Page 20 of The Missing Page
At first, he thought that it had to be a coincidence—Madame Fournier surely was not walking to the lodge for the purpose of meeting Carrow. Maybe she was just out for a stroll. Or perhaps she wanted to talk to Mrs. Carrow. Hadn’t Leo mentioned that Mrs. Carrow was an artist? Madame Fournier might want to buy a watercolor.
But when Carrow caught sight of Madame Fournier, he moved to the side of the lodge, out of view of most of the house, but still visible from James’s window. Madame evidently saw this, and followed him there.
James could hardly believe his eyes, but there was no way to interpret what he saw as anything other than Madame Fournier and Carrow having a secret conversation.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After discovering that Madame Fournier was in the telephone room, Leo realized two things. First, he would have to wait to use the telephone himself. Second, everyone in the house was accounted for, which made this a prime opportunity to do a little bit of poking about. Nothing excessive, he told himself. Just a peek into everybody’s luggage to see if anything was amiss.
A quarter of an hour later, he returned downstairs and found the telephone room empty.
It was a small, windowless room tucked beneath the stairs and made even more claustrophobic by virtue of being paneled in dark wood. He rolled his eyes when he saw that on a little table was an old-fashioned candlestick telephone. The telephone at the lodge was a standard black Bakelite number, but apparently nothing had been done to Blackthorn in twenty years. He picked up the receiver, tapped the switch hook a few times, then gave the operator his number.
A moment later a bored voice was wishing him a good day. At the sound of it he felt a sudden pang of utterly misplaced nostalgia.
“Mrs. Patel! Did you miss me?”
“I spoke to you last night, Mr. Page.”
Mrs. Patel had been the latest of a series of agents to serve as secretary, dogsbody, and general right-hand man to Leo’s former handler. After their bureau had been absorbed into MI6, Mrs. Patel had been absorbed right along with it, but into a corner of the bureaucracy that Leo had nothing to do with.
“Did you find the information I asked for?” The previous night, Leo had discreetly rung Mrs. Patel from the lodge and asked her to look into a few small matters.
“Your last case had nothing to do with Cornwall,” she said instead of answering him.
Leo had long suspected that Mrs. Patel had clearance far above his own and this seemed to prove it. “It’s not for work,” he confirmed. “It’s personal.”
“What’s personal.”
“Ha ha.”
“No, I’m being serious. What’s personal for someone in your line of work?” She saidyouras if it weren’t her line of work, just because she sat behind a desk. “You’re not a plumber, fixing a pipe for a friend. Are you on a con?”
“Jesus, no. And shut up. The operator might be listening in.”
“Thank you so much for teaching me how to do my job, Mr. Page.”
“I have a friend who stands to inherit something substantial if he can figure out a twenty-year-old mystery.”
“All right,” she said, sounding satisfied. “The body of Rose Bellamy was never recovered. There were no witnesses to her drowning. She was never declared dead.”
Leo raised his eyebrows. If Rose had never been declared dead, that meant her money couldn’t have been touched. Or at least, so he thought. He supposed rich people had ways of working around the rules. He’d have to look into that. “What about Marchand?”
“Harley Street practice. Rich patients. Two days a week at a private sanatorium in Bedfordshire. He has some kind of stake in the sanatorium. He does all the usual rich people things: splashes out on holidays, sent his daughter to exclusive boarding schools. Daughter is a bit of a hellion—got expelled from one school and then ran off from the second, and now is a darling of stage and screen.” She saiddarling of stage and screenin precisely the same flat tone she’d saySoviet assassin.
“She’s here too. Find anything else on the list of names I gave you?”
“Rupert Bellamy was a banker. Everything very by the book, but he got rich anyway. He married Charlotte Sommers, who was from an old county family that managed to hang on to its money. She died in 1916 of what seems to have been a lingering illness, leaving a packet of money to her daughters, which they came into on their twenty-first birthday.” She paused and Leo heard the rustling of papers. “I won’t point out that Charlotte Sommers was the aunt of the doctor you met during the passport incident.”
Leo sighed. During the case that had first brought him to Wychcomb St. Mary, Leo had resolved matters by giving his passport to a man who needed to flee the country. He still didn’t know how Mrs. Patel had found out about it, but a few days later three new passports, all with different identities, had arrived at James’s house, wrapped in cheerful paper and tied with a red ribbon. “Now you’re just showing off,” he said.
She sniffed. “Both Martha Dauntsey’s parents died of influenza in 1918. Without a first name, I can’t do anything about Madame Fournier.”
“Never mind her. It’s an alias. Thank you, Mrs. Patel.”
Next, he asked the operator to connect him with Little Gables in Wychcomb St. Mary. The phone rang six times before it was answered by a breathless Wendy, the teenaged ward of Edith and Cora.
“Leo!” she cried. “Did you come home only to run off to Cornwall with James?”
