‘ALL SET, THEN.’
Lily slapped her gloved hands together and stamped her feet. The pair of wellingtons she had on weren’t a perfect fit—she could feel her feet still sliding about in them—but they were an improvement on the shoes she’d been wearing, which would never have coped with the deep snow they were going to have to plough through on their way up to Wickham Manor.
‘I’m ready when you are, sir.’
She was doing her best to sound cheerful, though the more she thought about what they were bent on—she and Hans Probst—the less she liked it. The way Lily saw it they would either turn up at the manor only to find that all was well and this Mr Gonzales a perfectly kosher bloke—as far as con men went anyway—and would then have to throw themselves on Mrs Lesage’s mercy since there was no way they could get back to Oxford that night, not with their car stuck in a snow drift.
That was the ‘either’. The ‘or’ was much worse. Gonzales would turn out to be just what Commissar Probst feared—Heinrich Voss in disguise—at which point almost anything could happen, none of it good. Even if he was Voss he might have been biding his time and their arrival, together with the suspicions Probst harboured about him, could easily have the effect of setting him off and triggering an act of violence. It didn’t seem to have occurred to her companion that the bloke might well be armed, and with something more than the knife that he’d presumably used on his other victims. All Probst seemed set on doing was reaching their objective as quickly as possible and to the devil with the consequences. Lily was ready to answer the call of duty if she had to, but she just thought they might have done better to wait until some reinforcements were on hand. As it was she’d left a message for Billy Styles with the Banbury police telling him where she and Probst had gone, and could only hope that he and Inspector Morgan would decide to join them there, preferably that evening.
The rubber boots she was wearing had come to her courtesy of the owner of the village store, a chap called Greaves, who they had encountered in the pub, the only establishment open when they’d finally reached Great Tew cold and footsore. Lily had taken it on herself to ask him if he knew whether a Mr Gonzales was up at the manor, and Greaves had replied that she was the second person who had asked him that—Lily assumed the first had been Madden—and that he still didn’t know the answer to that particular question. As far as he knew, no one had come down from the manor that day. He had asked Lily if she and the gentleman she was with were planning to walk up there and when Lily said they were he had volunteered the opinion that the shoes she was wearing weren’t up to the job.
‘You’ll need something more in the boot line, miss,’ he had told her—he seemed to have taken a shine to Lily. ‘Tell you what—I’ve got a pair of secondhand wellies in the shop next door. They’re up for sale, but I’ll lend them to you if you like. You can leave those shoes you’re wearing behind as security.’ He’d pointed at her footwear, grinning as he spoke. ‘What do you say, miss?’
Lily had said yes, and she and Probst had trooped out of the pub after Greaves and waited until he had unlocked the door to his shop and switched on the lights inside, revealing an emporium that, far from being a mere grocery, seemed to stock all manner of articles along with the trays of fruit and vegetables on display and the shelves stocked with tinned goods. Probst’s eye had quickly lighted on a pair of torches standing on their ends, but his offer to buy them had initially been refused by Greaves on the grounds that Sunday was not a day he was permitted to engage in trade.
‘But I could make out the receipt for tomorrow,’ he had added, with a wink, ‘if you’re prepared to overlook it.’
Assured that this deceit would remain a secret between them he’d been further encouraged to sell a pair of thick socks to Lily, which had gone some way towards alleviating the problem of the overlarge wellingtons.
Finally, equipped now for their trudge up to Wickham Manor, they had gone outside with the proprietor, who had pointed up the road and told them if they walked a bit further on they would find a sign directing them to their destination.
‘There’ve been enough people up and down these past couple of days to leave a good set of tracks. Follow those and you can’t go far wrong.’
Waving goodbye, he had disappeared back into the pub and Lily had proclaimed her readiness.
‘All set, then.’