“I don’t think my arm’s going to drop off because you’re not here,” I assured her. “Go have fun.”
She flashed me a grin before shooting out of the room and racing out of the house. My hand twitched towards my phone, and I firmly brought it back onto my lap. I’d be the model of patience and wait for Archer to report back.
ARCHER
“Well? What did she have to say?” Ollie was bouncing with impatience.
“That was averyinteresting call,” I told him. “A lot of things are falling into place. D’you want a coffee?”
“I want to know what you talked about!”
“Come into the kitchen and I’ll tell you while I make the coffee.”
I didn’t tell Ollie anything until the coffee was made and we were sitting opposite each other at the table. I didn’t want to miss his reaction.
“I did the usual small talk first, telling her how good it had been to meet her at the moot before explaining I hoped she could help me with a specific question. In return, she asked me what we’d discussed at the moot.”
Ollie’s brows drew together. “What? Why?”
“So of course I told her that we’d agreed to speak at some point after the moot, when she was less pressured by other families. And then she sighed and said that she rather thought she owed me an apology.”
Ollie’s eyes were wide. “Why?”
“Because she’d taken a call from someone she thought was me a week ago.”
“Chris,” he breathed.
“Has to have been. She had no reason to suspect he wasn’t who he said, and she answered his questions about the line of succession in the Talbot family.”
Ollie was leaning breathlessly across the table. I moved his coffee mug before he could knock it over. “What does she know about it? Does she have proof who it is? What did—”
“She has noproof.What she has is an extremely personal letter sent by the mother of the twins to her sister, in which she was bemoaning the behaviour of the younger twin and wondering if she’d caused it by not loving him as much as his brother.”
Ollie flinched, and I realised that cut close to home.
“The younger twin, Thomas, sounds like a psychopath. He killed baby animals as a child—as ahumanchild, not in dragon form—and his mother said he had no compass when it came to right and wrong. So while that doesn’t necessarily mean his claim was false—”
“It makes it more probable,” Ollie concluded.
“The letter was written years before Thomas made his claim, so it’s not as if she was providing an alibi.”
Ollie sat back in his seat. “How did Chris get Evelyn’s number?”
“I haven’t given her number to anyone, so my guess is that June made up a tale to get it from her mother. Perhaps she said she’d mislaid it after I gave it to them or something like that.”
Ollie’s brow furrowed.
“June’s mother is the head of the Smythes,” I explained. Meaning she’d be likely to have come away from the moot with Evelyn’s contact details.
“So Chris’s headship claim has been disproved, more or less, but why was he so interested in the bible all of a sudden?”
“Now that’s where it gets evenmoreinteresting.”
Ollie’s mouth opened as he stared at me. “You mean there’s more?” he demanded indignantly.
“Yup. Sooooooo…..” I dragged it out until I thought Ollie was going to reach across the table and thump me. “There’s anoften-repeated rumour in the papers Evelyn has that the Talbot family bible holds secrets.Valuablesecrets about dragonkind. Evelyn, sadly, had no idea what they might be, but I’m guessing that didn’t matter to Chris. Once she’d told him they were there, he wanted to get his hands on them regardless. Oh, and by the way, I think we might be having Evelyn Berstow to stay before much longer. She wants to see the bible for herself.”
“But if thereareany secrets, we can’t read them. They’re either in Latin or invisible ink.”
