Inevitably, they asked me the same questions, but by then it was obvious that The Fantastique, who had been in business for decades, could not perform even the simplest psychic task. To use my powers and answer correctly—the ones I could answer, since it was absurd to think a psychic could tell you what card you were holding—would only expose her further. And so, when they asked me their questions, I had no choice but to grit my teeth, follow her lead, and say I didn’t know.
My fury burned itself out sometime in the second hour, and by the time they took the blindfold off, it was wet with tears. I could have shouted at all of them, shouted that The Fantastique was not a liar, the tests were unfair, and my mother was tired. But I said nothing. She wanted no defense; she wanted only to do the tests on her own terms, pass or fail them as she would, though I did not know why. When James untied my hands and feet at last, I jumped from my chair and faced all of them, the tears smearing my cheeks.
“This is finished,” I said, taking my mother’s hand in mine. She was unresisting, her skin cool and clammy. “You’ve bullied and humiliated two women for an afternoon, and you’ve done enough. We’re going home. Do not contact my mother again.”
In the taxi, I looked at her exhausted face and said only, “Why?”
To my amazement, she smiled. “It’s over,” she said. “It’s over. After all these years—all of my life—it’s finally over.”
“They’ll write about it,” I said, my voice still tight with anger. “They’ll write that we’re liars, frauds. And then where will we be?”
I felt her stroke the back of my hand with her beautiful fingers. “I’d have you live a different life if I could. Do you understand? This isn’t a good life—the right life—for a girl. Sometimes I think I should have done it years ago.”
“But this is our livelihood,” I replied, fighting panic. “This is what keeps us independent. That’s what you’ve always taught me.”
She shook her head, and I thought she would say something else, but instead she closed her eyes. “I’m so tired,” she said. After a moment she leaned into me, her head on my shoulder like a child. I put my arm around her and held her tight for the rest of the ride home, my anger forgotten, my mind spinning. I had never known, never suspected, that my mother wanted to be free.
She never worked again. She grew sicker and sicker—cancer, the doctors finally admitted. By the time the New Society’s report came out, neither of us cared about losing clients. She was too sick to work, and I was too busy caring for her, and too grief-stricken, to take over. The months went by and the money dwindled. A numbness came over me, growing around me like a shell. The world disappeared.
Five months after the tests, she was dead. I held her hand in those last moments, all of our arguments forgotten. And when she was gone, and I sat hollow and empty and helpless, I had no luxury to take up another life as she’d wished. I salvaged what clients I could and I found new ones—there are always people looking for answers who have never read obscure reports—and I started up business as The Fantastique. I stopped doing séances and I consoled myself with the fact that, despite how badly Gloria had wanted it, she’d never proven that I had been the power behind my mother’s curtain. My mother and I had won that much dignity, at least.
It isn’t personal, Gloria had told me.
But it was. It was.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Davies’s disappearance had left me at loose ends, unsure of what to do. It had also left me, I soon realized, in the company of George Sutter’s agent, the man in the houndstooth jacket.
I glimpsed him briefly in the reflection on a shop window as I wandered the crowds of Piccadilly Circus. He vanished into a doorway across the street, but before he disappeared I noticed his jacket and almost got a good look at him. He was tall, narrow shouldered, built very thin, wearing a hat that was the worse for wear. He did not have a mustache, which eliminated him from being the man I’d seen at the Gild Theatre.
If he was an MI5 agent, he wasn’t overly discreet, especially in his distinctive choice of jacket pattern. If MI5 had employed women, I would have dressed more blandly and done a much better job. However, it was likely that he saw me, a blithely unaware girl, as the easiest—and possibly most demeaning—of assignments, and my futile attempt at escape that morning had done nothing to alter his impression. It had been obvious that I’d been carted away from my home by a Scotland Yard detective, for example, and it would have been a simple matter to linger outside the Yard and wait for me to leave. And now here I was, oblivious again.
It chafed me. Men underestimated me at every turn—Paul Golding, Inspector Merriken, even James Hawley, though at least he had apologized. Certainly George Sutter seemed to think me nothing but a pawn for some mysterious end of his. All right, then—he could find me.
I continued to stare into the shop window like a dunce. I adjusted the set of my hat in the reflection in the glass. Then I looked in the next shop window, and the next, for all the world like a silly girl going shopping, a girl who has forgotten that she is in the middle of a murder investigation because she’s spotted a nice pair of shoes.
At the entrance to the Piccadilly Circus tube station, I ducked inside, bought a ticket, and hurried down the stairs. It took him exactly sixty seconds to follow me; I knew because I watched him from behind a set of scaffolding, covered by a canvas tarp, that was set up near the entrances to the platforms. The station was under construction, thank God. This time, from my vantage point, I got a clear look at his face. I watched Mr. Houndstooth look this way and that, then move through the gates, his eyes scanning the crowds. I turned to find two construction workers staring at me, one of them with a cigarette in hand. The other one waggled his eyebrows at me.
“Old boyfriend,” I said to them, making my tone brassy. “He’s the last bloke I want to see!”