“And what could that possibly be?” I asked him.
The inspector sighed. “I can’t believe I’m lending any credence to this, but if I had to guess, I’d say the purpose was to recruit her.”
I stared at him, aghast. “Into MI5?”
“Possibly, yes.”
I couldn’t help it; I laughed.
James raised his eyebrows, but Inspector Merriken looked faintly thunderous. “What is so amusing?” he asked.
“Gloria would never have worked for MI5,” I said. “Never. If that’s what all of this was, they were wasting their time. Gloria would have told them to go to hell.”
“Are you sure?” James asked me. “We both know Gloria liked money, and we know for a fact that she needed it. She could have dangled MI5 along and made herself a profit.”
I shook my head. “Gloria didn’t work for the government, or the prime minister, or anyone else. She certainly wouldn’t have worked for the brother who disowned her as a liar and a fraud. Gloria worked for herself, and only herself.”
“That may be, or it may not,” Inspector Merriken said, his logic grating on me. “But first things first. I’m not pursuing a dead man unless I have evidence he’s not dead. I’m going to make some telephone calls. I’m likely in very deep waters with my chief inspector right now, but I’ll see if I can get some backup sent out here after all, to deal with the attempt on Miss Winter if nothing else. And I’ll try to get Colin Sutter’s records from the War Office.”
“Hasn’t the War Office already shut you out?” James pointed out. “The last time you asked them for information, they told you it was classified.”
“Those were official channels. This time I won’t go through the front door. As it happens, I have a contact at the War Office who owes me a favor.”
James leaned back in his chair, his gaze speculating. “A woman? Just a wild guess.”
“Leave it, Hawley.” Merriken’s face grew very, very still and dangerous.
James grinned. “Don’t worry, old fellow. I’m a closed book.”
“I’m warning you.” Merriken pointed a finger at him. “Leave off. Try to make yourself useful, for the first time in your life, rather than pursuing pixies or fairies, or whatever it is you do.” He turned and left the room.
I looked at James. “Were you trying to rile him?”
“I didn’t think it would be that easy,” he admitted. “But the shot about the pixies and fairies was a good one, I admit.”
“Well, now you’ve offended him,” I said, thinking of Merriken’s fiancée, Jillian. There was no way he was unfaithful to her; that much I knew. Perhaps the contact at the War Office was a leftover from his pre-Jillian days. “I’ll see if I can smooth it over when he gets off the telephone.”
James turned to me. The humor had left his face. “Smooth it over, will you? That’s interesting. I’d like very much to know what the two of you talked about.”
I might have been working with two bulls butting heads; no one had ever taught me how to manage two independent, riled-up men. “Don’t worry—he’s taken. Quite comprehensively so.”
Something flickered across James’s eyes, and he leaned forward and kissed me, quick and hard. “So are you,” he said. “Now sit and rest for a minute. I’m going to search the house.”
“What for?”
“Anything,” he said, and left the room.
The pain in my head had receded to a dull pounding, and James had cleaned most of the blood from my knee. My stockings were ruined, of course; looking down at my legs, I found myself in the strange position of wondering whether it was better to wear torn stockings or to remove them and not wear stockings at all. It was perplexing, the kind of etiquette question one’s mother never covers. I gave up pondering it and limped to the sink, where I splashed water on my face and drank a glassful, suddenly dying of thirst. Pickwick lifted his head and thumped his tail hopefully at me; I put water in a bowl, gave it to him, and searched the cupboards for something to feed him as he gratefully inhaled his drink.
The Dubbses may not have been real people, but someone or other had lived here. There were a few tinned items, sardines and the like, and a smattering of mismatched dishes in the cupboards. The drawers contained eating utensils, and pots and pans hung from the walls. A kettle, a tin of tea on the counter. Who lived here, then, if not the Dubbses? What was this house used for? Where were the occupants? I gave Pickwick a tin of meat and began my own quiet search, unwilling to sit still despite my pain and exhaustion. From the sitting room I could hear the low rumble of Inspector Merriken’s voice as he spoke on the telephone.
I had just started up the stairs, noting that there wasn’t a single picture on the walls, when I heard James’s exclamation of triumph. I found him in the master bedroom, which was as neatly kept as the rest of the house, with a handmade quilt smoothed on the bed. James was standing in front of a tall cabinet, its doors flung open, its lock discarded on the floor.
“Oh, my goodness,” I said, looking over his shoulder.
“The Dubbses,” he said to me, “are nicely stocked—whoever they are.”
The cabinet held firearms, at least six of them by my count. Two were long rifles, one a thick shotgun of some kind, and the rest handguns. They’d been carefully placed in the cabinet, metal gleaming from the shadows. On the shelves beneath the guns themselves were boxes of gunpowder and ammunition, clearly labeled and neatly stacked.
Inspector Merriken entered the room behind us and gave a low whistle. “Well, well.”
James picked up one of the rifles, turned it over in his hands. “Lee-Enfield,” he said. “Standard issue, perfect condition. Well maintained.” He lifted the bolt and retracted it, peering down. “Unloaded. Clean as a whistle.”