A Simple Country Tragedy

by Blythe Baker

  Names were scrawled on the pieces of torn paper. Names that I felt I almost recognized, names I’d heard before. Were they famous? Figures in government?

  But then as I approached the board…there was a face on there that drew a gasp from me.

  Roger. His face was on the board.

  And not just once. Many times over.

  It took me some time to realize that every picture had Roger in it.

  What in the…?

  My trembling fingers grazed over a photo of Roger wearing his military fatigues. The sight made my breath catch in my throat, pulling the air right from my lungs. How long had it been since I’d seen him like that? And not only wearing his military garb, but also to see all of him? All of the photos I had of him were from the waist up. How had I forgotten how long and lean his legs were? And the way he carried himself? It seemed so familiar, so lifelike…it was almost as if I could call out to him and he’d look up at me.

  I stared at all of the pictures. Pictures of Roger, when he was walking through London, when he was at a pub with some other men, when he was taking a train…

  A small sob escaped me when I found a picture of him and me together, in Plymouth, shopping at the market on Saturday morning. I held flowers in my arms, and he carried a basket filled with fresh produce and bread.

  How…how had Sidney gotten this photo? I remembered that day like it was yesterday. It was one of the first times he had come home from London after the war had started. All he wanted to do was spend as much time together as possible. And not only that, but he wanted to explore and be away from anything that could remind him of the war.

  But…

  The questions that started to chase themselves around inside my mind made me feel ill. Sidney had all these photos in his house…of my late husband, and even…me?

  My blood turned to ice as I looked over the rest of the board. The names I saw…I began to remember them, as they were all names that Roger had mentioned to me at some time or another in the past. Names of generals, of soldiers, of places he’d been stationed at, companies he’d had to work with since the war began…

  I stared from picture to picture, each time astounded by the fact that it was Roger. It was really his face. His name. His identity, spread out all over this board as if –

  My stomach clenched. As if he was someone important. As if his life was worth dissecting, tracking, learning the secrets of.

  But he was. Hadn’t Patrick Gordon told me as much when I’d gone to visit him and his family in London? As I looked at the strings connecting certain images together, I realized that there were, in fact, more people that were aware of Roger’s position as a spy than perhaps even Roger had known. And given his position, it was no wonder that he was targeted the way he was.

  These pictures were proof that his position was not a safe one, and just further proved to me that his desire to keep me out of arm’s reach had perhaps been the right one.

  A sound downstairs finally snapped my attention away from the board.

  I hunkered down, the fear spreading through my limbs like poison, making my knees weak.

  What was I going to do? If that was Sidney arriving home, I was utterly trapped upstairs.

  I glanced around, desperate for a place I could hide.

  I could bide my time inside a closet, or perhaps behind a piece of furniture that was large enough…

  The idea sounded preposterous, but wasn’t it the only choice I had?

  I could just wait until he fell asleep, I said to myself. That shouldn’t be too long now, right?

  A creak of the stairs made all the hairs on my neck stand up.

  I had no time. I had no other choice.

  I dashed across the kitchen, desperate to keep my footsteps as silent as possible. It was a race to see who would get there first; Sidney, up to his flat, or me, into the broom cupboard beside the door to the washroom.

  I managed to make it, pulling the door open and throwing myself inside. I was just dragging it shut behind me when I heard Sidney’s footsteps on the last few stairs.

  My heart thundered in my chest as I listened. A narrow beam of light peeked in through the gap between the door and the frame. I could only see a sliver of the kitchen beyond, but it was enough to reveal Sidney to me as he walked fully into the room.

  I bit down on my tongue to prevent myself from crying out.

  Stay calm. I can still get out of this.

  I repeated that over and over as I watched him walk around the sparse kitchen. He pulled his jacket off and tossed it over his arm. Stopping at the ice box, he pulled the door open, withdrawing a bottle of milk.

  He tipped it back, pressing the bottle to his lips, and took long, loud slurps.

  My throat tight and my lips dry, I could only hold my breath as I watched, and waited…

  Sidney finally replaced the milk back into the ice box, half empty, and let out a sigh of contentment. Perhaps I would have found it funny at one point in time. Even yesterday, likely. But seeing the board on his wall, and the pictures of Roger…the picture of me…

  Something brushed against my shoulder, tickling the side of my neck.

  I couldn’t help it. A gasp escaped me, and I jumped backward, landing against a broom…which knocked against the back of the cupboard with a loud bang.

  My stomach plummeted to the floor.

  Through the crack, I saw Sidney turn on the spot and rush over to the closet.

  As he yanked the door open, I realized I had no choice but to accept my fate.

  The light from the room washed over me, making me squint as I tried to right my balance, still brushing off whatever spider or bug it was that had chosen that moment to crawl on me in the dark.

  Sidney’s eyes widened when they fell on me.

  “Helen…” he said, concern coating his words. “What’re you doing here?”

  12

  As frightened as I was, my mind went entirely blank, standing there in that closet. I had no idea what to say. Or what to do. All I could do was stare up at him…this man that until very recently, I had been so sure I could trust.

  “Are you all right?” he asked in his Scottish accent, leaning into the closet with his hand outstretched toward me. “You aren’t hurt, are you?”

  “N – no,” I said, allowing him to help me out of the dank, musty broom cupboard. As soon as I’d forgotten what I was so upset about, it all came flooding back to me in an instant.

  Especially when I could see the board over his shoulder.

  “Well, that’s a relief,” he said, his charming smile stretching across his freckled face. “I would have been quite upset had something happened to you.”

  That familiar chill ran down my spine as I saw a troubling glint of something almost dangerous in his gaze.

  I yanked my hand out from his own, my gaze hardening. “You can drop the act, Sidney,” I said. “I saw your board, and my husband’s pictures all over it.”

  Sidney folded his arms and glanced over his shoulder. He regarded it for a few moments. “Yes, I suppose this could have ended in one of two ways,” he said, turning to look back at me. The dark flicker in his eyes had returned, and a wicked smile replaced his charming one. “Either you’d find out, or I’d manage to kill you first.”

  A chill racked my whole body when I realized that his Scottish accent had completely disappeared…only to be replaced by another, much more harsh in nature, and thicker.

  German. It was a German accent.

  Before I could do anything, Sidney grabbed hold of my arm and dragged me from the closet.

  “Let go of me,” I demanded, trying to pull myself free. “Sidney, stop, you’re hurting me.”

  He didn’t listen.

  He walked me over to a chair, where he threw me down into it.

  Jostled and surprised by his sudden change in personality, I didn’t think to react quickly enough, and so, he managed to find something to secure my hands to the back of the chair with. Something strong
, like a leather cord.

  My heart was beating so fast it was making the whole room spin. Panic began to well up within me, clouding my thoughts.

  I have to get out of here. He’s going to hurt me. I need to find help. I can’t stay here. Sidney is not who I thought he was.

  “You know, I should have predicted this would happen,” Sidney said from behind me, tightening the second strap around my wrists much tighter than the first, so tight it made it impossible for me to move my hands at all. It squeezed so tightly against my skin that the bones in my wrists ached. “You have proven yourself to be awfully clever. I can see why he married someone like you.”

  With a jolt to my heart like a lightning strike, I glanced over my shoulder at him. “You knew Roger…” I said. “All this time you were lying to me?”

  Satisfied with how he’d tied the straps around my wrists, he stood and walked back around to stand in front of the board filled with pictures and notes. “I had no choice,” he said simply. “My own feelings about all this don’t matter. It was a job, and I was meant to fulfill it. It’s as simple as that.”

  My eyes narrowed. “It’s never as easy as that…” I said.

  “Oh, it certainly is, in my line of work,” Sidney said, clasping his hands casually behind his back as he studied the board. “But goodness, you certainly have not made things easy for me, have you?”

  “What do I have to do with anything?” I asked. “And why are you so obsessed with Roger? Why is his face all over your wall?”

  “Obsessed?” Sidney asked, glancing over his shoulder at me. “Hardly. A great deal of this knowledge was utterly commonplace…well, except to you, of course. I have never met a woman who was so entirely uninformed on her husband and his business in my entire life.”

  My blood began to boil. “It was Roger’s choice to keep me in the dark…so people like you didn’t start coming around, looking for information.”

  “Is that what he did?” Sidney asked. “Huh. Well, I suppose it fits with his character. Self-righteous, as always – ”

  “Roger was not self-righteous,” I snapped, my hands balling into fists behind my back. “He was anything but that.”

  “And how would you know for certain?” Sidney asked, turning around to face me. He gestured up to the board. “Tell me…what was it that your husband did, hmm?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, then snapped it shut. I realized this was exactly the sort of situation that Roger had wanted to protect me from, whether I’d known it or not at the time…and I was dishonoring his memory and all his efforts by spilling what little I did know to get back at a man who was not at all like I thought he was.

  A smirk passed across Sidney’s face. “I thought so.”

  He turned back to the board, and pointed at a picture of Roger in what appeared to be some sort of warehouse, with men in trench coats and bowler hats. “Allow me to enlighten you on who Roger Lightholder was then, shall I?”

  I tugged against the straps around my wrists. The one around my left wrist was so tight that it did nothing but cause me pain. But the one on my right…it wiggled ever so slightly, just a fraction looser than the other. That might be all I needed to free myself.

  I set my face, though, my jaw clenched as I realized he was going to tell me things I would not be able to get away from.

  “Roger Lightholder was a specially trained spy in the British special forces. A man highly skilled in all manner of espionage, he was also trained in hand to hand combat and the competent use of any weapon placed in his hands. He could operate vehicles from cars to planes, and was fluent in several languages, my own tongue of German being one of them,” Sidney said. “He was an experienced and shrewd negotiator, and given his size and ability to kill a man with nothing more than a quick snap of his wrists, he’d earned a reputation for being quite formidable. So, naturally…many wanted him dead.”

  My skin prickled as he stared back and forth between the pictures. I didn’t know whether or not to believe what he said. Not to mention I was rather ashamed to admit that I wanted to hear more about Roger and his life, as I knew so little…

  “Not only that, but your husband was also wanted for a very particular reason…something that he alone was a master at, something that no one could even come close to his level and skill in…he was a code breaker, which was incredibly valuable to British Intelligence. Thanks to Roger and men like him, the British could detect attacks and information quickly and pass that information along to their allies, thereby thwarting our plans in action, and ultimately, finding a way to get the upper hand in this war. As you can imagine, that was something Germany and her allies did not want to continue…and so a man as valuable as Roger had to go.”

  My eyes narrowed. How could he speak so flippantly about someone’s life like that?

  “Your husband managed to crack a code that I had been working on personally…it had taken him a great deal of time, but he’d managed to do it nonetheless. And do you know where he hid this code?” Sidney asked, his eyes flashing dangerously as he looked over at me.

  All I could do was stare up at him. He really wanted me to answer that? But then before he spoke, it struck me as hard as it had the first time.

  “My letters…” I said.

  Sidney smiled at me. “Well done, Helen. So you did figure that out eventually. I thought you might, having gone to see Roger’s London friends. You never told me their names…Was it possibly the Michaels? Or the Gordons? Or maybe it was even Dr. Lilith Stroughbeck?”

  I was not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing, so I simply hardened my gaze even further.

  His smile widened, but never reached his eyes. “Very well. I won’t bother them, don’t worry. I didn’t need to…not when I was able to track down Roger Lightholder’s own wife.”

  He slid his left hand into his pocket, and pointed up at the photo of Roger and me with his right. “You were quite difficult to find. Roger certainly did a good job at hiding you. I suspect he had intended to feed you information through letters without you ever really being aware of it, as a means of back up, in case things ever went wrong…which they certainly did.”

  He walked over to the desk that sat in the middle of the room, and pulled open one of the drawers. It was filled to the top with papers, old newspapers, and bills. Sifting around inside for a moment, he finally pulled out a stack of letters that I recognized right away.

  My stomach twisted into painful knots.

  “You were the one breaking into my house this whole time…” I said, a heaviness squeezing my heart. “I was trusting you to watch my home, and you – you were breaking in. You shattered that picture of Roger and I, and – ”

  “It may have been trespassing, certainly,” Sidney said, rifling through the letters without care, ripping the edge of one, creasing the page of another. “But you cannot truly consider it breaking in when I knew where the key was the whole time, especially when you would often willingly give it to me for me to get inside so I could repair things for you, yes?”

  The cold reality spread through me. He was right. I’d been the one allowing him in this whole time, completely unaware…

  “And yes, I did break the picture of you and Roger. I thought it might be just the clue you needed to spur you on. I needed more information, and you wanted answers, so off you went to London, didn’t you? Not that you shared anything when you returned home…” he muttered.

  I’m glad that something told me to keep that secret from you…

  “Well, regardless…Roger certainly thought highly of you, didn’t he? He assumed you would realize that he had hidden the key to the code inside one of his last letters to you, and he trusted that you would read between the lines, and get the information into safe hands. But that’s not how it all worked out…is it? No, it isn’t. Yet there the code sat, in your possession, for all this time…”

  “How did you know?” I asked, glaring up at him. “How did you know he’d hidden the key to the code
in his letters to me?”

  “Who else would he have trusted?” Sidney asked. “There were spies infiltrating the ranks of those he worked most closely with. How could he be certain none of them were aiding someone like me, someone who had successfully made his way into the country and worked himself into a position of trust? No, you were the only one he could have slipped the information to. You were the safe bet, since you were out of the city, and in some undisclosed location, a place that he never shared with anyone. Not even those he was closest to.”

  His words made sense, as much as I hated hearing them.

  I waited until he spun around to regard the board once again before tugging on the straps around my wrists. The one on the left still constrained me. The right, however…was even looser this time. He had failed to tie the first knot as tight. Maybe it was good he hadn’t really tried until I started arguing with him as he tied the second strap.

  “You would have been fine, you know…” Sidney said. “Had you decided to remain in Plymouth. But no, you had to come to Brookminster and start your whole life over. You were the one who landed yourself in all this trouble. Had you listened to Roger’s request and stayed in a safe place, I likely wouldn’t have gotten to you before you figured out how important those letters of his were, and who knows where we all might be now?”

  My throat grew tight at his words. Had it really all been my fault? Was my desire to move away from my past what started all this?

  “When you revealed yourself in London once again, that made it easy for me to find you at the funeral. From there, however, I lost you once more. But after further digging…I realized you’d moved to Brookminster, where you were now living, working at your aunt’s old shop.”

  “How did you learn that?” I asked.

  Sidney smiled. “There are people in this town who are helpful to me,” he said. “Money speaks louder than loyalty, sometimes…as do threats to hearth and home.”

  The blood pounded in my ears. “You’re disgusting,” I said.