Turning to the bookcase, he randomly pulled out books and looked at them. In a few of them, words and page numbers were underlined, but without rhyme or reason. The others had no such markings.
A cipher?
Intrigued now, he began to search the room, quietly and thoroughly. Vermuelen, it appeared, was Flemish by birth, the non-French-speaking half of Belgium, but had been brought up in Brussels when his father worked for the postal service there. Several letters from his sister were in the bottom drawer of his desk, some of them full of family news.
Rutledge found a torch in another drawer, and decided to explore. Leaving his boots in the workroom and walking the cold floor in stocking feet, he let himself out into the passage. But the other rooms of the house were ordinary, with no secrets that he could discover. It was clearly the home of a working-class family, the heavy dark wood of furnishings handed down in generation after generation, a crucifix over the beds in the four small bedrooms, and a shrine to the Virgin in a corner of the parlor.
Disappointed, he returned to the workroom. Remembering something one of his friends—an Intelligence officer—had told him during the war, he started to search all over again.
And against the back of the smoke-darkened painting of an elderly bearded man over the hearth, clearly someone’s ancestor, given the style of clothing he was wearing, was a thick envelope. It had been taped in place.
Rutledge took it to the table and opened it.
There were a dozen sheets of tissue-thin paper, the sort that could be used to attach to the legs of pigeons. The British had used pigeons to send messages to the Front and to people behind the lines in occupied Belgium who hated the Germans and were willing to risk their lives to provide whatever information they could on reinforcements moving through their tiny country. But the sheets were clean, unused.
What had all this to do with Essex? Or with Haldane, for that matter?
It was full light outside now, a cloudy dawn, almost as gray as the view from the workroom window.
Rutledge had put his boots back on, and now he cleaned his hands as best he could on one sheet of the tissue paper before walking to the kitchen and knocking on the door.
The nun, awake and dressed, opened it and invited him in. There was a cot up against a dresser, clearly where she slept, but of more interest to him was the pigeon cage outside the window, in the back garden.
She had made coffee, and offered him a cup. It was black but hot, and he was grateful for it, nodding his thanks as he sat down at the narrow table in the center of the room.
“I have borrowed bread and a little chicken from the priest. It is for his breakfast and mine. There is no other food.”
“I understand,” he told her. Then, he asked, “Tell me about Michel Vermuelen?”
“I was sent by my convent to nurse him through this illness.”
“When was he hurt? How long has it been?”
“A fortnight ago. On the road to Calais. He came home, only the leg wound had become septic. There is nothing to be done. A slow poisoning of the blood.”
“He was in the war?”
“I think not. He is lame. But he was a patriot all the same.”
That explained why her convent had sent her here. But the man had done something in the war . . .
On an impulse, he said, “I have looked at the maps and books in the workroom. He served in his own fashion. But there is nothing to take back to England with me. I should like to speak to him again.”
“It is not necessary. I think this is what you came for.” She turned, opened a small cabinet against the wall. It was where spices and flour and salt were kept. In the sack of flour was an envelope.
“Take it and go.” She opened a drawer in the dresser, found a cloth, and cleaned off the flour dust before handing it to him.
It was tightly sealed.
“Leave him now to die quietly.” But when Rutledge didn’t go, she sighed. “He did not trust the post,” she went on, and turned away to begin preparing a broth for Vermuelen, adding a raw egg to it.
Rutledge looked away. “Thank you. I’d still like to speak to him.”
“We shall see, yes? As God wills.”
Finishing his coffee, he thanked her again, and took the envelope back to the workroom.
It was indeed tightly sealed. But Haldane had sent him here without a word to help him find what the man wanted from Vermuelen. And Rutledge told himself that he’d be damned if he wasn’t going to open the wretched envelope and find out what it contained. He needed to return to Essex—but if Vermuelen was dying, this could be his only chance to ask questions.
Inside the envelope, there were pages of that tissue-thin paper, and this time, they were covered in writing. Someone—Vermuelen?—had kept a running account in the tiniest handwriting he could manage. In the dim light of the lamp, Rutledge was hard-pressed to read it. Fortunately it was in English, not Flemish or French.
At first he had no idea what the report was about, and then he began to understand. It was dated, clear, concise, logical. Rutledge wondered if the writer—or Vermuelen himself—had been a policeman in Belgium before the war, for there was a recognizable policeman’s viewpoint about it.
It began with troop movements in Belgium, which regiments the Germans were bringing into that country and staging to march into France. There followed a description of the heroism of the Belgians as they fought back, giving the Allies nine days to get their own armies into the conflict. There was a gap, and then the report began again at the French-Belgian border days later, again noting German troop movements and strategy. As if he had changed his location.
This continued—with gaps, apparently as Vermuelen moved his area of operations to another location. This time he was watching the French coastline and reporting on the submarines and other German naval movements. Once he rescued a British airman, leading him back to his own lines.
Rutledge was beginning to realize that this was a record, not a report, a duplicate of all the information he had managed to get into British hands during the course of the war. In the event that any messages were lost, the information in those messages would not be.
Rutledge began to scan. It wasn’t the war, three years in the past, that Haldane was interested in.
His eyes aching from the tiny print and his stomach growling from missed meals, he forced his mind to keep at it, looking for anything that might be useful. Searching the parlor again, he found a half empty bottle of whisky, and took that back to the workroom. As time passed, he was beginning to think that there was nothing of interest here. Nothing to do with Essex and murder.
He drank from the bottle, unwilling to ask the nun for a glass, and then went on with his search. By the time he’d read the last page, he knew this couldn’t be what he had come all the way from Essex to find. He would see that it reached Haldane, but there had to be another reason for this journey.
Folding the pages and returning them to the envelope, he put it safely in his pocket, capped the bottle of whisky, and returned it to the parlor. Then he went in search of the nun.
She was in the sickroom.
“How is he?” Rutledge asked quietly.
“He fights to live, but it’s only a matter of time.”
“Is he awake?”
“He hasn’t spoken for some hours.”
Rutledge moved closer to the bed. He could hear the man’s rough breathing, but he didn’t think he was actually asleep.