A Deadly Promise: An intriguing Edwardian mystery (Dr Margaret Demeray Book 6) by Harmon Paula

Author:Harmon, Paula
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: dp books
Published: 2025-09-18T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-One

On Friday evening, Inspector Silvermann telephoned to say that there was as yet no word on the woman from the railway. Margaret didn’t mention the Salvation Army. It would probably come to nothing.

‘Be careful, Margaret,’ he said. It was rare that he called her by her given name, and so far, he hadn’t told her his own.

‘I am,’ she said, to lighten his mood. ‘You sound like Walrus and Weasel.’

He didn’t laugh. ‘You know when there’s a smell and you can’t work out where it’s coming from? That’s my life now. Someone isn’t who they say they are.’

Fox came home soon afterwards and sat with Margaret in the nursery while the children fell asleep, stroking their soft curls and wondering what sort of world they had brought them into. In the dark room, Margaret lay a hand on her own belly, wondering. Apart from a little pain in her lower back and cramping in her lower abdomen, everything was the same. But it was still too early to be sure. This had happened before, when the world wasn’t crashing around them.

The only good news was that Bert had been released without charge and was on his way home.

On Saturday, Fox stayed at home. The conference was failing by the day, each side blaming the other and civil war still threatening. But today it was someone else’s job to watch for additional trouble.

‘Doesn’t Nellie have this afternoon off?’ said Fox, over Saturday breakfast.

‘Yes, so does Freda,’ said Margaret. ‘I thought it might be nice to be on our own this afternoon. Just the four of us.’

Fox folded his newspaper. ‘It would. But can we leave them with Nellie this morning? I’d like your help to get my thoughts in order.’

‘Of course we can. Where do we start?’

In his study they sat over a large piece of paper, pencilling in a list of dates against columns representing Amos Chalkley, Luther, Smith and, at Margaret’s insistence, Miscellaneous.

‘Miscellaneous seems a complicated way to spell Abney,’ said Fox.

‘It’s not him. It’s odd things, like the peaceful march I went on where we were thwarted, Ilse fretting over a photograph, Iris being committed, the dead typist …’

‘All right, all right.’ Fox ruled the additional column.

‘And we need another sheet for what might be happening.’

‘What might be happening is a large-scale production of something that could wipe out every army horse, and the men working with them, just as we need to mobilise.’

‘In Ireland or on the Continent?’

‘Either. Both. Hopefully neither.’

Margaret shook her head. ‘How could that be achieved, Fox? Maybe you could produce enough to take to every army stable in the country, but you’d need an awful lot of people to do it. Abney has always avoided using too many people. They’re hard to control.’

‘Granted, but I doubt he’d do the dirty work himself. He’d sell it to someone and the rest would be up to them. That must be where the map of Britain that Chalkley saw comes in.’

‘Those are two things, surely.’ Margaret tapped her lip with the pencil.

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