case, Maisie walked towards James Compton’s office. Yes, he would be busy. Yes, there was work to be done. But for now, perhaps he might be persuaded to leave work early to return to Ebury Place together. In fact, she knew he would.
Maisie’s list of loose ends to tie up seemed to grow each day. Amid the packing, the cancellation of the lease on the Fitzroy Square office, the necessary hours spent with her solicitor, Bernard Klein, and the process Maurice had called their Final Accounting—the essential visits to places and people encountered during work on the Usha Pramal case, a task that brought work on a particular investigation to a more settled close—she realized that this would not be the final accounting of a single case. She knew that, if he were with her, Maurice would counsel her to look critically upon the years since she first began work on her own, from the time she moved into the dusty office in Warren Street, when a man named Billy Beale, who recognized her as the nurse who had saved his life in the war, had come to her aid on her first big case, and had, ever since, been at her side—to the point where he had saved her life when Robert Martin discharged the gun, spattering her with the blood of a dog who tried to protect the children he loved.
“Oh, Billy,” said Maisie to the silent room as she lay down her pen and pressed her hands to her eyes. “Oh, Billy, bless you, dear man. Bless you for risking everything for me.”
From the Surrey Canal in Camberwell, to the house where she saw the “For Sale” sign—the Paiges really were leaving—she retraced her steps in the Usha Pramal case. The Reverend Griffith was gone now—there was a sign indicating that rooms were available for rent in the house where he’d lived—and the building that served as his church was boarded up. On a fine day in early October, Maisie stood for a while looking across the common land close to Addington Square, before setting off towards the clump of trees where children had played, where a boy she hardly knew, but knew so much about all the same, threatened a young family and was saved by their loyal dog. It was here that she sat down, that she lingered under the dappled light of a willow tree and rested her head against its trunk, to finally face the past and what it might mean to step out into another future.
“The trouble with you, love, is that you think too much.” The oft-spoken warning from her father—a light admonishment that she would accept and he would offer with a smile that hid his true concern—echoed in her mind and almost led her to leave this place where a tragedy had been averted, where the blood of an animal still stained the ground. But she remained, sitting, thinking, allowing her thoughts to roam across time and the lives she had touched and been touched by in return.
How different now was her life from that of the girl who left a small house in Lambeth to work at a grand mansion in Belgravia. Ebury Place. She was, to all intents and purposes, mistress of that same house now, yet at once she remembered the feelings that caused her to weep as she made her way towards the kitchen entrance on a blustery day so long ago. She had just turned thirteen, still grieving the loss of her mother, when she left her father’s house that morning. He was then a man suffering the death of his wife so deeply, he had considered the best future for his daughter was one away from a house with the curtains closed against the light of day, and a widower father clad in black whose heart was broken.
It was at Ebury Place that she had been summoned to meet Dr. Maurice Blanche, and from that moment, her life would never be the same again. How she had worked for that future—Frankie Dobbs could never have imagined such possibilities for his beloved daughter, who then pushed all opportunity aside when war touched her.
“You think what you can do for these boys,” her friend Enid had said as they watched the wounded being brought through Charing Cross Station in early 1915, after the crossing from the battlefields of France. Within hours Enid was dead, killed in an explosion at the Woolwich Arsenal where she was