The Detective and the Spy

by Angela Misri

  “Sorry,” I mumbled as I stooped to help her pick up the items that had spilled out, a tube of lipstick, an invoice for a language class, a letter addressed to a Maj. Collins, a limp coin purse and half packet of biscuits.

  Her face was a combination of annoyance and confusion, but I took a careful look at her hands as she picked up her items and placed them carefully in their proper spots in her purse, around an item wrapped in a stained kerchief. I sniffed the air and caught the faint scent of gun oil, perhaps indicating what was wrapped in the kerchief. She leaned away from me, suspicious for good reason, and walked away to rejoin her colleagues, glancing over her shoulder, perhaps to be sure I wasn’t following. Though it was unusual for women to carry guns, it was not unheard of in this economic climate when brazen daylight thefts were on the rise. Nothing here directly linked her to the girl I had seen in that crowd except for their remarkable eyes and the wariness with which they regarded me.

  CHAPTER 10

  I PUT DOWN MY library book on genetics and hereditary traits to scribble down some data. Of course, there were more than two women in London with heterochromia, but there were other facial similarities. Enough for me to suspect the women were related. Similar eye size in relation to the size of their faces, attached earlobes, and a shared widow’s peak. I had my mother’s eyes and according to photos of my father, shared his wavy dark hair, which he in turn had inherited from his own mother, Irene Adler. I had spent three hours going through photos of students at the college, but had not found the face of the girl on the crutches in any of them. Of course, she could be shy, or not involved in extra-curricular activities, and to be honest, she seemed young for college classes. Two women who might be related at two different crime scenes? Coincidence or just one of London’s big-city-small-world quirks?

  Over on the wall next to the door I had a large map of London, a useful relic from when Holmes and Watson had lived in this apartment. It included codes and a notebook corresponding to the codes, detailing hidden aspects of alleyways and buildings that were fronts for criminal activities in the 1890s when he and Watson had been active. In my work, I added pins when I had a current case, keeping my own coded notebook of explanation, and right now, the pins were placed wherever a bomb threat had been reported. Where a bomb had actually exploded, I wound a yellow string around it. The pins weren’t in a cluster, but I had included pins (wound in blue thread) for the call boxes closest to the targets. Staring at this map, I thought about places where you could call in a bomb threat and then watch from a safe distance as the mayhem ensued. I walked up to the pin at the train station. There were only two call boxes within viewing distance, but there were three pubs. I would have to check them out.

  I looked at all the tomes on the table, noticing that some of them were not mine. Heather and Amélie had been busy. Amélie had been over to my apartment twice more to try and help me learn basic sign language, but when I went downstairs to Brian’s apartment to get him to help with the lip-reading the way Annie had, I was told by his mother that he hadn’t come home yet. There were four books on sign language and lip-reading. I reached out a hand to open one and then pulled it away like the books were an open flame. I wouldn’t need them and I wouldn’t need any more of Amélie’s help. I was going to recover from this affliction. To open those books was to admit that this could be a permanent state. And that was unthinkable.

  The second unfortunate discovery was that Nerissa had been locked in my bedroom and I hadn’t heard her desperate attempts to communicate her need to be taken for a walk. She had expressed her need on the rug near the foot of my bed. With a sigh, I quickly bundled up the rug, my nose wrinkled against the smell, and threw it into my bathtub with some soap and water to let it soak.

  I could scarcely be angry at my bloodhound; she had probably been trying to get my attention since I walked in the door. I apologized to her with a hug, and leashed her, deciding we could both use the walk.

  It was bitingly cold tonight, so the park was all but deserted except for a homeless man on a bench, who, according to the movement of his mouth, was having a long conversation with the birds gathered around him. Nerissa ran off into the gorse bushes as usual and the squirrels she surprised came pelting out the other side, no doubt challenging her with their high-pitched chirps, which I remembered but could not hear.

  I had to go back to the beginning — to the motive. Why was someone warning the police and then carrying out bombings that neither killed people nor allowed for other crimes like theft? What was the motive? Terrorism was usually linked to some group to make a point. Was there a bigger plan or was this bomber just an amateur? Was the girl at the college also suffering from a disability such as mine? Is that why she hadn’t reacted? And who was the man with the slim knife? I needed more data and my usual skills were not up to the task.

  I sat down on a bench, my mind returning to the man who had attacked me as the smell of bubble gum and Morlands wafted over the breeze and I realized with a shock that it was not just a memory. I whirled to look at the bench where the homeless man had been sitting and cursed aloud.

  I called Nerissa to my side and strode to the bench he had so recently occupied, looking down the park lanes in both directions. He was long gone. I slumped my way home feeling discouraged, but it wasn’t until later that night when I was swallowing my handful of pills that I realized that Nerissa had come when I called. Maybe I had managed to say her name?

  I ran down the stairs at top speed, knocking on the apartment door to 221a. I had to knock three times before the door was opened and almost before he had fully opened the door, I said, “Brian.”

  He rubbed at his eyes, and said something, maybe “yes?” in answer, obviously I had woken him from a deep sleep.

  I grasped his arm and said it again, “Brian.”

  He finally understood and gave a whoop, his eyes going wide. I grinned from ear to ear as he started babbling at me, still not hearing any of his words.

  I shook my head and when he wouldn’t stop talking at me, grasped him by the sides of his face and kissed him solidly on the mouth.

  When I stepped back he was still grinning like an idiot which made me realize that we were both in our bedclothes. I stepped back, blushing, and said, “Tomorrow.”

  He seemed to understand because he nodded and said it back to me, “Tomorrow.” He waited for me to climb my stairs before he closed his front door.

  CHAPTER 11

  BUT SUNDAY WAS A step backwards in every way. Though Brian and I tried for a half hour on my couch, my words were once again jumbled and wrong. It put a damper on our ardour because instead of enjoying Brian’s lips, I found myself carefully watching his mouth and trying to interpret his whispered questions, only getting about one in ten words right. Trying to communicate what we wanted, what felt good, became guesswork. So much so that I pushed him away, his flushed face and half-closed eyes turned questioning and then disappointed. He left without an argument (or at least one I could participate in), carefully picking his shirt off the floor with his right hand on the way out, his left still bandaged. I let my blood cool for a few minutes and then, against my instincts, opened the book Heather had left behind on lip-reading and read it cover to cover. I hated the drawn images and I hated the advice and most of all I hated that I had been reduced to this condition. And then of course I felt the guilt over spending twenty-four years of my life with all my senses when people like Amélie lived happier lives with less. But her livelihood didn’t depend on deduction.

  I tried standing in front of the mirror to practise reading my own lips, but since I wasn’t sure I was saying the words I intended to say, that exercise just left me angry at my body’s betrayal.

  In addition, two clients who had hired me to help with their cases had sent notes absolving me of my detective assignments. They were notes full of sympathy, quoting the injuries reported by various newspapers, but I absorbed each word lik
e it was a carefully embedded splinter, dully painful and living beneath my skin. My skills were diminished and so too was my value to society. Even my value as a companion to the man I had fallen in love with seemed damaged. His pain was constant and not limited to his hand. Writing back and forth I wasn’t able to coerce the level of pain out of him, nor the treatment prescribed by the doctor. He didn’t want to talk about it and he most certainly did not want to spend our time together writing about it.

  Feeling epically discouraged, I decided to visit my grandmother, hoping that she could cheer me up.

  “The queen had better do something about all this bad publicity,” she wrote in my notebook in the back of her Bentley, handing me a few newspapers she had folded to highlight the damning articles. “She’s coming off worse than the king for her spending and she doesn’t have the benefit of a parliament to blame.”

  I shuffled papers featuring headlines that were bolder than usual in their attacks on the queen, noticing the stoic positioning of Ms. Wilans again as she raised an umbrella against a pack of journalists stalking her charge. Forget the royal guard, this woman was the queen’s most ferocious defender.

  I held one of the newspapers up to the car window as we pulled up to our destination. Was that bandaging around Wilans’ hands? What could a lady-in-waiting get into that would hurt both her hands like that? Was she actually beating the crowds away with her bare fists? It was hard to tell in this photo. I’d have to ask Annie if she could help me find the original.

  “Good news,” my grandmother wrote in my notebook as we sat down in the lobby of the St. Ermin’s Hotel while being served tea and fresh strawberry scones. “There is a clinic in Switzerland that specializes in brain trauma cases. I have secured you a room there starting in June.”

  I tried to convey a sense of gratitude, but failed miserably. The idea of suffering under these conditions any longer was stifling and a clinic in Switzerland sounded unbearably depressing.

  “But what about my work?” I wrote back to her. “And the college? I’m months away from graduating.”

  She assured me that the college would hold my place, or she’d make them hold exams that took my new disability into account, but that accommodation did not improve my mood. Who would hire a lawyer who couldn’t even communicate? Or a consulting detective who couldn’t speak to suspects or convince the police of their deductions?

  As usual, she felt the best remedy for sadness was spending money, so we left the hotel for the shops, stopping often at windows so she could point out the latest fashions coming from Milan and Paris. She abjectly refused to come into the boutique armaments shop and after a few minutes sniffing expensive gun oils and annoying the staff, I left. As far as I knew, Holmes had done an exhaustive study of 140 tobaccos and their ash, but had never taken on gun oil. I decided I would be making my own monograph soon.

  Thinking about smells, I was reminded of Amélie’s scent and my grandmother was all too happy to take me to her favourite perfumery on Grosvenor Street to purchase two small bottles of Shalimar — one for me and one to thank Amélie. The dandy behind the counter was trying to sell my grandmother a small bottle of men’s eau de toilette, but we both took a sniff and agreed it wasn’t for any of the men in our lives. Too floral and spicy.

  The tobacconist next door provided the confirmation I had been looking for. I picked up a Balkan blend of Morlands, holding it to my nose and recognizing it immediately.

  “For Brian?” asked my grandmother, a quirk on her lipstick-sheened lips.

  I shook my head, paying for the cigarettes, my heart still sad about the way Brian and I had left things, but beating faster when I thought of the man with the knife.

  I had decided not to tell my grandmother about the minor attack at Downing Street nor about my very brief recovery of my speech. The first would just upset her and the second would needlessly get her hopes up. My own hopes were exhausted, what with the promise of recovery and the regression of my symptoms. It was honestly tiring to be in a constant state of sensory flux.

  I walked my grandmother back to her car where her driver was patiently waiting, turning down her offer to attend an upcoming ball, but promising to have dinner with her within the week. I decided to walk some of the way home — the day was cool after all, but the sun was shining, which was not always so in this city.

  Standing on the platform at the tube, I looked from moving mouth to moving mouth, drawn to the lips, the responses, both vocalized and contained purely in the muscles of the face. Some of these Londoners were going to work, others coming home laden with shopping bags; all were able to communicate without even thinking about it, even with complete strangers. I glanced across the tracks and did a double take. Wasn’t that Ms. Wilans herself? From here I could see her bandaged hands, an umbrella in one, an ancient alligator purse in the other, and that same crabby face I had come to recognize from the newspapers. I wasn’t the only one who had recognized her. A group of young women were pointing and whispering in her direction and a man carrying one of the newspapers featuring her visage was looking from it to her and back again, his face betraying his growing anger. If these people couldn’t find a queen to make pay for their financial troubles, her lady-in-waiting would do in a pinch. I was walking towards the tunnel that would take me to the north side of the tracks before any of them moved. Halfway down the tunnel I felt the rumble of the train pulling in above me and I broke into a run, sprinting up the stairs to the other side, onto the platform, and throwing myself through the train doors just in time. The train lurched into motion and I started looking for my lady-in-waiting. I moved from train car to train car, not seeing her, until Stepney Green, when out of the corner of my eye I caught her stepping off the train just as the doors closed.

  I wasn’t ready to give up. I got off at Mile End, impatiently waited for the train that would take me back, and then got off at Stepney Green less than ten minutes later. Obviously, Wilans was no longer in the station — why would she be — but I headed north, hoping that she might choose to stop at the market on her way home.

  I passed several shops with Yiddish signs and a few Asian stores as well, the script flowing down and up and down again in beautiful columns meant to be read top to bottom and right to left. This was a part of London that was filled to the brim with immigrant culture, the sights and smells distinct and enticing, reminding me of my childhood in Cabbagetown. I shook my head at someone trying to sell me what looked like candied apples and smiled at a very serious couple pushing a baby carriage. They responded by doubling their speed and glancing back over their shoulders at me. The economic woes had hit this area hard and the number of children begging was almost double what you would find in the central parts of London. Their sad eyes looked up at me with a combination of hope and suspicion, so I stopped the man with the apples, bought ten of them and handed them out to the children in the alleyways between buildings. I remembered being this hungry. In Toronto, my mother had done her best to keep us clothed and fed, but there were more than a few mornings I went to school hungry, the breakfast money spent by my useless stepfather on booze the night before.

  One older child, a Chinese boy, took the apple I gave him and immediately handed it to a smaller girl at his side, his eyes on me. He said something to me, so I took out my notebook and turned to the page that explained my situation. I handed it to him. To my surprise he read it and nodded, reaching out his hand for my pencil. I gave it to him and he wrote back in neat even hand-writing, “We can help.”

  He beckoned me to follow him. I still hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Wilans and my curiosity overrode my reservations as usual, so I followed him a block and a half and into a narrow herbal medicine shop.

  The boy spoke to the woman behind the counter, their drumming sounds rhythmic and consistent, but different than any sounds I had heard before. I realized that they were probably not speaking English and almost smiled at the rhythmic diff
erences that language added to conversation. The way the beats seemed to end on an upward lilt and sound like questions, even in the dulled way I heard conversation now. It was hard to explain, but I closed my eyes to concentrate on the sounds, cataloguing another clue I would never have picked up on before. Body language transcended race and language, these two were close, and trusted each other, their hand gestures very alike.

  The boy mimed writing on my notepad. Bemused, I handed it to him, and he wrote, “My name is Lin. My aunt is a healer. Tell her what is wrong with you.”

  I wrote, “I was in an accident and I have a doctor. He says it will take time to heal.”

  “What kind of accident?” the boy wrote back after again exchanging words with his aunt.

  I shook my head, writing, “Thank you, but I have all the help I need.”

  He read the note aloud to his aunt who pulled a scrapbook out from under the counter and flipped to a page and spoke to us again. I moved forward to see an article from The Sunday Times pasted onto the page, including a photo of myself in full consulting detective mode and a crowd of reporters behind me.

  I looked to Lin and his aunt and tapped the image.

  “You recognized me from this photo, Lin?” I wrote in my notebook.

  He nodded on reading the note and on the encouragement of his aunt pointed to his earlier question, “What kind of accident?”

  “An explosion. I was knocked backwards and my ears were damaged,” I wrote back.

  I could tell when the boy said the word explosion because the woman’s eyes grew wide and she started speaking much faster, the staccato sound reminding me of rain hitting a pond, but deeper.

  “And you cannot speak because of this?” the boy wrote, on the instruction of his grandmother.

  I frowned, unsure how to answer this because no one seemed to know exactly why I couldn’t speak, but before I could write an answer, the woman moved around the counter to reach up and grasp my face in her bronzed hands. The lady turned my face this way and that, pulled my left ear close, looked inside, and muttered under her breath, the smell of ginger floating off her as she chewed on a piece of the fresh vegetable.