The Apothecary

Chapter 15

Turnbull Hall



We stopped at a three-storey brick building with a peaked roof, like an orphanage in a Dickens novel. Turnbull Hall had been built in the nineteenth century as a place where the poor could live and eat and get an education from reform-minded university graduates, and it might once have been a fine, clean, noble place. By 1952, though, it was grubby and cold, with sooty windows and surly guards, and held a juvenile court and a reformatory school.

Officer O’Nan immediately took Benjamin into one room, and Detective Montclair steered me down a hallway, past a classroom full of bored and pasty-looking children. There was a smell of poverty and abandonment and neglect, and of generations of kids who didn’t get enough baths or enough love.

We arrived in an empty, run-down classroom, and Detective Montclair told me to take a seat. He sat opposite me, squeezing into a child-sized desk. His fine hair was still disordered from our struggle.

“Now, do you go by Jane or Janie?” he asked.

“Jane,” I said flatly. I didn’t want him acting like my friend.

“You’re American.”

I nodded.

“Parents working here, yes?”

The detective’s manner was very calm, his voice soothing, and I was reminded of a king cobra I’d once seen in a film, which hypnotised its prey, swaying back and forth, before striking like a bullet. I nodded.

“How do you find London?”

“Are you arresting me?”

“No.”

“Then I’d like to go now.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened in the garden?”

I bit my lip. Obviously, they had separated me from Benjamin so they could compare our stories. But we hadn’t had time to get them straight, and anything I said might be different from what Benjamin said.

“If I’m being arrested, I’d like a lawyer,” I said. My parents had told me that you always needed to ask for a lawyer if you were accused of something, especially if you were innocent.

“But you haven’t been arrested.”

“Then I’d like to leave.”

“Then I might have to arrest you.”

“Okay, go ahead. And I’d like a lawyer.”

He paused, tilting his head. “Do your parents like their jobs, Janie?” he asked.

“Yes. And it’s Jane.”

“Well, Jane,” he said, “I can have you deported for refusing to cooperate with a police investigation, and then your parents would have to take you home. But I get the feeling that they don’t want to go back to Los Angeles.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’ve read their file.”

“They have a file?”

“Of course they have a file,” he said. “We don’t just let any old Communists in.”

“They aren’t Communists!”

“And now you have a file, too. So let’s fill it with good things, shall we? Things, say, about what a cooperative foreign national you are, and how helpful in matters of grave importance.”

“I’m fourteen,” I said. “I can’t have a file.”

Detective Montclair looked around the ancient classroom and smiled his crooked smile, as if approving benignly of the shabby desks and dusty blackboards. “When this building was built,” he said, “a child could enter the workforce at six. You might have been at work for eight years by the age of fourteen. Difficult work, too. Physical labour. So I think you’re old enough to answer a few questions about a murder, to help the country that has so generously allowed your Communist parents in, and seen fit to employ them.”

“Stop calling them Communists. They aren’t.”

“Where were you last night?”

“At home.”

“All evening? If we call your parents and ask them if you came home late, what will they say?”

I bit my lip harder, to keep the tears of frustration back. If only Benjamin and I had figured out our story ahead of time. If only I could have warned my parents to keep their mouths shut. I had a feeling Scotland Yard could track them easily to their castle in the country.

“I see from your face,” Detective Montclair said, “that your parents might have a different story.”

I said nothing.

“You know, if Benjamin acted alone,” the detective said soothingly, “you can tell me that.”

I glared at him. I wanted to tell him that a German man with a scar on his face had probably killed the gardener, and that they should be looking for him right now, but I was afraid to contradict what Benjamin might say. And the gardener had told us not to trust the police.

“Why don’t you think about it for a bit,” the detective said.

He left the room, and I was alone. I guessed he was going to talk to Benjamin. I would go to jail for obstruction of justice at the very least, and maybe even for murder. I wondered again what we had touched, in the gardener’s cottage, and left prints on. The lantern, at least. I felt trapped and frightened, which I supposed was exactly what they wanted, but knowing that they wanted it didn’t help.

After half an hour, the stocky Officer O’Nan came to move me to a room with a door at each end and two cage-like cells along one side, right next to each other, separated by a thick concrete wall. It seemed improvised, added long after the original building. Benjamin was in the first cell, holding the bars helplessly. There was another boy with him, who looked small and ragged, but then the policeman led me past and put me in the next cell and I couldn’t see them anymore. The cell was cold and damp, with a low wooden bench.

O’Nan left, and I went to the bars.

“Benjamin?” I whispered, remembering the Shiskins’ bugged kitchen and telling myself not to say anything incriminating, or loud.

“What’d you tell them?” he whispered back, around the concrete wall.

“Nothing! They tried to get me to turn on you and say you did it. I hate them.”

“They did the same to me.”

I put a hand out through the bars to see how far away the other cell was, and met Benjamin’s hand reaching towards mine. An electric shock of surprise went through me. Our fingers interlaced and squeezed.

“It’s going to be all right, Janie, I promise,” he said.

Then the other boy’s voice chimed in, from Benjamin’s cell. It was high and clear, with an accent you didn’t hear at St Beden’s. “So, d’you two have a plan for gettin’ us out of here, or do I have to spring us myself?” he demanded.

We unlocked our hands.

“That’s Pip,” Benjamin said. “He’s a pickpocket. And a housebreaker.”

“Leastways I never murdered no one,” the boy’s voice said.

My heart started to pound, and I thought of jailhouse movies I’d seen, with snitches planted in the cells. “Benjamin,” I whispered. “They put him in there hoping you’d talk to him!”

“I thought of that already,” Benjamin said, in a full, loud voice. “Good thing I’ve got nothing to tell.”

“Oh, they’ll pin it on you anyways,” Pip said cheerfully. “They’re right good at that.”

I heard a scuttling noise and turned to see a long grey rat moving along the wall of my cell, beneath the low wooden bench. It seemed to be heading for my feet, and I screamed, in spite of myself.

“Janie?” Benjamin called.

“There’s a rat in here!”

It froze and crouched along the wall.

“Sounded like you was being murdered,” the other boy said.

I felt indignant, because I was not some shrinking violet. In the past twenty-four hours, I’d seen a man die, let a boy stay in my room, and been threatened with deportation. I thought I’d handled it all pretty well. But a fat, dirty rat running at your feet was horrible. It watched me with beady, curious eyes, waiting for my next move.

“I want to go home,” I said pathetically.

“Then lend me a hair grip,” Pip said, from the other side of the wall.

“What’s a hair grip?”

“It’s, y’know, a little wire folded in half, like. For your hair.”

“A bobby pin,” I said.

“That’s a silly name.”

“I don’t have one.”

“What?” Pip said. “You’re a girl, ain’t you?”

“I don’t wear them!” I said, still watching the crouching rat.

“She has American hair,” Benjamin’s voice explained.

“What’s American hair?” I asked.

“It’s—you know, there’s sort of a lot of it, and it’s not all pinned back.”

“You’re making that up.”

“No,” Benjamin said. “You can always tell Americans by their hair. And their shoes.”

“It’s true,” Pip’s voice agreed.

I looked down at my shoes and remembered my too-big skirt. “Wait!” I said. “I have a safety pin!”

“Well, why din’t you say so?” Pip said.

I took the pin out of my skirt and handed it around the wall, hoping my skirt would stay up.

“Wish it was a bit longer,” he complained.

“It’s all I’ve got, okay?”

By pressing my forehead against the bars, I could just see Pip’s dirty hands fiddling experimentally with the safety pin in the lock. It seemed hopeless.

Then the door outside the cells to our right opened, and Pip’s hands quickly withdrew. A pink-faced matron in a grey wool dress came in and said, “There’s someone here to see you.”

“Me?” Pip said.

“No,” she said.

There were footsteps in the hall behind her, and then Mr Danby came into the room. I’d never been so relieved to see anyone in my life.

“Are these the children you mean?” she asked. “Not the little one, the other two.”

“These are they!” Mr Danby said. “Have they treated you all right, Miss Scott?”

I wanted to throw my arms around him, through the bars, but I sensed that would embarrass him. “No!” I said. “They keep saying we’re not really arrested, so we can’t have a lawyer. And they threatened to deport my parents, and it’s freezing, and there’s a rat in here. And we haven’t even done anything!” I added that last part as an afterthought.

“Let’s get you out of there, then,” he said. “And really, madam, can you do something about the rats? It’s unsanitary for the children.”

“Certainly, sir,” the matron said, though I could tell she intended to do nothing. She unlocked the bars and let me out.

Benjamin said, “What about the police? How do you have the authority to let us out?”

“He’s from the Foreign Office,” the matron said.

“The Foreign Office?” Benjamin said. “As in the government Foreign Office?”

“Yes,” Mr Danby said, looking slightly abashed. I didn’t know why our Latin teacher was handling matters for the government, but I thought Mr Danby could handle anything, so I didn’t care.

Pip tried to slip out after Benjamin, but the matron closed the door on him with a clank and relocked it. He pressed his face between the bars. “Take me, too!”

I had thought Pip was younger than we were, when I’d only seen him quickly, because he was so much smaller than Benjamin, but now I guessed he was thirteen or fourteen, like us. His hair was cropped close to his head in the way of the other Turnbull children, to combat lice, and his eyes were enormous, an unsettling bright hazel. He reminded me of a lemur I’d once seen in a zoo. “Don’t leave me!” he cried.

“I apologise,” Mr Danby said. “I’m only authorised to take Mr Burrows and Miss Scott.”

“But they’re my mates!” Pip said.

Mr Danby turned to Benjamin. “Is that true?”

Benjamin shook his head. “I think he’s a snitch.”

“I ain’t a snitch!”

Mr Danby and the matron led us away down the hall.

“Please!” Pip howled after us. “Take me with you!”

Mr Danby ignored him.

We passed the empty classroom where I’d been questioned, and the one full of ragged-looking students. There was a fight going on, and the matron stopped to break it up. I felt sorry for the kids, stuck in here.

“What a miserable place,” Mr Danby said when we were further down the hall and out of earshot. “Dickens would recognise it in an instant. We’ll go someplace warm for a hot cocoa.”

“Where’s Detective Montclair?” I asked.

“I sent him away.”

“What do you do for the Foreign Office?” Benjamin asked.

“It’s difficult to explain, but I’ll try.”

“Are you a spy?”

Mr Danby smiled. “Would I tell you if I were?”

“You are!” Benjamin said, delighted. “But then why do you teach Latin?”

Mr Danby sighed. “Our country lost many good men in the war,” he said. “And now we’re in another war, of a different kind. You’re clever, so I’m sure you know that we have always stationed people in our best schools to keep an eye out for emerging—talent.”

Benjamin went silent. I could feel his excitement at the idea that Mr Danby was a spy, charged with recruiting new spies. Myself, I’d had plenty of excitement already, and was ready for a hot cocoa.

“And the truth is,” Mr Danby said, “that I was assigned to St Beden’s to keep an eye on you, in particular.”

“On me?” Benjamin asked.

“We’ll go to E. Pellicci’s, just up the road,” Mr Danby said. “I have a driver waiting, and it’s rather a good little café.”

The matron joined us again and unlocked the heavy front door with a ring of keys, and Benjamin beamed at her as if they were old friends. “Thank you, madam, for the fine hospitality,” he said, imitating Mr Danby’s arch politeness.

The matron scowled at Benjamin, but stood aside and let us out the door.

On the steps of Turnbull, there was sunlight and a fresh breeze, and I realised how sour and unhappy the air inside had been. I breathed deeply, and felt almost safe. Mr Danby was going to make everything all right. “There’s the car,” he said.

A shining green sedan idled in the curving drive. The driver turned to look at us, and smiled a welcoming smile. I felt Benjamin catch my arm, and the blood seemed to turn to ice in my veins.

Mr Danby’s driver was the man with the scar.