Page 5 of The Spy Who Loved Tea

It was a waterproof pouch—heavy-duty plastic, double-sealed. Inside was a small, leather-bound notebook.

“Bingo,” she murmured to an observing spider.

She wiped the soil from the plastic and opened the pouch. The notebook was old, the leather cracked and soft with age. She flipped it open.

It was some sort of ledger. But not the kind she had expected.

Page 1:

G. — 14 / Zn(?) T. — 6 / Neg. P. — Inquiry. L4.

Page 2:

V. — 22 / Li ✓ HP B. — 31 /ite H. — 8 / neg

Vera frowned. Initials and numbers. Weights? Payments? The abbreviations could be anything—addresses, codes, quantities of something.

G for Gable? T for Thorne? V for... Vickery?

The letters after the numbers were stranger still. Zn. Li. HP. They looked like chemical symbols, but that made no sense in the context of a village dispute over land sales.

Unless Barnaby had been tracking something other than money.

She turned the page. Tucked into the crease was a loose piece of paper—a letter, typed on heavy bond stock with a corporate letterhead she didn’t recognize. A stylized ‘O’ surrounded by radiating lines, like a sun. Or an eye.

Major B,

Our offer is final. The mineral rights to the entire aquifer zone are essential for the development project. Your neighbors have already agreed in principle. Don’t be the obstacle.

Obstacles are removed.

— A.P.

A.P. Arthur Pym? The man in the suit?

So Pym was pressuring the village on behalf of some corporation. And Barnaby was documenting... something. The numbers and chemical symbols nagged at her, hovering at the edge of comprehension like a word on the tip of her tongue.

She didn’t have time to puzzle it out now. She slipped the notebook into her knitting bag, nestling it between the wool and her compact mirror.

Snap.

A twig broke outside.

Vera froze. She didn’t breathe. She merged with the shadows of the tomato vines, becoming just another shape among the leaves.

Through the dirty glass, she saw a silhouette. A man. He wasn’t wearing a police uniform. He was wearing dark clothes, hood pulled up despite the mild evening. He was moving toward the cottage’s back door.

He wasn’t investigating. He was breaking in.

Vera checked her watch. Constable Oakes was still out front, taking statements. This was someone else entirely.

A second player.

She had a choice. Confront the intruder, or slip away with the intelligence she’d gathered.

She looked at her knitting bag. She looked at the intruder’s heavy boots—military-style, rubber-soled, the kind designed for silent movement on hard surfaces.

Discretion, she decided, is the better part of surviving to feed the cat.