A Lesson in Secrets_ A Maisie Dobbs Novel - Jacqueline Winspear [109]
Maisie left her seat and walked to the exit, turning once to look upon Robson Headley as he swaggered back to his seat. She did not care if the motion was carried or not, whether the opposing team’s second speaker made a good argument or failed to carry the day. She had already seen much that she thought was not in the interests of the country she had served in a war still too easily remembered.
Chapter Seventeen
Maisie walked for some time following her departure from the Union. She meandered along the grassy verges of the Backs and eventually found her way to a vantage point from which she could look out upon the spires and towers of the city and be soothed by their silhouettes, bathed in the deep-orange glow of the setting sun. And later, having collected the bicycle and returned to her lodgings, she sat by her window in darkness, staring out into a purplish-black night sky embellished as if someone had thrown jewels to the heavens with abandon. She could not remember many starry nights as a child, but occasionally the coverlet of fog seemed to draw back and her father would point out the constellations. “There’s the Plough, Maisie—see?” And his hand would sweep across her line of vision, tracing the outline of a cluster of stars so she could see the shape. Now she tried to make sense of all that had come to pass since she arrived at the College of St. Francis.
She had read parts of the book written by the leader of Germany’s National Socialist Party, but was disturbed by so much of what he had laid down under the title Mein Kampf. And when she saw again, in her mind’s eye, the vision of Robson Headley standing with his hand held high in salute, and the light in his eyes as he shouted his allegiance, she remembered a line that she had marked in the book. The broad masses of the people are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force. Huntley had seemed almost indifferent to her concerns regarding the activities of Nazi supporters in Britain, though she understood that at least one person in his midst had also raised an alarm. There were those who were impressed by the leader, not least Britain’s own advocates of fascism, and she was dismayed that so many of those people seemed to be in positions of some influence.
But what about Dunstan Headley? She doodled his name on the case map in front of her, then tapped her pencil on the paper, absently creating a cluster of gray dots spiraling in and out, in and out, as if following the pattern of a snail shell. Dunstan Headley was an angry man. Robson was almost entirely dependent upon his father for financial support, and she had little doubt that Headley Senior might choose to turn the screw on his son by withholding money unless he agreed to toe a particular line.
Maisie rubbed her eyes and stood up; it was the early hours of the morning and she finally felt ready to go to bed. When she looked down at the case map, she realized that she had, without thinking, been inscribing the names Robson Headley—Dunstan Headley—Delphine Lang time and again in circles across a section of the paper.
The following morning—Friday—Maisie arrived at Liverpool Street station at half past nine, drove through the gate marked “Way in for Cabs,” and parked the MG. She hurried inside to check the arrival times of trains from Cambridge, then returned and moved the vehicle along so that she was not obstructing the cabbies, to a place that afforded her a view of people exiting the station and setting off again in taxi-cabs. The day was cool and beyond the canopy of the