Hither Page (Page & Sommers Book 1)

by Cat Sebastian

  “What about the bearded fellow?” Leo asked, indicating a man who had his arms crossed and his brow furrowed as he glowered in the corner. His hair looked like it had been cut with a kitchen knife and a beard obscured the lower half of his face. In a stage drama, he’d be the murderer, no question.

  In fact, as Leo glanced around the room, he felt like he had indeed walked onto a stage set. The vicarage parlor looked like it had been furnished at a jumble sale some thirty years ago and was now in a state of shabbiness that was very nearly tattered, but it had the kind of comfort that invited muddy boots and dirty dogs and generally made one feel welcome. A meager fire sputtered ineffectually in the hearth, and the room would have been chilly if it hadn’t been filled with people. They drank from mismatched, chipped cups that had likely seen hundreds of gallons of tea over the years. These people shouldn’t have gotten mixed up in the sort of predicament that required the likes of Leo Page. It was all wrong. He hoped his next assignment would be somewhere that felt less benign; somewhere he could cheerfully uncover a nest of spies and feel that all was right with the world.

  Leo took a packet of cigarettes from his coat pocket and held it out for Sommers to take one before helping himself. He had his lighter out of his other pocket before Sommers could reach his own, and when he leaned in to light the other man’s cigarette, he smelled hard soap and something like fresh air. He stayed there a second too long, in case he hadn’t made his intentions utterly clear by now. He watched Sommers’ throat work as he swallowed.

  “That’s Marston.” Sommers took a puff from his cigarette and blew the smoke out toward the ceiling. It took Leo an instant to remember that he had asked about the bearded man. “He’s staying in the old gamekeeper’s cottage at Little Briars.”

  The dossier hadn’t had anything on Marston, and if Templeton’s people couldn’t find anything out about a person it was because they didn’t exist or were using an assumed name. So Leo made up his mind to talk to this Marston fellow tomorrow. The man had come to the victim’s funeral, so he couldn’t be an outsider even if he wasn’t talking to anyone, and even if Sommers said he was only “staying” at the cottage.

  Now that he pretty much had the lay of the land, it was time to go before anyone wondered why he was more curious about the inhabitants of Wychcomb St. Mary’s than about its windows.

  “I’m for bed,” Leo said. “I suppose I’ll see you—”

  “Wait.” Sommers’ hand wrapped around Leo’s arm, inches away from where that bullet had been. Leo could feel the strength and heat of it through the tweed of the secondhand coat he had bought for this role. “You didn’t ask about Wendy.”

  “Pardon?” Leo hadn’t asked about Wendy Smythe because he had been able to identify her instantly as the overgrown schoolgirl who was half asleep in an armchair, one of the Griffiths children tugging at her untidy black plait. He knew she had been billeted with Miss Delacourt and Miss Pickering at Little Briars after being evacuated from London at the start of the war and had somehow never left.

  “You asked about everyone else, but you didn’t ask about Wendy,” Dr. Sommers explained. “I thought it might have been an oversight.”

  For a moment Leo had no idea if he were being accused of nosiness or espionage, or—given how Sommers’ hand lingered on Leo’s sleeve longer than it needed to—if he were being picked up. He decided his purposes would be best served by assuming it had been the last. “You’ve caught me out, Dr. Sommers,” he said confidingly, leaning into the doctor’s space. “I can’t mind my own business. It’s a character flaw.”

  They were close enough that Leo could hear Sommers’ breath hitch. They stayed like that for a moment, about as close as two gentlemen could be in a vicarage parlor.

  Then Sommers’ hand dropped. “Goodnight, Mr. Page.” His voice was low, pitched loud enough for only Leo to hear, and it seemed to hold both an invitation and a threat.

  “I’m staying at the Rising Sun,” Leo said before slipping from the room. He didn’t think the doctor would make use of that information—not yet at least—but he wanted to make his interests crystal clear.

  As Leo walked down the high street toward the inn, he gave it seven to three odds that he’d find his way into the doctor’s bed in less than a week. Ten to one odds that he’d solve the crime and have it nicely covered up in that same period of time. And then he’d get back on the train to London. He’d be none the worse for his time in Wychcomb St. Mary, no matter how much havoc he wreaked while he was there.

  Chapter 3

  James rapped on the cottage door. There was no answer, but then Marston never did answer on the first knock. James rapped again, harder this time. “It’s dashed cold, Marston. Might we cut the ritual short today?”

  There was a beat. “I’m in the garden.”

  James followed the dirt path around to the back of the cottage. Marston, wearing his old army coat and a wool cap that had seen better days, was fiddling with a box that James knew held one of his beehives. With his woolen cap pulled low over his forehead and his beard covering the lower part of his face, only his eyes—haunted and wary—were visible.

  “Is there much you have to do with them in the winter?” James asked. “The bees, I mean? I thought they just sort of slept.”

  “Why do you keep coming here?” Marston didn’t look up from the wooden box. “I’m not one of your patients.”

  James wasn’t quite certain where Marston came from or who his people were. He always managed to look thoroughly disreputable, but every now and then, James thought he could hear the remnants of a very expensive accent in the man’s rough voice.

  “Is there a rule about doctors only being allowed to speak with their patients?” James asked lightly. He stepped closer, as cautiously as he would approach a strange dog. “I’m here as a neighbor.”

  Marston snorted. “You’re here on suicide watch,” he muttered, which was the third complete sentence he had uttered today, an accomplishment that had to be counted as monumental progress.

  “I’m really not,” James said. “But should I be?” Marston had drunk himself into a stupor a few times during the year he had lived in the gamekeeper’s cottage, and it had crossed James’s mind that this might be a slow form of suicide, but he didn’t think it was. Marston didn’t seem depressed so much as angry, which was all too reasonable a reaction to what he had been through.

  “No, damn you,” Marston growled.

  James was counting that as a fourth sentence, a personal best. Usually, Marston glared and grunted while James kept up a one-sided conversation. “I’m here because you’re a hermit and I worry you might forget how to act around people or how to talk.”

  “How to talk?”

  “Right. Talking. It’s making words with your face.” James thought he could see the beginnings of a smile beneath that shaggy beard, so he decided to press on. “It was kind of you to go to Mrs. Hoggett’s funeral.”

  Marston said nothing.

  “I hadn’t realized you and she were friendly,” James said.

  Marston spoke without looking up from the slat he was fixing in place. “We weren't.”

  “Oh, it’s just that you’re so committed to the social niceties that you attend funerals and tea parties as a matter of obligation.”

  “No, that’s you, Sommers.”

  It was meant as an insult, but it still counted as another sentence, and anyway, Marston was right about James’s fondness for the niceties. These days he’d take any and every reminder that people were capable of something other than reducing one another to piles of meat. Tea parties, dull chats with the vicar, and the rote routines of village life tethered him to a world that too often seemed to slip out of existence. Mrs. Hoggett’s death had made that tether even flimsier than it had been before.

  Marston glared at James. “I’m going to tell you this so you’ll go away and leave me in peace. And it’s exactly what I told the constable. I hardly knew Mrs. Hoggett. When the weather was fin
e, she’d sometimes wave or call hello as she walked to work at Wych Hall.”

  The footpath through the wood between Little Briars and the hall passed directly in front of Marston’s cottage. The cottage was owned by Edith Pickering and was situated on the farthest reaches of her property, where it abutted Colonel Armstrong’s land. The path itself was an easement or a right of way or some such thing and the subject of generational disputes between the Pickerings and the Armstrongs. The latest chapter in the saga occurred some years before the war when Colonel Armstrong had tried to block access to his end of the footpath, which emptied out, he claimed, inconveniently close to the terrace of his own house. This attempt hadn’t endeared him to his tenants, several of whom used the path as a shortcut to and from the village. In the end, Edith’s solicitor had needed to take quite a firm hand with the colonel to remind him that he had no control over the path, however close it passed to his house.

  “The night she died, Mrs. Hoggett went to Wych Hall at six o’clock to help in the kitchen during the colonel’s dinner party,” James said.

  “I don’t know anything about that. I didn’t see anyone or anything that night.”

  The trouble with beards, James thought, was that they made it so hard to tell when a man was lying.

  “Anyway,” Marston went on, “I went to the funeral not for her, but for the girl.”

  It took James a moment to understand what Marston was saying. “For Wendy?”

  “She brings me eggs when she has them. And I give her honey when I have any. And then she goes on her way,” he added pointedly, with a look toward the path as if he could will James to walk out the way he had come.

  “Well. That really was kind of you then.”

  “Sod off, will you, Sommers.”

  James held up his hands in surrender and took several steps backward—colliding into a hard, solid body. He whipped around to see Mr. Page.

  “I’m counting to three, and you’re both getting the fuck out of my sight.” Marston’s fists were clenched. “One.”

  James grabbed Mr. Page’s arm and tugged him out of the garden toward the front of the cottage.

  “I was going for a walk and I heard voices,” Mr. Page said affably. “Thought I’d pop in.”

  “Save it.” James pulled Mr. Page down the footpath until Marston could no longer see or hear them. He kept his grip hard on Page’s arm, partly because he was annoyed that Page had disturbed Marston, partly because he had been having something like a conversation with Marston before Page interrupted. Certainly, it was only a coincidence that his fingers, of their own volition, seemed to want to seek out the feel of lean, ropy muscle beneath the tweed of Page’s coat.

  “Everyone’s terribly grumpy this morning,” Page said when they stopped walking.

  “I suppose now you’re going to tell me you needed to interview Marston because you’re writing a pamphlet on beekeeping.”

  There was a spark of amusement in Page’s dark eyes. “Of course not. That would be silly. I’m writing a treatise on—”

  “On church windows or some such rot. Despite the fact that you’d never heard of our three hares window.” That had kept James up into the small hours of the morning. He knew he had seen Page before, and he knew Page wasn’t here about church architecture or stone tracery or anything of the sort. Once he took those two facts as proven, it didn’t take long for James to arrive at the unpleasant truth.

  “You know,” Page said conversationally, “this is the second time you’ve grabbed my arm like that.” He glanced down at James’s hand. “I’m beginning to think you like touching me.”

  “I’ll do more than grab you if you pester Marston again.” But he didn’t let go of Page’s arm. Instead, he tightened his grip experimentally.

  A slow smile spread across Page’s mouth. “Promises, promises.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’re going to get yourself thrashed if you talk to men like that.”

  “Not by you, I don’t think.” Page leaned back against the trunk of an oak tree so he had to look up at James to meet his eye. They were about the same height and size, but Page was deliberately making himself small and unintimidating, as if he were trying to put James at his ease.

  “No, not by me,” James conceded, letting his hand drop to his side. “Listen, Page, I don’t know who you are or why you’re in Wychcomb St. Mary, but I do know you aren’t writing about church windows, and I’m fairly certain I took a bullet out of your arm in a room above an abandoned charcuterie in Caen.” James had been whisked away from the field hospital without any explanation beyond vague mentions of a patient who couldn’t be moved. When James arrived, he had found a man near delirious with infection. He wore, not an army uniform, but the battered clothes of a French Maquis. It was hardly the first time James had treated a member of the French resistance during those weeks after the arrival of allied troops into Normandy, but by the looks of the wound on this man’s arm, he had been shot before Operation Overlord, and had simply let the wound fester until he collapsed from illness. James had done the best he could with minimal supplies and in a setting that was about as far removed from a sterile operating theater as could be imagined.

  “I bet if I rolled up your sleeve I’d see the scar,” James continued. “Two inches long at least, crescent-shaped, about halfway between the elbow and shoulder on the front of the arm, matching exit wound.” During the war, James had assumed that the details of various injuries—body parts stitched together or lopped off; knife wounds, bullet wounds, burns—would fade into a manageable confusion of memories. Instead, he could recall all too much of it in gruesome detail. He had long since given up hope that he’d ever forget, and now merely hoped that he might one day tolerate sharing his mind with this catalogue of horrors.

  Page looked up at him from beneath a fringe of dark lashes. “I’m flattered that you want to undress me.”

  James snorted, his morose train of thought interrupted by the man’s shameless flirtation. “You don’t deny it.”

  “No, because when I take you to bed you’ll see any and all of my scars for yourself. Yours was the most neatly done, however. I’m certain I’ll find a way to thank you.”

  “That’s what you’re thinking of right now?” James sputtered. “Not that I’m accusing you of being some kind of intelligence agent?”

  “You don’t seem terribly worried about whatever it is I might be,” Page said, his eyes wide with feigned innocence, “so I suppose I’m not either. Now, onto the part where—”

  “No, I’m not worried. When Scotland Yard’s sudden lack of interest in a suspicious death coincides with the arrival of a man on false pretenses, a man who has some connection with, I’m guessing, Special Branch, then no, I’m not worried.” All James cared about was for life in Wychcomb St. Mary to return to normal as soon as possible. Intelligence officers, by their very nature, didn’t advertise their doings, which meant Page wouldn’t get in the way of James’s continued efforts to convince himself that nothing was amiss. He cleared his throat and tried to sound calm. “I don’t care what brings somebody like you to investigate her death,” he said, “but please don’t pester Marston. He’s been through enough.” They had all been through enough. The whole world had been through enough, and it was high time to get down to the business of being quiet and ordinary. People like Leo Page, people whose entire reason for being was rooting around in darkness and danger, had no part in that. “Just do your job, and the sooner you leave, the better.”

  IT WAS ADORABLE THAT Sommers thought he was involved with anything as straightforward as Special Branch. Leo was almost touched by the man’s innocence. He didn’t run across much of that these days. Really, the man was just precious, the way his broad shoulders squared up and his affable face got all serious and fierce when he wanted to protect his friends, the way he didn’t hesitate to lay hands on Leo but kept his touch far too light to do any harm.

  After reluctantly leaving the doctor in the woods—it
was cold but not so cold that they couldn’t have found some way to divert themselves—Leo wrapped his coat more tightly around his chest and made his way back down the path. There were footprints in the soil that didn’t belong to either him or Sommers. There were also several ruts caused by bicycle wheels.

  The footpath forked when it approached the village, one branch heading to the high street and the other, having dwindled to the merest scratch in the ground, led to the garden gate at the vicarage. There Leo found Mrs. Griffiths, the vicar’s wife, scattering seeds on the cold ground for a few drab brown birds.

  If Leo had thought Mrs. Griffiths had been shabbily dressed at the funeral, he now saw the error of his ways. The out of fashion but serviceable black frock she had on yesterday might well have been her finery if today’s threadbare and ill-fitting tweed skirt and moth-eaten jumper were her everyday wear. She wore no hat, but a muffler that covered half her head and did nothing to obscure the fact that she was badly in need of a trip to the hairdresser. Either that, or she ought to make peace with not doing anything with that mass of unruly-looking dark curls and resign herself to putting it in a knot. She saw him approach and waved, causing seeds to fly out of her hand to the great confusion of the birds on the ground.

  “Mr. Page! Out for a stroll? I’ve resolved to stay out of Daniel’s way while he’s meeting with the Sunday school teachers, so I came out here to feed these poor wretches.”

  The sparrows at her feet milled about, picking through the seeds until they found the sort they wanted. Leo had once known an old man who had gone outside every morning all winter with a palm full of seeds; by March he had bramblings and chaffinches eating out of his hand. By May he had been shot dead by a sniper, but that wasn’t the point of the story. The point was that in the unlikely event that Leo ever grew old, perhaps he’d devote himself to feeding birds by hand like some kind of good witch.

  “May I?” he asked, holding out his hand for some birdseed.