James raised an eyebrow. “Are you asking if Ramona is psychic?”
“No, though I admit her act is a good one. If I didn’t know better, I’d be fooled.” It mustn’t have been easy to hold the pose with her head bent to her shoulder for so long; it would take practice and determination. “But if we agree that Ramona is a skimmer, how did she know that the widow will be dead within a year? She was right—I could see it on the woman’s face.”
“So could I. All Ramona needed was the woman’s name and a little advance notice. Then she would have her plant find whatever he could. He could have found out about the illness by following her to the doctor’s, or going through her handbag in a café and finding a prescription, or overhearing her at the chemist’s. I knew one skimmer who found out everything she needed about her clients by going through their trash bins every week before the dustman came.”
It was disgusting, but I could see how it could work. “But the second prediction—when she said someone else in the room was going to die. What about that one?”
James shook his head. “Come now, Ellie. It’s the oldest trick in the book—a vague prediction that gets a shock. She may as well have said that someone will cross water, or meet the love of their life.” He looked more closely at me. “Are you saying she was right?”
“It must have been a lucky guess.”
“The girl,” he said, his quick mind putting it together. “She was very upset. I thought you couldn’t see the future.”
“I didn’t have to. She’s sick,” I replied. “I was holding her hand. I felt it.”
“Well, then, Ramona had a lucky shot. I’ve seen it before.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “I have the frustrating feeling we’re no further ahead than we were before, and it’s one o’clock in the morning.”
I was giddy with exhaustion, but it was almost freeing. I had spent three years going to bed at exactly ten o’clock every night, whether I slept or not, atoning in some way for all of the late nights with Gloria. I hadn’t seen one o’clock in the morning on the streets of London for a long time. “I didn’t choose this line of work,” I said to James, almost musing to myself. “But you did.”
“In a roundabout way. I was supposed to read for the bar.”
I raised my brows, trying to picture it. “A barrister?”
“Yes. It was what my parents wanted, and it was what I wanted; it all lined up. It was the only career I’d thought of having. I was going to be a young, smashing success.” He shrugged, his shoulders flexing under his jacket. “Then the war came. Afterward nothing worked the way it was supposed to, including me. When I came back, the law seemed stupid. I was . . . broken.” He gazed down the darkened street. “I drank myself into oblivion for a long time. It was a sickness, like a fever. The war didn’t leave my head unless I was drunk. My parents disowned me. They expected a barrister son—war or not—not a drunk. And then I was at the veterans’ office one day for one of their health tests, and in the waiting room I met Paul.”
“The president of the New Society,” I said.
“Yes. He’d been an officer, like I had. He took one look at me and said that the New Society needed men like me to help, and he offered me a job.”
“Why?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied. “He says it was because he saw what kind of man I could be once I dried out. Maybe he just saw my desperation and pitied me. I don’t think I’ll ever know.”
I watched his face, and suddenly I was terribly lonely. I wished he would touch me, put his arms around me, with a longing that was almost a physical ache. I wished he would look at me the way he had when he first saw me, the way he had in Trafalgar Square. I wished he would make my blood pulse, make my skin come alive, make me warm. I had spent three years buried, fossilized, feeling nothing. To feel things was painful and terrible, but it was better than being dead. “It’s impossible to know, isn’t it,” I said, “what people see in you?”
He turned his gaze on me, and his understanding slid through my ribs and stabbed my heart. “She liked you, Ellie,” he said. “She just didn’t exactly know how to show it. Gloria didn’t like very many people.”
I stood up, brushing at my coat. “That’s an interesting theory.”
“I’m right.”
“I didn’t know you were an expert.”
“Do I have to be an expert to understand your friendship with Gloria?”
I descended the steps to the street, my feet icy in my shoes. “Who says it was a friendship?”
“Both of you,” James said to my back. “Stop fighting it, Ellie.”
“I’m going home.” I walked down the darkened street, heading for the Streatham High Road to find a taxi. It was too much to feel after three years of being numb: regret, longing, lust, shame, anger. I pulled my coat tighter around me. James did not call after me again, nor did he follow me. He was wrong. Gloria and I had not been friends; we had never been friends.
Tell Ellie Winter to find me.
The grief hit me again, as solid as a punch, just as it had that first night in my garden when George Sutter told me she was dead. I made a strange little gasping sound, but I kept walking. My heels clicked on the pavement. And I kept walking until the world had receded into nothing behind me, until all of it was gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN