Chapter Thirty-Three. Imposters, All
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Imposters, All
I was getting closer—I had to be, especially with Inspector Beecham coming around to try to kill the only remaining witness.
While I was quite certain he killed Mr. Mueller and would have killed Annabelle—I did not believe he was acting alone.
He was simply the blade, someone else was giving the orders.
I blew out an uneasy breath. While the clues were finally beginning to align, they still brought me no closer to who actually killed Julius Harker, nor did it answer where Leona had gone?
Had she been taken, or had she run? There were too many unknowns still lingering at the edges of the investigation.
I racked my brain trying to recall what other thoughts or facts I may have scribbled on the missing page but came up blank.
My usually infallible ability to remember meaningless minutiae had failed me at last. The snowy streets of Oxford passed by in muted silence from the inside of the cab.
I scarcely spoke to the driver, remaining nestled in the back seat watching the buildings rush by outside the fogged-up window.
I rested my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes until the driver stopped outside the hotel.
The Randolph sat directly across from the Ashmolean like two warring giants set in limestone.
It was a grand hotel, all decorated for the holidays.
And even at this early hour the lobby was bustling with guests.
Mostly businessmen or travelers on their way to some far-flung location for Christmas.
The electric lights burned bright as I trotted up the main stair and off to the second-floor corridor in search of Hari’s suite.
I was early for our appointment, but we needed to speak in private before the imposter arrived.
I checked my pin watch, eyes fixed on the smooth white enamel face.
The second hand ticked away with a stuttering motion underscoring our urgency.
I rapped twice on the fine dark wood door.
Hari swung it open at once, dressed for the day aside from the fact he wore no shoes. “You are early.”
“It’s been an eventful eighteen hours. Can I come in?”
He swung the door wider, gesturing with his arm. “It is just as well. I have news too.”
“About Leona? Already?” I dared not hope.
He nodded, shutting the door behind me before slowly walking over to a glass pitcher on a nearby table, pouring a glass of water, and handing it to me. Hari gestured to a chair, urging me to sit. “The woman will be here soon I suspect. She was eager to speak with you.”
I glanced down at the water glass, running my finger over the cut crystal. “Tell me what you learned.”
Hari sank down onto the edge of the brocade high-backed chair, rubbing at the spot where his prosthetic affixed to his thigh.
He seldom complained about anything, but I recalled that mornings had always been a challenge.
He splayed his fingers across the bright blue of his trousers.
“You had said she worked for this Frederick Reaver fellow.”
I wet my lips uncertainly. “She did. I don’t trust him, Hari. Not at all—but I don’t get a sense that he’s our killer.”
“Your mistrust is good.” His hazel eyes remained unfocused in the dim morning light of his hotel room. “I do not know this for certain…”
“But you suspect something.”
Hari leaned forward. “I looked into the fellow. Everyone I have met here in Oxford during my inquiries spoke highly of his war record. I thought it prudent to phone an acquaintance of mine in the War Department, see what he was up to back then.”
“And?”
“He doesn’t have one.”
I blinked. “What do you mean? Doesn’t have what?”
“Doesn’t have a war record. Not under the name Frederick Reaver, that’s for certain.”
“The man is a professor, and the Keeper of the Egyptology collection at the Ashmolean. You cannot expect me to believe that one in such a prominent position has”—my hands flew of their own accord—“simply manufactured a war record for himself. Surely someone would have known, questioned it…”
Hari frowned. “One would think … and yet when I inquired, I was told in no uncertain terms to let the matter be. A quick denial, then told to stop asking. Typically, one either does or does not have a war record. It’s a straightforward question.”
Treadway and Leona both intimated that there was something else at play here in Oxford. Some undercurrent that was none of my affair. “Are you telling me that you believe that whatever he did during the war … he didn’t do as Frederick Reaver at all…”
Hari unfolded his arms. “That is exactly what I think. Either he did it under another name, or his own record is sealed. I have never been denied this type of information in such a way. But there’s more.
” He hesitated, moving to the window and pulling the curtains before peering out onto the bustling street below. “I also mentioned you on the call…”
“You mentioned me … to the War Department.”
“They know your name. In truth, they know a great deal about you, my old friend. More than I expected.”
A door slammed somewhere down the hall, followed by the laughter of a couple heading out for the day. “Who doesn’t? That dreadful reporter is adamant on exaggerating my every movement lately.”
“I’m afraid it is more than your public persona they are interested in…” He stared at the entrance to the Ashmolean. “Do you remember during the war when you asked me if a person would know if they’d gone mad?”
His words brought back a flurry of memories.
None of them good. It wasn’t long after we’d first met.
I’d liked Hari from the very start—a great deal more than any of the other wounded men I’d brought back.
Enough that the two of us would sneak out some nights when I was off duty.
I’d take him in his chair into the woods behind the hospital.
We’d sit by the pond there, watching the planes overhead.
Under the cover of darkness, we’d talk of our fears.
Of losing our families. His worry that he might never walk again, and once—late at night—after far too much gin and far too little supper, I asked him if he thought I was mad.
He told me no, but even he knew why I went away for a week.
When I returned, I no longer asked questions. I did my bit, and kept my mouth shut.
A light had gone out of me. One that took a very long time to turn back on.
I’d been scarcely twenty-four years old back then.
Sent to an abandoned field hospital near Armentières to bring back a wounded American officer who’d escaped German captivity.
The matron gave me no papers—a thing that should have struck me as odd at the time—but I was young.
Young and na?ve. As soon as I reached that bombed-out aid station, I knew it was all a lie.
The American was missing the better part of his face, clinging to life in the arms of a wounded British aviator, rocking him like a newborn babe.
They’d not escaped German lines at all. They’d been retrieved from them.
Retrieved and waiting for me to bring them to hospital.
“Will he survive?” I had asked the British airman after we arrived back at the hospital in Amiens, while watching two strangers gently load the groaning American into another vehicle.
The Brit had a wicked wound below his right eye, going down toward his ear, from where someone had recently taken a blade to him.
His coat smelled of petrol and castor oil from the engine of his plane.
Some of it still smeared across his face.
The wound hadn’t been stitched, just badly scabbed over.
He leaned close and murmured, “Don’t fear for him, love, he’s already dead. ”
He’s already dead …
The words haunted me for weeks.
The American was badly wounded, but no more dead than I.
I never saw either man again. According to the matron, no one else saw them either. There were no men. I’d not even been sent to that bombed-out hospital—my orders, the paper ones she pulled from my jacket pocket, said I had gone to Rouen. A city in the entirely opposite direction.
At first, I thought the fellow another of my dreams—like those I had of my mother—but never before had I confused my dreams with reality.
“Ruby…” Hari’s gentle voice snapped me back to the present.
“What I’m trying to say to you, is I did not think you mad then, and I do not think you mad now.
I saw you that day when you returned from that assignment.
Matron said you would be gone for two days to fetch supplies, and I had believed her.
That was until I saw the man being taken from the back of your ambulance.
I was so bloody pleased to see you. I started over to tell you the same—but that’s when I saw a soldier speaking to you.
An aviator with a bloody gash beneath his eye. ”
My eyes widened in disbelief. For all these years, I thought I was the only one to have seen that man. My heart hammered in my chest. “What do you mean you saw him?”
“I also saw that poor sod they loaded up onto the other lorry. The mess the Germans had made of his face. How he was alive but wounded so grievously.… It made me sick, the death—the senselessness of it.” He tapped his prosthetic leg hidden beneath his fashionably cut trousers.
“Looking at what remained of that poor man’s face, then the heartbroken expression on your own—I could not bear it.
Not then. I turned my chair around and went back inside. I was a coward, Ruby. I am sorry.”
I wanted to deny it—to tell him he wasn’t, but I was too lost to my own emotions. My head swam.
Hari had seen the men.
The men were real.
Flesh and bone and blood.
But my relief was short-lived as another thought came. “Why had matron lied to me?”
Hari gave me a sad smile. “Do you need to ask?”
I rubbed my eyes as the sorry truth settled into my chest.