I sat in one of the wing-back chairs in front of the desk, while Adele sat in the other one beside it. Mr. Conner reclined on the settee, long legs stretched before him, arms folded across his chest, his head back amid loud snoring.
He and Brodie had returned a handful of hours earlier, both exhausted. Covered with stains of mud and other things from the streets on their trousers, and what looked very like coal smudged across Mr. Conner’s face and beard.
To hide the glare of his white beard, he had explained with that familiar grin. Giddy as a schoolboy on an adventure. Brodie needed no coal with the dark bruise on his cheek and that dark beard.
There was no sleep, except for Mr. Conner, who had declared that he’d learned to sleep anywhere over the years. Brodie as well, the nature of having lived on the street. However, there was none since he now stared down at the contents of that brown envelope Adele DeMille had given me.
I had opened it earlier. It was her journal! Kept over the past year with entries, oftentimes no more than two or three words, but an account of what she had overheard at the house in St John’s Wood.
It was in French, and it had been necessary for me to translate for Brodie as he leafed through the pages.
He stared down at it now with a frown as he sorted through what the journal revealed.
“The names you have here...what are their real names?”
Adele had been hesitant at first, speaking to me in French. Yet she knew who Brodie was from Burke, and I assured her that she could trust him.
She sat now in that wing-back chair, pale but resolute. Yes, that was the word for it—resolute,with the certainty that there was no going back after what she had already shared with me.
“Only one name I overheard, and it was by accident that infuriated him—Montfort. The one known asTorch. After that, I was not allowed to remain on the main floor whenever they met.”
If she was correct in what she had overheard one of the other men mention, it might be Sir Richard Montfort, who was a member of Parliament, highly respected although considered quite afirebrand, a word that had been used to describe him. Ironically, in an article written by Burke.
He had also been appointed two years earlier by HRH Edward Albert, the Prince of Wales, to a committee that oversaw bills and expenditures for the military, according to another of Burke’s scathing articles, as well as an advisory committee for the Royal Navy.
I did wonder about the name he’d taken for those he met with at St. John’s Wood—Torch. A nickname to disguise his identity? But with a special meaning that connected back to that article Burke had written?
“What do you know about Gosport?” Brodie then asked, about that unusual location that she had overheard early in those meetings.
“I know only the name. Yet, it seemed important. They were very serious when they discussed it over several months.”
“Ye have written ‘B-10’ in yer notes. Wot might that mean?”
“I found it written on a piece of paper that was thrown into the fire in the hearth. I don’t know its meaning, only that it seemed important that no one else might find it.”
I had set a pot of fresh coffee on the top of the stove. We had emptied the pot when he and Mr. Conner first arrived. This was the third pot over the past hours. No one had complained!
“And the last note ye made—18 April?” he then asked. “Wot might that mean?”
This month, I realized, and only three days away! What did it mean? What was the importance of 18 April?
“I only learned it in passing. I overheard them saying there would be no need for the house in St. John’s Wood after that date.”
“That is when ye decided to leave?”
She nodded as she stared down at her hands wrapped around the cup of coffee.
“The one who calls himself ‘Torch’ sent a man to my room, the one called Steiner.
She had told me about that harrowing experience and still wore the mark of it.
“He said that he knew I had been writing about things and demanded to see what it was. I hid it behind a loose panel in the wardrobe. My maid was the only one who knew. She must have told them.
“I lied and said that it was merely a letter to my brother in Paris. He did not believe me and tore the room apart searching for what you have in front of you.”
Brodie had seen and experienced difficult things in his time as a constable, then inspector with the MET. Yet, even with that experience of things he refused to discuss with me, I knew he was affected by what she told him by the set of his mouth.
“I cannot go back there, Monsieur Brodie. They will kill me.”
