Page 11 of The Spy Who Loved Tea

Watson purred, though his eyes remained watchful.

Vera lay back against the pillows, but she didn’t close her eyes. She stared at the ceiling, her mind turning over the pieces.

Barnaby’s ledger. The cryptic entries. G. — 14 / Zn(?)

Pym’s panicked text. Asset Unstable. Requesting Extraction.

The grey-eyed doctor. The crushed petunias. The scent of expensive cologne.

And somewhere beneath it all, a corporation willing to kill for something hidden in this sleepy village.

Mineral rights, the letter had said. Essential for the development project.

What was under Lark’s End that was worth killing for?

Vera didn’t know. Not yet.

But she was going to find out.

CHAPTER FOUR

Vera did not sleep well.

Watson, however, slept like the dead.

The enormous tabby had positioned himself at the foot of the bed, wedged between Vera’s ankles in a way that made turning over impossible. Whether this was an act of protection or simply feline selfishness was impossible to say. Knowing Watson, it was probably both.

He had recovered from his earlier terror with remarkable speed. The moment Vera had finished her phone call to Finch and settled into bed, Watson had transformed from a trembling, bottle-brush-furred wreck into his usual imperious self. He had groomed himself thoroughly, eaten a second helping of pâté (stress eating, Vera assumed), and then claimed his spot on the bed as if daring any intruder to try their luck a second time.

Vera envied him his resilience. Or perhaps his short memory.

She lay in the darkness, listening to his steady breathing—punctuated by the occasional snore—and the creak of the old cottage settling around her. Every sound seemed amplified. The scratch of a branch against the window. The distant hoot of an owl. The tick of the grandfather clock in the hallway. Each noise made her heart stutter, her hand reaching instinctively toward the pepper spray on her nightstand.

Someone had been in her home. Someone had walked through her rooms, touched her things, left a message on her pillow. And she had no idea how they had bypassed her locks.

That bothered her more than the threat itself.

Watson shifted in his sleep, his back paws kicking gently against her calf. He was dreaming—chasing something, probably. Mice or foxes or the neighborhood tom who had the audacity to exist. In his dreams, Watson was fearless. A mighty hunter. A force of nature.

In reality, he had hidden under the bed for ten minutes after Vera had found the flower, emerging only when she’d opened the pâté.

“Some guard cat you are,” Vera murmured.

Watson’s ear twitched, but he didn’t wake.

At half past five, she gave up on sleep entirely. She extricated herself from Watson’s ankle-trap with the careful precision of a bomb disposal expert, earning a reproachful chirp from the cat as the warm spot she’d vacated began to cool.

“You could come with me,” she told him. “Keep me company.”

Watson stretched luxuriously, yawned to display every one of his teeth, and curled into a tighter ball in the centre of the bed. His meaning was clear: I have done my duty. The rest is your problem.

Vera descended to the kitchen, her joints protesting the early hour. She made tea—strong, with a splash of milk—and fed Watson, who had somehow materialized beside his bowl despite showing no intention of moving thirty seconds earlier. Cats, she reflected, operated on their own laws of physics.

He ate with the focused intensity of a creature who had never known a full stomach, despite having been fed three times in the past twelve hours. When he finished, he sat back and began washing his face with the studied nonchalance of a cat who had definitely not been terrified out of his wits the night before.

“Acting brave now that the sun’s up,” Vera observed. “Very courageous.”

Watson ignored her, one hind leg extended toward the ceiling as he attended to his personal grooming.