“Please. Sit down.” A waiter had already materialized. “What would you like?”
“Pellegrino and a lime,” she said briskly. “I can’t afford to be muddle-headed when talking to the smartest man in the room.”
And now she certainly had surprised him.
Gray slid his glass to one side of the table and studied her.
She studied him frankly in return. “Although I should like to take the compliment, I don’t reckon you met me here tonight on the strength of my good looks. Am I right?”
“Not solely on the strength of your good looks. No.”
That won a smile. “Excellent. It gets so old, that sort of thing.”
“Male admiration?”
“Male underestimation.” She turned her head slightly as the Pellegrino appeared, and reached for it with one long-fingered hand. “I’ve spent years persuading a world populated by males that I’ve a brain inside this head of mine.”
“You could always cut your hair,” he suggested.
“That’s just another way of losing the battle, isn’t it? Why scarify myself to be taken seriously?”
The bar was beginning to fill; a steady buzz of voices made it necessary to shout. Gray had no desire to broadcast his message to the better part of London; he spoke at a normal level. As he’d hoped, Margaux leaned toward him.
“You’re correct in thinking I wanted to talk to you. Without the rest of those folks from this morning pitching in.”
She nodded, waiting.
“I want to know why Jo Bellamy gave you that notebook.”
Margaux frowned. “Surely I told you? My ex-husband is a Book Expert. He brought it to me to be verified.”
“Understood. But that doesn’t explain why you still had it this morning. I’m surprised Jo parted with the thing. It’s very important to her.”
Margaux’s eyes slid away; she shrugged slightly, a beautiful movement, her breasts rising slightly with her sculpted shoulders in a fluid shift of jersey. “Peter — my ex — can be fairly vague. I think we agreed to talk over the next several days. I merely kept the notebook with me for safety’s sake.”
“And handed it off without a second thought to Marcus Symonds-Jones.”
“Well, he is Peter’s bloody employer!”
“Have you talked to your ex? Since Monday?”
She took a sip of Pellegrino, buying time. “Actually, no, I haven’t. May I ask what this tends towards, Gray? An examination of my mobile-use habits, or of the status of my divorce?”
She was attempting umbrage, a mood that suited her; it went well with the flowing hair and chocolate eyes.
“Why were you in Cambridge last night?”
“I’m often in Cambridge. I’m a don.”
Gray held her gaze. “Somehow I don’t think you were showing the notebook to a colleague. This is too important to share.”
Her lip curled. “Too bloody well right.”
“ — Even with the people who gave it to you: Jo, and your ex-husband.”
For once, she had no answer.
“What do you think they’re doing, right now? Why haven’t they come back to London?”
“Why do you care so much?”
Gray eased back in his seat, his fingers still caressing the stem of his martini glass. “I understand your hesitation to be frank with me — after all, we only met ten hours ago — but I confess I’m surprised that you’re lying to Marcus. He could cut off your access to the material completely. Should he learn of it.”
“I’m not lying!” Her voice had risen; she was leaning so far over the table toward him, she was nearly prone. In other circumstances, he would have enjoyed this view of her cleavage. In this case, he kept his eyes steadily on her face and held a finger to his lips. A warning. Steady.
She glanced sidelong, then raised herself upright. “I took the effing notebook Monday night and told Peter I’d give it back in the morning. Only I decided to go to Cambridge instead.”
“Why?”
“You saw that there are pages missing from the back?”
“Maybe Woolf didn’t like what she wrote.”
“I doubt it. I think someone else edited that manuscript for her. There’s a tantalizing phrase scribbled on the inside of the back cover. Peter saw it, too, I’m sure he did — a sort of envoi. A clue. In any case, I thought it possible the rest of the manuscript was hidden for a reason. And that it might be found.”
“At Cambridge?”
“Cambridge was supposed to tell me where to look. But I’m not as good at solving puzzles as Peter is — making abstruse connections. I’m better at emotional analysis.”
Abstruse connections. Gray’s pulse had suddenly accelerated. Peter Llewellyn was hunting for the rest of the notebook. And Jo with him.
“It’s frustrating to see the possibilities and lack the technique,” Margaux was saying. “Honestly, I was ready to chuck the whole thing in the River Cam when Marcus called.”
“But you decided instead to make the best of a… partial… situation.”
“Exactly.” She placed her hands on the table, fingers linked. “I don’t want cash, Gray. I’m not in it for a payoff. This isn’t about greed.”
“Of a financial kind.”
“It’s about access,” she pushed on, ignoring his gibe. “I want exclusive rights to this new material — no sharing, for the first time in my entire career. Marcus has the power to stipulate my terms — you have the power to grant them.”
Gray frowned. “Limit access to information? That’s profoundly un-American. I’m not sure I can agree.”
“You already signed a paper to that effect this morning.”
“Paper, as we’ve seen, can be torn in half.”
Margaux’s teeth worried at her lower lip. “Tell me you’ve never closed communications about a deal you’ve decided to make. A fund you intend to set up. A client whose millions you’ve decided to squander. I won’t believe you.”
“But in those cases I control the deal. It’s a closed system, like playing tug-of-war with both ends of the rope. You, unfortunately, have got only one.”
She stared at him. “Now we come to it. Your terms. What is it you want, Mr. Graydon Westlake? How much body and soul do I have to sell?”
“I want you to drink this martini,” he replied, sliding it across the table toward her. “And then I want you to call your ex-husband.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
PETER AND JO WALKED BACK TO THE ABERGAVENNY Arms feeling as though every eye in the small village of Rodmell was upon them. Jo succeeded in looking over her shoulder only once; Lucy was not, as she’d feared, posted in Monk’s House’s front door staring balefully after them.
“I’d make a lousy criminal.”
“It’s all in the practice,” Peter said impatiently. “I’m sure you’d take to it, with time. Look at Anthony Blunt, for God’s sake. Right there in the Monk’s House display case, innocent as a lamb. Nobody suspected him.”
“Who’s Anthony Blunt?” Jo demanded, bewildered.
“An Apostle to end all Apostles. And one of the Cambridge Five.”
“I thought there were twelve.”
“No, no — the Cambridge Five,” Peter insisted, as though repeating the phrase might make it comprehensible. “Surely you’ve heard of them?”
“I know the Jackson Five, but…”
“Oh, Christ. Burgess and Maclean? Ring a bell?”
“I’m sorry. Were they theater people?”
“They were spies,” he said with immense patience. “Double agents. In the pay of the Soviets. For most of the Cold War. Kim Philby? Heard of him? I won’t even ask about John Cairncross.”
“Philby sounds familiar,” Jo offered tentatively. “But isn’t he American?”
Peter sighed. “Look — Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean defected to the Soviet Union in the early fifties. They’d been up at Cambridge together, and Burgess was an Apostle. He was also one of the more flamboyant sons of King’s. Part of a group of Golden Youth that cut their political teeth in the age of Fascism, and the Spanish Civil War — ”