“But Mrs. Sheffield confirmed he was there?” Saffron asked.
“I don’t know,” Adrian said. His voice had grown taut. He reached behind himself to the kitchen counter for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. He lit one with unsteady hands, and the pungent scent of burning tobacco filled the small room.
“What happened when you reached the station?” Saffron asked.
“There was a great commotion as soon as people discovered there was a dead man aboard the train. Mrs. Sheffield and I stayed in the compartment until the police and doctor arrived. I felt for the man, Petrov. He was dying and alone, with only our sorry company. I wanted to make sure he was taken care of.” His lips twisted. “But that was suspicious, I was told later. It was also suspicious that I had aeroplane plans on my person. And suspicious I sound and look like this.” His cigarette left behind a hazy ring as he waved around his face.
“Because you are Greek,” Saffron said cautiously.
“Because I look and sound foreign,” Adrian said. “They don’t care that I was born and raised here. They see only the darkness of my features and hear my mother’s people in my voice.” He tapped ash into a dish on the counter. “Because being foreign is itself a crime, eh?”
“I’ve never thought so.”
Adrian shrugged, but this time the motion did not look to be casual punctuation to his thoughts, but like he was trying to shed the suspicions others held toward him.
“It would have been better,” he said somewhat sullenly, not looking at her, “if I’d done as Alex did. Forced myself to speak like our father.”
Saffron said nothing, at once deeply uncomfortable to hear something so private about the Ashton brothers and breathless to learn more.
Adrian obliged her silent wish. “He watched our mother be treated poorly and listened to our cousins complain about prejudices. Even as a very young boy, he never let our mother’s voice take root like I did. It didn’t matter though, he was kicked out of dance halls and pubs same as the rest of us, when we went out all together and spoke our mother tongue.”
He leaned slightly forward on the table. “We came back broken, you know. People, they don’t understand how it is, to be stuck.” He tapped the side of his head. It occurred to her then that Adrian was perhaps not entirely sober, for his dark eyes were hazy. “Makes it hard to tell what’s in your head and what’s real. The street becomes a sky full of bullets. A fellow sweeping the street looks like he’s holding a bayonet. God knows it can be frightening, dangerous.”
Usually, soldiers did themselves harm rather than others. Saffron’s uncle, her cousin John’s father, had killed himself not long after returning from his deployment. She’d never considered that he might have done the other members of the household harm too, but that had been a bone-chilling possibility.
“Alex, he knows this. He knows what people see when they look at him, what they think about those with the shock. He wants to be seen as strong, smart, in control.” Adrian chuckled. “Oh, the control! It is something he never cared for before, and now he needs it badly. So, he stepped away from it, from the family. Removed one strike against him by hiding in our father’s name, his manner.” He seemed to recollect his cigarette, now heavy with ash, and took a long drag. “But we all hide, do we not, eh?”
Saffron cleared her throat, wishing she could open a window and clear out the air too. Adrian was delving into very private matters.
“Alexander mentioned you’d been to the police station a number of times,” she said, hoping to get him back on track. She still had things she wanted to know about the case. “What did they ask you?”
“What did they not want to know?” he mused. “I have been to the police station three times, and they have come here twice. They asked me what I did that day, who I saw, when I’d last been to London, if I’d ever visited a place called Harpenden. What I saw the man eat, drink, or smoke. What I gave him, what he said when he woke, and where he came from. If I noticed anything strange about the circumstances, our train compartment. They asked me why I chose to sit there with him.” He shook his head with a faint smile on his lips. “They didn’t believe I wanted a quiet place to take a nap.”
“And it was Detective Inspector Green interviewing you?”
“Yes, and another fellow. A big, tall man, blond hair.”
“What was his name?”
“He didn’t give one,” came a voice from behind her. “But I’m sure you can guess who it was.”
Saffron winced slightly at the hard edge of displeasure in Alexander’s voice. He stood with arms crossed, shoulder leaning against the door frame. A parcel dangled from one hand.
Adrian frowned at his brother. “Do not be rude, Alex. Your friend Miss Everleigh is here.”
“I came to speak with you,” she told Alexander. “But I found your brother instead. He’s been giving me his account of the situation.”
“I see” was his only reply. He skirted her to place the parcel on the table before his brother.
Adrian opened the parcel and exclaimed something in what Saffron presumed was Greek. “It’s as if you went straight to Kyllini!”
Saffron darted a glance at Alexander, and she found he was looking at her already.
“Kyllini is the town where my mother grew up,” he said evenly.
“I see,” Saffron said. She watched Adrian unpackage a series of small crocks, all emitting smells that made her mouth water. “I will leave you to your supper,” she said to Adrian, and he looked crestfallen.
“But you must stay!” he exclaimed, getting to his feet as Saffron rose.
