Susan nodded slowly. She didn’t want to be involved in anything to do with anything Greene had mentioned.
“What about the whatever-handed booksellers?”
“They should leave you alone, too,” said Greene. “But stay away from their shops.”
“They have actual shops?” asked Susan in disbelief.
“Two in London. Big one in Charing Cross Road for new books and a smaller one in Mayfair for the collectors,” replied Greene, opening a side door to the car park and going out ahead of Susan. She paused to look carefully around and then beckoned. “Watch the steps.”
Chapter Four
Most strange dreams I had, and
Waking, had them still
Of storied creatures, good and ill
Under the bookseller’s right hand
MRS. LONDON’S BOARDINGHOUSE WAS INDEED FAR BETTER THAN anything Susan could have afforded by herself. A four-story early Victorian town house on Milner Square, it was clean, immaculately maintained, and everything worked. Susan was even allowed a choice of rooms and took one at the top, which—though she didn’t say so—was considerably larger than her bedroom in her mother’s very old and rambling farmhouse. It was certainly cleaner and tidier and it came furnished. Even the bed was more comfortable.
But it was being paid for by Special Branch, and that meant not only being observed—Susan had a very jaundiced view on what Inspector Greene’s “keep a bit of an eye on” actually meant—but also beholden to the police. This made Susan feel more than uncomfortable and she wasn’t prepared to put up with it for long. She told herself it would only be until she could find a job and some doubtless far worse accommodation that didn’t come with strings attached.
Susan presumed that her comings and goings would be recorded by the apparently uninterested Mrs. London, and quite possibly all the other inhabitants of the house would be watching her as well. She expected questioning at breakfast, and possibly a handsome young man (or woman) strangely keen on showing her the city or something like that and being a bit too curious about her life, but was surprised to find that there were only three other inhabitants, two women and a man, all much older and all very much dedicated to keeping to themselves. There was hardly any talk at breakfast, and after the barest introductions—and those with patently false names—Susan was left entirely to her own devices.
Surveillance was another possibility, so she spent some time examining the light fittings and a couple of minor bumps in the wall plaster for microphones, but they seemed innocuous as far as she could tell, and besides, what could she do about it anyway? There was only the one phone for the residents, in the entry hallway. That was undoubtedly bugged, but as so far she had only called her mother, it didn’t seem likely there would be anything of interest for the police to record.
Susan’s mother, Jassmine—the extra s added only a few years before, courtesy of a short-lived relationship with a numerologist—had been curiously uninterested in the demise of Uncle Frank, though Susan had not gone into any details and certainly had not said anything about Merlin, giant lice, or the Old World. In fact, Jassmine wasn’t particularly interested in anything Susan had to say, her bemused tone typical of one of her periods of detachment the psychologists blamed on her use of LSD in the sixties, when she had been heavily involved in the music scene. Jassmine herself, when she returned to a more alert plane, did not think it was to do with drug use and claimed to have taken “very little” acid, despite hanging around with people who did. Susan wasn’t sure whether to believe her but had long since gotten used to her mother varying between being somewhat unreliable and completely so.
“The bedsit sounds good,” Jassmine had said vaguely. “Do send me a postcard. Trafalgar Square or somewhere nice.”
“I will, Mum,” replied Susan. Why Jassmine thought Trafalgar Square was nice, she didn’t know, but it was a place they always visited on their trips to London, which, though they usually coincided with Susan’s birthday, never seemed to have a particular point or object to them. In fact, the only regular part of these excursions was a visit to Trafalgar Square, where Jassmine would sit beneath one of Sir Edwin Landseer’s bronze lions for a while and then suggest going somewhere—anywhere and nowhere in particular—for cake.
Jassmine’s early life was a mystery. Like much else, she either wouldn’t or couldn’t talk about it, so Susan only had snatches of information gleaned from occasional comments, never answers to questions. The fifteenth-century farmhouse near Bath was the only home Susan knew. It had apparently “belonged to the family forever,” but it had been a holiday house until Jassmine moved there sometime before Susan was born. Jassmine herself had grown up somewhere in central London, evidently to a family with money, since the farmhouse sat on three acres and had been extensively rebuilt at least twice in the last hundred years.
But Susan had never met a living relative. There was only she and her mum.
Given Jassmine’s general stonewalling on the past, it was a minor miracle Susan had managed to extract some names and other fragments of information about the men who could possibly be her father. One look at Frank Thringley had given her a visceral sense he was not her father, later confirmed by Greene’s explanation about the usual sense of wrongness from a Sipper.
Thringley had been the easiest of the names to investigate, because of the Christmas presents and a definitive current address. For the others, she had some first names; possibly misremembered or misspelled surnames; a reading room ticket, presumably for the British Museum, that looked like it had been through the wash, with the name written on it faded into oblivion; and a silver cigarette case engraved with some sort of emblem or perhaps heraldic device, which might or might not have any relevance to the past owner.
But before she could start investigating, Susan needed a job. She was used to working in cafés, restaurants, and pubs (since the age of fourteen, illegally, though no one paid any attention to that in the country), but with the country falling into recession, jobs were not easy to find, even casual pub work. But Susan was lucky, and on her first day, after only fourteen attempts, she walked in as a barmaid walked out to go home to Australia. She and the owners immediately got on, and so Susan was employed at the princely cash-in-hand rate of 60p per hour for a casual but regular shift at the Twice-Crowned Swan, which was on Cloudesley Road, less than half a mile from Milner Square.
The Swan was a good pub, as they went, Susan considered. It was clean and well-run and the publican and his partner—Mr. Eric and Mr. Paul, as they insisted on being called—were both former circus performers; they’d done a strongman/acrobat routine for twenty-five years where they threw each other up in the air and spun about and also threw enormously heavy items at each other and juggled them. Both could still do a standing backflip and lift a keg under each arm. No one messed with either of them, so the drunken anger-management issues that had marred some of Susan’s previous pub work experiences tended to be few and short-lived.
Mr. Eric and Mr. Paul were control freaks, but she didn’t mind that, once she’d learned they really were particular about the exact angle to hold a glass when drawing a pint, or that the tonic bottle had to go on the left side of the gin glass, and change had to be counted back, no reading it off from the cash register.