It was more anger than humiliation that colored Chace’s cheeks. Of course Crocker had known. They’d given her a complete workup at the Farm; they’d have done bloodwork as well.
Which meant Crocker had sent her to Iraq knowing she was pregnant.
“I am taking a leave of absence.” She was more than a little surprised at the sound of her own voice. It was surprisingly calm.
“Is it Tom’s?” Crocker demanded. “Is that it?”
“Twelve months,” she said.
“You can’t do it, Tara, not on your life. You can’t have a child and be in the Section, it’s not possible.”
“Ariel and Sabrina,” Chace countered, using the names of Crocker’s daughters.
“Jennie.” The name of his wife.
“Twelve months’ leave. Sir.”
“Not on your life.”
“Then I quit,” Chace said, and walked out.
She caught an early train out of King’s Cross the next morning, bound for Leeds, riding in a nonsmoking carriage that reeked of stale cigarettes. The ride took some two and a half hours, and once in Leeds she changed to a local connection, taking it as far as Skipton, where she hired a car and bought a copy of Lancashire A to Z. She took a room at the Hanover International Hotel, stowed her things, and, famished, ate a late lunch while going over the maps. She went to bed early.
In the still-dark hours the next morning, Chace made the fifteen-minute drive from Skipton to Barnoldswick. She parked the car near the town square, and after a seventy-minute reconnoiter, had found four positions ideal for static surveillance of number 17 Moor View Road, the home of Valerie Wallace.
It was light surveillance, the best Chace could manage without giving herself away, the best she could manage working alone. As a result, she was careful, trailing Valerie Wallace at a distance as the older woman went about her business in the town, working at the local charity shop, meeting friends for lunch or tea at this or that house, visiting the local surgery to see her GP. Autumn brought an already cold wind that promised a fiercer chill come winter, and most of the widow Wallace’s activities were thus confined to the indoors, which made getting close difficult.
Shortly after midnight on her third day of surveillance, Chace broke into the surgery, curious as to the reason for Wallace’s visit. She spent an hour with a penlight in a darkened file office, reading Valerie Wallace’s medical history. When she was finished, she replaced everything as she had found it, and managed to relock the door on her way out.
In the afternoon of the sixth day, while Wallace was having her regular luncheon with friends at the tea shop off the square, Chace picked the lock on the back door of 17 Moor View Road, and worked her way in careful silence through the older woman’s home. If her schedule held true to form, Wallace would go from lunch to the local hospice for volunteer work that would stretch until almost the evening, and so Chace took her time. She searched in cabinets and closets, beneath the beds and in drawers, even going so far as to examine the contents of the kitchen, just to gain some insight into the older woman’s diet.
In Valerie Wallace’s small bedroom, smelling of lavender and laundry soap, Chace discovered a collection of framed photographs carefully arranged atop the dresser. There were pictures of a younger Valerie and, presumably, her late husband. Gordon Samuel Wallace had been a career soldier, and in two of the pictures stood in uniform, looking proud to be wearing it, if vaguely uncomfortable to be photographed while doing so. A third showed Valerie holding a newborn, and the remaining two were of Tom exclusively. One of them mimicked the portrait of his father, perhaps intentionally, wearing the dress uniform of a Royal Marine; the last, more recent, was taken in the sitting room of this very house, the branch of a Christmas tree reaching into the frame as Tom looked out the front window at the moor.
Wedged beneath the last was a folded letter, and Chace freed it, opened it, already knowing what it was.
Dear Mrs. Wallace: It is with great sadness that I must inform you of the passing of your son, Tom, in service to his country. . . .
Chace replaced the letter as she had found it, and departed as silently as she had come.
On the tenth day, a freezing November Tuesday, at nine o’clock exactly, Tara Chace knocked on the front door of Valerie Wallace’s home.
“My name is Tara Chace,” she said. “I worked with Tom.”
Valerie Wallace, standing in the half-opened doorway, frowned slightly, squinting up at her. She was a small woman, easily a foot shorter than Chace, with hair more gray than black, and not so much heavy as thickened by age and gravity. She let her frown deepen, and didn’t answer.
And Chace found herself at a loss, the speech she’d so carefully rehearsed abruptly gone, disappearing like the vapor from her breath. She tried to retrieve it, found only bits and pieces, incoherent and useless.
Valerie Wallace shifted, one hand holding the door, still staring at her.
“We were lovers,” Chace finally managed. “Before he died. We were friends and we were lovers, and I’m pregnant, and it’s his. It’s ours.”
She thought it would garner some reaction, at least; if not the words, at least the clumsiness of them. And it did, because, after another second, Valerie Wallace blinked, and then opened the door more fully, inviting her inside.
“Perhaps you’d like to come in for a cup of tea, Tara Chace,” Valerie Wallace said. “And you can tell me why you’re here.”
On the twenty-eighth of May, at seventeen past nine in the morning, at Airedale General Hospital in Keighley, with Valerie Wallace holding her hand as she screamed through the final surge of labor, Tara Chace gave birth to a daughter. The baby was healthy, twenty-two inches long, weighing seven pounds, eleven ounces.
She named the child Tamsin.
There were nights when, despite exhaustion, Chace found she could not sleep.
Staring out the window that overlooked Valerie Wallace’s well-tended and now fully in-bloom garden at Weets Moor, holding Tamsin in her arms as the baby slept, Chace would sit and stare at nothing. She could feel her daughter’s heartbeat, the rustle of her breath, the heat of her small body.
And Tara Chace would wonder how she could feel all of that, and still feel nothing at all.
CHAPTER 1
Uzbekistan—Tashkent—14 Uzbekiston,
Malikov Family Residence
9 February, 0929 Hours (GMT+5:00)
They gave it an hour after the husband left, just to be certain he hadn’t forgotten anything, that he wouldn’t be coming back, before they knocked on the door. Four of them went to do it, while another two waited in the second car, the engine idling.
The two who waited were jealous of the four who went. They thought they were missing the fun.
All were men, and all wore business suits of the latest style, acquired for them in Moscow and Paris and Switzerland, then altered by tailors here in Tashkent, men who were paid pennies to adjust clothing worth thousands. All six finished their look with neckties of silk and shoes of Italian leather and cashmere-lined kidskin gloves. A few wore overcoats as stylish as the suits they covered, to ward off the howling chill that blew down out of the mountains in Kazakhstan to the north.