A Spy in the House (30 page)

She grinned despite herself. “It’s a long story.”

When he tried to move, he seemed surprised by the ropes at his hands and feet. Slowly, memory seemed to flood back, and he grimaced. “Damn.” He struggled, then winced. “You need to get out.”

“I know. The building’s on fire.” A hysterical laugh rose in her throat, but turned into a cough en route. “We’re both getting out.”

He glared at her — a confused, vague glare, but familiar all the same. “Forget it. Escape while you can.”

“James. Do you have a knife?”

“No.”

She looked about, her frantic gaze bouncing off bedstead, washstand, hookah. “There must be something sharp. . . . I can break the windowpane.”

“God damn it! Get out, Mary!” A fit of choking caught him, and when he finished, he croaked, “You’re damned stupid for a clever girl.”

“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me,” she quipped, crawling round the bed toward the window. Then, in quite a different tone: “Oh, dear God.”

He grunted. “Is he alive?”

There was a long pause.

“No.” When she crawled back, her expression held an odd blend of dismay and perplexity. She clutched an object in her hand. “A knife,” she said to James. Her voice trembled. “He had a penknife in his pocket.”

James stared for a moment. Then, as she began to saw at the cords binding his wrists, he suddenly understood. “She knew he’d be no match for her strength.”

It was a small knife, and the hemp fibers were coarse and strong. She gasped with frustration as the knife bounced off the rope once, twice, three times.

“Mary?” He sounded dazed.

“Yes?” Drops of salt water stung her eyes. She hadn’t realized she was sweating.

“Mrs. Thorold. She did this — she was working against her husband, not with him.”

“What?”

“She’s a pirate!”

“Not an
actual
pirate?”

“Well, I doubt she has a parrot or an eye patch, but she’s running a pirate crew!”

“So all those ships that went down . . . Thorold’s cargoes . . . ?”

He nodded. “All her work.”

She sighed and swore quietly.

“What’s wrong?”

“You worked it out first.”

He laughed at that. “I charmed it out of her.”

“You can’t have been that charming; she still left you here for dead.”

Finally, the rope gave way. As James winced and flexed his chafed and bleeding wrists, Mary set to work on his ankles. They’d already had more time than she could have hoped. But what if the fire had moved into the stairwell?

Finally. “Sit up,” she ordered.

He raised himself with a groan, but slowly managed to push himself to his feet. He grinned cockily. Almost immediately he wobbled and his knees buckled, sending him crashing to the floor with a slurred curse.

“Is it the smoke?”

He grimaced. “Concussion, I think.”

She slid her arm about his waist, looping his arm over her shoulders. “Come on, then.” She braced herself and stood, taking some of his weight. He was able to help, but still leaned heavily on her shoulders.

He glanced vaguely toward Chen’s body. “What about . . . ?”

“The fire seems to have slowed in here, but I don’t want to risk another minute.”

They set off, lurching and staggering. The heat seemed less intense, but sweat poured down both their faces: James’s from pain, Mary’s from the strain of holding him upright. The smoke was collecting in the corridor, and they both began to cough furiously.

Mary couldn’t afford breath for speech. She could only hope that he stayed conscious. At the head of the stairs, she slapped his cheek lightly. “Down,” she ordered.

In response, he gripped her shoulders tighter. At the first landing, the smoke eased a little and Mary glanced up at him. His face was black with soot. Hers must be the same. How had he ever recognized her?

They turned onto the second-floor landing, and James ducked as they passed under a low doorway, tipping them off balance again. They lurched and staggered against the wall.

“Mary.”

“What?”

He tilted her face back and kissed her.

Her eyes widened. “What — what was that for?”

For an answer, he kissed her again.

She pushed him back breathlessly. “You really must be concussed.”

“I’m perfectly lucid.”

“You don’t even like me!”

They began moving downward again. “That’s your main objection?”

“It’s rather a good one.”

“Well, as it happens, I do like you.”

“Telling me to clear off? You have a funny way of showing it.”

He stopped again. “For God’s sake,” he said in exasperation. “I was trying to protect you. Foolishly and pointlessly, as it turns out.” It was the most James-like speech he’d uttered so far, and for that reason it unnerved her all the more.

“Shall we focus on leaving the burning building?” she snapped.

They descended the remaining stairs and burst out through the front door, disheveled and reeking of smoke. They collapsed against the nearest lamppost, clinging to it to remain vertical, swallowing huge gulps of air that under any other circumstances would seem impossibly foul.

Some time later — she couldn’t have said how much — Mary looked about her. Something was different, although her dazed senses couldn’t work it out. The streetscape, the buildings, the relative quiet of a Sunday afternoon . . . and then it struck her. The crowd, small as it had been, was gone. Only one person remained, watching her and James with mild interest.

She tried to speak, but only a rattle emerged. She cleared her throat and tried again. “Where’s the crowd?” Her voice was a foghorn, two octaves lower than her usual pitch.

The barefoot girl smiled wryly. “Bloodthirsty buggers; they’re only interested in total destruction.”

Mary looked up at the Lascars’ home, the windows of which still belched smoke. “A house fire isn’t enough?”

“Didn’t you know? I thought that’s why you went in.”

Mary shook her head, thoroughly puzzled. “What do you mean?”

The girl — or rather, woman — grinned again. Seen in the late-afternoon light, she was older than she first appeared and a number of her teeth were black or missing entirely. “The fire’s near put itself out.” At Mary’s frown, she sighed and leaned in. “The house. It’s too damp to burn, love. How else d’you think you came out alive?”

After breakfast, Mary was summoned to the teachers’ common room. It promised to be another warm day. Her heart thumped hard enough to make her breathing shaky and her lips tremble. She knocked on the door, two crisp raps, and was pleased to be able to control her nerves to that small extent.

“Come in.”

She entered and sat on the blasted horsehair chair, daring it to slide her onto the carpet. “Good morning, Miss Treleaven, Mrs. Frame.”

Greetings were returned, tea poured. Not Lapsang souchong. Mary immediately set hers on a side table so that the cup wouldn’t rattle in its saucer.

Anne sipped her tea, set down her cup, and fixed her sharp gray gaze on Mary. “We hope you are feeling better after the events of Sunday.”

“Entirely, thank you.” She’d nearly gone mad after thirty-six hours of enforced bed rest and barley water to soothe her smoke-scorched throat.

“We have asked you here this evening, Mary, to present your report on the affair of Henry Thorold. As you know, his case is now concluded, and he is in police custody.”

“And Mrs. Thorold?” The question slipped out before she could think to repress it.

“Still at large.” Anne’s clipped tone was the only indication of her frustration. “Scotland Yard believes she may have fled the country.”

Mary’s eyes widened. “She must have left on Sunday — immediately after setting fire to the refuge. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t use enough paraffin to burn down the house; she was in a hurry.”

“All possible,” said Felicity. “And if she had had a false passport ready, she could easily have been in France on Sunday night.”

“In the future, the Agency might have an opportunity to help Scotland Yard find Mrs. Thorold,” said Anne. “But we are meeting here now to discuss her husband. Before I present our final report on him to Scotland Yard, there are a number of details I should like to confirm with you and which should prove useful to the prosecution. You may begin whenever you are ready.”

Mary shouldn’t have been rattled by Anne’s formality, but she had to swallow hard before finding her voice. “As you know, I first went to Cheyne Walk to observe the Thorold family without expecting to be an active participant in the case.” Her voice was still huskier than usual, but at least it was steady. “I eventually learned that the secretary, Michael Gray — whom we’d suspected as part of the ring — was also suspicious of Thorold. Gray informed me that he’d taken secret copies of some relevant documents and hidden them safely. I believe the police retrieved the relevant documents from him?”

Anne nodded. “I understand that he was very cooperative. He is, however, still under investigation. Your report may certainly help to clear him of any wrongdoing.”

“I hope so.” Mary took a deep breath. “While I was searching Thorold’s files, I met James Easton, who was searching for related information.” She couldn’t control the blush that stained her cheeks, but pushed on. “Working together, we discovered the Lascars’ refuge in Limehouse and Mrs. Thorold’s house in Pimlico. At that point, I had nearly all the information I needed, but couldn’t see how to put it together until it was nearly too late. The missing link between Thorold, the Lascars’ refuge, and the Pimlico house was, of course, Mrs. Thorold. I should have known better than to underestimate a woman,” she added, “even one pretending to be an invalid.

“But I did underestimate Mrs. Thorold. She was clever: she disguised her business as an illicit affair. It was a perfect stereotype. And in a sense, it was also the truth. Mrs. Thorold was betraying her husband’s confidence, but instead of committing adultery, she was running her own business.

“In hindsight, I ought to have been more suspicious of Mrs. Thorold. Her performance didn’t quite cohere; she was weak and passive at some times and quite assertive and strong-willed at others. In fact, Thorold was much the better actor: he seemed to be a very ordinary, slightly stressed businessman, not one whose trade was being sabotaged by his wife and whose company was on the brink of failure. I allowed myself to be distracted by Mrs. Thorold. It wasn’t until the last minute, when Cassandra Day showed me the notebook she had found, that I realized Mrs. Thorold was actually engaged in business.” Here, she paused. “You know, of course, that James Easton managed to wring a fairly comprehensive explanation from her?”

Anne raised one eyebrow. “I believe it was quite a classic, theatrical villainous confession: high-seas piracy, revenge, marital discord.”

“He must be a persuasive young man,” Felicity said with a grin.

Mary didn’t take the bait. “The weakness in our theory, of course, is that it depends on that confession. The notebook is a very careful document — it contains financial information without any direct references to the business. It could belong to hundreds of other people.”

“But something in it led you to the Lascars’ refuge. . . .” said Felicity.

Mary hesitated. “Yes . . . there’s a tiny pencil reference to the address of the refuge and the surname of the warden. But it’s very cryptic. My decision to go there was partly — perhaps largely — a matter of . . . instinct.”

“There’s no reason why reason and instinct can’t coexist,” said Anne gravely.

Mary nodded, grateful for the affirmation. “I believe you know the details of Mrs. Thorold’s piracy better than I; you’ve spoken to James yourselves?”

“‘James’?” Anne’s eyebrows lifted.

“Mr. Easton,” Mary corrected herself. Her cheeks were burning.

“Ah. Yes, you were excluded from those interviews for reasons of security. We didn’t meet him ourselves, of course; that was a matter for the Yard. But we did read the transcripts of his evidence. Her house in Pimlico was searched yesterday and while most of the papers appear to have been burned — there were a lot of ashes in the grate — there are enough indicators for us to formulate a theory.

“We know from her own boasting that Mrs. Thorold directed a pirate crew who attacked her husband’s ships on the high seas; she probably used detailed routes and cargo information stolen from his files. She seems to have had an accomplice in the firm, most likely a junior manager named Samuels, who didn’t turn up for work yesterday. His lodgings are deserted, and no one knows where he is.

“We aren’t certain when Thorold realized what she was doing. It may have been quite recently, since his will was revised to include the Lascars’ refuge only last year. It’s possible he was afraid no one would believe that he’d been ignorant for so long. A wife is the property of her husband, and what she knows, her husband knows. That is the presumption in law and in practice, and she must have counted on that to keep her secret safe. Who could have imagined that Mrs. Thorold, of her own initiative, was assembling pirate gangs, attacking her husband’s ships, stealing his cargoes, and murdering his crews?”