When I returned to the guesthouse at midnight, my father asked me where I’d been. He trusted me to provide details. I provided them: Quentin and I had eaten pizza in the gymnasium together while he talked about his girlfriend, Tasha. I’d always liked the name Tasha. It was the first time I’d successfully lied to my father.
In actuality, once I arrived at the “party,” I was ignored. Basil and Thom had drunk a bottle of tequila between them, then spent the night retching in the restroom. After I cut Quentin’s hair, Quentin had practiced table tennis for hours with a laserlike focus I hadn’t seen on him before. As for me, I wandered down to the school swimming pool and read my encyclopedia Q–R with my feet in the water. It was de rigueur, except for the part where I’d swapped my bottle of pills for Quentin’s.
His I actually liked.
TWO YEARS LATER I TOLD MILO, IN A FIT OF HONESTY, THE real events of the night. The handwritten apology I received from Quentin was done in such a shaky hand that I could only assume that Milo had been holding a knife to his neck.
This was love. This is what love looked like.
AT 4 A.M., I PUT THE KETTLE ON. I RAN THE NECESSARY information back through my favorite American business database (subscriber-only) and took down the results, then filtered them, then filtered them again. I spent some time looking at Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood on Google Maps. Then, at four thirty, I phoned the Yard.
There was a certain pleasure in calling Scotland Yard and asking to speak to the detective inspector on duty. I was an official source. I was listed in the records as such. That knowledge was pleasurable too, though I didn’t put too much stock in such institutions.
“Stevie,” DI Green said today. “Good to hear from you.”
“Hello,” I said. Stevie was my code name, as in Nicks. It was why Green was saved in my phone as “Steve.” The detective inspector had a fondness for seventies folk rock and a certain cheesy sense of humor. “I’m settled in.”
“Excellent. You have a report to make?”
I suppose I had a soft spot for Lea Green.
I’d known her for some time. She was the detective from the famous Jameson incident, the one where, if the papers were to be believed, I’d drawn a crayon map to lead the police to the stolen emeralds. I often wished I could go back and take a pair of scissors to that day, like I was removing scenes from a play. So what if the play was my life.
Really the worst-case scenario I could imagine, had I never gotten involved with the Jameson case, would be that my father had overlooked me entirely. That I turned out to be an ordinary girl, studying for my A levels somewhere in London, on hard burn to get into Oxbridge for chemistry. Instead, I’d been a child with a famous detective’s last name, hiding behind a sofa while her father talked case notes with New Scotland Yard. All because his famous last name had given him such delusions of grandeur that he styled himself a tiny crime-solving king.
Green had been studying detective fiction at Cambridge before joining the force. Hence, her coming to my father. (I often thought she and Watson would get on quite well. He always liked formidable women.) I’d been informing for her ever since, though the operation she and I were running right now was only half legal, at best. She trusted me. Whether or not that was wise was her own business.
“I confirmed the Peter Morgan-Vilk identity,” I told her. “If you have any sway with customs, I’d pull that passport. Morgan-Vilk won’t miss it, but Lucien Moriarty will.”
“Good.” She was typing. “Your uncle came up with this information, then?”
For months I’d been telling her I was shadowing Leander as he’d been investigating Lucien Moriarty. I hadn’t been speaking with DI Green every day; I had reached out sparingly, at odd hours, to provide her with intel I had “gleaned” from my uncle’s “case notes.”
“We’ve split up,” I told her. “It was my birthday present. I’m striking off on my own.”
“Right,” she said. “Congratulations, girl. What will you do now?”
“Look into certain insinuations Morgan-Vilk made about Lucien’s political career,” I said. “I have some thoughts about Michael Hartwell’s daughter—”
“Stevie.” Green huffed a laugh. “The answer is, ‘I’m going to Disneyland.’”
“What?”
“Nothing—look, I’ll pull the Polnitz and Hartwell passports too.”
“I’m going to look into their provenance anyway. I imagine Moriarty didn’t choose them out of a hat. He’s been careful to avoid assuming identities of the deceased, for whatever reason—except for this Polnitz identity. But the others I don’t understand.”
“Leave me to figure it out. I need you to go to Greenpoint today.”
“Greenpoint,” I said. It had been in my plan, and still I disliked being ordered there.
“You could hide a little of your disdain for me, you know. Might take you further.”
I opened my mouth to apologize, and instead said, “I saw Watson yesterday. He didn’t see me.”
DI Green exhaled. If she didn’t know the full extent of my and Watson’s history, she did see firsthand how everything went to shit. “How are you feeling about it?”
It was a simple question. Why did it always make me want to bite the person asking it? “I didn’t sleep well. Is something in particular happening in Greenpoint today?”
“There’s a shipment due for Connecticut from the gallery. It leaves at close.”
Whatever mawkish emotion I was feeling was gone, erased as though with a damp cloth. “Where? Where in Connecticut?”
“Stevie—”
“Where?” I loathed asking questions to which I already knew the answer.
“You aren’t to be on the truck. You aren’t to be anywhere near the truck, do you understand? No. Lorries. You’re on intel only. I don’t want you to be seen by them. I don’t want you to be—”
“Saying something five different ways doesn’t make it more effective—”
“—or any of your Lara Croft bullshit, I mean it, Stevie—”
“Fine,” I said.
A pause. “I should go,” she said with a huff. I could hear someone—her supervisor?—in the background. “You didn’t send me that photo last night.”
Of my pills. I’d fallen asleep. “Sorry.”
“Doesn’t cut it. Send it now.” Green put the phone down.
I supposed I was going to Greenpoint, then. The ease with which I had taken her advice surprised me. Certainly, the DI had given me a good reason, but in the past, that hadn’t had been enough.
I knew, at this point, that I should have a handler. The briefest of glances at my last operation would tell you that.
If you’d said anything at all, Watson had said to me that day on the lawn. Anything. I could have changed your mind! But you maneuvered me here just to—
This is love, I’d told him. This is what love looks like, and then I’d left him to the wolves.
Yes, I needed a handler. If DI Green wasn’t the exact right fit, she was a beginning.
I took my stash out of my coat lining. I photographed it. I made another cup of tea, put on my Rose-from-Brighton kit, topped it off with flat-black, cat-eye sunglasses, and went off to buy myself some Kevlar.
The man in the body armor shop was incredulous. “What—”
“It’s for my Fashion Institute admissions portfolio,” I said impatiently. “I’m putting together work that’s a commentary on personal security. It has a lot of tulle.”
“Tool?”
“Tulle. T-u-l-l-e. Like a tutu? Attached to a vest.” I shrugged my bag from one shoulder to the other. “Here are my measurements. I’m going to model it myself.” When he continued staring at me, I stomped my foot. “Honestly. How hard is this to understand?”
Thankfully the shop was empty; I was having to make a scene. At least I was providing this clerk with exactly the sort of girl he expected to be buying his wares, and so he’d forget me soon enough. Had I arrived as myself and quietly made my purchase, I would be the sort of oddity he would remember.
“It’s your money.” Shrugging, he turned to pull the least expensive model from the wall.
“No. I want the Byzantium Express Level 3X-A. With the moisture wicking if you have it.”
“You’ve done your research,” he said, obnoxiously surprised.
I blinked at him. “With the wicking,” I repeated.
“Wicking?”
“It’s a high-stress interview.”