Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (41 page)

Skrtich. Skritch. Skritch.

The file folder sitting alongside the blotter contained a summary of the observation team’s findings since May. With forced nonchalance, Harrison said, “I understand that you’ve been away from home for some time. Just for the sake of completeness then, where exactly have you been?”

Nice try, mate.

Marsh leaned forward. Harrison flinched. “Milkweed reports directly to the PM. So short of a directive from Churchill himself, or a proclamation from the King, what I do is none of your bloody business.”

Harrison set aside the fountain pen. He pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and set about cleaning the spittle from his eyeglasses. “Mr. Marsh. I understand your frustration. Truly I do. This is a trying time for every Briton. Please understand we’re not doing this arbitrarily. We believe that this commander fellow is mixed up in something grim.” He set the glasses back on his nose, then picked up the file. “When the police nabbed him in St. James’, he was carrying a passel of documents supposedly belonging to the brother of a member of the House of Lords.” He squinted at something, then chuckled. “Rather sloppy work, though. Gibberish, all of it.” Harrison read further. “That same brother, by the way, later hinted at being involved with secret work for HMG.”

Marsh ran a hand over his face. Under his breath, he said, “Damnit, Will.”

“I understand you know Lord William. Do you work together?”

“I know him from Oxford.”

“Ah! Very good. Balliol College, ’36.”

“Bully for you.”

Harrison frowned, sighed, turned his attention back to the file. “Well then. Getting back to the police. When asked, this mystery fellow claimed to be John Stephenson. I’ve spoken with the constables in question. They remember that night clearly. Unusual circumstances, you see.” He tapped his temple. “Anyway, the name raised a few flags. Seems there had been a Stephenson here in SIS, before he created his own section and toddled off to the Admiralty.”

“You don’t say.”

“Now here’s where it gets rather interesting indeed.” Harrison set the file open on the desk, then leaned over it with fingers locked together. “Once set loose, our mystery man shows a remarkable skill at evading trails and escaping detection. Almost as if he’d been trained. MI5 loses him immediately. And he might have been lost forever at that point,” he said. “But he reappears when our own watchers observe him spending quite a large amount of time with the wife of a fellow agent of the Secret Intelligence Service. An agent who works for John Stephenson. The same Stephenson, it should be noted, who requested the surveillance in the first place.”

He closed the file, and plied Marsh with a we’re-all-just-doing-our-jobs-here-surely-you-see-that type of smile.

“So. Do try to see it from our point of view, won’t you? Whoever this Liddell-Stewart fellow might be, he’s intimately connected to the SIS. And, it appears, your wife. So while you fellows have been having a jolly time running your own little fiefdom in the Admiralty, we’ve—”

Marsh cut him off by jumping to his feet and wrenching Harrison out of his chair by the necktie. Marsh grabbed the fountain pen. He leaned over the desk, and pulled Harrison closer until their noses touched.

“Stop wasting my time with your internecine bun fight. I haven’t seen my wife and daughter in seven months. Take me to them, now, and in return I’ll give you Liddell-Stewart. Or, keep wasting my time, and I’ll put the nib of this pen into your carotid before you can call for help.”

A trickle of ink stained his fingers. He shoved Harrison away. The bureaucrat fell backwards over his chair. A man barged into the office. Tall fellow, bit soft around the middle, hair shorn close to the scalp and gone gray at the temples. Ex-army? He gave Marsh a hard look.

“Everything all right, sir?”

Harrison climbed out from under his overturned chair. He’d gone scarlet. He coughed, loosened his tie, and waved the other man away. “Yes. It’s under control,” he managed. “Thank you.”

Once they were alone again, and Harrison had composed himself, he said, “They’re at a safe house in Croydon. I’ll take you myself.”

*

His experience in Germany had Marsh dreading the worst. He expected to find Liv and Agnes stuck in a lightless oubliette. But the Croydon safe house was, outwardly at least, a perfectly ordinary corner lot on a perfectly ordinary set of dingy brick terraced houses. Harrison stayed in the car while Marsh went inside.

The safe house parlor doubled as a reading room. A pair of windows with quarreled windowpanes overlooked the street. They were flanked by floor-to-ceiling bookcases of leather journals and black binders that Marsh knew, from his experience in MI6, held newspapers. The glass panes had been removed from the bookshelves, as a precaution against Jerry bombs. Battered armchairs with torn upholstery were scattered about the room and around a long table that might have dated from Cromwell, judging from its nicks and gouges. A blanket and two sofa cushions had been turned into a makeshift bassinet.

Liv was in the kitchen. A saucepan and two teakettles adorned the stove. The room smelled of warm milk on the stove and a soiled nappy.

Marsh’s breath hitched in his chest. A single glance was enough to quench the furnace heat of his rage, like a campfire buried beneath a glacier. It left him hollow and windblown, uncertain and more than a bit afraid. He swallowed. His mouth tasted sour.

She sat at the table with her back to the door. The crook of her arm cradled Agnes in a pink elephant blanket; she fed the baby from a bottle.

Her hair was longer than when he’d last seen her. Several wisps of auburn had escaped from her hairpins, to dance about her head like a halo. She’d lost the last bit of roundness from the final stages of her pregnancy.

Liv sighed at the sound of his footsteps. Without turning her attention from Agnes, she said, “We’ve been over this quite enough. I can’t tell you what I don’t know. So I do hope you’ve come to take me home.”

He knew that tone in her voice. The last threads of her patience had come undone, leaving no buffer on her irritation.

Not upset. Not afraid. But bloody angry. Woe to SIS.

“I have,” said Marsh.

Liv froze. From his vantage in the doorway, he saw the subtle tightening of skin along her neck and jaw. He knew she was steeling herself to look. Hoping her mind hadn’t played a cruel joke on her. Hoping her husband’s voice hadn’t been a hallucination. Because her hope for reunion had withered. But now, suddenly, the moment was upon her, bringing with it a surfeit of contradictory emotions. She knew not what to do, nor what to say.

She stood. With great care, she set Agnes’s bottle on the table. Next, she straightened her dress. Then she secured Agnes in the crook of her arm, drew a deep breath, and turned.

Liv’s eyes were red and watery. Agnes was twice as big as he remembered. Marsh’s heart was a snowball. He felt a hollow shell of a person.

“Raybould?” Liv’s voice came out thready.

He found his voice. “Hi, Liv.”

Wife and husband stared at each other. An unbridgeable chasm, each ticktock between heartbeats.

“I thought you were dead—”

“I’m so sorry—”

“—and that I’d never know how or why or where. I never heard from you. Not one word.”

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated. “I thought about you every single day. Every hour. It kept me alive.”

Not gently, she said, “I grieved for you, Raybould. I had to come to terms with never seeing you again, and we couldn’t even hold a funeral to say good-bye…” She sobbed. “I didn’t know what to tell Agnes when she grew older.”

Agnes sneezed. Absently, Liv dabbed their daughter’s face with a corner of the baby blanket. Their daughter.

“My God, she’s so big.” Marsh found he was crying. He held his arms out. “Please?”

Later, he wouldn’t remember how the gulf was bridged, but somehow Liv was in his arms while they cradled the baby between them. Soft lips. Hot tears. Liv’s hair smelled of old sweat. Agnes was still tiny, still an infant, yet so large he wanted to rage at the world. He’d lost so much of her life.

“I couldn’t tell you where I was. I couldn’t tell anybody. I wanted to. Dear Lord, I thought the loneliness would crush me to death.” The words came tumbling past his lips, riding his breath into her ear.

Liv said, “Just don’t insult me by pretending it was work for the Foreign Office.” Her fingertips traced the cuts on his face. “What did they do to you?”

“I can’t…”

“I know.” She said, “When?”

“This morning. Just now. Have they been asking about Liddell-Stewart?” She nodded. “Don’t worry. I caught him sneaking around the house. They’ll let you go now. They can question him to their heart’s content.”

She pressed her lips to his ear. “Raybould, no! You mustn’t,” she hissed.

“Liv, he—”

“No, you don’t understand. He’s a friend. You’ve no idea what he’s done for us.”

Marsh tensed. How had that wretched, plug-ugly excuse for a man won his wife’s devotion? What had taken place while he was away? Seven months … So much could happen in that time. An entire chapter in the life of his family. “They told me he came to the house.”

Liv hesitated. “He watched over us while you were away. It was as though he knew, Raybould. I can’t explain it, but I’d swear he knew something terrible was coming and he was sent to protect us.”

Marsh asked, “Protect you from what?” But he knew the answer:
I’ve finally solved a long-standing problem.

“He saved us, Raybould. He saved our lives. I tried to stay in London, truly I did, I wanted to be here when you returned, but the bombing was so terrible, every night the airplanes came, and I started to believe you were gone forever. I couldn’t take it any longer. Will convinced me to leave London. I wanted to go to Margaret’s house in Williton but the commander was dead set against it, and he’d been such a good friend I didn’t want to betray his trust. Aunt Margaret called around and scraped up a billet for the two of us, so I took Agnes to Coventry. I thought anywhere had to be better than London.”

“Liv. What happened in Coventry?”

She started to shake. “It was terrible. You’ve no idea. The bombs fell like rain. I thought the Jerries wouldn’t stop until there wasn’t a single house left standing. But then the commander arrived.” Her whispering tickled his ear and cheek. She hadn’t brushed her teeth today. “In the midst of that hell, he came for us. He found us in the middle of this terrible attack, insisted we come with him. Almost dragged me out of the shelter. But then we were in his car and had barely moved and then the house…”

Liv trailed off. She pressed her forehead against the crook of his neck. A tear dripped under his collar. Marsh tightened his arms around her, careful not to squeeze Agnes.

Dear Lord: Liddell-Stewart had saved his wife and daughter. And not from a run-of-the-mill raid, either, but saved them from something that Gretel had orchestrated. He’d known what she intended. He’d known the bint would move against Marsh’s family. And he intervened. Marsh remembered that night in the garden shed, remembered the passion, the sheer hatred, that entered the broken ruin of the commander’s voice whenever he spoke of Gretel.

Never trust Gretel. Never.

A wide-eyed fervor like that, such enmity, didn’t arise easily. It was the fanaticism of a man who’d been cut down to the bone. Of a man who’d seen his life destroyed. And he’d known Gretel would try to do the same to Marsh.

He’d deal with her soon. But first things first.

If not for the commander, Marsh wouldn’t have had a family with whom to reunite. Marsh owed him an unpayable debt. And he wanted to know more about the man who could thwart Gretel.

It was Marsh’s turn to whisper. He leaned down to touch his lips against the soft, cool curve of Liv’s ear. “The commander is trussed up in our Anderson shelter. I stashed him there before coming here.”

Liv started. She looked up. “Did you hurt him?”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, not permanently.”

“Oh, Raybould.”

Think quickly, now. What would Harrison and company believe? They suspect a connection between the commander and Will. They know I’m connected to Will …

Marsh tipped his head toward the door. “I’ll tell them I’ve tracked the commander to one of the offices for Aubrey’s foundation. The one Will uses from time to time, above the Hart and Hearth. I’ll lead them there, in exchange for one of his men driving you and Agnes home.”

That would keep Harrison well away from Liv and the commander for a few hours.

2 December 1940

Walworth, London, England

I came around on the frigid floor of the Anderson shelter. My younger self hadn’t lit a lamp for me, but dreary daylight snuck through cracks around the door. Enough to illuminate my situation, once my eyes adjusted.

My wrists ached where my younger self had tied them to the corners of the cot. He’d used lengths of rough, scratchy hemp rope from the garden shed. It didn’t take much struggling to abrade the skin on my wrists. He’d pulled my arms as wide apart as the cot would allow. The growing ache between my shoulder blades had woken me. But I couldn’t feel a damn thing below my knees. He’d cinched them together with the belt from his trousers; he’d used my own belt to do my ankles, and then more rope to secure my feet to a bolt in the Anderson’s steel hull.

He had me stretched out like the Christ figure in a passion play. I wondered if he’d noticed I was wearing his clothes. I ran my tongue along the hard crust at the corner of my mouth. It came away tasting of blood.

By flexing my waist and shoulders, I could lift the cot frame a few inches. Enough to rattle it, but there wasn’t enough room in the cramped shelter to work the cot apart. I might have managed if I could have braced my feet against the hull, but my lower legs had all the strength of wet newspaper. I flopped about like a fish, trying to toss my feet into a position with leverage. The Anderson echoed with my exertions. It sounded like a demented Highland drum corps holding a tattoo inside a saucepan.