achieved.
“The German agent didn’t suspect anything?” I asked.
“No. He barely said a word, in fact. He just took the documents and disappeared back into the sea.”
“Then it’s all a go,” Felix said.
“So long as your letter verifying the contents of the plans can fool the Germans into believing that Miss Abbot wrote it.”
Felix smiled. “My forgery could fool Jocelyn Abbot herself.”
There were still a few things about all of this that weren’t making sense to me, parts of this story that were still a jumble in my head.
“But I don’t understand,” I said softly. “What … How … How did Winthrop, and Oscar, and Jocelyn Abbot fit together?”
It was the major who spoke. “Winthrop and Jocelyn are both members of Sir Nigel’s collector’s club. When Barnaby Ellhurst was shot down in France and captured by the Germans, they began sending messages to Jocelyn Abbot that they wanted information in exchange for Ellhurst’s life. She knew Harden from the collector’s club, knew that he might be in a position to get the information for her. He agreed to it, and Matthew Winthrop agreed to help facilitate the exchange with the Germans. She knew, I’m sure, about his political leanings. Everyone did.”
“And that’s how Oscar came into it,” I said. “He told me he was able to get a job working for you because of your uncle, and when he got reacquainted with Winthrop he thought he could make a profit.”
He nodded. “Davies was always clever at arranging things. I think he was the one who began to pull the scheme together. It was something of a double cross, really. He didn’t care what happened to Ellhurst. He expected the Germans to pay for the information.”
“But then Harden began to have second thoughts,” I said, thinking of the poor dead man we had found at the beginning of all of this. It seemed like a very long time ago.
The major nodded. “I think he was either going to refuse to give them the documents or had even decided that he was going to go to the authorities. He had to be stopped.”
I asked the next question, even though I wasn’t sure I really wanted to know. “Was it Oscar, then, that killed him?”
The major nodded. There was a flicker of some emotion in his eyes for just a moment, but it was gone so quickly that I couldn’t quite interpret it.
“He killed Harden and took the papers. But the Germans were still demanding a letter in Jocelyn Abbot’s hand verifying certain portions of the documents. They didn’t believe that she would lie when her fiancé’s life was at stake. So Davies passed them off to her and sent a message to Winthrop at the party that he should collect the documents—and the letter authenticating them—from Jocelyn at the tearoom that day. He then killed the waiter who he sent to deliver the message to Winthrop at the party so that there would be no loose ends.”
Oscar. That glum-faced, apparently meek young man had had a violent streak that none of us had seen. I thought of the cold blade of the knife against my throat and clenched my teeth to keep from shuddering.
“But how did he come to be here tonight?” I asked. “Why didn’t he leave Winthrop to do it?”
“Because he had gleaned, from our actions at the office, that we were onto Winthrop. So he sent him as a decoy to distract us and planned to meet the German contact on the beach himself. It might have worked, too, had your cousin not been so sharp-eyed.”
“Do you think they’ll release Ellhurst?” Felix asked.
“I doubt it,” the major said. “But I’d not lay odds against him. A man like that knows how to survive.”
“Miss Abbot had no choice but to do what she did,” I reflected. “She just wanted to save her fiancé.”
“She had a choice,” the major said grimly.
As much as I didn’t care for the woman, a part of me felt the need to defend her. After all, she had been blackmailed. To my mind, she hadn’t been a willing participant. I had seen for myself the angry looks she had been giving Matthew Winthrop. She had been acting to save a man’s life. Didn’t that count for something?
I was distracted by these thoughts and was startled when every man in the room suddenly got to their feet.
I looked up to see that the front door had opened and Jerome Curtis, Sir Nigel Randolf’s hired brute, stood in the