The Shadow Cabinet (10 page)

10

I
DON
'
T
HAVE
MUCH
OF
A
HISTORY
OF
T
ROUBLEMAKING
. I
T
'
S
not in my nature. I've always done stupid things, but with an awareness of the general boundaries. Attempts are always made to meet the curfew, put the car back where it belongs, hide the phone down the front of the shirt in class. I observe the niceties.

Which I guess is another way of saying I'm kind of a low-grade sneak. I don't try for much. I'm like the Toaster Thief.

The Toaster Thief was a famous figure in Bénouville. He or she or they made the rounds when I was ten or eleven. There was a rash of burglaries in town, the first of which, at Miss Carly's house, was notable because the only thing taken was a toaster. It seemed unlikely that someone would take a toaster and leave the television and computers and stuff, but that's what happened. Miss Carly was telling my parents about it down at the soccer field—people tell my parents anything even remotely legal, because they are the big lawyers in town. She was asking if she should file a police report, because it was only a toaster, and my parents said yes, of course, someone has been in your house and taken your toaster. You don't know what they might get up to. And then, in the next few days, someone took Ralph Murchis's old microwave. And then it was Dolly Allen's blender. Just when the town was convinced some thief was slowly building up a not-super-great kitchen somewhere, it was a lamp from Pat Silvo's, some folding chairs, a landline telephone. It got to the point that it was sort of a badge of honor to have had the Toaster Thief come to your house, except it was also creepy. But the point is it was all so low-level that the police, who really had nothing better to do, still thought it was barely worth looking into. Because who cares about a six-year-old blender, really, when people are getting murdered (not in our town, but certainly somewhere else in the world)? Bénouville police like to do one thing only, and that's set speed traps and catch strangers from up North. That's it. So no one bothered to look for the Toaster Thief, and they stopped because I guess they had all the appliances they needed. The Toaster Thief was simply accepted as a facet of our lives.

This was my level of bad. So I'd gone out. I hadn't gone far. I hadn't gotten my face up on a Jumbotron. I'd gone to a cemetery, which was certainly part of my remit. I was in a quiet pub in a quiet corner of London. And, well, yes, I was now sitting here with my former boyfriend and a complete stranger . . .

This was not going to go well. Because Thorpe, unlike the Bénouville police department, seemed to take infractions pretty seriously. There was a kind of low-grade radiation that seemed to come off his back and shoulders in waves. You don't go white-haired when you're that young unless you lead a pretty serious life. Freddie and Jerome regarded our new companion warily.

“Oh,” I said. “Hi.”

Jerome looked at me, his eyes asking who this was.

“Rory,” Thorpe said, “why don't you step over to the car with me for a moment.”

Jerome rose out of his seat a little. I think he may have been trying to defend me—from what, he likely didn't know. It made my throat close up.

“Perhaps I can explain—” Freddie said.

“Rory.” Thorpe tapped on the underside of my elbow, indicating that I should rise. While I felt cowed and cornered for a moment, I remembered what had gotten me out the door in the first place—Stephen's report, the fact that Thorpe had known that Stephen might do something dangerous. I wasn't inclined to blindly follow him anywhere right now. I held my seat. Thorpe resigned himself and dropped into one next to me.

“I'm Freddie—” Freddie said.

“Sellars,” Thorpe said. “Yes, I know exactly who you are.”

That stopped Freddie for a moment.

“You do?” she asked.

“I wouldn't be very good at my job if I didn't. And you are Jerome Croft.”

A nod to Jerome, who leaned back in his seat a bit on hearing this stranger say his name. Thorpe sniffed a bit, and I knew he was getting a whiff of smoke from my clothes and hair.

“I'll make this very brief,” Thorpe said. “Rory is part of an active investigation . . .”

“I just told a bunch of people we found her,” Jerome said.

My heart seized.

“No, you didn't,” Thorpe said, not missing a beat. “But I understand your impulse to say you did. You're afraid for her safety, and you're generally suspicious of authority. I've seen your work on the Ripper message boards.”

Thorpe spread his hands on the table and stretched out his fingers, and the gesture mesmerized us all a bit.

“If you
have
told someone where she is, you've put her at serious risk. She'll be taken into protective custody immediately, and the investigation will be compromised. So is what you said true?”

One thing I always liked about Jerome—he never seemed cowed by authority. Which was weird, because he was a prefect and in charge of making sure rules were followed. But it was in his conspiracy-theory-loving nature to stick it to the Man a little. He looked at Thorpe for a long moment before replying.

“No,” he said. “We just found her.”

Thorpe accepted this answer with a nod.

“Have you been in a fire?” he asked me.

“Not a
fire,
exactly . . .”

“She was locked inside a tomb,” Jerome said. “There was something on fire inside. Your protection isn't great.”

“It's easier to protect someone when she cooperates,” Thorpe said.

“It wasn't a big fire,” Freddie said. “It did look like you had the situation in hand.”

“I'll address this in a moment,” Thorpe said.

“Who are you?” Jerome asked.

This was another reasonable question, and I was surprised it hadn't come up before. I guess we all kind of knew roughly where we stood except for Jerome.

“My name is Thorpe. And I'm responsible for Aurora. I think you have her best interests at heart, so I hope you comply with what I ask. I can't make you do anything—you can simply choose whether to be a help or a hindrance to this investigation.”

“The Ripper investigation?” Jerome asked. “Not just Charlotte.”

Also, Jerome still thought we were talking about the Ripper.

“For now,” Thorpe said, “I need to establish the rules and ask for your assistance. I realize, Jerome, that the temptation to act on what you've seen or heard today will be strong. I could put you in custody—”

“On what grounds?”

“I would have thought you'd know that I don't need grounds. Something can always be arranged. But I have no desire to do that.”

“So my choices are keep quiet or get banged up on some fake charge?”

“It would be more constructive to think of it as—”

“You want to know about Jane Quaint,” Freddie blurted out.

This stopped us all. This Freddie was like a can of pop-up snakes.

“Who's Jane Quaint?” Jerome said.

“What do you know about Jane Quaint?” Thorpe said.

“Yeah,” I said. “What?”

“I know about something that happened in that house. I know someone you can talk to. He's not going to talk to you,” Freddie said. “No offense. He's quite countercultural. He'll talk to us, though. To me, to Rory . . .”

She left that little hint dangling in the air. She tipped her chin up as a kind of challenge, but I could see uncertainty swimming in her eyes. Thorpe never appeared to lose his footing, but it took him a moment to collect his thoughts and compose his reply.

“If you know something and you fail to disclose—”

“What I know isn't something you want me to disclose to anyone else but you. I want to be a part of this. If you know who I am, maybe you know why. You know the kind of information I'm talking about isn't the kind you ring the police with.”

Whoever this Freddie was, she had some spine. She was probably bluffing. I'd bluffed my way through similar things, but that was with Stephen, not Thorpe. They were both challenges in their own way, but Thorpe was the one who could probably call in helicopters and people with guns if annoyed. Worse, he could cancel everything. Maybe Freddie had just blown it all. This challenge, the fact that two people now knew I was here—even though it wasn't my fault—maybe this would make Thorpe turn me in. Maybe I would have to run. Maybe I needed to get up right away, claim to need the ladies' room, go into the pub, sneak out a back door, and start running across the fields of north London. Running forever and ever without end.

All these thoughts passed through my mind as Thorpe sat there, silently regarding Freddie.

“Who's Jane Quaint?” Jerome said.

Everyone ignored this question. Thorpe had decided to speak, and when he did, it was not with the voice of someone who was going to call down an air strike.

“Where is this person?” he asked.

“Soho. I'll tell you exactly where in the car. If there's a car. Or Tube. I can certainly show you the way on the—”

“There's a car.”

“And we all come,” Freddie said eagerly. I had no idea if Jerome wanted to come with us, given the nature of the conversation, but Freddie had attached herself to him and thrown them both overboard.

“Soho,” Thorpe said.

“Yes.” Freddie sat up straight. “Soho. He's there now. I was going to tell Rory about him when you came in. If you want to talk to him, you take us all.”

“If I take you all,” Thorpe said, “you both hand me your phones. Now.”

Freddie handed hers over pretty quickly, but Jerome held back a moment before passing his over.

“You'll get it back,” Thorpe said. “It's a simple precaution.”

For Jerome to give his phone to someone who was still unknown to him—someone like Thorpe—it must have gone against his every self-protective instinct. But he did it. Thorpe got up, and we followed him to the black Mercedes, which was parked outside. I sat in the passenger's seat, and Freddie and Jerome were put in the back.

“Soho,” Thorpe said, starting the car.

“Soho,” Freddie repeated.

“Could you be more specific?”

“I'll tell you as we get closer.”

Thorpe sighed quietly as he pulled the car out.

“Perhaps,” he said, “someone will explain the tomb and the fire.”

“I went to talk to someone,” I said. “It didn't work out.”

“Later, then,” Thorpe said.

Thorpe was tolerating this, but I couldn't tell for how much longer.

This new assortment of friends and strangers was messing with my head something terrible. It was like a dream where people in your life who shouldn't know one another are all in the same place, and you have to put on a show together or something like that.

“How is it that you know who I am?” Freddie asked. She leaned in with polite interest.

“You've been following us for some time. A colleague spotted you hanging about months ago and looked into your background.”

“How?”

“He followed you,” Thorpe said.

Stephen. Had to be. Boo or Callum would have noticed her and tackled her. Only Stephen would follow and research.

“You followed us for miles on a bicycle yesterday,” Thorpe said. “I let you tag along for a bit, but lost you on the Archway Road.”

“You didn't lose me,” Freddie said. “I went behind a bus and followed the reflection in a car window.”

That was pretty impressive. I mean, Freddie seemed a little intense, but that was good going. Thorpe, as usual, registered nothing.

“Have Boo and Callum—” I asked in a low voice.

Thorpe gave me a sharp side look, and I realized too late that using names was probably bad.

“Her name
is
Boo!” Freddie said from the back.

“Boo's a part of this?” Jerome said.

The dawning of a great realization crossed his face. Boo—my chatty roommate—was a cop.

“Let's end this particular conversation,” Thorpe said. “How about you tell me more about whoever it is we're going to meet.”

“My friend is someone who knew Jane a long time ago.”

“And how do you know about Jane?”

“I saw her,” Freddie said. “She used to hang about near Wexford sometimes. It caught my attention, the way she was lurking about. So I made a note of it in my book. I knew I was on the right track if
she
was interested in Rory too.”

“What does that mean?” Thorpe asked.

“Jane Quaint is famous to some people. If you're interested in some things—”

“Who's Jane Quaint?” Jerome asked again.

But no one was ever going to answer him. I knew this. I wanted to answer, just to put him out of his misery on this point. What I wanted to do, actually, was crawl into the backseat and bury myself inside his big coat and wrap my arms around him and—