She crossed the road, navigated the puddles of last night’s rain and entered Foyles. She made sure to spend time in the bird section, looking for a book on feeding finches. That would come in handy for the cover story she was working on.
Over breakfast, she had told Joe she was going shopping. He had suffered another bad night. A cold spot had appeared in the bedroom and Rachel had slept in the guest room. When she woke, she had found Joe lying down on the couch in the drawing room with curtains closed, Gertrude fussing over him.
‘Maybe you can bring me a new head, dear,’ he said. ‘I heard they are on sale at Harrods.’
She felt guilty at the easy lie. ‘I like this one just fine,’ she said and kissed his forehead.
Now, as she breathed in the smell of new books and made her way through the labyrinth of shelves, she wondered if actually getting birds would be a bad idea.
Then she recognised the young blond man in the camel-hair coat, leafing through a book barely thirty feet away.
Memory matched his features to other impressions from her route, like light glinting off facets of a jewel. A sandy brown coat glimpsed in Harrods. The face of a man bent over a newspaper on the Oxford Court Line. Thin blond hair, combed back from a high forehead, and improbably chiselled features.
Rachel made sure to walk across his field of vision and then proceeded farther into the bookstore’s depths. When he turned a corner into the history section, she was waiting.
The man froze when he saw her standing there, only a few steps away.
Of course the Service was watching. She had been an idiot to think otherwise. Someone—probably Harker or Roger—had already passed her information to C in the Summer Court, and they were keeping an eye on her just in case she planned to do something foolish. The feeling was both reassuring and embarrassing at the same time, like when her mother had caught her as a child after she ran away with her wet nurse’s daughter in Bombay to make chapattis in the local bakery.
The man pretended to ignore her, studied the shelves and touched the spine of a book with a gloved hand. He was remarkably handsome, too much so for the field, where the real heroes were faceless, average-looking men.
Rachel herself, on the other hand, belonged exactly where she was. Behind a desk. On the shelf. She just refused to admit it. That was why she had saved Kulagin from the duel. She had wanted something more than the empty nursery and the haunted man in her bedroom.
No matter. There was no arguing with tradecraft: no rendezvous under surveillance. Harker was probably laughing behind her back, but she was not going to give him the satisfaction of acknowledging that she had been caught. She headed back to the bird section and bought a book on the care and breeding of Gouldian finches. There was a hollow feeling in her stomach when she walked back towards the Tube station.
‘Excuse me, Mrs White?’ said a voice with an impeccable public-school accent.
The young man in the camel-hair coat stood in front of her.
Rachel sighed. ‘Tell Harker to send you back to Brickendomby Hall for more training,’ she said.
‘You misunderstand me, madam. I am not a Watcher.’
‘Enlighten me, then.’
‘My name is Henry. I am merely a messenger. Would you be so kind as to step inside for a moment?’ He gestured at the entrance to a wax museum that advertised THE HORRORS OF THE TRENCHES—OVER 100 FIGURES.
She stared at him.
‘It will only take a minute,’ the man said reassuringly. ‘Allow me, please.’ He offered her his arm. ‘This is supposed to be a splendid show. Our mutual friend you worked with in Wolverhampton thinks so, too.’
Rachel raised her eyebrows, accepted the man’s arm and allowed herself to be led inside.
* * *
The wax museum was crowded, hot and smelled of burning dust. The exhibits were in small, low rooms filled with sandbags to make them look like trenches. In the dim light, stiff wax figures in their broad-rimmed helmets and uniforms enacted scenes from the war.
A medic offered a wounded soldier with a bloody bandage around his head a Ticket and a vial of cyanide. A group of Tommies huddled behind barbed wire while an old rattling newsreel played on the wall—hulking forms of ectotanks over charging soldiers, striding forward and growing bigger with every death, picking up field guns with ectoplasm tentacles. A group of doctors and technicians, white coats stained by dust and grime, doing final checks on a spirit-armoured soldier before his transformation. The metal plates and heavy coiled wire evoked a medieval knight. Rachel stared at that tableau for a long time. Was this what Joe’s nightmares were like?
‘Here, Mrs White,’ Henry said. He ducked under a piece of tape blocking a corridor, indicating an unfinished part of the exhibit. She followed him into a pitch-black dead end. He fumbled with a light switch. A bulb flickered into a half-hearted glow and revealed a group of naked wax dolls standing at attention.
Henry removed his hat. Underneath, he was wearing a Crookes aetheric resonator, or a spirit crown as it was colloquially known. It was an expensive model, too: the filigreed silver net practically vanished into his hair, and it was only now that she noticed the skin-coloured power cord that ran into the pocket of his coat. That explained the good looks: Henry was a high-class medium who rented his body to affluent spirits. He smiled a little sadly and reached into his pocket. There was a small click and his features contorted unnaturally, his eyes flickering from side to side and then rolling back in his head. No wonder mediums usually wore masks.
‘Mrs White,’ he said in a new voice. It was gentle and mellifluous, lower than Henry’s own, and made her think of a kindly old uncle. Children across Britain loved that voice, the voice of Max Chevalier, the famous naturalist and author whose radio shows were a part of many a family’s Sunday ritual even after his passage to Summerland. What most people did not know was that Chevalier had been the head of his own Section in the Winter Court and the most successful agent runner in the Service.
Until he was assigned to vet Peter Bloom.
‘You passed the test, Mrs White,’ Chevalier said. ‘I hope you will forgive my little ruse. It is always good to observe wild animals from afar for a while before approaching.’
Rachel stared into the medium’s white, empty eyes. Henry’s handsome features were contorted into something resembling a mischievous grin, but exaggerated, like a Mr Punch figure in a street booth.
‘Do you mind if I smoke a pipe while we talk? It’s a pleasure I rarely experience—thought-forms simply are not the same—so I asked Henry to bring it especially.’
Rachel nodded and waited while the medium took a curved pipe from an inside pocket and filled it. His movements were jerky and a lot of the tobacco spilled to the floor. Then he lit it, filling the corridor with pungent smoke.
‘Ah, that is better. Now, I have made some inquiries about you, Mrs White. I understand you had something of a career setback recently. A pity. A real pity.’ He blew out a cloud of smoke that obscured his unnatural face.
‘I do not want your pity, Mr Chevalier. I want answers.’
‘Please call me Max. And I can assure you that it is not pity making me spend my meagre savings on Henry’s services to meet with you like this. It’s curiosity. Tell me, do you actually plan to breed finches?’
‘I might. As you say, I have suffered a career setback and have more spare time on my hands.’
‘Intelligent creatures, more so than they get credit for. But very fragile, Mrs White. A sudden cold, shock or unhappiness can kill them. Prone to tumours, as well. You need to keep them warm. Feed them fennel seeds.’
‘With all due respect, I did not seek you out to discuss birds.’