“None of your business,” I replied. “Keep talking.”
He glanced at the librarian, who was napping soundly in her chair, and continued, pretending to look at books over my shoulder. “When we finally did the operation,” he said, “it went off without a hitch. I flew over enemy lines and parachuted from the plane with my papers and my German uniform in my pack. As the plane crashed, I landed and quickly changed sides. I walked out of the woods as Faber and hailed the first man I saw in flawless German, telling him I’d seen a plane go down while on the way to join my regiment. No one questioned me for a second.”
I shuddered. “Alex, that was bloody dangerous,” I said. “You could have been killed.”
He was silent for a moment, behind my shoulder, and then he placed a fingertip behind my ear, drawing it along the edge of my hairline. “I’ve made you use terrible language,” he said.
Flustered, I grabbed a book called Molly of the Plains from the shelf. It seemed to be about a young girl kidnapped by Indians. “Hans Faber wasn’t in a real regiment,” I said. “How did you do it?”
“There is chaos on the ground in war,” Alex said in my ear. “There are giant masses of men being moved this way and that. My cover was as a messenger, so I was always on the move. I pretended I always had to be on my way to one place or another, urgently. With enough plausible details, I made it work. And when I had the chance, I radioed information back to England about who was moving where, using which supply lines and which routes.”
I couldn’t imagine it, living like that from day to day. “Was it better than being in the RAF?” I asked. “Or worse?”
He was quiet so long that I didn’t think he’d answer. Then he said, “It was both better and worse, I suppose. Worse, because I had to keep the story straight and sleep rough most of the time—I barely slept for months. Because I knew you were home thinking I was missing in action. Better, because instead of being blown into bloody pieces, I had a shadow of a chance to come home.”
I bowed my head and stared blindly at the book in my hands. “It worked too well, didn’t it?” I said. “That’s why you didn’t come home.”
Ever so gently, he put his palm on the back of my neck, touching my hair almost with reverence. “Yes,” he admitted. “After the war, they wouldn’t let me go. Hans Faber became a traveling businessman again. He traveled Germany, Austria, Serbia, Belgium. They needed information to pass to the diplomats at the Treaty of Versailles. They needed to know what was happening to the Kaiser in Berlin. They needed to know what was happening in Italy. They always needed something, one thing after another. It was important work, they said. Work that influenced the lives of thousands of people, instead of the life of one man who wanted to go home to his wife.”
I could have kissed him then. I had done it a million times, as easily as breathing. I could have turned and pressed my lips to his, felt everything he was thinking, understood everything in his soul. Right there in the Anningley library, with the librarian asleep in her chair. But when I turned around and looked up at him, his expression was marked with pain.
“I thought it would be easier, coming back,” he said. “But I can see now that I was naive. I have to find the traitor—I cannot stop until I find him. And I have to find Franny’s killer.”
Yes, of course. He hadn’t come home for me, not completely. I folded my book under my arm and turned away.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
We left the lending library and Alex unfolded the umbrella again. “I knew Franny all of her life,” he said. “Aside from your mother, Jo, she was the most tormented person I’ve ever met. Her grasp on reality was tenuous, and she saw hallucinations. But there was a sort of vitality about her—it’s hard to explain. She was very intelligent, very alive, and sometimes very determined. She was not suicidal.”
“That’s why you believe it was murder?” I asked.
“That, and the timing of it.” He shook his head. “Something was not right about that day. I knew it from the minute I came home to find her dead.” He glanced at me. “If I believed in such things, I would say that it doesn’t surprise me that she haunts the house.”
“She wears a dark gray dress and a string of pearls,” I said. “Her hair is tied back and held with pins.”
He was silent, and I knew that I’d just described what Frances had been wearing the day she died.
“I’m not hallucinating, Alex,” I said. “I found photographs in her room—one of them was of me. The one of me as an artist’s model. It was in my trunk when I arrived, but I found it folded with two others, with a message on the back. One of the other pictures showed Wych Elm House, and there is a shadow in the window—”