The Consequences of Fear

by Jacqueline Winspear

  “How will Pascale get out?”

  “Same way she got in—as you suggested, the place is full of hiding places and escape tunnels used by the aristocracy during the Revolution. She’s been seen by a local doctor—ostensibly called to attend to Chantal, who as we know is as strong as an ox. She’ll leave tonight, alone, then meet her courier on the road. All being well and with the gods in attendance, she’ll make it into Spain and then to Gibraltar. We’ll have someone ready to meet her as soon as she reaches British territory. At that point she’ll be as good as home and dry.”

  Maisie rubbed her forehead.

  “Gibraltar bringing back memories, lass?”

  Maisie nodded. “It’s the thought of her getting through France before reaching Spain that worries me—and she could be at risk in Spain. It might be a neutral country, but we both know the police there have been handing over known escapees from Belgium and France to the German authorities.”

  “We have confidence that she will get by in Spain because she speaks the language as fluently as if she were a native. Amazing, being able to slip from one language to the other like that, and then into English as if she were born to the upper classes. Anyway, if a navigator from Stepney named Dennis Kemp, who bailed out of a Wellington over France ten days ago, can get home and be in his mum’s kitchen having a cup of tea this afternoon, then she can make it to England in one piece too.”

  “The shoulder wound—that’s a giveaway, surely.”

  “Any German soldiers might try to flirt with her if they see her in a town, Maisie, but I don’t think they’re going to rip off her jacket.” He shuffled his notes.

  “But you’re worried, I can tell—they know who she is, don’t they? The Gestapo must be looking for her.”

  “Maisie—she’ll get home. She’s been trained for this—she’s laying low and will be moving with care under cover of darkness for the most part, and she won’t take any chances—she knows the risks.”

  There was an hiatus in the conversation. An image flashed in Maisie’s mind’s eye: thirteen-year-old Pascale galloping toward her on a high-spirited stallion, laughing as she directed the horse toward the gate and clearing it by a foot before executing a perfect landing and cantering in a circle around Maisie.

  “There’s the problem, Robbie—and I’m on the record drawing attention to it in my report. Pascale might know the risks, but it never stopped her taking them, even if she isn’t as hotheaded as Priscilla.” She looked down at her hands, then at MacFarlane. “You say she’s coming home via Gibraltar?”

  MacFarlane appeared to consider the question for a moment. “No. I’m ahead of you, Maisie, even before you float the suggestion toward me. The answer is a very firm ‘No.’ I’m shocked you’d even think about it.”

  “I was just thinking that—”

  “We will have someone meet her—someone else who knows her and knows Gibraltar and that part of Spain just across the border—but it won’t be you. You have other things to attend to, and other responsibilities. One of them is named Anna.”

  “Yes, of course. You’re right. Sorry—it should never have crossed my mind. Am I free to leave now?”

  “It’s gone five o’clock in the afternoon, so yes, you’re dismissed, Miss Dobbs. But before you go—a couple more files to take a gander at. Early days. Nothing doing yet—just possibilities. Bit of homework for you—but be careful with it. I’ll telephone in the morning.”

  An ATS driver took Maisie back to her flat, where she once again checked the blackout curtains, then flopped down into the armchair next to the fireplace. She had not bothered to remove her jacket, though she unpinned her hat and threw it to one side, where it landed on the sideboard. She kicked off her shoes.

  “Five minutes, and I’ll make a cup of tea,” she said aloud.

  “Just what the doctor ordered—a nice cup of tea!”

  Maisie started and jumped up from her chair. “Mark!”

  Mark Scott walked from his hiding place in the dining room and took her in his arms, pressing his lips to hers before speaking.

  “Missed you, Maisie.”

  “I missed you too.” She looked up at him, the instant honesty of her comment rendering her heady. “I really missed you.”

  “How about my specialty? Spaghetti, a nice bottle of wine and a great guy on the opposite side of the table?”

  Maisie smiled. “Perfect! Though where will we find the guy?”

  “I fell into that one, didn’t I?” Scott held her close. “I’m afraid I must leave after supper. I’ve a late briefing at the ambassador’s residence.”

  “Oh—”

  “But I can come over here every evening for dinner this week until you leave, and then down to Chelstone on Saturday morning until Sunday, or even Monday morning—if you like.”

  “I’d like that very much, Mark. So would Anna. She’ll be so excited—she has been despondent since Emma died.”

  “I’ll cheer her up. And I’m sure Brenda will be overjoyed to see me!”

  Maisie laughed. “Oh, it’s good to have you home, Mark Scott.” She blushed again as she spoke the words.

  Scott lifted her chin and looked into her eyes. “We’ve come a long way, haven’t we, Maisie?” He kissed her again.

  Maisie must have dozed in the armchair for a while after Scott left the flat, but she was nudged awake by the rumble of bombers passing overhead. She knew she should go to the cellar and shelter until the all-clear sirens sounded, but as she glanced at the clock, it occurred to her that there was just enough time to read through the additional files that MacFarlane had passed across his desk before she left Baker Street—her “homework.” The first candidate was a young man named Giles Mason, who had been awarded honors in French literature from Cambridge and was fluent in the language. She ran her finger down his list of accomplishments, along with notes from the scout who had spotted Mason in a bookshop in London and struck up a conversation with the young man, who was at the time in the process of purchasing a novel in the original French.

  “Clever lad, aren’t you, Giles?” said Maisie, as she closed the file and put it to one side.

  She opened the second file and studied the name.

  Charlotte Bright.

  Maisie held her breath, and felt herself tense.

  “Oh no you don’t, Robbie,” she said aloud. “I’ve had enough of your bloody tests, and this one won’t fly. Why are you doing this to me?”

  She took a thick red crayon from a pocket in her document case and scrawled “Rejected” in large letters across the front of the file.

  “If you don’t like it, Robbie—I know where the door is. I don’t care which of your official bloody papers I’ve signed either.”

  She returned the files to her document case, switched off the lights and went to bed, where she lay awake for hours, listening to the bombers overhead, and the crump-crump-crump in the distance as they dropped their lethal loads.

  “Been a few days since we were both here in the office together, eh, miss?” Billy handed Maisie a mug of steaming tea, then joined her at the long table situated perpendicular to her desk. Several files were already laid out for attention, along with a rolled-up case map.

  “It has indeed,” agreed Maisie. “Let’s go through every case and see where we are with them.”

  Over the next ten minutes, they discussed cases in progress, all of which, bar one, Billy was dealing with. Maisie studied her assistant as he responded to each of her questions, and remembered the man who’d introduced himself to her when she moved into the shabby office around the corner some twelve years earlier. He was the caretaker then, yet he had recognized her straightaway: she had assisted the surgeon when Billy was brought into the casualty clearing station during the Battle of Messines, in 1917. Having helped with her first case following Maurice’s retirement, Billy became her assistant, and though others thought her mad to take on a man untrained in investigation, he had proven himself through diligent, if sometimes slow
work on one case after another. Perhaps it was time . . .

  “Let’s talk about Freddie Hackett,” said Maisie, reaching for the case map, which she passed to Billy.

  As Billy pushed the closed files to one side and pinned the case map out on the table, Maisie took a jar of colored wax crayons from the top of a filing cabinet. She began adding lines to the map, and notes—all leading to the center of the case map, which, as always, was created on the reverse side of an offcut of wallpaper.

  “Sounds like a bottle of cheap wine, that one,” said Billy, pointing to the name Maisie had added after striking out a question mark above the words “Deceased from River.”

  “MacFarlane made the same observation.” Maisie did not look up as she added a name here, a note there.

  Billy looked at the map and rubbed his chin. “I can see what you’re thinking, miss, and it’s all very well—but how did the body get moved, and so fast?”

  “Two possibilities,” said Maisie. “Well, more may emerge, but I’ve two so far. Number one is that this was indeed a planned assassination, though I don’t yet know what our d’Anjou might have done to deserve that sort of extreme attention. If it was, then the killer would likely have made arrangements to dispose of the body.”

  “Charming bloke,” said Billy.

  “Indeed. The other possibility is that he was being followed anyway, and when he was murdered, perhaps by a common criminal for his money—remember the wallet was empty of cash—the people on his tail made sure the body was removed.”

  “Why would they do that?”

  “If—and it’s always an ‘if’ at this point—his movements were being monitored by the people he worked for, or even an enemy, I would imagine that when he was killed, the officials might well have wanted his body removed for security reasons so there would be no more questions asked.” She looked up at her assistant. “Billy, he was working on the periphery of the Free French and he wasn’t quite up to snuff—rather a drinker, apparently—so we have to consider the variables.”

  “Hmmm—not exactly what you might call cut-and-dried, is it?” Billy furrowed his brow. “All right, let’s say he was assassinated. What would he have to do to get himself topped by a professional killer, aside from being a drinker and a security risk?”

  “I paid a visit to a woman named Gabriella Hunter—she knew Maurice and is also half French. Anyway, she had a lot to say about the French sense of honor, so I thought it would be worth keeping it in mind. It sounds as if it could also be a weakness, dependent upon the circumstance, and it made me wonder if the man Freddie saw murdered lacked honor—or perhaps he just upset someone.”

  “That’d get your throat cut in the East End, never mind France.”

  “Be that as it may, Billy—I think ‘honor’ is going to be part of the answer here. The fact that the victim couldn’t hold his drink could have led to him being unable to keep a secret, which could be fatal for a good many souls if he was mouthy and the wrong people were listening.” She tapped a corner of the paper with the red crayon. “We have to take into account that enemy agents are likely operating in London and other places.”

  “Well, look at that bloke who had the flat downstairs, right under our office here.”

  “I know.”

  “I thought he was a nice chap, then all of a sudden he’s been copped by the authorities and is in the Tower of London!” He looked at Maisie. “Wonder what happened to him.”

  “He’s probably dead, Billy.”

  “Dead?”

  “Yes. In a time of war, that’s what happens to a traitor of whatever stripe.”

  Billy turned his attention back to the case map. “So . . . so this man could have been a traitor?”

  Maisie was thoughtful. “It’s a possibility—something for us to bear in mind, because he could have been.”

  “Only in his case, someone couldn’t wait for him to meet the hangman.”

  “Or the guillotine.”

  “Blimey.”

  Maisie sighed, took one more look at the case map and stood up. “Let’s put the case map away, Billy.”

  “Where are we going? You’ve got the look that’s telling me to get my cap on.”

  “We’re off to see Freddie Hackett’s father—before he’s had a few.”

  There was no answer when Maisie knocked on the door of the squalid house where Arthur Hackett now lived alone.

  “Let’s have a look in the Coach and Horses, just down the street,” she suggested.

  Walking together along the street, they parted to avoid a large pile of rubble. “Funny how you get used to it, isn’t it?” said Billy. “You sort of look down and expect to see a bit of brick or sand here and there, or a house half demolished. It’s not a shock anymore.”

  “When I first saw a street after a bombing, I thought it looked like a row of dolls’ houses with the sides ripped off. The curtains were hanging down and you’d see a bed half in and half out of the room, or the pictures still hanging on the wall.”

  “I tell you, miss, I thought I’d seen the worst in the last war—and what I saw was about as terrible as you could imagine. Soldiers torn to pieces or blown up so nothing’s left of them. But we were men in uniform. Now we’re seeing ordinary people lying there with no limbs, or dead, or with terrible wounds—it’ll stay with every one of us, what we’ve seen.”

  They walked the rest of the way in silence, stopping outside the pub.

  “Hang on, miss—let me go in and have a quick look. This is what I’d call a drinking pub, a bit ‘spit and sawdust’ if you ask me—it’s not one ladies would generally frequent, even in the snug.”

  As he opened the pub door, Maisie caught a strong waft of smoke and beer fumes.

  “He’s not in there,” said Billy, returning within a minute. “But the landlord said he’d been in, and when he saw him, he was a bit more flush than usual; bought his own drinks for a change.”

  “I wonder whether he went home and we missed him—could he have taken a different route, do you think?”

  “There’s another pub up the road, a bit closer to the water.” He pointed along the street. “It’s not far to walk—and in fact, miss, it’s closer to where Freddie thought he saw that man knife the other bloke. You know, we could kill two birds with one stone—while we’re there we could have another gander at the scene of the crime, as our mate Caldwell would say.”

  Maisie was about to agree, when a man stumbling along the pavement in the distance caught her eye. “I think that’s Hackett. Come on.”

  “Blimey, I reckon you’re right, miss.”

  “Mr. Hackett!” Maisie called out. “Mr. Hackett—are you all right?”

  Hackett squinted as they approached, then held up a fist and shook it at Maisie. “You! You’re the interfering cow who took away my wife and children. You—”

  “Steady, mate.” Billy stepped forward, a barrier between Hackett and Maisie. “The lady was only trying to be of assistance. Now then, wind your neck in.”

  “And what will you do, you bleedin’ long tall drink of water?”

  “Come on, mate—we’ll see you home.”

  Hackett seemed to waver on the street, but allowed Billy to take his upper arm and lead him toward the decaying back-to-back houses.

  “If I wasn’t ill, I’d give you a right-hander and you’d be gone,” slurred Hackett, his eyes almost closed. “This is what she’s done to me, that woman there.”

  “I reckon you’ve done it to yourself, sir.” Billy continued to steer the drunken man along the road. “Now then, pick up your feet or you’ll never get home.”

  Maisie remained on Hackett’s other side, occasionally reaching out to help him keep his balance by supporting his elbow. They soon arrived back at the house, whereupon Hackett pushed his hand through the letterbox to draw out a length of string with a key on the end. “See what I’ve had to do? No one at home when I get there anymore, so now I’m like a nipper coming home from school early, and have to get i
n this way.”

  “You could keep the key on you,” said Billy.

  Inside, Hackett began to calm down. “No need to come up. Much obliged to you, sir.” He turned to Maisie. “Even if your wife took my family away—nasty piece of work she is.”

  “I’m not Mr. Beale’s wife, Mr. Hackett.” She paused. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’d be better if you two would bugger off now.”

  “We’ll come upstairs and make sure you’re settled,” said Maisie. Without waiting for an answer, she nodded to Billy, and they walked up the stairs behind Hackett. She watched his every step.

  She also watched the way he opened the door at the top of the landing and how he made his way into the kitchen. It was as he reached the kitchen table that she grabbed Billy by the sleeve of his jacket and pulled him back. In a flash Hackett had grabbed a carving knife from the table and was lashing out at Billy.

  “All right—we’re leaving,” said Maisie. “But if you move with that thing, you will be sorry—and you’ll also be behind bars for a very, very long time.”

  Hackett laughed as he stumbled against the table, then shouted, “Sod off—both of you.”

  Outside the flat they caught their breath before Billy spoke.

  “Bit close for comfort, wasn’t it, miss?”

  Maisie held her hand against her chest. “Did you see the way he took the key from the letterbox and then opened the door?”

  “Oh, a lot of people do that, miss—keep a key on a bit of string inside the letterbox. My old mum used to do it before she came to live with us, you know, before she passed away. It meant that when I went round there I didn’t have to knock, I could just unlock the door and let myself in.”