At the western edge of the Common, the sergeant swung south on Arlington to Boylston and then west again. “We’ve got ourselves a couple-three miles to go,” he said. “Address Major Harris gave me is Lansdowne near Ipswich, way out in the Fens.” He sighed. “Not much good happens in that part of town, and hasn’t for a long, long time.”
He turned right onto Lansdowne and pulled to a stop in the middle of a block full of shops that looked dedicated to one purpose and one purpose only: separating the none-too-discriminating customer from whatever small store of shillings he might possess without giving him anything worth having in return. Bushell stared in pained disbelief at the bright red socks on display in a haberdasher’s window. Who would wear such things, and why?
George Harris, looking altogether too dapper to belong on Lansdowne Street, came up to Scriver’s motorcar. “Kilbride was observed going into Yawkey’s Tea Shoppe” - he pronounced the last word as if it had two syllables, so the name of the place nearly rhymed - “by Senior Constable McGinnity, as I told you back at the station, Colonel. He has not been observed to leave.”
“Has the place got a back door?” Samuel Stanley asked.
“It does, but the alley on which it opens has only one egress” - Harris pointed to show where that was “and McGinnity has been able to keep it and the front entrance to the tea shop under observation at the same time.” Now the RAM pronounced shop in a normal fashion. Bushell glanced over at McGinnity, who was leaning against a lamppost trying to pretend he wasn’t doing anything in particular. The pretense wasn’t worth much: if you needed a stage Irishman to play a constable, McGinnity would have been your man. He was big and beefy, red-faced and knobby-cheekboned, with red hair now drifted with gray. Throw in his uniform and he was about as inconspicuous as a chimp in church.
In thoughtful tones, Bushell asked, “Could Kilbride have gone into the Yawkey’s place, out the back door into the alley, and then into another shop on Lansdowne here?”
Harris glanced over to Senior Constable McGinnity. He might not approve of having Kathleen Flannery along here, but he was no fool. “That would complicate our lives, wouldn’t it?” He glanced back over his shoulder. “We’ll have the manpower to find out, though.”
Several constabulary steamers rolled to a stop. Big, burly men in uniform piled out of them. By their looks, a fair number could have been McGinnity’s cousins. More motorcars pulled up at the corner of Lansdowne and Ipswich. The men who got out of them wore suits and waistcoats. Bushell had seen several of those fellows at the RAM station.
“All right, we can search the area,” he said. He unbuttoned his jacket so he could get at his revolver in a hurry. Sam Stanley had already done the same thing. Bushell said, “Let’s have a look at Yawkey’s Tea Shoppe, Sam.”
“Right, Chief,” Stanley said.
“You want backup?” Harris asked quietly.
He’d had all the backup in the world at Buckley Bay. “We’ll go first, anyhow,” he answered, and started down the street. Stanley matched him stride for stride. Harris waited behind him, respecting his judgment. Kathleen Flannery, on the other hand, started after him. Hearing her footsteps on the paving slates behind him, he turned around. “Go on back, Kathleen. This is what they pay us to do. It’s not your job.”
“It’s my painting,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t get in your way, but I want to do whatever I can to help.”
Bushell exhaled through his nose. “The last time I went after the Sons of Liberty, I watched a good man get killed before my eyes because he didn’t take them seriously enough. I’m not keen to run the same risk twice. Now will you go back, or shall I get a pair of manacles from Senior Constable McGinnity?”
Kathleen glowered fiercely, but halted. Bushell wouldn’t have bet that she was going to. He and Stanley walked past a chemist’s, a bakery, an ironmonger’s shop, and a cabinetmaker’s establishment that looked too fine for the neighborhood. A very fat, very blond man was examining the inlay work on a table by the front window.
A tavern, a tobacconist’s, a fish market. . . Yawkey’s Tea Shoppe was only a few doors away now. Bushell heard the sound of a woman’s pumps clacking up the street after him. Samuel Stanley sent him a glance that said only one thing: I told you so.
“God damn it,” he muttered under his breath. He didn’t know whether he was angry at Kathleen for not listening to him (though when had she ever listened to him?) or at Major Harris for not keeping her in better check (though Harris undoubtedly figured she was Bushell’s problem). Then he realized he didn’t have to divide things up. He could be angry at both of them at once - and he was. If he caused a scene on the street, he was liable to spook Kilbride - assuming Kilbride wasn’t spooked already, a dubious proposition at best. Ignoring Kathleen also gave him the chance to savor his anger and let it grow. He stalked on toward the tea shop.
He’d just set his hand on the door latch when Kathleen stopped. That made him turn around where anger hadn’t - had she had a sudden rush of brains to the head? He supposed stranger things had happened, though he was hard-pressed to think of one offhand.
Kathleen was staring into the window of the cabinetmaker’s shop. She can’t possibly be shopping, ran through Bushell’s mind, though he didn’t know what else she could be doing. After a moment, she started running again, not back down toward the steamer that had brought her, but up Lansdowne toward Bushell. Scowling, he turned away from her and started to go into the tea shop. “Wait, Tom!” she called urgently. “Please wait!”
“Why the devil should I?” he demanded as she came panting up to him. “I told you to - “
“To hell with what you told me,” she said. She’d calculated that nicely; hearing her swear startled him into brief silence. She took advantage of that to go on, “That fat man in the front of the cabinetmaker’s - I know him.” She corrected herself: “I’ve seen him before, anyhow. I don’t know who he is, but I’ve seen him.”
Bushell believed her. He’d noticed the fat man himself. If you’d seen him once, you’d remember him. Whether that meant anything was a different question. “Where did you see him?” he asked. Kathleen didn’t even take any vindictive pleasure in dropping her bombshelclass="underline" “At the showing of The Two Georges in Victoria, just after it got here from London, and then again when the exhibition moved up to Philadelphia.” She surprised Bushell by laughing. “In a cutaway, he looks rather like a penguin that’s swallowed a watermelon.”
Bushell brushed at his mustache with a forefinger. Then, almost absentmindedly, he leaned forward and kissed Kathleen half on the mouth, half on the cheek. “And how will he look in a different suit?” he said, his voice musing. “One decorated with the broad arrow, I mean.”
“Shall we go find out, Chief?” Stanley said.
“Yes, I think we’d better,” Bushell said. “We’re liable to come up with Kilbride at the same time, too, with only a little bit of luck.” He turned to Kathleen. “Will you please wait here now?”
“After I’ve come this far? Not bloody likely.” Again, her deliberate vulgarity surprised Bushell, but it didn’t make him change his mind. The only way he could keep her back, though, was to have Sam hold her, and he didn’t want to do that. Shoulder to shoulder with Stanley, he started down Lansdowne toward the cabinetmaker’s. He hoped Kathleen would at least have the sense to walk behind the two of them rather than alongside.
He didn’t get much chance to test that hope, because he’d taken only a couple of strides when the fat man came out onto the pavement. He looked down the street toward Kathleen. “He recognized her, too,” Stanley said softly.