A soft grinding noise. That was the cane twisting into the rug. Cummings said, “I’ll get to the point then. You brought a woman here, injured. Do you know she’s a notorious spy? She’s a French émigré we’ve been keeping an eye on for years. A shopkeeper in Exeter Street.”
Justine would smile, being called a shopkeeper. Hadn’t Napoleon called the English a nation of shopkeepers? He glanced at Doyle. “Notorious spy? That does sound familiar. We have one of those tucked away upstairs, don’t we?”
Reams snarled, “For God’s sake, man. You have blood on your front door.”
“How biblical of us.”
“She was attacked in the square,” Doyle said. “It’s been reported to the magistrate.”
“Sneak thieves. They’re everywhere. I didn’t know street crime in the capital fell under your jurisdiction.” He watched Cummings.
Who seemed angrier than he should be. Why was that? “She’s alive? She’ll recover?”
“Yes.”
“Did she see who attacked her? Can she identify him?”
“No.” He didn’t expand.
“Well, then. Well.” Cummings gathered in his cane, gripped the head of it in both hands. Awkward because he was crowded in, he scrambled to his feet. “These things get exaggerated. Rumor said she was at death’s door. Heh. Death’s door is the door to Meeks Street. Amusing, that.”
“Diverting.”
On his feet, Cummings began a fussy pacing back and forth, flourishing his cane. Reams glowered from the sideline. Cummings huffed and hemmed. At last he came out with, “There’s something you should know.”
“Tell me.” Maybe he was about to find out why Cummings was in his office.
“Private, really. You want Markham to leave. Don’t want to say anything about this in front of him.”
“There’s nothing he can’t hear.”
Cummings shrugged. “You may wish you’d chosen privacy.”
Another trip across the office. “There have been a pair of murders in London. Frenchmen. Antoine Morreau, bookseller. Pierre Richelet, publican in Soho. Both stabbed. They passed themselves off as Royalist émigrés. In fact, they were French secret agents.”
Cummings was pleased with himself. He knew something more. He was enjoying himself too much to just say it right out loud.
“Police Secrète.” Reams pronounced it like an Englishman. “Both of them.”
Doyle rearranged himself. The chair creaked. “How long have you known about them?”
“Does it matter?” Reams demanded.
“If they were killed because Military Intelligence let something slip, it matters.”
“We don’t leak information.” Reams shifted on his feet, a bantam bull, pawing the ground. “You can damn well—”
“Reams got a letter.” He didn’t have to tell Doyle this. It was obvious. “An anonymous letter. Probably yesterday. They didn’t know before that, or they would have pulled them in to harass.”
Reams’s face turned red.
“Their real names,” Cummings said, mellifluous and superior, “were Gravois and Patelin. They were senior officers of the Secret Police under Robespierre. I’m sure you’ll find them somewhere in your records.”
He didn’t have to search the records. Those two, he remembered. The Tuteurs of the Coach House. He’d very nearly met them one night when he was young enough to be an idiot.
Reams subsided against the wall, muttering, “Don’t know why there’s Frenchies everywhere. They have their own country.”
“We took the matter to Bow Street.” Cummings nodded to Reams. “Tell them.”
“When we got the let—” Colonel Reams rubbed across the buttons on his coat, shining them up. “When we connected those two murders, I went to Bow Street. Tied the cases together for them, you might say.” He let the pause drag out, enjoying himself. “They’d spotted some similarities. What they don’t understand at Bow Street, though, is intelligence.”
So many things one could say. So tempting. But he let the colonel wind to his conclusion.
“They were both stabbed,” Reams said. “They were goddamned French émigrés. Dead ones now. The knives were left sticking in their gut where they fell.”
Almost poetic, the colonel.
“I asked to see the evidence boxes.” Cummings tucked his cane under his elbow, getting ready to leave. He’d done what he came for. “The murder weapons were flat, black throwing knives of a most distinctive design. I recognized them at once, of course. A British agent used knives like that in France during the war. A rather infamous agent.”
“The Black Hawk.” Reams laughed. “They had your initials on them, Hawkhurst. I told Bow Street they’re yours.”
Twenty-four
JUSTINE’S SHOP, VOYAGES, HAD A SOLID, PROSPEROUS look to it. The windows gleamed. The name was spelled out on the front in green letters edged with gilt. There was a proper mercantile bell on the door.
From across the street, Hawker heard the faint jingle as a muscular clerical gentleman emerged, hunched in the rain opening his umbrella, and strode off carrying a large, oblong package under his arm.
It was short of noon, but lamps were lit inside the shop, paying blackmail to the mucky gloom of the day. He and Pax had pulled back to the line of shop fronts, just to give the carriages a challenge if they wanted to soak somebody. They stood in the doorway of an antique dealer across the street from Voyages. Nothing much else happened, except everybody got wet.
Inside Justine’s shop, two customers stood at the counter and examined every possible aspect of some small metal instrument, passing it back and forth between them. The shop clerk, a Negro, tall and thin as an ebony cane, advised and discussed and sometimes pointed. This went on.
The clerk was calling himself Mr. Thompson now. He’d used a half dozen other names when he worked for the French.
Pax said, “Somehow I never expected Justine DuMotier to end up a shopkeeper on Exeter Street.”
“A surprise for all of us.”
“Everybody buys here. Good business. Doyle watched her for months when she first set up to see if it was legitimate.”
“I know.”
“I figured you knew everything you wanted to know.”
Three years ago, when Napoleon fell, Justine DuMotier disappeared from the sight of man. He’d looked for her everywhere, worried as hell. Paris was full of occupying armies. Petty, rancorous men tracked down Napoleon’s followers to pay back old scores. The new French government was thinning the ranks of the Police Secrète, not being frugal with the bullets.
It had been months before the Service spotted her in London. More months, before he got back to England himself.
He remembered. He’d landed in Dover, ridden up from the coast in a night and a day, dropped his kit at Meeks Street, and walked straight here. To her.
It had been late afternoon of the day, and foggy. The shop was lit up inside, the way it was now. He’d stood . . . He’d stood almost exactly at this spot and watched her at the counter of her shop, fifty feet away. She’d unrolled a big map and was showing a gentleman customer some river on it, or a sea route. Something that involved leaning over close and tracing a line with her finger.
He’d stayed in the shadow, watching. Didn’t go into the shop. The war was over, but it didn’t make any difference. The last words she’d said to him dug a chasm he hadn’t dared to cross.
“What do you think that is?” Pax said, meaning the instrument everybody was so fascinated with, inside.
“Sextant maybe. A small one. And that’s the case for it.”
“We don’t buy from her,” Pax said. “The Military Intelligence boys do. The navy officers. The Ethnological Club. The Service goes to Barnes instead.”
“That’s tactful of us.”
“We like to think so.”
Voyages designed and sold gear for travel to the far corners of the globe. Now that the war was over, Englishmen were pouring out of dull old England, headed to Egypt, South America, India, and every port in the Orient. Voyages was the first stop. They knew what you needed. They’d buy it for you or make it, and pack it up neat. The expeditions Justine supplied never ended up hiking through the monsoon in wool underdrawers. Her guns didn’t misfire during some sticky dispute with Afghani bandits. That clerical gentleman with the umbrella wouldn’t run out of soap and ipecac while he was bringing enlightenment to the Maori.