“I can’t believe you left your job—I’d been told you loved the school and your teaching post.”
“They’ve given me a leave of absence until January. I don’t want to do this for long, and I believe it will only be short term anyway.” He looked around the café. “I doubt our lady of the urn over there is a spy, but just in case.” He lowered his voice. “There’s a move afoot to bring together scientists, mathematicians, those sort of people, to serve the country—it’s very unofficial, and will probably remain so. Their task is to keep us one step ahead of the Germans. I can’t say more than that, but I was earmarked to work with the War Office on security. The fact that I’m a mathematician at heart and have studied alongside the sort of men they’ll be recruiting, together with the fact that I was with both the military police and Scotland Yard, means that—according to the powers that be—I can work with security personnel as well as liaise with the boffins, who are the sort who generally balk at any suggestion that they must follow rules. According to the man who brought me in—and it wasn’t as if I was asked, exactly, it was more of an order—they’ll have one of their own among them, so we’ll know if we’ve got a bad ’un.’”
“Richard, that sounds like more than a short-term job—I think they’ll want you for longer than they’ve given you to believe.”
Stratton sighed. “Frankly, I would rather be teaching quadratic equations to pimply boys any day. I wanted my policing days to be over.”
“You’re doing your service on behalf of the nation.”
“Yes, I suppose so. How about you?”
“Me?” Maisie shook her head, and was quiet before adding, “I don’t know. I might be a liability. You see, I don’t know that I have what it takes to do what I was trained to do anymore. I’ve not talked about Spain, but . . . well, let’s just say it’s another dragon to be mollified.” She looked at her watch.
“What are you going to do about this case? The ticket seemed a pretty important lead.”
“Important, but not the be-all and end-all. I have a feeling it will still come in handy,” said Maisie. She consulted her watch again. “I really have to be on my way—a long drive ahead.”
Richard Stratton pulled a couple of coins from his jacket pocket and placed them under the saucer, a tip for the waitress. At the door he turned to Maisie.
“You know, I have some time on my hands—I could find this theater and ask if they kept any record of when the ticket was purchased. There’s bound to be someone working in the office I can find to talk to. They might have retained a note of whoever bought the ticket—some of the smaller theaters do that, so they know the next time the person buys a ticket and can acknowledge a regular customer, that sort of thing.”
Maisie hesitated before responding. “Only if you’ve time, Richard—and I’m so sorry, I have to run.”
The drive to Norfolk gave Maisie time to think, to consider the morning and ask herself what she wanted in the way of information, so that by the time she returned to London it would be as if she had defined the parameters of the puzzle, and only needed the details, the center of the picture. The killer knew each of his victims—that, she felt, was without doubt. She believed Rosemary Hartley-Davies was not aware that the person of her acquaintance to whom she’d placed a call was the killer—or was he? Or she? And if not the killer, might the person who received the call have alerted someone else? That the telephone call took place at all was speculation on Maisie’s part, but she felt sure that Rosemary Hartley-Davies had been playing for time as soon as she understood the purpose of Maisie’s visit. And part of that time would have been spent informing another person that the two men had been killed. What was the connection? And the connection to Firmin, and possibly to Lucas Peeters?—apart from the fact that they stood together in one photograph. She didn’t like the direction in which the finger of her investigation was pointing. It was one thing to intuit the killer’s identity, but quite another to work out the grievance at the heart of such passion—and what was murder, if not a passionate act? It was an inflamed, yet devastating, immoral deed of destruction. And Maisie suspected that in this case it was a misguided and malevolent undertaking in the name of retribution. More than anything she hoped her undercover journey to Belgium would provide her with the knowledge she needed—that it would establish the why as much as the who behind the killings.