Lining the walls were glass-fronted cabinets with Gothic arches; inside stood rank upon rank of rectangular cases, tooled in leather, and stamped with a date in gold. 1827. 1843. 1896. 1907…
“Did you talk to her?” Peter was saying.
“Margaux? Avoided her like the plague,” Hamish growled. “She wasn’t here long, mind you. Forty minutes, perhaps. Bit peevish as she left. Had words with our porter.”
“Maybe he found something in her bag that didn’t belong to her,” Jo said.
Hamish gave her a wolfish smile. “I’m off. Back in an hour. Have to lock you in. Don’t panic — nobody will hear you if you scream.” A flicker of amusement crossed his blunt features — the shoe, Jo realized, was now decidedly on the other foot — and then with a salute, he pulled the heavy door closed.
Neither of them spoke as Hamish’s footsteps shuffled down the dirt passageway. Peter drew his cell phone from his pocket, as if to call Margaux one more time — then thrust it away in disgust. There would be no signal so far underground.
“Where do we start?” Jo asked quietly.
“Nineteen forty-one, I should think.” He crossed to the Gothic cabinets, scanning the volumes as he loosened the knot of his tie. He’d already undone the top buttons of his shirt, and the effect, Jo thought, was of the true Peter emerging from the shadows. All his attention was fixed on the task, but his elegant fingers were so blindly languorous that for an instant, Jo had to close her eyes. When she opened them, he had stuffed the tie in his coat pocket and dropped the coat itself over the back of a chair. He was briskly rolling up his sleeves, determined to get down to work. “Bring the oil lamp,” he said, halting before one of the cabinets.
Jo snatched at it with trembling fingers; the knowledge that Margaux Strand had actually been in the chamber recently enough to leave her scent was infuriating. If they’d been quicker, Jo might have gotten Jock’s notebook back.
“Better take 1940 as well,” Peter said, and drew two leather-tooled cases from the shelves.
“What if Margaux took what we need?”
“She’d never recognize it,” Peter replied. “She’s good enough at literary analysis — Woolf’s obsession with drowning reflects the independent female’s fear/fascination with orgasm, the unwillingness to submit to the annihilating vortex of the male psyche, and so on — but terrifically dull when it comes to puzzles. I’ll lay odds she completely missed whatever’s here. Hence the row with the Wren porter. She’d need to rip up the closest available minion.”
“Unless, of course,” Jo murmured as she stared down at the empty interior of the case labeled 1940, “she just picked off everything available.”
Peter stared at her wordlessly for a second, then lifted the lid of 1941.
“Fucking Christ!” he spluttered, and shoved the empty case away.
“SO YOU SEE,” MARCUS SYMONDS-JONES WAS SAYING, “what we chiefly need is your help.”
Margaux kept walking straight down King’s Parade, away from the college and its beastly gate, her mobile pressed to her ear. If Peter’s boss wanted to find him, then Peter hadn’t given up and taken his gardener back to London. He might be searching for her and the Woolf manuscript even now. Bloody hell, he might even be in Cambridge — Peter was no fool. Margaux’s impulse was to tell Marcus Symonds-Jones to shag off, thank you very much, but before she stabbed the End Call button she hesitated. She did need help —
“What’s it all about, Marcus? Has Peter been naughty again?”
“So naughty he’s about to be arrested for theft,” the department head retorted tartly, “and you with him. It was you that Peter and his client Jo Bellamy consulted in Oxford last night, wasn’t it, Margaux?”
Shit. Shit shit shit —
“You do realize,” Marcus went on, “that the actual owner of that possible Woolf is either the National Trust or the Nicolson family, neither of which is going to take kindly to Peter’s pilfering?”
“It’s not Peter who’s stealing, it’s that American,” Margaux sputtered indignantly. “She may look naïve, but I’ll bet my knickers she’s no innocent, Marcus. You know what Peter is. Always bending arse backwards to be of help — ”
“So you did see him.”
“What if I did? He’s my ex-husband.”
“Where he is now, Margaux?”
Her stiletto caught again in a paving crack, and Margaux lurched painfully. “I don’t know. That’s the truth.”
“Look — Margaux…”
She remembered this wheedling tone; it was the one Marcus always used when he wanted sex. It meant that he needed her. Margaux was suddenly acutely alert. She came to a halt beneath a Tudor window, nursing her ankle, and listened.
“You wouldn’t like Peter to lose his job. Or, heaven forbid, go to jail. Would you, Margaux?”
“I don’t suppose so.”
“What if I told you I had a deep-pockets buyer for the item who might be willing to put everything right? No loss to the Trust, no loss to The Family, no loss to you or us — Provided, of course, the Woolf is genuine?”
Margaux hesitated. “Money isn’t the point, Marcus. My work is the point. My reputation — ”
“ — Will be rubbish, if the tale of this theft ever gets out.”
The wheedling note had vanished. But Margaux’s mind was only half on Marcus’s threats. She was thinking more clearly now. No more sharing.
“ — As I’m afraid it will, if Peter isn’t found. That’s where you come in, Margaux. Find Peter, won’t you, darling? Before we’re obliged to call in the police?”
“Poor Marcus,” she said, her heart suddenly lifting. “So thick, always. Peter is irrelevant. Why bother with him when I’ve got everything you could possibly need?”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“SO WHAT DO WE DO NOW?” JO ASKED DISPIRITEDLY.
In a few minutes Hamish would reappear to release them from the Ark. She had spent most of their allotted hour listening to Peter rant about the maddening cheek of his ex-wife, elaborated in a series of piquant episodes that filled all possible gaps in Jo’s knowledge of Margaux. She had said little during Peter’s diatribe, too sick with worry to stem the flow. But their time was up.
“We’ll have to find her,” Peter said. “There’s nothing else for it. Roust out the police, if we must.”
“I should just go back to Kent. Tell Imogen everything. Make a clean breast of it, and get the Trust to help.”
“But if we found Margaux — ”
“We’d have to bind and gag her to get our stuff back! I’ve already lost twenty-four hours, Peter, on a wild-goose chase — and I’m supposed to be working here!”
“Look — I know it’s been a difficult day — ”
“Make that two.”
“But there is one more place in Cambridge we could look.”
Jo stared at him with a mix of frustration and pity. “She’s long gone, Peter. Give it up.”
“Not look for Margaux,” he persisted, “but for Keynes.”
“What’ll that do?” she asked, bewildered. “We’ve lost the manuscript and the contents of the Ark.”
“But you said it yourself, remember? We’ve got to beat Margaux at her own game. She’s amassing loads of stuff, all right, but I tell you — she hasn’t a clue what it means. Forget the Ark. Let’s outmaneuver her on her own ground.”
He was standing now, and the oil lamp swept his shadow over the Gothic cabinets, wavering and wraithlike. Why did his intensity move her so much? Against her inner reason?