The chains gave an abrupt clang against the table leg as he moved, and for a second I nearly jumped out of my chair. But he was only shifting, jolting with surprise and suppressed emotion. “What did you see?”
“Look,” I said. “We can sit here all afternoon and talk of bombings and false papers and shootings of ambassadors, or whatever you’ve been doing, but I don’t want to. Perhaps because I’m a woman. All of that, I think, is secondary. What matters is the woman I saw. She had dark hair and dark eyes, and she was terrified of something. I couldn’t see what it was.” I stared at him, my chin up, unblinking. “I think she’s the key to everything. Am I wrong?”
He closed his eyes briefly, and then there was anger in his face, real anger. “I met her in Belgium. She was helping soldiers to escape, English soldiers, to help smuggle them back through the borders and home to avoid the slaughter. She wasn’t the only one; it was a network. We were everywhere. She and I worked together. But someone betrayed her.” He looked at me with empty eyes. “She was convicted of treason and executed by firing squad.”
I swallowed. “You loved her. And that is why you hate your country. That is why you’ve done all of this.”
“I went to war for my country,” he said, his gaze vanishing backward into memory, “and I believed in it. I had dreams, plans. And the first day I went into battle, I saw a man get the top of his head blown off, just”—he raised one chained hand as far as it would go, touched the fingers together—“so. The top of his skull hung down by a flap of skin, dangling, while he screamed and his brains were open to the sky.” He looked at me. “People who are shot by firing squads often shit themselves when they die. Did you know that?”
My stomach turned and my head spun. I hadn’t been able to eat before coming here; now I was glad. “Give me your hands,” I managed.
“What else did you see?”
“I have questions first.”
“What could you possibly want to know?”
“How you knew about me,” I said. “You read the article about Gloria, didn’t you?”
Colin shrugged. “She’d always claimed she was psychic. But yes, when I read it, I realized. She could do a séance, try to reach Harry and Tommy and me. And then she’d know.”
“But me,” I said. “The article didn’t mention me. The tests said my powers were unproven. Why did you come after me?”
He looked thoughtful, and then he decided to answer. “I questioned the fortune-teller before she died. Or I should say, she offered me information.”
“What do you mean?”
“When it became clear what my business with her was, she told me that Gloria wasn’t the only one. That you had powers, too. That she’d seen you summon the dead.”
I put my hands on the table and gripped it. Ramona had tried to sell me in exchange for her own life. How terrified she must have been, trying to think of something, anything, that would placate her killer and convince him to show mercy. “But you knew who I was before that,” I guessed.
“I knew you were working for my brother, yes. I’d seen you in Trafalgar Square. But until I visited the fortune-teller, you had stayed largely out of my way. It was only afterward that I understood you were an obstacle. And there you were, just as she finished talking about you—there you were, coming up in the elevator.” He almost smiled. “Life has a great many coincidences sometimes.”
I wanted out of there, in that moment, more than I had ever wanted anything in my life. But I took one breath, and then another, and I held on. “How did you do it?” I asked, remembering the shreds of the briefing George Sutter had given me, the questions he wanted answered. “How did you convince the Germans to falsify your death, give you a new identity?”
“Oh, come now,” he said. His voice had grown easier with use, more melodic. “You can’t possibly be confused about that. After she died, I got myself captured by the German army. I demanded to see the prison commander, and I made him an offer to take to his superiors.”
“And they welcomed you? Just like that?”
“They were worried I was a double agent, of course, but I was convincing. I no longer cared about my life, and they knew it.” He leaned forward over the table, though his restraints did not let him move very far. “Now tell me. What else did you see?”
I cleared my mind, thought about the images that had gone through my head that sunny day on a green hilltop in Kent. “I saw what you were wearing, your motorcycle, the sidecar. I saw you throw a suitcase through the window of a factory.” I shook my head. “I saw men at a table, four of them. I saw the woman’s face, and I knew that she was dead, that that was what drove you. You wanted to kill yourself with your razor, but she was the reason you stopped. Because you hadn’t finished.” I looked at him. “And then the telephone rang, and you put the razor down and answered it.”
His face was slack, and I suddenly realized that I was heartily sick of that expression, the one of wonder that I had seen on so many faces. I never wanted to see it again. “Impressive,” he said after a moment. “I thought that summoning my sister and my brothers was well-done already. You are rather amazing, are you not?”
Not for long, I thought. I looked at his hands.
I was supposed to take his hands, to gather information. Names, dates, faces, details. I was to use myself as a conduit, to absorb as much as I could and transmit it to the authorities, like a human radio. Those were my instructions, and they had been clear.
And suddenly I wanted none of it. I pushed my chair back.
“I’m leaving,” I said loudly to the pane of smoked glass. “You’re going to have to get the rest of your answers yourself.”
I banged on the door, and after a moment—there was quiet consultation on the other side, male voices deliberating—the guard opened it.
It was over. I was quits. I did not look back at Colin Sutter. I walked out the door and went back to my life.