Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Vera did not sleep well.
Watson, however, slept like the dead.
The enormous tabby had positioned himself at the foot of the bed, wedged between Vera’s ankles in a way that made turning over impossible. Whether this was an act of protection or simply feline selfishness was impossible to say. Knowing Watson, it was probably both.
He had recovered from his earlier terror with remarkable speed.
The moment Vera had finished her phone call to Finch and settled into bed, Watson had transformed from a trembling, bottle-brush-furred wreck into his usual imperious self.
He had groomed himself thoroughly, eaten a second helping of paté (stress eating, Vera assumed), and then claimed his spot on the bed as if daring any intruder to try their luck a second time.
Vera envied him his resilience. Or perhaps his short memory.
She lay in the darkness, listening to his steady breathing—punctuated by the occasional snore—and the creak of the old cottage settling around her.
Every sound seemed amplified. The scratch of a branch against the window.
The distant hoot of an owl. The tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway.
Each noise made her heart stutter, her hand reaching instinctively toward the pepper spray on her nightstand.
Someone had been in her home. Someone had walked through her rooms, touched her things, left a message on her pillow. And she had no idea how they had bypassed her locks.
That bothered her more than the threat itself.
Watson shifted in his sleep, his back paws kicking gently against her calf. He was dreaming—chasing something, probably. Mice or foxes or the neighborhood tom who had the audacity to exist. In his dreams, Watson was fearless. A mighty hunter. A force of nature.
In reality, he had hidden under the bed for ten minutes after Vera had found the flower, emerging only when she’d opened the paté.
“Some guard cat you are,” Vera murmured.
Watson’s ear twitched, but he didn’t wake.
At half past five, she gave up on sleep entirely. She extricated herself from Watson’s ankle-trap with the careful precision of a bomb disposal expert, earning a reproachful chirp from the cat as the warm spot she’d vacated began to cool.
“You could come with me,” she told him. “Keep me company.”
Watson stretched luxuriously, yawned to display every one of his teeth, and curled into a tighter ball in the centre of the bed. His meaning was clear: I have done my duty. The rest is your problem.
Vera descended to the kitchen, her joints protesting the early hour. She made tea—strong, with a splash of milk—and fed Watson, who had somehow materialized beside his bowl despite showing no intention of moving thirty seconds earlier. Cats, she reflected, operated on their own laws of physics.
He ate with the focused intensity of a creature who had never known a full stomach, despite having been fed three times in the past twelve hours.
When he finished, he sat back and began washing his face with the studied nonchalance of a cat who had definitely not been terrified out of his wits the night before.
“Acting brave now that the sun’s up,” Vera observed. “Very courageous.”
Watson ignored her, one hind leg extended toward the ceiling as he attended to his personal grooming.
Vera sat at the kitchen table with the ledger spread before her. The cryptic entries seemed to mock her in the grey morning light.
G. — 14 / Zn(?) Li ? HP
What did it mean? What had Barnaby discovered that was worth killing for?
Watson finished his bath and jumped onto the table, padding across the ledger with wet paws before settling himself directly on top of the most important page.
He fixed Vera with his pale green stare—a look that said, quite clearly, I have faced danger and emerged victorious. You may now worship me.
“You hid under the bed,” Vera reminded him.
Watson began to purr, utterly shameless.
By seven o’clock, she had formed a plan. Pym was staying at the Jolly Miller. Pym was scared. Scared men made phone calls—to handlers, to superiors, to anyone who might tell them what to do next.
And Vera intended to listen.
The Jolly Miller Bed & Breakfast was, according to its faded sign, “A Charming Rustic Retreat.” Vera knew it as the place with the thinnest walls in the county and a landlady, Mrs. Pringle, who charged extra for towels and could be distracted by almost anything on television.
It was also where Arthur Pym was hiding from his problems.
Vera arrived at half past eight, clutching a plate of biscuits covered in cling film.
She had baked them herself that morning—a batch of respectable shortbread that contained nothing more sinister than butter and sugar.
The plate was a prop, but the biscuits were real.
One should always commit fully to a cover story.
Mrs. Pringle was exactly where Vera had expected to find her: wedged into an armchair behind the reception desk, eyes fixed on a rerun of some antiques program. A man in tweed was examining a vase with the intensity of a bomb disposal expert.
“Good morning, Mrs. Pringle,” Vera called out in her most quavering voice. “I’ve brought a little welcome gift for your guest. The young man in the suit? I felt so terrible about the unpleasantness at the fête yesterday. I thought some homemade biscuits might cheer him up.”
Mrs. Pringle barely glanced away from the screen. “Room four. Up the stairs, second on the left. Mind the loose board on the landing.”
“Thank you, dear. I’ll just pop up and leave them outside his door. I wouldn’t want to disturb him.”
“Mm-hmm.” Mrs. Pringle had already returned to the vase, which was apparently worth more than Vera’s cottage.
Vera climbed the stairs slowly, letting her footsteps creak on each step. An old woman bringing biscuits. Nothing to see here. Nothing to remember.
She reached the landing and paused outside Room 4. The door was closed, but she could hear a voice inside—muffled, agitated. Pym was on the phone.
Vera set the plate of biscuits on the hallway table and adjusted her hearing aid.
To the naked eye, it was a standard-issue beige device, the kind that whistled if you got too close to a microwave.
In reality, it was a modified piece of kit she’d liberated from a signals station in East Berlin, 1987.
It could isolate a whisper through a concrete wall, filter out ambient noise, and record up to six hours of audio on a chip the size of a fingernail.
She turned the dial behind her ear.
Static. The hum of the old radiator. The creak of floorboards as Pym paced.
Then, his voice, sharp and clear:
“—telling you, it’s out of control. He dropped right in front of me. People saw. People are asking questions.”
Vera leaned closer to the wall, feigning interest in a watercolor of Bourton-on-the-Water.
A pause. Pym was listening to someone on the other end. Then:
“I didn’t panic. I strategically withdrew. There’s a difference.” His voice cracked. “You didn’t tell me you were sending someone. You didn’t tell me there would be—that he would—”
Another pause, longer this time. When Pym spoke again, his voice had dropped to something close to a whimper.
“A cleaner. You sent a cleaner. To a village fête. Do you have any idea how—”
He was cut off. Vera could hear the tinny buzz of the voice on the other end, though she couldn’t make out the words. But Pym’s reaction told her everything.
“Yes. Yes, I understand. OmniCorp’s interests are paramount. The Viper Protocol is in effect. I know.” He was pacing faster now, his footsteps marking a frantic rhythm on the creaking boards. “But the timeline—“
Vera’s mind snagged on the words. OmniCorp. Viper Protocol.
The stylised ‘O’ on the letterhead. The corporation Finch was trying to identify. Now she had a name.
“The lithium deposit is still secure,” Pym was saying. “No one knows. Barnaby was the only one who figured it out, and he’s—he’s been dealt with. But the properties—I need more time. These people don’t just sign away their land because a stranger in a suit asks nicely. They’re stubborn.”
Vera felt something click into place in her mind. A tumbler falling, a lock opening.
Lithium.
Li ? HP
The ledger. The cryptic entries. Li wasn’t a name. It was an element. Lithium. And Zn—zinc. HP—high purity?
Barnaby hadn’t been tracking payments or blackmail. He’d been documenting mineral surveys. Someone had been taking soil samples across the village, testing what lay beneath each property. And under Lark’s End, under the chalk and clay that everyone assumed was worthless—
There was lithium. Enough lithium to kill for.
“The Gable woman is close to breaking,” Pym continued.
“I’ve applied pressure. She’ll sign by tomorrow, noon at the latest. The Vicar is a problem—he’s got some moral objection to selling church land—but I can work around him.
It’s the others I’m worried about. Vickery won’t even take my calls, and the Calloway woman—”
Vera’s heart stuttered.
“She was at the pub last night. Asking questions. Playing the dotty old lady, but there was something off about her. The way she looked at me—” Pym’s voice tightened. “I’m telling you, she’s not what she seems.”
The voice on the phone spoke again. Vera strained to hear, pressing closer to the wall.
“Calloway?” Pym repeated. “You’re checking her out? Good. Because I’m telling you, something’s wrong with that woman. She looked at me like she could see right through me.”
A longer pause. Then Pym laughed—a nervous, brittle sound.
“Redacted? Her file is redacted? What does that mean?”
Vera felt a chill run down her spine. They were looking into her. Someone at OmniCorp had resources—serious resources, the kind that could access files that shouldn’t exist anymore.
How much would they find? Her Service records had been buried deep, sanitized and scattered across a dozen archives. But no burial was ever complete. There were always traces for those who knew where to dig.