Maisie nodded, looking up as Sandra returned to the room, and handed her an envelope. “Here you are, miss. It was all I could do to get him to give this envelope to me—I thought he would just barge up here, but I assured him I worked for you and I wasn’t a spy! I had to sign an official docket for him, to say I’d received the papers. He was very polite though, and nicely turned out—mind you, working for an embassy, you’d expect him to be. And his English was perfect.”
“I’m sure Dr. Thomas has very high standards for her staff.” Maisie picked up a letter opener, unsealed the envelope, and began to lift out a sheaf of papers. “Sandra, would you have a go at getting the names of some of the associations set up to look after Belgian refugees during the war? Just in London, Kent, and Sussex for now. We’re going to need names, and more background information. And Billy—you’ve been an engineer, so I think you should talk to the staff at St. Pancras in the first instance. Find out about Addens, his work, how he mixed with his fellow workers, that sort of thing. Try to find out if he seemed a little more flush with money than usual. And did he seem in any way different in the weeks before he died? Usual procedure at this point. I’ll go over to speak to his wife, perhaps the local pub landlord, and anyone else—without seeming too curious, I hope. I want us to understand the geography of the man’s life, and then we can start digging deeper. Oh, and I’ll be paying a visit to Detective Chief Inspector Caldwell, if I can see him today.”
“Detective Chief Inspector? That little gnat’s a chief inspector?” Billy’s eyes had widened.
“Now then, Billy. Let’s be respectful, shall we?” Maisie paused. “Though I know what you mean—it came as a bit of a shock to me, the ‘chief’ bit. And before we all leave, let’s just go over those cases in hand—we’ll need to keep all the hoops spinning.”
They discussed the case of missing jewelry—not the sort of assignment Maisie would usually take on, but the client had been referred by Lady Rowan. Billy reported on a case regarding a wife who doubted the fidelity of her husband, and the trio conferred on another case concerning the whereabouts of a wealthy widow who appeared to have vanished, but who Maisie—having located the woman—knew very well just wanted to get away from her manipulative adult sons.
As Billy left and Sandra began a series of telephone calls, Maisie stood by the windows in the main office and watched her assistant make his way across the square. She could see from the way he carried himself that he was glad to be starting out on a bigger case. The dodgy wills and missing valuables were only engaging to a point; Billy always liked to sink his teeth into a more substantial assignment, one they were all working on together. But she knew he was troubled too, with one boy of enlistment age, another approaching it, and a wife with a history of mental illness. She would have to keep an eye on him. And on Sandra too. For if she was not mistaken, her newly married office administrator was expecting a child—and given her comments this morning, Sandra was fearful of what the future might hold for her firstborn.
For her part, Maisie knew that each day had to be taken as it came, and to do her work she must be flexible, to move the fabric of time as one might if sewing a difficult seam, perhaps stretching the linen to accommodate a stitch. She had learned, long ago and in the intervening years when she was apart from all she loved, that to endure the most troubling times she had to break down time itself—one carefully crafted stitch after the other. If consideration of what the next hour might hold had been too difficult, then she thought only of another half an hour. She had explained this to Priscilla, once, and her friend had asked, “What’s the longest time you could bear, Maisie?” And she had whispered, “Two minutes.” But at some point the two minutes became five, and the five became ten, and as time marched on she was able to imagine a day ahead and then a week, until one day, almost without realizing it, she could plan her life, could look forward to time laying out the tablecloth as if to say “Come, take what you will, be nourished and know that you can bear what might be on your horizon, the good and the ill.”
Now, on this day, some twenty-four hours after a new war had been declared, she wondered if she might have to begin reining in the future once again, with her thoughts only on the next hour, and the hour after that. She stepped back to the table and leafed through the folder of papers. As she read through the notes, the nagging feeling returned that Dr. Francesca Thomas had not been entirely open with her regarding some aspect of the assignment. Or was it that, despite her regard for Thomas—the nature of her past, her bravery, and her ease with secrecy, subterfuge and danger—Maisie had never quite trusted her, despite her own assurances to Sandra and Billy?
Picking up her hat and document case, Maisie left the office—only to return to collect the gas mask she had left behind.
Chapter 2