The Queen's Accomplice (Maggie Hope Mystery #6)(44)

Buckingham Palace

London

Dress: uniform / day dress

This Invitation Will Be Requested Upon Arrival

Tomorrow, Maggie realized. Of course, it’s taken a while to get the invitation….

Durgin returned with a notepad, pencil behind one ear. “What’s that?” he asked, taking in the fancy card.

Maggie smiled, dropping it back in her handbag. “Tea with the Queen, if you please.”

“Oh, of course, Miss Tiger—or should it be Lady Tiger now? There’s a Scottish tiger cat, you know—looks like a fluffy housecat, that is, until you get too close—then the claws come out.” He blinked grayish eyes. “If you don’t want to tell me, just say so. Besides, I have news—at the London Clinic, we have a female victim named Gladys Chorley, age twenty-two, with a massive lump on her head and thirty-nine—yes, exactly thirty-nine—stab wounds.”

Maggie inhaled sharply. “We need to talk to her!”



“Now, hold on a tick, Lady Tiger—she’s in a coma.”

“We can talk to her doctor—”

“And he’ll be in tomorrow morning at eight. We can all meet up at the hospital, in the lobby, at quarter to.” Durgin was already on his way out the door.

He stopped and turned back, face serious. “By the way, I asked after your friend,” he said to Maggie. “Bronwyn Parry.”

Maggie’s heart beat faster. “Yes?”

“No one with her name or fitting her description in any of the hospitals or morgues.”

Maggie felt relief mixed with even sharper fear. “So, she might still be out there. He could have her—”

“Look, maybe she got cold feet is all,” Durgin interrupted. “Maybe she missed her mum and went back home, or ran off with a particularly handsome Yank to Palm Beach, Florida.” He shrugged and began to walk down the hall.

“Maybe.” Maggie considered the tall figure walking away from her. “And what does your oracle-speaking gut tell you about her?” she called.

Durgin didn’t turn around. “That she’s still alive and she’s out there. And that we’d damn well better find her.”

—

The first night Brynn spent conscious in her underground cell, she lived through a wild, panicked fear. As she lay awake in the flickering candlelight, she tried to distract herself by studying the strangeness of her surroundings. Her bed was hard, and each time she turned over, she realized she could hear scratches and rustles through the walls, the occasional squeak.

Brynn had grown up with three older brothers, who teased her mercilessly, and she’d always refused to cry back then. Now she dropped her head on her arms and struggled not to burst into tears. Crying was useless. Her throat constricted, as it always did at such moments, before she told herself sternly, Be strong. She started counting in her head, as she’d been taught at Beaulieu, to slow her breathing and heart rate. She needed a chance to think clearly. She was absolutely certain her life depended on it.



She drew the ragged quilt around her. “Other people have lived in worse places,” she croaked, testing out her voice, which had been silent for so long. It was hoarse and rough, but she continued, finding the sound reassuring. “Right now, there are people in much worse places—in Ravensbrück, and Dachau, and Auschwitz. And I know they’re being brave. People have spent years in the camps, enduring crueler conditions than this.”

She looked over at her book on the table, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. She picked it up and turned to a random page: “If he be Mr. Hyde,” he had thought, she read, “I shall be Mr. Seek.”

There was the odd smell—familiar now—and then Brynn fell back against the bed, her eyes closed.





Chapter Eight


The next morning, Elise had to wear the slippers to her appointment at the Reich Main Security Office. She stood in the snow on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, looking up at the massive gray stone building. Then, pulling her scarf firmly over her shaved head, she strode—head high—up the main steps and into the building’s lobby.

The SS officer at the security desk raised his eyebrows at her appearance. “Papers?” he barked. Elise noted there was no gn?diges Fr?ulein here.

She handed them over to him. “I’m here to see Captain Alexander Fausten.” Her voice echoed in the cavernous marble space. “We have a nine o’clock appointment.”

“Regarding what, exactly?” The man’s tone remained insolent.

“Condition of release,” Elise told him, her voice not betraying the fear she felt.

The man thrust back her papers, scarcely glancing at them. “Up the stairs. To the right.”

In the antechamber to Fausten’s office, a buxom, blond, well-coiffed secretary sat at a large desk, her fingers striking the typewriter keys in sharp, precise movements. “You are Fr?ulein Hess?”

Elise nodded.

The secretary looked her up and down, taking in her scarf-covered bald head, her slippered feet. She pursed her lips. “One moment,” she said, pressing down on the switch hook to clear the line, then pushing a red button under the telephone dial. “Elise Hess is here, sir.” She replaced the receiver and thrust out her chin to indicate the heavy double doors. “Go in.”