LILY LOOKED UP. She could see a sprinkling of lights in the distance.
‘It’s not far,’ she panted. ‘We’ll soon be there.’
Hans Probst’s only response was a grunt. The Berlin detective had lost none of his sense of urgency—he was leading the way, setting a stiff pace—and though Lily was with him in spirit it was all she could do to keep up. Her shoes were the problem. The smart court shoes she was wearing had not been designed for tramping through the snow.
Stifling a groan, she looked about her. Although the blizzard had passed and the moon had risen, she wasn’t able to make out much of the countryside around: only flat snow-covered fields and the dim outlines of trees, their long shadows marked like ink stains on the white surface beneath. It had still been light when they’d left Enstone, but the early winter darkness had set in quickly and before long Lily had found herself having to drive with extra care and keep a sharp eye out for patches of ice that showed up as flat, greyish circles in the beams of her headlights and to which she’d reacted by lifting her foot off the accelerator and resisting an impulse to put the same foot on the brake so that they could freewheel across them. She had recently taken an advanced course in driving—one of several ways that she’d sought to distinguish herself, reasoning that it was necessary, being a woman, to keep at least one or two steps ahead of her male colleagues at the Yard if she wanted to progress in the force, a strategy that so far had yielded dividends—but she had never encountered anything quite like the conditions she was faced with that evening.
Yet somehow she had coped, and they had passed through the hamlet of Little Tew without incident and were well on their way towards the larger of the two villages when disaster had struck.
And all on account of a blooming fox!
Breasting a slight rise, she had come on the animal standing in the middle of the road with its pointed ears pricked and its eyes shining bright in the headlights. It had taken Lily all of a second to realize what it was and another second to react automatically by swerving to one side. Even as she did so, the animal had leaped off the road and disappeared, but by then it was too late. When she sought to correct her mistake and bring the car back on course it had simply continued in the same direction, sliding on a patch of ice she hadn’t seen at the side of the narrow lane they were following and then straight down the slippery slope into a bank of snow. Although no damage had been done to the car—they’d been going at a moderate speed, less than twenty miles an hour—Lily had found it impossible to reverse. Try as she might, she had only managed to cover a few feet before her spinning wheels lost their grip and the vehicle settled back in its original position buried nose-deep in the drift.
Forced to accept defeat finally, she and her passenger had climbed out of the car and studied the situation. Probst had been the first to accept the obvious.
‘It seems we will have to walk the rest of the way,’ he had said.
Tempted to express her frustration in somewhat stronger terms, Lily had managed to keep control of her tongue.
‘You’re right, sir. We’ll have to leg it.’
What she hadn’t realized, though, was how cold it would be out in the fields, exposed to the elements. Although the blizzard had spent itself—or at least moved on—there was still a frigid wind blowing and the air was full of flying snow and bits of ice that stung when they struck the exposed flesh of her cheeks. Lily had a coat equipped with a hood, which she had pulled up over her head, while Probst was sporting a fur-lined cap with flaps that came down over his ears. But somehow the wind found its way to the bits of her left unprotected, her nose in particular, and she was forced to plod forward with her head bent, keeping her eyes on the heels of her companion, who, lucky man, was wearing what looked like a stout pair of boots well suited to the conditions.
To add to Lily’s woes there was the car to think about. It was the same police Ford Billy Styles had used to drive down from London in—she herself had come later by train—and, good bloke though he was, one of the few who had helped to advance her career in the male-dominated world of Scotland Yard, he would not be best pleased to learn what had happened to his transport; nor that, unable to locate him, Lily had taken it on herself to commandeer the vehicle for what was coming to look more and more like a harebrained mission.
Her only excuse—that she’d been talked into it by Hans Probst, a senior police officer to be sure, but unfortunately one who hailed from Germany—was unlikely to weigh much when her punishment was eventually decided by some disciplinary board, manned solely by men, which Lily was tolerably sure she would be summoned to appear before at some stage. Up to now her career had followed a charmed path; she had four commendations to her name, something almost unheard of at her age, never mind her sex, but that flawless record would soon be marred by a formal reprimand at the very least and might even lead to her losing her sergeant’s stripes. It had happened before.
And as if that weren’t enough, she was becoming increasingly concerned about their expedition, whether it even made sense.
‘I’m just not sure how we’re going to do this.’ She had raised the question during their drive from Enstone. ‘As I see it you want to get Mrs Lesage out of possible harm’s way, and the same applies to Mr Sinclair and Mr Madden. But how can we do that without alerting this Gonzales bloke, who may or may not be Heinrich Voss? I mean, if he senses we’ve got his number, if he thinks he’s in danger, there’s no telling what he might do.’
‘I’m aware of that.’ Probst had nodded calmly. ‘We must tread carefully. And before anything else we must determine whether in fact he is there, at the house.’
‘Yes, but we can’t just turn up, can we?’ This was what was really bothering Lily. ‘What’s Mrs Lesage going to think? We’ve got to have a reason for calling on her.’
‘That would certainly be of help.’ Her words had brought another judicious nod from her passenger. ‘I shall be more than content to go along with anything you can think of, Lily.’ He had smiled at her.
And thank you very much, Lily said to herself. The ball was back in her court and there it had stayed and she had no idea what to do with it.
All she could do was to keep walking.