Catching the Wind(47)

But Quenby could find no information about the woman who’d once worked for Winston Churchill. So as she sat in that tree, she’d wondered—had Olivia disappeared like Brigitte? Or had she simply been forgotten in the record of time?

When Lucas reversed the car, light from his headlamps shot beyond the house, toward the forest. “Did you find the Mill House?”

She shook her head. “I found the road on an ordnance map, but it’s all bracken and bramble around the mill now.”

Dozens of cars sped by on the main road before they were able to turn.

“Did another investigator locate the house?” she asked.

“If they did, they never told Mr. Knight.”

“The Ricker family once owned Camford Mill.” She shifted in her seat. “Even if Brigitte was sent to Canada, I want to search the Mill House.”

“So we’ll try again in the morning?” he asked as they approached the town.

“If you really don’t have to go back to London—”

“I don’t.”

“Then we’ll search together.” She wouldn’t admit it to him, but she’d be grateful not only for his vehicle but for his company when she went back to explore the woods.

Her inn was full for the night, but Lucas found a motel room a few blocks away. They ate a late dinner of pollack encrusted with chorizo, in a café along a more civilized portion of the river. Lucas’s eyebrows furrowed when she ordered a bottle of Coke with her fish instead of a white wine, but he didn’t tease her about the selection.

Below them, ferries carted passengers between France and the coast of England, not far from where the Higgins boats launched for Normandy on D-Day.

“Does Mr. Knight own a boat as well as a plane?” Quenby asked as she watched a yacht cruise into the harbor.

“No. I think his channel crossing as a boy cured him of any interest.” Lucas took a bite of his spinach salad. “How did everything sort out at the Royal Institution?”

“I’m still working on the report—”

He stopped her. “I’m not angry.”

“Meribeth had the microscope waiting for me.” Quenby opened her iPad and found the pictures, turning the screen so he could see. “They’re photos of some sort of air base.”

He scrolled through them at first. Then he returned to look at them again, slowly. “Blast.”

“What is it?”

“That’s Biggin Hill. See the chapel?” He pointed at the screen before looking up at her. “Probably during World War II.”

She studied the screen, then leaned back in her wicker chair. “Biggin Hill was an RAF base,” she said, recalling the conversation with the Uber driver.

Lucas searched for more information on his phone. “The Germans bombed it twelve times between August 1940 and January 1941 alone. Took out a teleprinter network and the operations room.”

She whistled. “They must have known what to bomb on the base.”

“Probably from photographs like these.”

Her skin tingled. “So the Terrells or someone else in the cottage might have been helping the Germans?”

“Perhaps, but that would be almost impossible to prove now, especially since the Terrells seem to have vanished along with Brigitte.” He watched another yacht cruise into the waterway, rope lights strung from stern to bow. “Then again, I suppose adults leave more of a trail than children, however faint.”

“Not all adults leave a trail.” The words slipped out, too late to retract. Her mother might have left a trail, but Quenby had never searched for it.

Before Lucas questioned her statement, she changed the subject. “Do you still want me to e-mail a report tonight?”

His eyebrows slid up. “Breaking the contract already?”

“It seems the lawyer who wrote the contract could give me permission to break it, especially since I already told you everything I found.”

He sipped his wine. “Mr. Knight will want to read your report.”

“Then I’ll write up something from yesterday and today.”

“You can wait until morning.”

“Rule breaker,” she teased. “Why don’t I dictate it to you right now?”

He laughed as he reached for his phone. “I’ll try and keep up.”

“Bullet point number one,” she began. “I reviewed microphotographs found at 12 Mulberry Lane. They appear to be of the RAF station at Biggin Hill.”

She poured Coke into her glass. “Number two, searched for the Mill House on Kelmore Street where Olivia Terrell presumably resided but have located neither a house nor the designated street.

“Number three, received confirmation from an evacuee record that the Terrells did indeed house Brigitte but she left about five months after she arrived, purportedly for Canada. And number four, had dinner with an irritating attorney who—”

“Who rescued you from spending the night in a tree.”

“True,” she said. “Scratch number four.”

He tapped on the screen. “Expunged from the record.”

“It’s like a superpower,” she said, pushing her hair back over her ear.

He laughed again. “The ability to use big words?”

“No—” she rolled her eyes—“the power to expunge. Just think of it. You could expunge anything. Every stupid decision you’ve ever made or the memories of when someone else has done something wrong to you.”