An Inquiry Into Love and Death (25 page)

“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.”

S
idney 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.”

“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?”

“That’s a very good question,” I said. “I’d love to know the answer.”

•   •   •

Drew and Teddy had gone. I had no way to reach them. I threw Toby’s few clothes into his empty suitcase, then went into the library and began to pack the instruments into their velvet cases. I put away the heavy galvanoscope carefully, wondering what in the world I would do with it.

Sultana wound around my legs. I would take her, of course; the landlady at my boardinghouse would have a fit, but she would just have to make do. I wasn’t leaving my cat behind for anything. And what about Poseidon? What if William didn’t come home?

I bit my lip and went into the kitchen to get Sultana something to eat, thinking furiously. If I could find Edward Bruton, I could ask him to take care of the dog. And perhaps he had a way to get in touch with Drew. I needed to tell him what I suspected—that somehow the smuggling ring had included looting merchant ships. I wasn’t sure how it could help them, but they had to know. It could be how the codebook had come to light.

And I should talk to Diana Kates. Today was the thirty-first, so at least she’d be glad I was out by month’s end, as I’d promised—though she wasn’t likely to be very happy about the state of the house.

I put down Sultana’s dish and looked around the kitchen for anything I’d forgotten. My eye caught on a book on the windowsill.

I’d completely forgotten about it. It was the book I’d found in the stove on my first day in Rothewell,
A History of Incurable Visitations.
It was lying on the kitchen windowsill, where I’d last put it when clearing the table for tea.

I picked it up and leafed through the pages. Toby had left this book out for me that first morning, opened. The section about
boggarts
, I recalled. I turned the pages until I found it.

Though possibly demonic, the account of the
grappione
at Sénanque also bears resemblance to the traditional Scottish haunt called a
boggart
, or sometimes
bogey
, a mischievous—sometimes vicious—manifestation tied to a single place, and often terrifying the inhabitants of the area in which it takes up residence. . . .

And the next page:

For
boggarts
of particularly vicious temperament and tenacious character, a certain ward or charm can be used for removal. A person who has been born in the place that ties the
boggart
to it must take six branches of hawthorn, lay them crosswise in the haunted place, and turn his back to it. He then tells the spirit that, as one born in this place, he now asks the spirit to leave, as he has become unwelcome. In some cases, the
boggart
will appear, but the back must stay turned; it is crucial to the completion of the spell. When the spirit sees that those who inhabit his place have turned their backs on him, he will depart. This charm is thought to originate in Rumania, though it is also known in France, Greece, and Ireland. . . .

I have Vizier’s book here,
Toby had written.
I will read until I fall asleep.

I made a sound, and Sultana, startled from her supper, glanced up at me. I laughed.

“It’s here,” I said to her, holding up the book. “It’s always been here. Toby showed it to me on the first day, but I didn’t read the other page. Toby tried to tell me from the beginning.” I lowered the book and looked around the empty kitchen. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have understood sooner. You wanted to try it, didn’t you? And now you want me to try it.”

I set down the book and thought of the fixed motorcar, the suitcases.

I would leave Rothewell tonight, just as I’d promised. But I had one last thing to do first.

I
found the Kateses’ house rather easily, as it was the next house along the lane. It had an elaborate garden, currently dead, that would be as pretty and as overblown in summer as one of Diana Kates’ hats. The shutters were painted periwinkle blue.

I ducked around the side of the house, trying not to be seen, peeking in the windows one by one. I lucked out at the kitchen, where I spotted Julia slicing apples next to a large woman who was obviously the cook. When the cook left the room, I tossed pebbles at the window and waited.

Julia’s plain face appeared soon enough, and her jaw dropped when she saw me. She stood still in the window in indecision, then disappeared.

A moment later she was at the back door. “What are you doing here?” she whispered in a high-pitched hiss that could have been heard at the neighbors’.

“I need your help with something,” I said.

“Mother will see!”

“Hush—I don’t want her to know. I don’t want this all over town.”

She glanced behind her, then drew closer to me, lowering her voice. “What is it?”

“Just read this and see.”

I handed her the book, open to the page about
boggarts
. Her brow furrowed as she began to read. As she finished, her expression tightened, her skin paling. She looked up at me.

“You said you wanted to fix this place,” I said. “You asked my uncle to do it. Well, this was what he found, only he never lived long enough to try it. Why don’t we try it? You and I.”

“But it’s just an old folktale,” she argued.

“It may be. How are we to know if we don’t try?”

Wariness flashed across her face, as if she thought perhaps I was duping her. “I’d get in trouble.”

“That’s why you must sneak away. When do you think your mother wouldn’t notice?”

“I don’t know. She always takes a nap after supper. Five o’clock or so.” Now she was calculating. “She closes her door and sleeps like the dead, and the cook goes home.” She looked up at me, uncertainty in her eyes again, and the pain of deep shyness. “I’ll be afraid,” she said.

“So will I,” I told her. “I’m completely terrified, in fact—too terrified to do it alone. But it will be less frightening, don’t you think, with the two of us?”

“It isn’t just that. You need to have me with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“The charm.” She nodded toward the book. “It says you have to have someone who was born here. I know I was. So that’s me.”

I nodded. “Yes. That’s you. It’s up to you, Julia.”

She bit her lip, and then the corner of her mouth quirked just a little in a trace of a mischievous smile. “Tonight?”

I smiled back. “Tonight. Where shall we meet? In the woods?”

“I don’t go in the woods at night. No one does.”

“Julia, I have only one chance at this. It says we have to go to the haunted place. It’s almost All Souls’ night. He’ll be there.”

Her eyes were wide, but she nodded. “I’m not going alone. We’ll meet at a landmark and go down to the beach together. How about the signal house?”

“All right, but I don’t know how to get to it.”

“There’s a shortcut. You go north instead of along the main path down to the bay. The turnoff’s just behind William Moorcock’s house. There’s a track through the trees. It’s less used than the other, but it’s there.” Behind her, a voice came from the hall, calling her name. “I have to go.”

“Five o’clock?” I said. “Before it gets dark.”

This time she smiled. “Five o’clock.”

I melted back into the garden, behind a tinkling cherub water fountain and its seashell pool, and waited until Julia closed the door. Then I slipped through the back gate and away down the path by the trees.

•   •   •

I had no idea whether the spell would work. It was an old folktale found in a book. But I had seen firsthand that old folktales were not always what they seemed. I was glad I’d enlisted Julia, because I truly was afraid. But still, it felt rather good to have a plan.

The postmistress, Mrs. Trowbridge, led me to the village’s only telephone, which was placed in a tiny booth in the post office, with a folding door considerately placed for privacy. “Take your time,” she told me with a smile. “We don’t put much stock by telephones here, so I barely get one person in a day.”

I looked at her for a long moment. She had known Elizabeth Price and had cared for her. But no. I wasn’t ready, not yet. “Thank you.”

I had the operator connect me to Scotland Yard. I told the person who answered that I needed to get a message to Inspector Merriken; I was patched through to one person, and then another, and then another, then mistakenly disconnected. I rang through again and finally reached someone who told me that he wasn’t entirely certain of where Inspector Merriken was, or whether a message could be gotten to him, but if I told him my message, he was game to take it down. I told him that I had information about the book and that I needed to speak to the inspector as soon as I could. I told him I’d be in Barnstaple in the morning and named the inn I’d stayed in before. I’d wait there for the inspector’s call.

The man repeated it back to me, and rang off. Next I rang the White Lion Inn in St. Thomas’ Gate on the chance that the inspectors hadn’t yet left, but Mrs. Ebury—disgusted, of course, at yet another girl phoning for the popular Inspector Merriken—said they’d gone more than an hour ago. I sat in the telephone booth, staring at the receiver, wondering where else I could call to find him. I could come up with nothing.

I thought perhaps I’d leave then, nod to Mrs. Trowbridge, walk out the door, and keep going down the street. I saw all of that in my mind, but what happened was I picked up the receiver again and had the operator put me through to London—to the Savoy Hotel.

The front desk man confirmed that yes, Professor and Mrs. Leigh were staying there, and he’d put me through to their room right away. I listened to the clicks on the line, my heart in my chest, waiting for the voice to come on the other end.

It was my mother—my adopted mother, that was. “Darling!” she said. She sounded happy, but I thought I detected a high note of strain in her voice. “We’re only here for such a whirlwind stay. It came up so quickly, and we knew you weren’t at school. However did you find us?”

“Mr. Reed told me,” I said.

There was a pause. “I see. So you’ve spoken to him, then?”

“Yes,” I said, and suddenly I was tired. “I know everything now, Mother. I know.”

The line crackled in the silence, and then I could hear the distinctive sound of my mother lighting a cigarette and slowly inhaling. “Well. You’ve been thrown for a loop, I’m sure. It was best, darling.”

“What was best?” I asked. “Lying to me about my parentage, or keeping Toby away from me?”

“Both of them, actually. That girl was practically a child. And Toby—well, you know how Toby was.”

“I don’t,” I said, unable to hide the bitterness in my voice. “I don’t know how he was at all. Perhaps you could tell me.”

She took another drag on the cigarette. She was keeping her voice carefully controlled, but my mother never smoked quickly unless she was quite upset. I knew her so very well. “Difficult,” she said finally. “He was younger than your father, and quieter, but he was just as stubborn. We could never talk him out of ghost hunting—God, how we tried! We were at him for years. Charles said he’d get him a job at a bank or an insurance company, use his connections. A stable job that would make money. Toby would just nod politely and go his own way. What do you do with someone who actually
believes
in what he’s doing?”

“Perhaps it was true,” I said softly. “All the things he saw.”

“Please don’t say that, dear. He lived his entire life under that delusion. He couldn’t possibly have raised a child. We were going to tell you everything; I promise.”

“For God’s sake, when?”

“Soon. Very soon. We should have known you’d find out if you went to Rothewell, if you talked to Mr. Reed. But Toby’s death was so unexpected, and we were caught in Paris, and it’s been incredibly busy, and we couldn’t leave. You understand, don’t you, darling?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose hard right between my eyes. “Mother, he was murdered.”

“What?”

“It’s true.”

“That’s madness. I can’t imagine why anyone would want to kill Toby.” Another pause, this one worried. “My God, I’ll have to tell Charles.”

“Is he there?”

“No, he went out to get a new tie; the one he has got ruined. He’s taken Toby’s death very hard, darling, harder than you’d think. This will only make it worse.”

“If he’s taken it so hard, why am I here alone? I had to identify his
body
, Mother.”

“All right,” she said slowly. “Yes, I’ll admit we deserved that. We weren’t thinking, I suppose. Your father . . . Charles wouldn’t even hear of going home. I don’t think your father quite understood how Toby’s death would affect him. It’s been hitting him slowly. And, God, he has a lecture tonight. What should I do?”

“Mother, listen.” I recognized the tone of my own voice from long years of calming down my mother. “You have to tell him. Just tell him that it’s an open case, and Scotland Yard is investigating. I’ll update both of you as soon as I can.”

“You’re angry; I can tell. Darling, please don’t be angry. And there’s something else going on. What is it?”

There’s a ghost, and Toby is haunting my boardinghouse, and someone tried to kill me. Toby was murdered over a treasonous plot, the Germans want to sink our merchant ships and we’re trying to stop them, and I think I may have fallen in love with the police inspector who came to my house and took me to bed. . . .

“I’m handling it,” I said. “I am.”

“Of course you are.” And I knew, with a sudden flash of perfect clarity, that she hadn’t wanted to know. “I know you’re angry with us. I do. And I’ll admit that cutting Toby out of our lives was rather a mistake—that was your father’s doing, I’m afraid. But Jillian, you were fourteen, and he came to take you back. You’ll understand when you have children, but you’re my
daughter
.” A fierceness had crept into her voice that I recognized as the product of genuine anger. “You’re my daughter, and anyone who wanted to take you would have had to kill me first. If you want a mea culpa, I can give you one. But I won’t apologize for that. I won’t.”

The operator cut in and warned us that we were nearly out of time. When we were connected again, my mother had lit another cigarette. “All right, then,” she said, her voice brittle. “We haven’t much longer, and Charles and I are in London for only few more hours—we leave for Paris just after midnight. So I suppose we have to leave it.” She exhaled. “Just tell me one thing, please, before you go. Tell me you forgive me.”

I closed my eyes. I thought of Toby, of all the opportunities I’d missed, the chance to know him, to see whether he was like me. “I want to,” I said honestly, “but I don’t think I can. Not now. I just don’t think I can do it.”

“Darling.” Her voice, even with the brittleness, even through the crackling line, was classic Nora Leigh—charming, magnetic, confident, and utterly without fear. “You are my daughter. I raised you from the day you were born. I gave you everything that was the best in me, and I know you better than you know yourself. The one thing I know is that you can do anything.”

And before I could answer, the line went dead.

•   •   •

Rachel’s store was still closed, so I went ’round the building to the back door. I found her sitting at her father’s bedside. She had stopped reading and was now only sitting, his hand in hers, her eyes hollow. It looked to be the last vigil George York would ever need.

“Go rest,” I told her gently. “I’ll sit by him for a while.”

The smile that illuminated her features nearly broke my heart. “Would you? Do you mean it? I have Sam back, but he’s upstairs alone. I don’t want him here for this.”

“Yes, of course. Go see to him. And get some sleep.”

“It’s just for a while.”

“I know.”

She stood. “Jillian, you’re a good friend.”

She moved to the door, but before she was gone I asked her one more question. “Rachel?”

“Yes?”

“Your father’s boat. Who has used it since he got sick?”

She looked puzzled. “No one.”

“No one at all?”

“No.”

“Has anyone been on the boat? For any other reason?”

She thought about it. “Just William. I told him I was going to sell the boat, and he helped me. He went through it top to bottom to get it ready to sell.” She shrugged. “He’s the only one. Does that help?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ll call you if anything happens. Now go.”

She went, and I took her place in the bedside chair, the old man’s hands in mine. He moved restlessly, and his eyes opened. “Elizabeth.”

I turned to him, and this time I smiled. “Yes, it’s me.”

“I’m so glad you’ve come. . . .”

“Yes,” I said. “I’ve come.” I leaned closer to the bed. “I hear you have something to tell me.”