Page 29 of The Spy Who Loved Tea

The train.

The five-fifty AM mail train to London. It was the only public transport out of Lark’s End that didn’t involve the main roads. It was quiet, it was anonymous, and it connected to international rail services.

Vera reached the fence and pulled herself through the gap, ignoring the way the chain-link scraped against her burned wrists. She emerged on the other side and stood up, swaying slightly, taking stock.

She was injured—burned hands, bruised ribs, lungs full of smoke. She was blind—or near enough, without her glasses. She was exhausted, filthy, and smelled like a bonfire.

But she was alive. And she knew where Julian was going.

She checked her watch, bringing it close to her face until the numbers swam into focus.

Four-seventeen AM.

The train left at Five-fifty. That gave her an hour and a half to get to the station, find Julian, and stop him before he disappeared forever.

Vera looked back at the burning mill. The flames lit the sky like a beacon, visible for miles. Someone would have called the fire brigade by now. Questions would be asked. Investigations would begin.

But none of that would matter if Julian escaped with the evidence of OmniCorp’s crimes. Without proof, Mrs. Gable would still be convicted. Without proof, the village would still be destroyed. Without proof, Major Barnaby and Arthur Pym would just be tragic accidents, their murders unpunished.

Vera turned away from the fire and began to walk.

Her body screamed at her with every step. Her wrists throbbed. Her lungs ached. Her eyes stung and watered, useless in the darkness.

She ignored all of it.

She had a train to catch.

CHAPTER NINE

Navigating the village without her glasses was an exercise in humiliation. The streets were empty at this time of morning, so there was no one to help direct her.

Vera knew these streets. She had walked them a thousand times in the five years since her retirement—to the bakery, to the post office, to the pub and back. She could have done it blindfolded.

But blindfolded would have been easier. At least then she wouldn’t be tormented by the blur of almost-shapes, the suggestions of objects that refused to resolve into anything useful. She stumbled over a kerb she should have seen. She walked into a bollard that loomed out of the grey murk like an ambush. She barked her shin on a bench and had to bite back a string of profanity that would have scandalized the village for generations.

This is absurd, she thought, steadying herself against a shop window. I’ve infiltrated Soviet military installations. I’ve escaped from a moving train in the Alps. And now I’m being defeated by a high street I could draw from memory.

The shapes around her were maddeningly familiar and utterly useless. She knew the butcher’s was somewhere to her left—she could smell the faint iron tang of the cold room. The newsagent was ahead, marked by the fuzzy rectangle of its illuminated sign. But she couldn’t read the signs. She couldn’t judge distances. She was operating on instinct and memory, and both were failing her.

She needed glasses. Any glasses. Something strong enough to⁠—

And then she saw it.

Looming out of the darkness like a beacon, enormous and unmistakable even to her ruined vision: a giant pair of spectacles.

The optician’s sign. Two massive lenses, each one four feet across, mounted above the shop door. The kind of gaudy, oversized advertisement that Vera had always found rather vulgar.

Tonight, it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

“Oh, thank God,” she breathed.

The security was minimal—a simple pin-tumbler lock on the front door and a basic alarm system that Vera disabled by the simple expedient of cutting the phone line where it entered the building.

She picked the lock in under thirty seconds, her burned fingers protesting every movement, and slipped inside.

The shop smelled of lens cleaner and new carpet. Display cases lined the walls, filled with fashionable frames that would be useless to her. She needed strength, not style.

She moved to the back room, where the dispensing equipment hummed softly in the darkness. The “High Prescription” drawer was clearly labeled—a small mercy. She pulled it open and began trying frames by feel, holding each pair up to her face and squinting at the eye chart on the far wall.