Nellie flinched, as if an icy hand had touched her nape. Looking around Regent’s Park, she could see only the tardy workers rushing to their offices and the early nannies with their perambulators. She suspected Maud, no living person would have such a cold touch. Although there was someone—flesh and blood, not a ghost—a man who was lurking behind a large beech tree, half hidden by its wide girth. When he saw that Nellie had spotted him he stepped further out of view, although his shoes remained comically visible.
Of course, in Nellie’s （quite wide） experience, a man lurking behind a tree could be up to any number of things, most of them unpleasant. Especially one who was wearing two-tone shoes. Co-respondent shoes may be good enough for the Prince of Wales, but it was Nellie’s belief that they gave a man a vulgar air （although few people would have taken fashion advice from Nellie Coker）。 But this man belonged to her.
He was making himself very obvious. Shouldn’t a spy try to fade into the background a bit more? And why was he watching Nellie at this moment in time? He was supposed to be keeping an eye on Hanover Terrace, for heaven’s sake.
She got up from her bench and waddled towards the beech tree, lifting her new cane as if it were a bayonet with which she was intending to stab the owner of the shoes.
Landor, unshakeable in the face of most violent assaults, took a step back in alarm.
“Stop lurking,” Nellie said.
A Shropshire Lad
On his way to the Dead Man’s Hole, Frobisher took a detour through the Floral Hall opposite the police station. He could smell lilac. The scent drew him inside like a thread, to a stall that had a row of galvanized buckets full of great-headed blooms that must have come up from the country somewhere.
He should buy Lottie some flowers. She disliked lilacs. And lilies, of course, the French reserved lilies for funerals. Freesias, perhaps, something that indicated spring. Or tulips. You couldn’t go wrong with tulips. He would stop in on the way home.
He was keeping knowledge of Lottie away from Bow Street. His colleagues would have been intrigued to know he had a French wife, even more intrigued to know that she was often not in her right mind. He preferred that they imagine his wife was called Hilda or Mabel and that she scurried around him when he came home, hanging up his overcoat, frying him a pork chop, soothing his troubled brow. They would have been baffled by the erratic Lottie, who would sometimes spend an entire evening crooning to a little cloth doll she had made.
He drank in the perfume of the lilacs. There had been lilacs growing wild along the lane leading to the farm cottage where he lived when he was a boy. And hawthorn, its sour scent the herald of summer. God, he missed the smell of the hedgerow.
“Help you, guv’nor?” the stallholder said, but Frobisher shied away, overcome by reminiscence of the past, for the innocent hopes of boyhood. It was unexpected, where was it coming from? It could hardly have been aroused by the Cokers. And not by Miss Kelling, surely? He had only met her for the first time yesterday, not long enough for her to have pierced his shell （he imagined a needle rather than a sword）。
Had he done the right thing in engaging Miss Kelling? He was not about to put her in any danger, was he? She seemed the spirited type （“Absolutely, Chief Inspector”）。 It was a relief to come across that in a woman. She was not mad, nor French, nor particularly beautiful. She was a librarian.
He left thoughts of Gwendolen Kelling behind, along with the lilacs. There was a dead girl waiting for him. Perhaps she was the one he should be taking flowers to.
Après la Guerre
“Have you had a good look at them, Miss Kelling?” Detective Chief Inspector Frobisher asked Gwendolen as they watched the Cokers swagger away in their Bentleys. “And do you think that you can do what I’m asking of you?”
“Absolutely, Chief Inspector.”
Gwendolen believed that it was always best to sound confident, even if you were not. It helped to prevent those around you from faltering. It was something that had served her well during the war, of course, but it had also proved a useful trait to have in the Library afterwards. Her fellow assistant librarians—the Misses Tate, Rogerson and Shaw—often seemed to need a steadying hand on the tiller. It had never ceased to surprise Gwendolen how much panic could be engendered by a misplaced book or an index card wrongly filed. Miss Tate, Miss Rogerson, Miss Shaw and even their Head in Clifford Street, Mr. Pollock （yes, a man—a man, it seemed, must always be the Head）， could get all a-twitter over the smallest thing. York was planning a new Carnegie Library in Museum Street and Gwendolen worried that the delicate hearts would not be able to stand the excitement of the move, let alone the reshelving of all those books.