by Angela Misri
Still holding my face, she motioned for me to speak, waving her hand at her throat and opening her mouth.
I said, “My name is Portia Adams and I live on Baker Street,” waiting for and recognizing the look of confusion that came across the boy’s face that confirmed that I was still speaking gibberish.
The aunt raised her chin and asked him something while I took back the pen to write an explanation, “I can say words, but the words I end up saying with my mouth are not the words I mean to say in my head.”
She pulled at her nephew’s sleeve and said something else to him that he wrote, “My aunt Chen asks if you are taking medicine for the accident.”
I nodded, writing, “Three times a day, I take about fifteen pills. Why?”
“Do you have them with you?” he wrote directly underneath. I nodded, reaching into my satchel for a small pillbox and handing them to the older lady who had extended her hand for them. She shook a few out into her hand and then, carrying them to her counter, crushed one up in a mortar using a pestle. I wasn’t really that concerned about the loss of one pill, but I tapped Lin’s shoulder, shaking my head, hopefully indicating that I didn’t want any more of my pills destroyed.
He shrugged, but said something to his aunt who, in the meantime, had added some oily liquid to the crushed pill and then, with her pinky finger, tasted the mixture, spitting it back out a second later.
“She says you must stop taking the medicine. That you are better already,” Lin said.
I frowned as she pulled out a small canister and spoke to her nephew.
“Drink a cup of this tea every night instead of taking the medicine your doctor gave you. She says it will help your mind recover.”
I had no intention of taking the advice of a woman I had just met over the Watsons, who had supervised my care since my accident, but I chose to write instead, “Why does she collect articles about me?”
Lin read the note and shook his head, not needing to ask his aunt before writing the answer. “It is not hers. The man who lived here before left it behind.”
Curiouser and curiouser. I asked Lin if I could see the scrapbook and after a quick word with his aunt, he handed it to me. I flipped through it, finding to my surprise articles pasted in it that made no mention of me, but were cases I had been involved with behind the scenes. No other writing could be found on the pages, but I had an idea who this had belonged to. Someone who knew my methods intimately and had a mind that burned as brightly and unrelentingly as my own.
“The man who left this behind, was he a doctor?” I wrote to the young boy.
He nodded, so I asked, “Can I take this with me?”
He looked to his aunt who to my surprise shook her head, extending her hand for the scrapbook. I handed it back, not sure why she wanted to keep it, but unable to come up with another idea on how to convince her to give it to me.
“She says she keeps it as a ward against his return. She didn’t like him,” Lin had written in the meantime.
I didn’t know if he would be back, but I wondered what Gavin had done to make this woman distrust him. I hoped for both our sakes that he would not return, because I did not relish the confrontation. I gave a small bow of thanks and left the small shop, my mind full of worries I hadn’t walked in with.
CHAPTER 12
HE WATCHED HER LEAVE the small store alone, her uncharacteristically slow pace betraying her distraction. He knew that posture well. She had learned something from the shopkeeper and her nosy nephew. Portia Adams did not need a lot of data to start formulating a hypothesis. And he really didn’t need her interference.
He leaned away, behind the ragged curtain as she looked around, eyes narrowed, another one of her habits. Constantly cataloguing. Constantly gathering information. Nothing escaped her gaze and once she had something between her teeth, she was a veritable bloodhound.
She finally seemed to come to a decision, walking back the way she had come.
She was adapting to her condition.
The part of him that loved her applauded her resilience. The part of him that was scared of her hated her for it.
CHAPTER 13
“SORRY PORTIA, MR. BENSON is taking his sweet time looking through his archives for mention of a Major Collins,” the note Annie Coleson handed me read.
She then said aloud what she had written so I could practise recognizing the words on her lips, her finger hovering over each word as she said it the way Amélie had demonstrated.
She hadn’t been able to help me much with Ms. Wilans either. None of the other ladies-in-waiting had mentioned an accident that could account for her injuries, but Annie promised to follow up with some of the more gossipy ladies and ask some discreet questions about the older woman.
I sighed, blowing out my breath so that my new bangs flew around my forehead. Annie had taken me to her favourite barber to finally fix the damage done to my hair. I had to admit, turning my head slightly so I could see the sides of my short cut in the mirror across from where I sat, the style suited me and would be far less work to maintain than the longer styles I had worn since I was a teenager in Toronto.
Annie grinned, seeing me looking at myself, and I stuck my tongue out at her. Annie had had short, curly blond hair since the day I had met her and nothing I ever did in a beauty salon would compete with her natural good looks. She was seeingsomeone new, but so far had not told me about him. I found it impossible to ignore the types of gifts he was lavishing upon her, the kind that spoke of wealth but anonymity. Gifts that would be hard to trace back to the giver. But I had learned from experience that it was best to allow my friends to tell me about new relationships rather than revealing that I had known about them for a long time.
I pulled the notebook back to me as she took another bite of her banana split, batting her eyelashes at the gentlemen who had just entered The Trifle café behind where I sat. This spot across from the War Office on Whitehall was frequented by officials of the government and their underlings because it was a block away from 10 Downing Street.
“So, what do really you think of Gavin’s creepy scrapbook?” she wrote on the notepad.
I crossed out the word creepy and gave her a look.
She raised her hands in mock surrender but wrote, “Boyfriends aren’t supposed to keep tabs on you. Ex-boyfriends even less so. So glad you broke up with that creep.”
I bit my lip before I took the pencil she proffered, “He broke up with me. And you know that he was good to me before —”
She snatched the pencil before I could finish the sentence, “Oh no, Portia Adams,” she said aloud, forgetting my issues.
I pulled another pencil out of my bag, “— before he decided that money and power were more important than me. Lesson learned, Annie. New subject?”
“I’m working on a story about stockpiling weapons,” she admitted via the notepad. “Not my usual beat, but Henry Rees asked me to help him out. You know how he gets when he’s chasing a rumour.”
“Do you want to come with me to the War Office?” I wrote, passing the notebook back to her and waving away her offered spoonful of ice cream.
She shook her head ruefully, writing, “No. I need to telegram my father in Sandwell. Haven’t heard from him in weeks. Getting worried.”
She passed the notebook back to me, giving a tiny wave to the men who now sat behind me. I sighed. Annie’s secret relationship didn’t keep her from flirting with anything in suspenders and a fine hat. One of the men took her up on her flirtation, strolling over to lean on the table and introduce himself to us. He extended a hand my way and I shook it dutifully before he dismissed me from his gaze to focus on my lovely friend, who smiled beatifically up at him. I turned away from the conversation I couldn’t hear to lock eyes with the man who had held a knife to my neck at Downing Street. He blew a large pink bubble and before it had popped I had switched fro
m my table to his, notebook in hand.
“Hello again,” he said, if I’d read his lips correctly.
I wrote on my notepad, “Why are you following me?”
He said something I couldn’t decipher from watching his mouth, so I tapped the notebook with my pencil. He gave a dramatic sigh that I could see if not hear, before reaching for the notepad and writing, “Who’s following whom? You didn’t show up at The Trifle just for the desserts, I’m sure.”
Not being able to snap back a retort was so annoying, but worse, I was not at my best, and dealing with this man, I sensed I needed to be at my best. I slid the pack of Morlands I had bought for him with my grandmother and his smile wavered. He didn’t like that I was creating a profile of him. I had landed a glancing blow. I had another.
“You’re not a Navy man and you’re not police,” I wrote beneath his words. “You’re with Box 850 aren’t you?” The last time I had had dealings with someone from Box 850, as the British Secret Intelligence Service was colloquially called, was with an unscrupulous agent who had turned from serving the British people to lining his pockets. I didn’t know if the British Secret Intelligence Service employed many minorities in their spy ring, but I knew there were a few women in the service and I suspected this man would do well as a spy because no one would suspect him.
The man sitting in front of me leaned back his chair, that sexy smile that I’m sure other women found entirely disarming resurfacing as he opened his gift of cigarettes.
“Don’t make me take another swing at the family jewels, you can’t afford it,” I wrote. “Who are you?”
I expected him to flinch at the memory, or at least glower, but this man was a strategist, plus a threat delivered by pencil and paper was not my most intimidating power. He pulled the paper back his way to write, “You can call me Lancaster. And don’t worry, I’ll never underestimate you again. By the way, what did you find out about Heddy Collins?”
Her name was Heddy Collins. What else did he know? I leaned over the table, intending to scrawl something incendiary, when I felt the lightest of vibrations through the table leg. I couldn’t hear it because of my injuries, but was it normal that I should feel the vibration? Lancaster had leaned back again and I followed his eye line to two men sitting on barstools. He noticed me looking and continued his gaze as if he were enjoying the sight of a server leaning over a table, wiping it clean. I wasn’t fooled. I recognized one of those men. If I wasn’t mistaken, that was Éamon O’Duffy, of Sinn Féin … and what was that vibration? I couldn’t concentrate with that pattern knocking against my knee. I looked around for a large clock or a piano being played nearby. Nothing. I stood up, looking for the source of the rhythmic tremor, shutting everything else out, pressing my hand on the table to feel the consistent pulsation, barely discernible unless you really concentrated. I could hear the drumming of voices all around me, but they were easy to ignore, to push back into the silence that engulfed me. This was an entirely different sense, one that was not injured and it was fully engaged. I closed my eyes, running my hand down the table leg to the floor. It was slightly stronger here. It was pulsing from beneath the floorboards. I opened my eyes to meet the gaze of the man who wanted me to believe his name was Lancaster, his air of indifference long gone.
“What is it?” he asked me, enunciating slowly.
I tapped the floor with my hand. “Underneath us,” I said.
He pressed his hand to the floor and then his ear to the floor for a few heartbeats, then leapt to his feet and spoke in a deep drumming voice. I didn’t need to hear him to know he was telling people to leave the restaurant from the way they stood up and started gathering their things frantically. We both watched O’Duffy’s reaction, but he just followed his friend out of the pub with a frown, his mouth moving constantly and unreadable through the crowd. Annie reached for me from her table, but her erstwhile beau (no doubt Lancaster’s peer) picked her up in his arms and carried her out of the room. He was going to get an earful from her about his assumptions once he put her down. I got up from the floor and moved against the crowds, making my way to the kitchens. Behind the cooks and wait staff clamouring to leave I saw what I was looking for: stairs leading down.
I made my way down the dimly lit wooden stairs to a basement that was barely five feet high and obviously used for storage, refuse, and little else. The light switch was useless, so I pressed my hand to the ceiling of this basement and felt the multitude of vibrations of a room full of people leaving the building and then a second single vibration, the weighted footsteps of a man walking down the stairs to join me. Lancaster put his hand on my shoulder and I immediately picked it up and pressed it to the ceiling so that he might feel what I was feeling. That rhythm I had noticed had returned now that everyone had stopped moving. Crouching down, I moved forward, squinting in the darkness, already dreading what I was looking for. I turned to see him pointing at a small alarm clock attached to the ceiling of the basement with wires. We carefully pushed boxes of potatoes and onions out of the way, until we could crouch beneath it. The man pulled out a small torch and he pointed it up to reveal the face of the clock, the red alarm hand set to midnight and a wire leading out of it, also stapled to the ceiling. Following the wire with his torch light, I counted eleven bombs wired to eleven clocks, arranged in a circle that would surely destroy the main floor when detonated.
Lancaster pointed at the stairs adamantly. “Go. Now.”
I shook my head, looking around for wire cutters amongst the boxes and shelves. If someone had placed this system of bombs and wiring down here surely they had used tools. Why had they used eleven clocks? Why not wire them all to one clock in sequence?
The man reached into his pocket to pull out the slim knife that had once been pressed against my throat in a hallway on Downing Street. He pointed it at the wires above us, and then at me, and then at the stairs.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I muttered at him, not amused by his look of confusion at whatever word jumble had actually left my mouth.
I focused on the wires. Were they armed to trip if we were to cut the wrong one? It did not seem complex. I ran my hand lightly along one, following it from clock to mine. Could it really be this simple to disarm? I looked back to where the man was crouching to see him holding my notebook up with the words, “If you’re determined to die down here with me, you should at least tell me what you know about the bombings.”
You first, I thought, watching as he turned the notebook back his way to write again. I would never trust an agent of the British Intelligence Service again. My fingers found a wire wound in a loop and I refocused on it rather than the man a few feet away. The loop went round a small screw in the mine and I unwound it carefully it so that it came loose in my fingers. The wire dropped free of the bomb it was attached to and I let out my breath. I followed the wires back to their respective clocks, unwinding the loops one at a time, noticing that Lancaster had caught on and mimicked my actions. We met under the clock where we started from, where four wires now hung loosely from their clocks’ backs, all detached from the bombs.
I reached up to take hold of the clock closest to me, glancing at the agent. He lit a cigarette and nodded as if I was plucking an apple from a tree rather than taking our lives into my hand. I wondered for a second how it feels to be that confident, and then I remembered, it’s how I used to feel before losing half my powers of deduction. I gritted my teeth as I pulled the clock from its cradle.
CHAPTER 14
“THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” I said again.
The men sitting across from me glanced my way — Lancaster with a look of curiosity, the other with annoyance. Who knows what I had said in my confused patois. The evidence and my satchel had been stripped from me, slung over the back of this interrogator’s chair, so I had no notebook or pen with which to communicate. Not that these two seemed interested in what I might have to say; their rumbling conversation
sounded like an argument to my injured ears.
I was in a holding room of some kind, with a single door and no windows. Not at Scotland Yard, but on the south end of London, if my perception of all the twists and turns we took as I sat in the back of the unmarked lorry was right. I should add a compass to my belt of tools that already includes a folding magnifying glass and a lock pick. This room was stark and old with yellowing walls, and when I concentrated, I could smell old paint … perhaps this was part of a warehouse or a factory. There were no grinding sounds that I could discern and the few men we had passed as I was shuffled into this room had been professionals, of the same ilk as the men in front of me.
After I had walked up the stairs carrying the clock, we had been “escorted” out of The Trifle by five men through a back doorinto an alley and hustled into the back of a lorry. I could sense Lancaster protesting physically behind me, but we were given no chance to explain or escape and I saw no one else in the alley who could help us, not even one of my faithful Irregulars.
I blew out my breath, remembering Olsen’s advice, and refocused on the annoyed man with the moustache and the circular glasses and skin so pale that the red spots of anger in his cheeks looked like poppies. Late fifties, former military if his haircut, scars, and posture were any indication. He held a series of coloured index cards in his hand and seemed to be referring to them as he argued. His lips were almost impossible to read because of the moustache, so I looked at Lancaster’s perfectly shaped brown lips instead, catching every third word or so. She. Heddy? Over?
Lancaster suddenly stood up, gesticulating in my direction and knocked over his chair in his exit from the room. He didn’t even look back at me.