A Lesson in Secrets_ A Maisie Dobbs Novel - Jacqueline Winspear [21]
“Oh, speaking of the telephone at home, Mr. Beale came round to the flat to check the new line you’ve had put in. He knows some of the engineers who installed lines around the Pimlico area, so he was able to get into a junction box—or something like that—and check the lines from there.”
“Did he find anything untoward?”
“He said he wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but he thought you should be careful about what you say on the telephone. He had his mate with him, and they said it looked like someone had been working on that box who wasn’t a proper GPO engineer. It was clear enough to see, he said, because you don’t have a party line.”
“No, I wanted a private line to my flat—frankly, more for personal telephone calls. Anyway, point taken. I’ll speak to Billy about it when I see him.”
Having looked at three vacant rooms, Maisie paid a deposit to the landlady of a boarding house closer to the center of Cambridge, yet within easy reach of the College of St. Francis. Though she could now afford much more comfortable surroundings, she did not want to seem ostentatious. In any case, her room—the front bedroom in a double-fronted Edwardian villa with large bay windows and a staircase that swept up through the center of the house to the two floors above—was clean and comfortable. There was a double bed with a floral eiderdown and counterpane, an armchair with a slightly worn floral cover—which did not match the counterpane or the eiderdown—and a desk in the corner with an angle-poise lamp. She hoped it would help to throw light on whatever Huntley and MacFarlane suspected might be going on at St. Francis College that was “not in the interests of the Crown.”
Her lodgings secured with a deposit and one month’s rent, Maisie thought she would meander around Cambridge—a walk down memory lane to some of the places she’d enjoyed when she was a student at Girton College. Her early days there did not afford the opportunity to socialize much beyond the college, though Priscilla had certainly accepted every invitation that came her way and seemed to know a great number of people. So many of those young men, including Priscilla’s three brothers, had died in the war. Maisie walked along the Backs, watching a younger set larking around on punts. They were just boys, she thought. All just boys.
She continued on her walk, looking in shopwindows and leafing through magazines in a newsagent’s, before deciding it was time to drive back to London. She remembered a shortcut between a row of houses, across a bridge, and then a park. It was as she set foot in the park that she noticed a young couple holding hands under a tree. They might not have attracted her attention at all had not Delphine Lang’s blond hair caught her eye. Maisie moved into the shadow of a tree to continue on her way—she did not want Lang to see her, as it was clear that this was an assignation Lang and her male friend were trying to keep secret by meeting in a park used, for the most part, by local people. She could not avoid, however, noticing that Delphine Lang was weeping and that her male friend had drawn her to him to soothe her.
It was on Maisie’s final day in the office before her departure for Cambridge that Geoffrey Tinsley came to Fitzroy Square.
“I thought I would come over with the book you asked me to acquire for you. I was lucky to find a copy, you know.” The bookseller—whom Maisie had first met at his bookshop on Charing Cross Road while working on a case at the end of the previous year—unwrapped a book with a burgundy cloth cover. There was no dust jacket,