Page 63

The crowd in the courtyard were whispering to each other in excitement. Cath opened the door quickly – of course she did. She’d been standing behind it the whole time, praying we would leave. I wedged my foot inside before she could close it on me again.

‘I know you don’t like her,’ I said, nodding over my shoulder to Miss Decima. ‘But this isn’t about her. It’s about Éimhear.’

Cath was furious. ‘Get your fecking foot out –’

I leant closer, so no one else could hear what I was saying. ‘We’re not police. We’re not from the WSPU. We’re friends of Éimhear and we want to help her. She’s in more danger than you know. If you don’t tell us the truth, you’re stopping the only people who can save her.’

Cath didn’t reply. She was thoroughly frightened now, but it wasn’t me she was frightened of. She was frightened of something much worse.

‘Show me her bedroom,’ I said. ‘Not the fake one that you showed the police. Her real bedroom. The one you hid behind that big wardrobe.’

And with that, Cath crumbled. She’d kept up the front for a long time, too long, and the effort of it had burned her through. ‘I – I had to hide it. They’d shut me down, if they saw it. They’d say I was in on it, too.’

‘Stephen!’ Miss Decima bellowed behind me.

I ignored her. ‘Show me.’

Cath nodded, shaken, and held the door open. I followed her inside, back into the darkness, back down the corridor where the wardrobe stood in the corner. A wardrobe that had no business being there.

Without a word, I heaved it away from the wall. There, tucked in the shadows behind it, was a door. And on the floor in front of it … hatpins. Dozens of them. They led under the door inside, like a trail.

‘I was going to wait until the whole thing was over and then clear it out,’ said Cath, fretting her hands. ‘If I’d had any idea what she’d been doing in there …’

I opened the door. Like the other bedroom, it was lit by the faint grey of a grimy window. But, unlike the other bedroom, this one was lived in. There were papers spread across the desk and pinned to the walls. Flyers for the demonstration; maps of Kensington Gore; photograph after photograph of the same bald head, the same stern expression.

Sir William Crace. His eyes stared out at me from every wall, along with newspaper clippings of his burnt-out mansion, and floor-by-floor layouts of the building. They were covered in scribbled notes, with parts circled in red.

But it took me a moment to make out what Cath was so afraid of. What Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh had been hiding in here.

There was a carpet bag on the bed, open. It was the one that I’d seen them carrying on Saturday. Only now, I could finally see what was inside. Hatpins: thousands of them, spilling out of the top and scattering across the bedsheets. Like it had been filled in a terrible hurry. Which was understandable, given what else was inside it.

Dynamite.

And, suddenly, I understood what Lavinia Welford, Theodora Gussett and Éimhear Ó Ceallaigh had been planning to do to the statue before Constable Watts caught them. They were going to blow it up. Just like they’d blown up Sir William Crace’s mansion.

But that wasn’t all they were planning, was it? You don’t fill a bag with hatpins unless you also want to hurt as many people as possible. I thought about all the police I’d seen at the demonstration: how easy it would have been to draw them all to the back of the Hall, just before the bomb was detonated. ‘Oh my–’

I never had the chance to take the Lord’s name in vain, on account of the front door to the boarding house being kicked in. I wheeled around just in time to see Cath flung backwards by a set of uniformed arms, and four constables charge into the room where I was standing, surrounded by maps and dynamite.

45

Wednesday, 21 June, 10.42 p.m.

It’s amazing how many hours you can spend doing nothing when you’re absolutely – beg your pardon – bricking yourself.

I was sitting on a hard wooden chair in a back room of Bethnal Green police station. The room was exactly like the one they’d put me in when I got arrested three years back – no window, greasy walls, faint smell of rubbish from the alley – which was concerning, seeing as the last time it’d happened I’d got my head kicked in for twenty solid minutes.

No one was kicking my head in now. They’d dragged me here around three o’clock and locked the door, and now it was nearly eleven. I hadn’t eaten or had a sip of water, and I’d needed the toilet since teatime. I had no idea what had happened to Cath or Miss Decima, or what they were going to charge me with. All I’d had was silence for eight hours, wondering what was going to happen when that door opened again.

It was Miss Decima that I was really worried about. I’d called out for her as the police dragged me from the boarding house, but I hadn’t seen her – the officers had me bent double, facing the ground. They must have arrested her, too – but, if they’d brought her to the station, I’d surely have heard her by now. The woman had a voice like naval artillery.

So where was she?

There was a sudden swell of footsteps outside. I stiffened and grabbed the seat of my chair. The door opened and two officers walked in: the very same two who’d questioned me on Saturday, and who I’d heard with Cartwright in the basement this morning. That didn’t bode well.

‘Beg pardon,’ I said, ‘but if I might use your facilities …’

The second officer held the door open, and a third man walked in. Which is how I found myself staring into the exhausted, furious eyes of Chief Constable Cartwright.