Page 90 of The Number of Love
Her eyes slid closed. “I’ve been obsessing over what killed my mother, wasting hours of time on newspapers that told me nothing. I could have been working on this instead. Finding answers that obviouslyarethere. Becausehe’sthere.” Had been for so long. Could he have had anything to do with Maman’s death? No, that didn’t fit. Not if he’d been hovering outside this flat. It must have to do with something else.
“I’m sorry.” His thumbs rubbed at her neck, digging into the knots of tension and bidding them loosen. “I’m used to protecting the women I love—hence why I didn’t even want to tell Dot what my position in the navy really was. But I should have told you sooner. You’re right.”
“Not to appease me. Because I could help. You know I could.”
“I know you could.” His voice was a whisper at her ear. “I didn’t want you to have to. I didn’t want to bring that danger to your door.”
She turned, dislodging his hands but catching them in her own. Facing him. “It was already there. I don’t need to be coddled, Drake. And I won’t coddleyou. He could have killed your sister. He was aiming a knife at her.”
He knew that. The sobering truth of it turned his eyes from silver to lead, heavy and dark. His fingers tightened around hers until it nearly hurt. “We need to stop him.”
We. One plus one. But the truth was, it didn’t always equal two. Sometimes the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. Sometimes, when two things worked together, they were stronger than they should have been.
Pounding on the door made her jump, her gaze breaking away from his, her pulse hammering as fast as it had when she’d run here fifteen minutes ago. As fast as it had when he’d kissed her.
“Drake! Open up!” Red’s voice called out.
Margot released Drake’s hands, and he strode to the door, jerked it wide, even as the one to Dot’s room cracked open too. “What is it?”
Holmes’s chest was heaving, as if he too had run all the way here—or as close as he could get to running with his foot, anyway. He looked past Drake, to Margot. “I saw police swarming all over a building of flats on my way here and stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. It was Williams’s building.”
She looked to Drake, then back to Red. “What has he done now?”
“Williams?” Red shook his head. “Williams apparently hasn’t done anything for more than a month. They found his body in the basement. The bloke who’s been living there, the one I followed ... apparently he isn’t Williams at all.”
“Walsh, then.” Drake charged toward the stairs, his face a stony mask. “And he’ll be on the run.”
28
Drake stood in the center of Williams’s unfamiliar flat, knowing well he was only here because Hall had once again pulled strings. Margot stood beside him, her fingers gripping his. To give strength or receive it? He wasn’t sure anymore.
Dot was at home, with Red and their upstairs neighbor to chaperone. And to fuss over them. Camden had been standing sentinel at the door when they’d left. Hall hadn’t sent him, but Cam apparently had heard him barking out an order for an armed guard and had volunteered for the job.
Heaven help anyone who tried to cross him.
“I don’t understand.” Margot’s eyes stayed fixed on the portrait that hung, framed, on the wall. The real Williams, it seemed, smiling as he posed for the camera, shaking the hand of an important-looking Japanese official. Not the man either he or Margot had seen before. “Why would he have assumed Williams’s identity?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps he thought his Niall Walsh cover had been compromised.” Drake’s glance skidded around the room, not sure where to rest. The police had already been all through it, looking for any hints as to who had murdered the poor man. Muddy boot prints marred the floor, papers had been left out on the table, drawers upended.
“Who is this man?” Margot had looked away from the portraitat last. But her gaze settled on the grey overcoat hanging neatly in the corner. Apparently he’d had to flee from the bobbies too quickly to grab it.
But it was the one he’d been wearing outside Dot’s flat. The one, according to Margot, he’d been wearing earlier that evening when he’d attacked them.
“I don’t know. I only know who he’s not. Not Jaeger.” Jaeger hadn’t operated like this, killing innocents for his own convenience. The warehouse clerk, all those people on the streets between them, the family in the train carriages. Abuelo, for that matter, and the household there. Jaeger had known who Drake was, called him by name. But he’d never hurt anyone else to get to him.
Professional, Hall had said. Opposite numbers. But it hadn’t been personal.
Yet it had been Jaeger’s voice on the phone. He was involved. Somehow.
Margot’s fingers slid free of his, and she wandered through the small, three-room flat. For a moment, Drake just watched her unique way of wandering. She didn’t do it aimlessly like other people. She wandered with precision. Two steps, a halt, a three-hundred-sixty degree turn. Two more steps, another halt, another turn. Taking in everything. Seeing numbers, probably, to account for everything. Boards in the floor. Books on the shelf. Pillows on the bed. Slices of bread on the plate on the table, where Walsh or whatever his name really was must have been sitting down to eat when the police had knocked on his door.
Nothisdoor. Williams’s door.
Drake moved, too, after a minute. Less precisely, but perhaps more purposefully. He was no stranger to poking about, finding information, investigating. The police had said they’d taken nothing with them, that there was nothing to give them a clue as to the killer’s identity. Nothing, they insisted, to indicate that the man living here was even Williams’s killer rather than a random squatter.
He knew better. Drake opened every drawer, checked every loose board, pulled out every book.
“Margot.” The volume in his hands was in German, but he recognized a few of the words. It was a guide on the game Go. And it had telltale yellow papers sticking out of its pages like bookmarks.
