The Apothecary Page 0,32

war more obvious and unrepaired. My mind was racing through possible explanations we could give for being at the garden. Our botany project for the science competition, maybe—except that the science competition didn’t really exist.

“Why are we going to the East End?” Benjamin asked.

“Because that’s where Turnbull Juvenile Court is,” Detective Montclair said.

“I thought we were just being questioned.”

“You are,” he said. “Nothing to worry about. Just ordinary procedure.”

“I want to call my parents,” I said, even though they were at a castle in the country.

“Naturally,” the detective said.

“You can’t question us without them present,” I improvised.

He smiled his crooked smile. “Oh, yes, we can, my dear,” he said. “This isn’t the ‘land of the free’, you know. You just sit tight.”

CHAPTER 15

Turnbull Hall

We stopped at a three-storey brick building with a peaked roof, like an orphanage in a Dickens novel. Turnbull Hall had been built in the nineteenth century as a place where the poor could live and eat and get an education from reform-minded university graduates, and it might once have been a fine, clean, noble place. By 1952, though, it was grubby and cold, with sooty windows and surly guards, and held a juvenile court and a reformatory school.

Officer O’Nan immediately took Benjamin into one room, and Detective Montclair steered me down a hallway, past a classroom full of bored and pasty-looking children. There was a smell of poverty and abandonment and neglect, and of generations of kids who didn’t get enough baths or enough love.

We arrived in an empty, run-down classroom, and Detective Montclair told me to take a seat. He sat opposite me, squeezing into a child-sized desk. His fine hair was still disordered from our struggle.

“Now, do you go by Jane or Janie?” he asked.

“Jane,” I said flatly. I didn’t want him acting like my friend.

“You’re American.”

I nodded.

“Parents working here, yes?”

The detective’s manner was very calm, his voice soothing, and I was reminded of a king cobra I’d once seen in a film, which hypnotised its prey, swaying back and forth, before striking like a bullet. I nodded.

“How do you find London?”

“Are you arresting me?”

“No.”

“Then I’d like to go now.”

“Why don’t you tell me what happened in the garden?”

I bit my lip. Obviously, they had separated me from Benjamin so they could compare our stories. But we hadn’t had time to get them straight, and anything I said might be different from what Benjamin said.

“If I’m being arrested, I’d like a lawyer,” I said. My parents had told me that you always needed to ask for a lawyer if you were accused of something, especially if you were innocent.

“But you haven’t been arrested.”

“Then I’d like to leave.”

“Then I might have to arrest you.”

“Okay, go ahead. And I’d like a lawyer.”

He paused, tilting his head. “Do your parents like their jobs, Janie?” he asked.

“Yes. And it’s Jane.”

“Well, Jane,” he said, “I can have you deported for refusing to cooperate with a police investigation, and then your parents would have to take you home. But I get the feeling that they don’t want to go back to Los Angeles.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I’ve read their file.”

“They have a file?”

“Of course they have a file,” he said. “We don’t just let any old Communists in.”

“They aren’t Communists!”

“And now you have a file, too. So let’s fill it with good things, shall we? Things, say, about what a cooperative foreign national you are, and how helpful in matters of grave importance.”

“I’m fourteen,” I said. “I can’t have a file.”

Detective Montclair looked around the ancient classroom and smiled his crooked smile, as if approving benignly of the shabby desks and dusty blackboards. “When this building was built,” he said, “a child could enter the workforce at six. You might have been at work for eight years by the age of fourteen. Difficult work, too. Physical labour. So I think you’re old enough to answer a few questions about a murder, to help the country that has so generously allowed your Communist parents in, and seen fit to employ them.”

“Stop calling them Communists. They aren’t.”

“Where were you last night?”

“At home.”

“All evening? If we call your parents and ask them if you came home late, what will they say?”

I bit my lip harder, to keep the tears of frustration back. If only Benjamin and I had figured out our story ahead of time. If only I could have warned my parents to keep their mouths shut. I had a feeling Scotland Yard could track them easily to their castle in the