Chapter Twenty-Seven #3
“You worked as a nurse before returning to Oxford to teach, didn’t you?
Which isn’t unusual in itself.” Gin paused, watching for any reaction.
“Only it was the hospital nearest Marion’s childhood home, and I would wager where Robert Crowne drove the ambulance during that same time.
I can’t think of an innocent reason to lie about knowing him except to conceal it from Leland. ”
The fob watch pinned to Watkins’s lapel ticked in the silence, and a muscle quivered in the don’s jaw.
Gin recalled Mr. Tolliver’s newspaper photograph of the woman leaving her job at the hospital, the same watch pinned to a black jacket, the matching black skirt and close-fitted black hat—the blank eyes staring at the camera as though they felt nothing.
“I saw the picture taken at the hospital before you left to join Lady Margaret Hall as a tutor,” Gin said quietly. “I believe it was the same year Robert died, and you were dressed in mourning. Was he perhaps a sweetheart or a fiancé?”
Marion gasped. “Robert used to talk about marrying, but my parents scoffed at the idea since he hadn’t worked long enough to have much set aside.”
There was a flutter of strong emotion across Watkins’s face, but the don remained silent.
“You must have eventually realized some of your colleagues knew Robert too,” Gin continued, “that they were intimately connected with the events at Vosburg. Only Donald’s revelation changed everything, and you devised a scheme to make Leland pay for his crimes by turning traitor and framing him for your actions.
The truth coming out at the party must have been quite a bonus to your plan, but I don’t think you would drop all your hard work now.
You want Michael Leland buried so far in the muck there’s no chance of a quiet pardon. ”
Gin could see the cogs whirring in Watkins’s mind as she calculated how she might yet wriggle free while the theory was a string of connections with no real proof.
Provoking a confession from someone with more backbone than Michael Leland would take a deeper twist of the knife.
Gin crossed her arms. “Naming the leak Cassius, though, was especially clever, Dr. Watkins. I was momentarily distracted to discover Dr. Neville held that role in the recent production of Julius Caesar. Only, it wasn’t his part, was it?
He took over Leland’s role—the role Leland has played in every production since his undergraduate days. ”
A muscle quivered in Watkins’s jaw, but she was resolute in her silence. Gin took a step closer, lowering her voice.
“Did it needle you that Leland should play the leader of the conspirators against Caesar, the one who turns Brutus against his friend? Was Dr. Neville next on your list of vengeance? Or were you satisfied to get your pound of flesh from Leland—”
“Enough.” The word shot out of Watkins in a rough voice Ginevra almost didn’t recognize.
The don’s expression had hardened into a mask, but there was a delicate crack around the eyes that spelled guilt.
“Sam is also a victim of Leland’s treachery.
I have no doubt if the truth were discovered sooner, Leland would have pinned the idea on him. ”
Neville choked on a gasp. Sidney made an almost imperceptible nod, and Gin felt like she’d earned a medal.
With calm deliberation, Watkins rose and crossed her arms. “How very clever you are, Miss Bishop. Yes, I met Robert Crowne at the hospital while finishing my degree. We fell in love and wanted to marry, but then the war broke out. There were few available teaching positions, and it seemed smarter to continue as a nurse until after the war.”
“I knew he had a sweetheart,” Marion breathed. “He was so much happier for a bit, before he went away…”
The lines around Watkins’s mouth tightened.
“Robert wouldn’t even see me when he returned, and he broke off the engagement.
I accepted he was the traitor because I didn’t know what else to believe, but reconciling that with the man I’d known was a bitter pill to swallow.
When I heard he’d died, I came to Oxford and threw my grief into teaching. ”
“When did you start spying for the Kremlin?” Gin asked. “Was it before or after you started stealing your colleagues’ books and selling them to Olenev?”
Watkins’s cheeks pinked. “The books came first,” she said stiffly.
“Olenev could see I was hard up, and he’d hint about other avenues for income …
if I heard things, if I knew the right people—interesting people.
I ignored him at first. I was embarrassed enough to be selling the books.
” She cleared her throat. “And then everything fell into my lap, neat as a present.”
“You realized the truth about Leland when Donald started complaining about mistakes in the book,” Gin clarified.
Leland hung his head with a soft groan.
“Yes.” Watkins’s voice was thick with bitterness.
“I nearly ignored him, he was pestering me so much. Only when I realized he had been in Vosburg too, that he knew Robert … that he’d overheard the truth and yet was too stupid to piece it together.
It was not so very hard to figure out what Leland had pulled off then, and I was gobsmacked.
” Her jaw tightened. “He had already shown off Trixie at a few parties and bragged about her father’s work with the Foreign Office.
When they started throwing parties at his London house, it didn’t take long to discover he doesn’t always follow protocol with classified information. At that point, the idea formed itself.”
“This is outrageous!” Leland huffed. “To abuse our friendship—”
Watkins whirled upon him. “You’ve used that woman and her father to burnish your own reputation for years. You’re a hypocrite and a monster.”
“But I’m not the traitor now!” Leland wrestled against his bonds. “You all can see she’s mad, yes? She’s orchestrated this whole thing to ruin me—”
Watkins slipped Ginevra’s gun from her coat pocket and trained it on Leland. “I’m simply righting the balance,” she said. “You owe us all more than your miserable life can repay. But it will be a start.”
“I don’t think Uncle Robert would see it like that,” Marion said. “He was always saying he preferred driving the ambulance to fighting because saving lives was better than cutting them down. He said everyone deserved another chance.”
Watkins’s hand wavered, her eyes darting at Marion before returning to Leland.
“I should have realized sooner you were related to Robert. You have the same look when you’re angry.
” She adjusted her grip on the gun. “But I don’t really care what Rob would have wanted, Marion.
He put his faith in faithless friends, and it ruined his life.
I refuse to let Leland have the upper hand on him again. ”
“You can’t just shoot the professor!” Ginevra cried. “Shouldn’t you let the police handle it now? We have the proof!”
Watkins avoided her gaze. “Unfortunately, Miss Bishop, this evening has spun out of my hands. I assume if I wait much longer, whoever has kept you so well informed of the treason I pinned on Leland will descend upon us.” Her mouth pinched. “I am sorry. This should all have been much simpler.”
Only Gin could tell from the way the don held the gun that she was not comfortable with the firearm and had likely never shot one. She also didn’t know to whom the gun belonged—that Ginevra was prepared to disarm her, just as her mother had taught her.
Gin spun around and shoved backward into Watkins.
One swift elbow jab into the don’s stomach, one hard wrench to break her left hand’s hold on the gun.
But Watkins held fast, fighting back harder than Ginevra had anticipated.
The don threaded her right leg between Ginevra’s, catching her off-balance, and Gin tripped over Leland.
She fell against the chair propping up Sidney’s feet, and he stared at her wild-eyed but didn’t move to catch her, which for a moment felt outrageously unhelpful.
But it was then Gin noticed her minuscule torch tucked under his folded arms. Pressed to the window. Flashing, ever so quickly.
The earlier moment she’d interpreted as a swift embrace had in truth been surreptitious thievery of the torch from her coat pocket.
Sidney had seated himself in a posture of dogged annoyance, propped against the window, sending an SOS into the night under his crossed arms, over and over the entire time.
If Hughes was in the garden, he knew someone desperately needed help inside the house.
“You’re bloody brilliant,” Gin whispered. Sidney rolled his eyes.
She turned for another go at Watkins—now tangled up with a surprisingly agile Dr. Neville—when the back door flew open with a bang.
Gin was thrown to the floor, and Sidney did leap from his seat then, flailing after her.
Watkins, trying to wrench free of Neville, fired the gun toward the ceiling, but enough constables to capture an elephant swarmed into the room and encircled the pair of dons.
Gin collapsed against the cold, dirty linoleum in relief.