I took the paper and put it in my handbag. To hell with it, I thought, and held out my hand. “Thank you for your help.”
He looked surprised, but he shook my hand. His grip was huge and strong. “Good day.”
I stood. It had been easy this time, even with gloves on. “It’s at the back of your drawer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Your watch. You don’t wear it every day because it’s expensive and it was your father’s and you’re afraid of losing it. After the last time you wore it, you put it in the back of your drawer, thinking it was a good hiding place. But then you forgot your own hiding place when you decided you wanted to wear the watch this morning.”
There was a brief silence. Then Paul Golding tilted his head, his gaze on me changing in a way I could not read. His voice was very careful. “Miss Winter, you surprise me.”
I shook my head. It had been a stupid impulse, petty and vain, wanting to prove something to this man. Still, I couldn’t quite be sorry I’d done it. I turned to go.
“As it happens,” Golding called after me, “you are correct.”
With my hand on the knob of the office door, I turned to face him again. “Sorry?”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out an antique watch on a chain. “I found it this morning, after nearly an hour’s search,” he said. “Perhaps we underestimated you, Miss Winter.”
I stared at the watch, hiding the waves of shock that were breaking over me like a fever. I swallowed and forced myself to shrug. “That’s up to you,” I said, my voice cracking. “Good day.” I walked breathlessly through the outer office, past the eternal glare of Sadie, and hurried down the stairs, nearly running by the time I got out the front door and onto the street.
He’d found it. He’d found the bloody watch already. I made my way through the crowds on the Strand, looking at no one, seeing nothing. The vision had been quick, and so very clear.
And yet he’d already found it. This had never happened to me before. I’d never been wrong. Or nearly wrong. For a second, panic gripped me so hard I nearly stopped breathing. I tried to calm myself. It was a simple slip, purely human to be wrong from time to time. But my powers had never failed me—not ever. And if they could be wrong this time, could they be wrong again? Had they been wrong before? How many times? What else had I seen that wasn’t true?
If my powers could be wrong, then who was I?
Someone bumped my shoulder, and a woman with a pram nearly nicked my shin. Raucous laughter came from a window somewhere. I took a breath, and then another.
I wouldn’t think about it now; I had other things to worry about. It must have been a random mistake, wires crossed over what Paul Golding had been thinking about at the moment I touched him. It was just one of those things.
In the meantime, Gloria’s killer was still free, and I needed help. I knew where to find it.
I fished the address from my handbag and headed for the nearest stop to catch an omnibus.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
According to Paul Golding’s paper, James lived in Brixton. I boarded a bus going east, then got off and boarded another going north. I sat with my gloved hands folded in my lap, my eyes trained ahead as I tried to note everyone around me. What did George Sutter’s man look like? Was he the fiftyish gentleman trying to relight his dampened pipe? The man in the houndstooth jacket reading a copy of the Daily Mail? The stout man wiping his forehead with a handkerchief? Had I seen any of these men before? I didn’t remember.
I entered my third bus and sat on the second deck, looking down at the streets below. What if it was a woman following me? I had no idea whether MI5 even employed women, other than as secretaries or typists. George Sutter knew who James was, and could presumably find his address, but the thought of being followed bothered me in a way I couldn’t explain. I remembered the hard-eyed, mustached man I’d seen at Ramona’s disastrous stage show. I’d assumed he was Ramona’s plant, but now I wondered.
I circled for a while, until I was tired of buses and certain I hadn’t seen anyone twice, and then I went to Brixton. After disembarking, I turned up one street, then ducked through a likely alley and came out on another. I zigzagged the best I could, past washing lines and through tiny back lots with bedraggled kitchen gardens and bemused cats watching me from the damp tops of garden walls.
I finally arrived at James’s street address. It was a three-story brick home that had long ago been turned into flats, like much of Brixton. The front stoop was sooty and the walk hadn’t been swept in ages, but a single pot of geraniums stood well tended by the door, vainly hoping for sunlight. I approached the door, raising my hand to knock, and the corner of my gaze caught something familiar. A houndstooth pattern. I turned to see a man in a familiar jacket cross the street a block away and turn a corner. He did not hurry, and he did not look at me.
So much for losing my pursuer.
A woman of at least eighty greeted my knock, her knobbed hands almost silvery pale in the cloudy light.
“Third floor. The door is right off the landing,” she said when I asked for James. She eyed me swiftly up and down, but made no comment. I wondered how often girls came here asking for James Hawley.
I climbed the windowless staircase—it smelled vaguely of gravy—and knocked on the door.
The door swung open and James stared at me. He wore trousers and a white shirt open at the throat, his braces hanging loose. His hair was mussed, and when I dropped my gaze I couldn’t help but notice his feet were bare. My first thought was that I was happy to see him. My second thought, as I looked into his face, was that the feeling was not mutual.
“Oh, good God,” he said.
I swallowed. “I went to the New Society,” I managed. “They sent me here.”
Wild surmise crossed his expression, and a flicker of panicked dread. “Paul sent you?” he said. “Paul sent you here?”