He ignored her and opened the hip-high gate for them with mocking courtesy. Elizabeth followed Saffron up the path to the house. She looked about for something that could be of use to them—a convenient hole to shove Colin into would have been marvelous—but saw only the building and its garden, the next house too far to see more than the roof. Saffron’s Path Lab was housed in a tall, stately manor that, while not falling apart, had fallen into a genteel state of shabbiness, with the red brick striated with frostbitten ivy and the garden in its sad winter slumber.
Saffron opened the door, and they trooped inside. Colin stood uncomfortably close.
“Eliza,” Saffron murmured, “you’re to be with the ministry. Nick has the whole place well and truly afraid they’ll be shut down, so all you need to do to get them to cooperate is make them think they’re in trouble. Get them all into the mycology lab, if you can. It has only one door for you to guard.”
Elizabeth wanted to warn Saffron against whatever she planned to do to Colin, for that bleakness in her eyes said her dearest friend wasn’t planning to give away any dangerous secrets without a fight. She feared what the result would be. Colin was armed and desperate, not to mention that if they didn’t comply, Nick and Alexander would be in even more danger. But Saffron knew that, and she’d never endanger her brother or the man she loved. Hopefully.
Elizabeth exhaled shakily, willing herself to recapture some of that furious confidence she’d cultivated in the motorcar. Time to put the poet on the stage and see what yarns she could spin.
Saffron and Colin went upstairs, Saffron speaking to him in a low voice lost to the creaking steps. Elizabeth stood motionless in the foyer, thinking.
She required a prop.
There was a small library to her left. She marched inside, plucked a notebook and pen from the nearest table, and opened it. She scrawled some nonsense she hoped would be convincing on the page. With adeep breath to lift her chest and chin, she began down the corridor Saffron had indicated.
There were voices coming from the end of the hallway, where two doors stood open to reveal a massive room full of scientific stuff. It was a veritable maze of glass, brass, and soil. Good Lord, but they had a lot of soil.
“Who are you?” asked an acerbic female voice.
Elizabeth turned to the left where a woman even taller than she stood. She was graying at the temples and had a pair of spectacles on her nose. “Ah,” Elizabeth said in her best posh tones, “you must be Dr. Quinn.”
“Miss Quinn, actually,” said the man sauntering up behind her.
Elizabeth scrutinized him. He was also tall, but where Miss Quinn was a robust woman with the look of an obnoxiously healthy schoolmarm, this fellow was lanky and sallow of skin. Even from more than an arm’s length away, she could smell cigarette smoke on him. Elizabeth couldn’t place him in any of Saffron’s descriptions of the scientists at the lab.
“Victor Burnwell,” he said with a smile that had Elizabeth putting him in the “Smarmy” column in her mind. “How do you do?”
Then the name registered in her mind. Burnwell! Saffron had been at school with a fellow with that name and had been inclined to despise him. Saffron had mentioned he worked here, she now recalled. “Aren’t you and your colleague meant to be at the other research station?” Elizabeth asked. She pretended to look at the notebook she held in the crook of her arm.
Quinn’s and Burnwell’s expressions turned to confusion. Elizabeth cleared her throat, looking at them expectantly. “Well?”
“I beg your pardon,” Quinn said imperiously. “But I’m afraid I have no idea who you are.”
“I see my own colleague failed to mention my arrival. Allow me to apologize on behalf of Mr. Hale, he can be the most unreliable of devils. Frankly, I don’t know why the ministry hired him.” She sighed with brisk annoyance. “I’m here to finish his inquiries, and I require all of you to gather so I may do so. Where are the others?”
Burnwell shrugged. “Since Crawford and I were absent the last month, I suppose we’re free to carry out our work.”
“You suppose wrongly,” Elizabeth snapped. They couldn’t very well be wandering about when Saffron was doing whatever it was she was doing. With Colin. And hisgun. She needed something ironclad to keep them in place. Inspiration was close at hand. “You shared a workspace and collaborated with Dr. Petrov and Mr. Wells, and are therefore suspect in their deaths, as are the rest of the staff of this research station.”
Burnwell gaped at her. Quinn gasped.
“I see you understand the seriousness of this matter,” Elizabeth said, nodding. “Now, please assemble your colleagues. The mycology lab will do very nicely.”
“Dr. Calderbrook,” Saffron said, peering in the open door. The director sat at his desk and startled at her interruption.
“Miss Everleigh,” he said. “What can I do for you?”
Saffron cleared her throat. “Sir, there’s someone from the Agricultural Ministry here. She’s following up on Mr. Hale’s investigation and she’s … I’m very concerned she thinks something is afoot. She’s gathering everyone to question them now.”
Dr. Calderbrook blinked rapidly behind his round spectacles. “Good Lord. I see. Well.” He stood, knocking his chair back with a screech. He looked thoroughly bewildered. “I see. I’ve been summoned too, have I? This woman from the ministry—what is her name?”
“Miss … Hamilton,” Saffron said.
He didn’t notice her hesitation. “We’ll just answer her questions. It’s all just a horrible mistake. A strange, horrible coincidence.”
Saffron gave him a reassuring smile. “Of course, sir.”
Calderbrook hurried from the room, too distracted to notice Colin lurking in a corner of the landing, or that Saffron didn’t follow him down the stairs.
