the lift operator and his loathsome quarry. She steadied her hands on the gun, swaying a little with the speed of it all. “I have him now.”

“I thought something was suspicious when I asked him where he’d served and he didn’t answer. That war wound.”

That war wound one might mistake for airman’s burn, just like John’s, but was not. That burn inflicted by the man’s victims in one final brave act of rebellion.

Wilson unpinned the man and rose, straightening his uniform and the empty sleeve of his jacket’s right arm. He started the lift up again and jogged it up and down until they lined up with the sixth floor.

“Thank you. Doors please, John,” Billie said, ignoring the angry mutterings coming out of Hessmann’s mouth.

Wilson opened the inner door and slid the grille back, revealing the sixth-floor entryway.

“Thank you, again,” Billie said. “I do owe you one. And I’ll explain later.” She urged her prisoner out of the lift. “Call the police straightaway, John, if you would. Ask for Detective Inspector Cooper. He’s at Central, just up the way. And Constable Primrose. Tell them I have Franz Hessmann. Tell them to bring as much backup as they see fit, and to make it quick if they expect me to keep this fellow alive. My patience isn’t what it used to be.”