Before going to bed, Maisie worked on her case map. She had identified two points to which she would direct her attention the following morning. She wanted to return to the place where the Voice of Freedom had been published, and to revisit the house where Elaine Otterburn had lived with the other girls. And where was Elaine, if not in England?
In the morning, on her journey toward the Au, Maisie thought about Elaine and how she’d come to the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten to find her, her clothing in shreds, blood on her dress, with barely an ounce of dominion over her thoughts. Was it real terror? Or an act? Maisie had at once responded to Elaine’s predicament. Her decision to help the young woman now seemed to be a poor choice—but there had been few options. She could hardly alert the police—Elaine would have been under immediate suspicion, and in all likelihood incarcerated. Had John Otterburn’s daughter left Munich for another city—if not in Germany, then perhaps one of its neighbors? And if she was still here, then why had she remained? I am not what I seem. Then what was she? Was she more than Mark Scott’s sometime informant? Maisie thought about the woman’s character, the way she’d reacted when asked to recount the events that led to the disappearance of Luther Gramm. It was as if she were a doll dropped and broken in many pieces. She seemed to do well when told exactly what to do, but in this instance she’d shown no ability to retain her presence of mind, no fortitude under pressure. It occurred to Maisie that Elaine was only able to present herself as a certain type of woman—devil-may-care, lighter than air—when she had a safety net beneath her. On the ground it was her father’s money. In the air it was her training. Maisie considered the relationship between Elaine and her mother. Lorraine couldn’t cope with a daughter who had lost control of her emotions because the man she had a crush on was married to someone else. Maisie felt little shame when she whispered to herself, “She should have had Becca for a mother.”
The edge of the Au was as quiet as she’d hoped it would be on a Sunday. No children played, and the street in front of the former home of the Voice of Freedom was empty. She dispensed with looking through the glass-paned door that marked the entrance to the basement at the front of the building. But as she walked farther along the street, turned the corner, and stepped along the narrow alley that led to the back entrance, she wondered why people who played a dangerous game of risk would choose to house their press in a cellar accessible via a door half-paned in glass? Or had it been disguised as something else—a small-time lawyer’s office, perhaps? The workshop of a woman who took in mending? Or a tailor? But a printing press was not a small thing—unless there had been a disguise she had missed. Perhaps there was something so blatant about running an illegal press in a room with a part-windowed door that it would seem inconceivable to the authorities that anyone would take a risk in a place so vulnerable.
She stopped some way back from the rear entrance to study the boarded-up door she had breached the day before. There were three upper floors, all of which appeared empty—perhaps abandoned when the lower floor was raided, although one resident had of course left a cat behind. As Maisie looked up at the windows, she felt a soft touch on her ankles—the stray cat had returned to press its body against her, weaving a figure eight around her ankles. The animal stared up into her eyes and squawked a meow, so she reached down and ran her hand from its pointed shoulders to its tail. The thick throaty purr was loud, signaling pleasure—or a call for food. She had come prepared. Unwrapping a table napkin which was inside a paper bag she’d brought, she knelt down and laid out a feast of leftover fish. She observed the cat crouching, ever watchful for a predator in his territory, eating in ravenous mouthfuls.