She shook her head. “And they think Aubrey—”
“They don’t know. They just want to question him.” I couldn’t tell her about Germans, fires, and dangerous smuggling operations, but I couldn’t leave her in the dark, either. “Rachel, you must be careful.”
She was refilling the water glass by her father’s bedside. “Of course. I’m always careful.”
“No, I mean truly be careful. There are some strange things going on, and I’m not sure what it’s about or what’s going to happen. Please promise me you won’t trust just anyone.”
She gave me a look. “I’ve known Aubrey Thorne all my life, and William, too. Those two have always been best friends, inseparable, at least until the war came. It does make sense that if William has gone off somewhere, Aubrey might know where he is.”
“You don’t like William,” I said.
“I didn’t have much to do with him until I married Ray.” She passed a tired hand over her forehead, tried to smooth the wisps of her hair. “I tried to like him.”
“William said he and Ray were very close.”
“Did he?” She shook her head. “William adored Ray; that much is true. And Annie dotes on William, though he barely notices her. That’s how it went in that family. Annie adored William, and William adored Ray.”
“And Ray?” I said.
“Ray wanted to get away from both of them. That’s what he told me after we married—that he was glad to get out of that house.”
George’s hand twitched in mine, and I looked down at him. He was drifting off to sleep, his breathing shallow in his narrow chest. “I’ve been in that house twice,” I said through the thickness in my throat. “Alone. With William.”
“He had that horrible sickness during the war,” said Rachel. “No one thought he would live. He came back different. He had always been calm and gentle, but when he came back he was wild, unsettled. Aubrey was the same. They both seemed so . . . disaffected, somehow. They’d come home when the war was still on—they’d been invalided out—and I think it bothered them to be at home while others were fighting. They didn’t work; they said they wanted to have fun. They stole fishing boats and tried to race them, though neither of them knows how to drive one. They’d go up to the cliffs at night and drink until they passed out—one wrong step and they’d have gone over. William said he could swim anything, so Aubrey dared him to go into the ocean on the coldest day of winter. William swam until he was nearly unconscious, and two fishermen had to get in their boats and haul him out before he died. That sort of thing.”
I swallowed. It didn’t sound fun, or funny, to me. It sounded like the actions of men who wanted to die.
“Aubrey’s parents were worried to death,” Rachel continued, “and Annie nearly had a breakdown. The war ended, and we thought it might calm them down, but it made no difference. Then Aubrey met Enid. She had an amazing effect on him. He stopped doing all those crazy things, quit drinking, and became vicar. Will calmed down as well, perhaps only because Aubrey did.”
When I was sure George had fallen asleep, I gently slipped his hand from mine and laid it on the coverlet. Rachel slid into my place as I rose, a book in her hand. “In case he wakes,” she said. “Reading seems to make him feel better.”
“I’ll come back later.”
The smile she gave me when she heard this was heartbreaking in its pleasure. “Will you? I think he’d like that. I know he thinks you’re someone else, but . . .”
“I know.”
I left the room, closing the door softly behind me. Aubrey had gone, and Drew and Teddy were standing in the empty store, arguing under their breath.
“God,” Teddy was saying. “How unbelievably frustrating to have to let him go. What I want to do is go to that vicarage and turn the bloody place upside down.”
“It wouldn’t do us any good,” said Drew.
“It would put an end to it. I had a quick look at Moorcock’s, but there could be lots of places in that little house where he’s stashed it. What I wouldn’t give to go back there and toss it.”
“Teddy, we’re leaving, just like we were told.”
“And what if the information’s wrong? What if nothing happens tomorrow, and they’ve gotten wind? Get the evidence now, I say. For all we know, that book burned up in the fire.”
“What book?” I said.
They stopped and looked at me. Drew opened his mouth, but Teddy spoke over him. “You needn’t concern yourself, Miss Leigh.”
I came toward them down the aisle. “I’d say I’m already concerned. I want to know. What book are you talking about?”
Drew held my gaze, but it was Easterbrook who spoke. “How thoroughly did you go through the books in the old archive before they burned?”
I didn’t look away from Drew. His mouth became a hard line of resignation, but he nodded.
“I looked at them,” I said.
“Closely?” Teddy went on. “Each one?”
I thought back, remembered. “I read all the spines.”
“And you saw nothing out of the ordinary?” This was Drew. “Did you open them all? Look at the pages?”
“I didn’t open them all, no. The only thing I noticed was the Book of Common Prayer. It was worthless, and it was stuck in the bookshelf with all the antiques.”
“What about that one?” This was Teddy. “Did you open it?”
“Yes. It was truly the Book of Common Prayer.”
Teddy gave Drew a meaningful look, and Drew said, “He moved the book, then. He put something else there to fill the gap.”
“Unless they’re lying to the Germans.”
“Look,” I said. “You may as well tell me. I know enough about it as it is. Perhaps I can help. What book are you looking for?”
Drew put his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. He loomed big in the dimly lit store, and I pushed away my memory of the muscles moving in his shoulders as they flexed bare under my palms. “We don’t know for certain,” he said. “There’s no proof.”
“For goodness’ sake, what is it?”
Teddy glanced at Drew. “You tell her,” he said. “I won’t be the one to spill a bloody state secret.” He walked out of the shop, and we heard the back door close behind him.
Drew and I were quiet. From the other room I could faintly hear Rachel reading to her father, her voice soft and steady as she spoke the words. There was no movement among the tins and bags in the aisles.
“If I tell you,” said Drew, “you must promise to leave. Tonight.”
“I already told you I would,” I said.
“I’m asking you again, and I’m making you promise. Tonight, Jillian.”
“Yes. I promise.”
“Very well, then. Yes, we think that the next transaction is going to be for a book. A codebook.”
“Codebook?”
“We used code during the war for radio communication, especially at sea. The Germans did the same. That way, if the other side picked up reception of the signal, it would be meaningless and they wouldn’t know what to do with it.”
“I see.”
“In order for everyone to know what code they were using, every captain was given a book. The codebook. So he could encode and decode messages from his fellow ships. When ships were taken or captured, the books were valuable, as you can imagine.”
“If you had the book,” I said, “you could decode the enemy’s messages.”
“Exactly. We got a number of the German books, but they never got very many of ours. The intelligence tells us that they’re buying a thing they call Mercury, and they’re excited enough to pay a lot of money for it. Mercury was the name of one of the codes we used that the Germans never captured.”
“Do we still use it?” I asked.
“Yes. I don’t know where this book has been since the war, or
why it’s surfaced only now. Our orders are to find the book and stop the transaction as a top priority, because a compromise in the Mercury code is a threat to our merchant ships.”
“Now?”
“Perhaps now. Perhaps soon. We’re at peace with Germany, Jillian, but not everyone in Germany is at peace with us. There are factions with ideas that would keep you up at night, and they’re growing every day. The codebook in the wrong hands could be deadly.”
I put a hand on one of the shelves, my fingers grasping a jar of mustard. “Wait,” I said. “Wait. You’re saying that Englishmen are selling their own code to the Germans?”
“Yes. It’s treason, pure and simple, and we mean to catch them at it.”
I was nearly dizzy. “Who would do such a thing? Put our own sailors in danger? Aubrey? William? I can’t believe it.”
“Teddy wants to search for the book,” said Drew. “The problem is that finding the book now does us no good. Just having the book isn’t enough. We have to wait for the transaction to take place, and catch them as they’re doing it. That way we get all of them, and we get them cold.”
I nodded, unable to say more.
“I’d like to know how they got their hands on the bloody thing as well.” Drew’s voice had gone rather dangerous. “But that’s a conversation we’ll have once we get them in custody.”
I remembered the second visit Toby had made to the archives, the scuffs on the shelves. Toby’s note in his journal: If only I could find it. Toby had searched the archives. He must have learned about the book somehow, learned what would happen. That was why he couldn’t do anything without proof. Why he had been more upset than he would have been over a few loads of smuggled goods. I believe I can stop this.
He found out about the book. And then he was dead.
I was in over my head. Drew was right: I had no place in a world of treasonous dealings and murder. I was a fool to think I could help, that there was anything I could do. Someone had murdered Toby over this deal, and they may have hurt or killed William as well. I tried to put my scrambled thoughts together. “I don’t think . . . I don’t think the book was in the archives.”
“It was there,” said Drew. “At some point it was there. The Book of Common Prayer proves it. Thorne hid it. But he moved it and put the other book in its place.”
“I wish I had found it.” I shook my head. “And I thought finding Walking John’s message was so important.”
“If Walking John makes an appearance, things will be interesting tomorrow night.”
I felt cold. “Don’t make light of it. You saw the destruction around Barrow House this morning. He’ll appear, Drew. It’s his most active time of year.”
“That’s why I want you gone, Jillian. Tonight. I’m not leaving you here alone.”
“I’m going, I’m going.” I didn’t mention the small complication of my motorcar currently sitting in pieces in the front garden of Barrow House.
“Good.” There was a long, tense pause. I kept my face tilted away, my hand gripping the shelf. He was leaving, and he’d catch his criminals, and I’d go back to Oxford and continue with my life. No connections.
I found the strength to look at him. I would not cry. “There’s something I need before I can leave town, as you’ve repeatedly demanded I do.”
“What is it?”
He was very close, looking down at me. I could have kissed him by just raising up on my toes.
But I took a step back. “I need someone to fix my motorcar.”
Thirty-one
Sidney Corr was fiftyish, solidly built and nimble, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a paunch that pressed tightly against the knitted wool of his jersey, as if he’d just eaten a pumpkin. He had picked up the strewn pieces of my motorcar with barely a greeting and gone straight to work.
“Bit of a mess here, then,” was his only comment after several moments of tinkering.
I shivered in the chill wind and pulled the collar of my coat closer, trying to forget my terror over the codebook and my misery over Drew. “Your ghost did it,” I replied.
“Did he, aye?” His elbows moved as he worked. “It isn’t his usual kind of handiwork, but then we don’t have motorcars in Rothewell. And some of these pieces are upside down.”
The people of Rothewell never ceased to amaze me. “Aren’t you afraid?”
“Of Walking John? I steer clear of him, and I hope he steers clear of me. It seems to work well that way.” He straightened and wiped his hands on a handkerchief he pulled from his pocket. “I don’t go to Blood Moon Bay, if that’s what you’re asking, and I never did. Not even when I was a fisherman.”
“You were a fisherman?”
“Oh, yes.” His salt-and-pepper beard split into a grin. “For over twenty years. Did you think I fix motorcars for a living? I only know how to do it as I’ve fixed my boat so many times. A motor is a motor, even if it’s in one of these newfangled things.”
Sidney had been Rachel’s idea; she knew him through her father. When she heard I needed my motorcar fixed, she’d said she knew exactly whom to ask, and Sidney had turned up barely an hour later. “I don’t see very many boats in the water,” I said.
“No, aye. There’s not as much as there used to be. The waters here are deep and hard to fish, and no one goes to the bay. There are easier places to go. I thought my nephew would take it up after me, but he moved to London before the war, met some girl, and never came home to see his old uncle. So I retired and put my boat away, and I do odd jobs instead.” He looked dubiously around my ruined yard. “Could be I could fix some of those shingles, perhaps, if you had a ladder.”
I thought of George York, with no one to take over his trade, or his boat either. “Don’t you miss it?” I said. “Fishing.”
His wily eyes twinkled at me, and he turned back to the motorcar again. “Oh, yes,” he said, loud enough for me to still hear. “Though it wasn’t easy, as I said. The water was cold, and sometimes there were storms that made you wish you’d never been born. But there’s nothing quite like it, I’ve always said.”
I put my hands in my pockets, content to listen. He seemed to be settling in to talk.
“Of course, it got even more difficult during the war,” he continued. “What with the U-boats and all.”
My muscles grew taut as my every sense came alert. I remembered what Drew had said about German U-boats sinking our merchant ships. “Surely there weren’t U-boats along here?”
“They were everywhere, or so we believed, and who can tell with a boat that sinks underwater like that? There’s something wrong with it, in my opinion, putting a bunch of men in a tin can and sinking them into the sea. But no, we never saw anything directly along this coast. It was out to sea that was the worst, where all the big ships came along. God only knows how many ships they sank, and how many men died. To go in that direction, you’d never know quite what you’d find, and it was never pleasant. Broken bits of boats, torn lifeboats, burned pieces of furniture—even bodies, or so some said, though I never saw one myself. It takes a man’s heart out of his job, it does, to have to navigate through that, and to be terrified of getting in the crosshairs of a U-boat besides. I wanted to fish and make a living, not get in the middle of a war.”
“That’s terrible. But how far would you go? Surely where the ships were hit was several days’ journey from here?”
“No, aye. Four hours, three and a half in a good wind. And the current carried the stuff toward you, so you’d meet it as you went.”
And suddenly, just like that, my mind was spinning, spinning. “Are you certain?” I couldn’t keep a strange note from my voice. “Are you certain about this? How many fishermen saw this?”
He shrugged, deep inside the car. “All of us, I suppose. You wouldn’t have to go far down in the water out there to find sunken ships of a size you wouldn’t believe.”
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“Did you only see . . . debris? Did you never see, say, the cargo?”
“A crate here and there, perhaps, but nothing so valuable, if that’s what you mean.” He straightened again and pulled out the handkerchief, looking down at the parts of the motorcar with a practiced eye. He seemed to be talking almost without thinking. “Though, of course, some of the fellows had stories. There were legends that some of the ships sank with gold on them and all kinds of valuables. One ship supposedly carried the Kaiser’s secret plan.” He looked up and smiled at me. “Me, I would have sold my boat for some sugar or flour under the war rations. Everything I saw was waterlogged anyway, and what sort of man would pick up cargo from a sunken English ship that could have been carrying his own son?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Then I’ll tell you. No one would do such a thing, no one. Even the other fishermen I knew, the ones who talked the biggest—no one would have picked up a single piece of coal.” He shook his head. “I never thought I’d live to see a war like that. I was never so glad as the day it was over. But then, it hasn’t really been the same since, has it?” He nodded toward the fallen shingles. “Walking John haunts the woods; sure he does. But what’s an old haunt next to a betrayal like that?”
I shook my head. There had not been a single thing about any of this in Aubrey Thorne’s archives—not a single newspaper article mentioning a sunken ship, not a single photograph or letter. “Mr. Corr, I have what may seem a strange question.”
He wadded the handkerchief and put it back in his pocket, digging under his paunch. “Well, all right.”
“Did you never—truly never—hear of anyone looting those merchant ships?”
He looked at me for a long, steady moment, but I gave nothing more away.
“Never,” he said. “Never. They could not have done it in our sight.”
“And if one were to do it,” I said, “how would one go about it?”
Now he seemed almost offended, as if I’d accused him, but he gamely thought about it anyway. “Well, you wouldn’t be able to, not really. Because you’d have to be there right when the ship was sinking, wouldn’t you? And how would you know where to be, and when?”
An Inquiry Into Love and Death Page 25