Walking the Labyrinth (11 page)

There was nothing about the trial the next day, or the next. In the newspaper for the next week Molly and John found a brief note saying the suit had been dismissed.

“That seems to be that,” John said. “I wonder why they didn’t check Emily’s bank account.”

“Because laundresses didn’t have bank accounts,” Molly said, a little angrily. “Why are you so eager to think the worst of my family?”

“But was she still a laundress? The trial’s thirty years after she joined the Order of the Labyrinth. A lot could have happened in that time. For one thing, she seems to speak like a lady now.”

“She still has the same last name, though.”

“Quiet, the both of you,” the librarian said. “Another word and I’ll have to show you the door.”

“The letters!” Molly said. The librarian started toward them. “Sorry, sorry,” she said.

She scrolled quickly through the fiche to the letters page. The
Times
had devoted far more space to letters about Binder’s suit that it had to the suit itself. There were dozens of them, and the one Swafford-Brown had quoted was not the worst. “Lunacy,” “folly,” “extraordinary gullibility,” some of the writers said.

“Poor Emily,” Molly whispered.

On August 25 there was an answer from Lord Sanderson. “It is always easy to ridicule secrets and rituals that are incapable of immediate interpretation. Unfortunately it is far more difficult to understand these rituals with the proper questing spirit. We regret that these mysteries of our Order have been made public.”

“Look,” Molly whispered, pointing to the bottom of Sanderson’s letter. “25, Sibylline Crescent,” it said. “Could the Sandersons still be there? Eighty-five years later?”

John shrugged. “Maybe,” he said.

She rewound the fiche and put it back. The librarian glared at them as they left. Molly blew him a kiss.

They bought a
London A-Z
at a corner shop and looked up Sibylline Crescent, then caught a taxi. Molly had expected a manor as imposing as the Westingates’, but the taxi dropped them off in a part of town that reminded her a little of Berkeley. She saw small bookstores, record stores, take-out vegetarian restaurants, people wearing torn black clothing with their hair dyed in a dozen colors, blue, pink, purple, white. Loud reggae music came from a street market on the corner.

“Where are we?” Molly asked.

John looked at their map. “It’s called Camden Town,” he said.

“And the Sandersons lived here? It’s not quite what I expected from Emily’s description.”

“It could have changed over the years. Or Emily could have made a lot of it up.”

“There you go again.”

John didn’t answer. He walked to the corner and turned at Sibylline Crescent.

“Over here,” Molly said from the other side of the street. “This is twenty-five. And look.” She pointed.

She had stopped at a plain storefront. The front windows were soaped over, but three smaller windows above them were still clear. Two were blank. The middle one said:

RUE AND ANT
OF THE LAB
N BRANCH

“Rue and Ant?” John said.

“The True and Antient Order of the Labyrinth,” Molly said slowly, working it out. “London Branch?”

“Or Camden Town Branch. Maybe they had branches all over—maybe they were bigger than we thought.”

“I bet this is Harrison’s second house in London, the one Swafford-Brown mentions. Swafford-Brown must have seen the address in the
Times
and didn’t bother to go there himself. If he had he’d have known it was a storefront.”

Molly went to the front door and knocked. No one answered. She turned the knob. To her surprise it opened. “Careful,” John said behind her.

The shop was empty, dimly lit by the three top windows. The hardwood floor was scuffed and streaked with white paint. Dust circled in the wind from the doorway. “Hello?” Molly said. Her voice echoed in the bare room. “Hello!”

John moved to one of the corners. A light shone from another doorway. Molly went over to it.

A man lay slumped against the wall halfway down a corridor. Beside him was an overturned flat racing cap. Molly put her hand to her mouth.

“John!” she said.

“Don’t touch anything,” John said, coming over beside her. “He’s dead.”

“I know,” she said, thinking of her days as a cab driver. “I’ve seen a dead person before.”

“Go to a phone and dial nine-one-one. No, wait. It’s nine-nine-nine in this country. I’ll make sure no one disturbs him.”

Molly went toward the body, reached into the man’s pocket. “Molly!” John said. “What are you doing?”

She took out a small key and hastily stuffed it into her coat pocket. Then she went outside and made the call.

John was still studying the body when she got back. “How much do you want to tell them?” he asked tensely.

“What do you mean?” Molly said. “We didn’t kill him.”

“Do you want to tell them about the Order of the Labyrinth? About your family?”

“About the fact that you stole a book from the Westingates?”

“Well, yes.” For the first time since she had met him Molly thought he looked a little embarrassed. “We could say that we were interested in the Order. That we traced it here, through the newspaper articles, and found this man dead. All of that’s true, actually. And then there’s the thing you took out of his pocket. Do you want to mention that? What was it, by the way?”

Molly looked at the dead man. She could not rid herself of the feeling that she was back in the labyrinth beneath the Westingates’ house, that this man was made of wax like all the others. “He’s the one who was following us, isn’t he?” she said. “He’s Flat Cap.”

“Yes.”

“Oh, God,” Molly said. “I said I thought we’d see him again.”

They heard the rise and fall of sirens. “Look,” John said urgently. “I don’t want to go back to jail.”

“Okay,” Molly said. “So we’re—what? Students of the occult.”

John relaxed. “Thanks,” he said.

Two police officers, a man and a woman, came into the room. “Where’s the body?” the man said. Molly pointed toward the hallway.

After a moment the woman came back. “Who phoned it in?” she asked.

“I did,” Molly said.

“Can I see some identification?”

Molly and John took out their passports. “Yanks, are you?” the woman said. “We’ll have to take your statements.” She raised her hand as they started to talk. “Separately.”

“You interview the woman,” the other police officer said. “I’ll take the man.”

The room was too small for them to be interviewed separately. “We’ll go outside,” the policewoman said. She looked at the passport again. “Molly A. Travers, is it?”

“Yes,” Molly said. She followed the woman out into the street.

It was easier than she had thought to stick to the story she and John had agreed on. They were students of the occult, come from America to learn more about the Order of the Labyrinth. No, she didn’t know who the dead man was. They had come here after seeing the address in the London
Times.
No, she didn’t remember the exact date of the letter in the newspaper, but she was sure John had written it down. She pointed to the sign on the window, explained what they had thought it meant.

More police cars and an ambulance drove up to the curb. People hurried into the store. The day was growing chilly. Molly shivered and balled her fists in the pockets of her coat. The key was still there, cold and hard. She closed her hand tightly around it.

“How long were you planning on staying in London?” the officer asked.

“I don’t know. As long as it takes to do the research, I guess.”

“Good. I’m afraid you won’t be able to leave for a while.” The policewoman paged through her notes. “I’ll need you to show me your purse. And your pockets as well.”

For the murder weapon,
Molly thought. She handed over her purse and turned her pockets inside out. The woman saw the key but said nothing and wrote nothing down.

John and the other officer came outside. “They found his passport,” the officer said. “Joseph Ottig. He’s American as well. Interesting, that.”

“Have you ever heard that name?” the woman asked Molly. “Joseph Ottig? Did you know him in America?”

Molly shook her head.

“We’ll need your current address,” the woman said, handing Molly her purse. Molly gave her the name of their bed and breakfast and the woman wrote it down. She said something to the man and they went back into the store together.

“I guess we’re done,” John said. They started walking back to the main street. “Don’t leave town, they said.”

“They told me the same thing. Do you know how he died?”

“He was shot, someone said. They looked at me when they said it, too. People don’t tend to carry guns in England—it’s not like America.”

“Are we in trouble?”

“I don’t know. I told them I’m a private investigator—they would have found out anyway, just by making a phone call. And then there’s the fact that the guy’s American. But they can’t prove anything.”

“Of course they can’t. We didn’t do anything.”

“Well, I did steal the book. And you stole something, too. What was it?”

The street vendors at the corner market were packing up their wares, folding away awnings and tables. Molly took her hand out of her pocket, showed him the key. “It goes to a locker, I think,” she said.

John nodded. “Probably from one of the train stations. Why did you take it?”

“That’s where the book is. Emily’s book.”

“How do you know?”

“I just know. Like Emily would, or Fentrice.”

“I bet it’s his luggage,” John said. “Half a dozen pairs of underwear, couple pants and shirts. Well, it’s too late to check it out today.”

A thin man with a sharp face watched them leave. First Joseph Ottig and now these two—would he never be free of these interfering Americans? But these interlopers were not nearly as dangerous to him and his associates as Ottig would have been.

Ottig was from the so-called American branch of the OotL, an upstart organization whose history only went back as far as the 1950s. The British branch had always kept a skeptical eye on the American heretics. As soon as they’d heard that Ottig was in the country the sharp-faced man had invited him to the storefront, insinuating that the two groups might be willing to put aside their differences and work together. And Ottig had had something, that much was obvious, an artifact or book from the first and nearly legendary Order. But he’d refused to say more.

The sharp-faced man frowned. He shouldn’t have shot him, shouldn’t have lost his temper that way. Then he smiled as a new thought came to him. The police suspected the two Americans of the murder. Lucky for him they had shown up when they did.
Let them interfere as much as they want,
he thought, patting the gun in his pocket. Maybe they would be able to find out where Joseph Ottig had hidden whatever it was he’d found.

The next morning Molly asked the owner of the bed and breakfast what the nearest train station was. “Charing Crustacean,” she said.

“What?” Molly said.

“Charing Cross Station,” she said, enunciating carefully, as if talking to a child.

They walked to the underground and set off for the station. John studied his notebook as the train trundled along the tracks. “All right, what do we know?” he said. “We know that Joseph Ottig probably belonged to the Order of the Labyrinth, and so did the man who killed him. Otherwise they wouldn’t have been in the storefront. Maybe they’d arranged to meet—”

“But is there still an Order? It’s been—what?—eighty-five years since Colonel Binder’s suit.”

“Flat Cap started following me after you asked about the Order in Oakland. And then he stole the book, and here he is, in a storefront that was probably used as their meeting place.… Even if the Order came to an end, say when Lady Westingate died or Emily left for the United States, they might want to revive it.” He turned back a few pages in his notebook. “And why did Emily and Harrison go to the United States right after the lawsuit? Were they afraid of more scandal? Why did the family change its name?”

“Fentrice said that all immigrants did it. A new start, she said.”

“Only if they had a name that was hard to pronounce. Anyone could say Wethers. Or Sanderson, for that matter.” He fell silent for a moment. “At least we know why Lady Dorothy put the stained glass picture of Emily in that dark corner of the room, where it would never get any sun. She must have moved it when she got Emily’s journal—she must have been terribly disillusioned.”

“I don’t know,” Molly said. “I just can’t see Emily deliberately bilking Dorothy and Colonel Binder out of all that money. Not the woman who wrote that journal.”

“Emily admits to deceiving Dorothy.”

“But she says she did it out of kindness, not for money. To stop Dorothy from thinking about her husband, get her interested in life again.”

“Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she? She’s apologizing to Dorothy. She’s not going to say, Hey, I took all your money so my lover and I wouldn’t starve.” John sighed. “I’ve never had a case get away from me like this, go off in so many directions. Occult groups and traveling magicians and laundresses and labyrinths … Maybe if we find out what’s in the locker it’ll start to make sense.”

But the locker wasn’t at Charing Cross Station, or at the next place they tried, Victoria Station. At Euston they found a number that matched the key. Molly put the key in the lock and the door opened.

“Emily’s book,” she said, reaching for it.

The book seemed thinner than she remembered. “Good Lord,” she said, opening it. “Someone’s torn out some pages in the middle. Three or four pages, looks like.” She started to read aloud. “‘And I should not have done what I did to you, Lady Dorothy. True, it was all meant for the best, but that is a feeble excuse when one considers the consequences. My children were right.’”

People were hurrying past the lockers, running for trains. The clatter of heels echoed in the vast space. A man in a business suit pushed them out of the way with his briefcase and opened the locker next to theirs. “Sorry,” he said, not sounding apologetic at all.

“We can’t read it here,” John said. “Let’s go back to the bed and breakfast.”