“It’s good,” Murphy said. “Very good. But of course I miss your hair.”
“Don’t you like the red, darling?” Claire reached up to pat her waves of hair, held back with a carved tortoiseshell barrette. “There’s not much to do with it. She doesn’t care much about her hair, after all.” She looked down at her hands, stripped of polish and cut straight across. “Or her hands.”
Murphy gestured to the brown straw hat on the bed. “Try it with that.”
Claire put on the hat and stabbed it with a pearl-tipped pin. Slowly she lowered the net veil down over her eyes, then dropped them and gazed demurely at the floor.
“What do you think?”
“Dead ringer,” he said with a low whistle. “Congratulations, my dear. Are you ready?”
Claire gave a sigh and then looked at her reflection in the mirror once again. “Ready as I’ll—”
They both started at a noise from below, then froze. Claire put her finger to her lips.
David and Maggie drove through an autumn countryside of copses and hedges beginning to turn yellow and brown, orchards with trees laden with tiny red apples, fields dotted white with grazing sheep. They motored past thatch-roofed pubs and over-wrought Victorian railway stations, the heavenward-pointed spires of Gothic churches, and the occasional Romanesque Norman tower with narrow arrow slits in its thick, heavy walls.
It’s enough to make you want to sing “Rule Britannia!,” Maggie thought, rolling down the window and letting the fresh fall air blow over her. She was trying not to get overly excited about something that could turn out to be just a dead end. I only hope Robin Hood and his Merry Men don’t accost us before we get there.
Bletchley was a small Victorian railway town, with brick homes and shops with cheerfully colored awnings built up alongside the train tracks. The air was punctuated with the sound of locomotives chugging, clanking, and then letting off low, mournful steam whistles and belches of steam and soot.
David navigated his way through town and, after a few wrong turns, pulled up in front of the Eight Cups.
“Is this really time for a pint?” Maggie managed.
“We can both do with a bit of lunch,” David replied with a grin. “And before we do anything else, I have to make a phone call.”
“A phone call? To whom? Why?”
“Just give me a few minutes.”
Murphy and Claire heard the sounds—a bag dropped down, a coat hung up. Then the light tread of feet on the stairs.
“Hello?” They heard a low and raspy voice call. “Anyone home?”
The door suddenly swung open. “Hello? Maggie?”
She’d taken a step into the room when Murphy came at her, swinging a milky-glass bedside table lamp at her head. There was a sickeningly loud thump on impact, the glass shattering and raining down. The young woman crumpled to the floor like a broken doll.
Claire took one look at the figure on the floor, arms flung open and legs akimbo, blood gushing from the wound on the head and starting to puddle in her hair.
“Oh my God, Michael!” she cried, falling to her knees, mindless of the shards of broken glass. She looked up at him. “What have you done?”
It was one thing to assassinate the Prime Minister to further their cause. It was another to just, well, murder someone. Someone who hadn’t done anything, really. Her thoughts flashed to Diana Snyder, and she shook her head as though to force them out.
“What I needed to. What we needed to. Now let’s get up and get moving.”
Claire’s shoulders slumped, and she buried her face in her hands, the grim reality setting in. “Is she dead? Really dead?” Diana Snyder was different—Claire hadn’t known her. But this wasn’t the same. This was someone she knew. This was someone, she realized, she loved.
Murphy felt at the prone girl’s neck for a pulse. “If not now, she will be soon.” Then, “For Christ’s sake, pull yourself together, Claire,” he said, taking the powder-blue silk quilt from the bed and throwing it over the girl’s slight, still form.
Claire looked at him, tears in her eyes. “You didn’t have to kill her.”
“Yes, I did. Because you didn’t have the courage to kill her yourself.” He gently but firmly put his hands on her upper arms and gave her his most charming grin. “Besides, you, my dear girl, have an appointment with the Prime Minister.”
With a long last glance down at the girl’s body, Claire wiped tears from her eyes and squared her shoulders. She took a deep breath. “You’re right. I do.”
Maggie sat down in the smoky, dim dining room of the Eight Cups, which boasted burgundy flowered wallpaper, lace curtains covering the ubiquitous blackout tape, and spindly dark-wood tables and chairs. From the blowsy blond waitress, she ordered the fish of the day for both of them—an unidentified sea creature covered in a gummy sauce. Maggie toyed with hers in silence while David used the telephone in the back. In the distance, she heard a church bell toll five times, its solemn chime reverberating through the air.