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Even Edith Pickering and Cora Delacourt, who had lived with Mrs. Hoggett, didn’t seem terribly moved, but then again they had a good deal of practice in losing people, having lived through the last time the world decided to kill off a generation.
Wendy came up beside him and shoved a cold metal flask into his hands. The unexpectedness of the gesture jolted him back to the present. “You’re fifteen years old,” he hissed. “This’ll make you go blind.”
it looked like he had shaved with neither a looking glass nor the slightest interest in the results.
everyone seemed younger when they weren’t in the middle of a war. He supposed it was regular sleep and not being shot at that worked the magic,
“Mr. Page,” Mrs. Griffiths said, “have you ever met a rich man somebody didn’t want to kill?”
The memory unsettled him. Damn near everything unsettled him these days, which was the problem with having a brain that stubbornly refused to grasp that the war was over.
He ought to have developed a callus over whatever part of his heart was meant for mourning, but instead, it was like a wound that never quite healed.
“Your name came up. She said you were pleasant to look at, but one can’t develop an appropriate pash—her word, not mine, I assure you—for the man who lances one’s boils.”
“It looks like a gingerbread house assembled by a thoroughly mad child,” Page said. He took a puff from his cigarette and stepped a few paces to the side as if to survey the house from a different angle. “I love it.”
“She’s very resourceful,” Miss Delacourt said dubiously, and Leo inferred this meant the girl was up to shenanigans that were not entirely above board.
He was here to violate the space of a dead woman, not to befriend old ladies, not to kiss handsome doctors in the wood.
He was dimly aware that he wanted Page to be several hundred miles away—Moscow or Bolivia or wherever people like him plied their trade—but also simultaneously in his bed.
“What you’re not going to do is talk about shell shock or combat fatigue or brain fuckery as if it’s a special treat that you haven’t earned.”
It would be a daily reminder of death, of the fact that people sometimes killed one another on a grand scale, with flags waving and songs in their heart, with the roar of guns and the smell of rot.
The cyanide was likely overkill for a trip to London, but Leo hardly wanted to leave it lying about his room at the Rising Sun.
His fictional mother (widowed young, now living in someplace like Torquay, he decided) had taught him the importance of keeping up appearances, of having standards. His sister (married, three children, living in Plymouth) grew roses and had strong opinions about horticulture in general.
like a skeleton, once the secret was visible to the naked eye, something had gone drastically and irretrievably wrong. That was when people started to die.
when he stood, he realized he had unconsciously taken hold of one of the skeins of wool in Miss Pickering’s basket and wound it into a perfectly neat sphere.
He had long assumed that the ladies at Little Briars were more than old companions, but the idea of them being blackmailed over the nature of their friendship was outrageous.
“I don’t like the idea of you being alone right now.” James bristled. “I don’t need nursing. I’m a doctor.” “I’ve heard doctors make the worst patients.”
Do you know, James, this evening I thought to myself: I would like to put paper stars and glass balls on a tree.” “I see you’ve reached the heights of depravity.”
“Doubtless there are many things you can do, but I will personally beat you unconscious and throw you into the boot of this car if you so much as make an attempt,” James said firmly. “I have had a day, Leo. Do not try me.”
It’s an unfortunate truth that people seldom stop at one murder, so perhaps she worried that the colonel’s next victim would be someone she cared about.”
