Page 81 of The Oxford Guide to Scandal and Lies

Neville flipped the switch, and the wheels inside the case whirred to life. “You may begin,” he rasped.

“I, Michael Bertram Leland,” the professor began in a dull voice, “confess to spying for the Germans inside Vosburg while imprisoned there. They nicknamed me die Zahnkrone on account of my gold tooth. When Sam Neville caught wind of it, I convinced him he’d heard them say die Krone; that the leak was, in fact, his orderly, Robert Crowne, and I placed incriminating messages among Crowne’s things. After an informal court-martial, we decided to hand Crowne over to the Germans.” Leland closed his eyes, wincing. “They held him elsewhere until we were all released, and he was dismissed with disgrace rather than imprisoned again on account of the meager evidence.” He looked up at Marion, pleading. “I did everything I could to make sure he wasn’t punished more harshly. Over a year had passed at that point, and I had destroyed all the physical evidence, pretending it was lost—”

“You absolute bastard,” Marion whispered, pale with rage. “You still ruined his life.”

Leland hung his head in silence. Neville switched off the machine, and Watkins knelt beside him, repacking the microphone.

“What about the rest?” Ginevra stretched out her foot and nudged Leland’s shoe. “Shouldn’t you make a clean slate of it?”

“I did,” Leland snapped. “What would you have me do, Ginevra? Grovel like a dog?”

She tilted her head to catch his eye. “No, the rest of it. Your business with the Russians.”

Leland wrestled against his bonds. “Damn it, Ginevra, I still have no idea what you’re talking about!”

Ginevra Bishop had known Professor Michael Leland for a long time. He was always exaggerating and arrogant, polished enough to blind you with charm, and very often a terrible liar. Gin was so familiar with his mannerisms from years at dinner parties that she now saw something was dreadfully amiss. He stared at her with a raw bewilderment she had never seen on his face—and it felt genuine.

But Tolliver had so clearly said die Krone. The Rook found evidence in Leland’s cottage. The pieces added up to a very simple solution.

Across the room, Sidney coughed, his long lashes downcast. With his right hand still tucked across his body, he lifted his left hand and gently grazed his left ear.

Ginevra had often reflected on the funny nature of communication. Even when two people spoke the same language, meaning could be lost because of translation errors through the lens of personal experiences or missing context. Now, Sidney’s subtle signal jogged something in her memory that cast the message from Leland’s pocket in an entirely new light, and Gin saw what she’d missed in one cold, horrible moment: the reversal of the pen strokes, the subtle differences in line thickness from what the eye usually saw. Whoever had written it used their left hand—and Leland was most certainly right-handed, a fact Ginevra could attest to from his fondness for autographs. Sidney’s brilliant mind for details had recognized this in an instant, and his earlier comment about everyone being so diligent for justice was not a wry dig—it was a warning.

Someone wasn’t there for justice. Someone had been working all this time to frame Leland for a second round of treason, and they had shoved this note on the professor at the party as insurance. And someone had come to the cottage that night to ensure Leland didn’t blow up the plan they’d so carefully orchestrated to entrap him.

It was then Ginevra realized she had set down her gun on the counter to tie up Leland, and the gun was now missing.

A slow, strangling feeling twined around her breastbone. The real culprit might have been satisfied enough by Leland’s unmasking as the Vosburg traitor to dissolve the Kremlin connection and leave the leak an unsolved mystery. But Ginevra had revealed her hand by pressing Leland on his business with the Russians, and the second traitor likely now realized it was only a matter of time before the authorities looked elsewhere. With Ginevra’s gun, they could tie up loose ends tonight.

Her eyes locked with Sidney’s, and his twitching foot stilled. Even in the dim kitchen light, she could translate the shifts in his countenance easier than any textbook exercise. He still hadn’t worked out the correct answer, but he understood her safety was compromised. They needed to sort this out fast.

Neville and Watkins still fussed with the recording case while Marion kept up an undercurrent of invective toward Leland that he accepted with his chin slumped to his chest. No one appeared to be plotting a murderous accident meant to silence her. But one of them was a very fine actor indeed. Ginevra squeezed her clammy hands against her trousers, willing her pulse to remain steady as she studied them. It was nothing more than retrograde analysis of a chessboard: If she could see the steps that had led everyone to this night, she could work out which moves someone had tried to hide.

Justice was the ostensible reason for everyone’s presence, and it was difficult to find fault with that. But Leland’s ruination of Robert Crowne’s life, both blaming him for the student’s death as an undergraduate and framing him for treason in Vosburg, had stained Marion’s family with a shadow that had shaped her life. The Communist literature in her bedroom indicated Soviet sympathies, and Marion openly railed against the class hierarchy she felt had destroyed her uncle’s life. Even if she believed Robert had been innocent, vengeance might have prompted her to commit treason for a cause of her own choosing—in for a penny, in for a pound if your family’s reputation was already tarnished.

On the other hand, Leland had abused his friendship with Dr. Neville for decades. He’d exploited Neville’s insecurities while at Oxford to keep him quiet about their involvement in the boy’s death and influenced Neville’s testimony that condemned Crowne as a traitor. Recognizing Leland’s manipulations might have been enough impetus to make meek Dr. Neville snap under pressure and seek to right the balance of lies. And with a sweetheart trapped in a KGB family, any information funneled to them might have helped his cause as a suitor, killing two birds with one stone.

As for Dr. Watkins, she clearly needed funds if she were selling stolen books to Olenev, and turning informant was probably good money. Her manner toward Leland lacked the warmth of her friendship with Dr. Neville, but Gin well knew his belittling ways with women. He was probably a dreadful colleague, and his dismissal might also give Watkins more opportunity for promotion among her peers. Personal animus could certainly have motivated her to bait such a trap if she’d uncovered Leland’s secrets while snooping about his office as she had Neville’s.

Yet with every passing moment Hughes hadn’t reappeared, Gin wondered if her intuition about his honesty had been wrong. He might very well be a double agent, working for both the Americans and Soviets, and agreed to help to protect his own operation. And if he’d been looking for dirt on someone in Oxford to become the patsy, Leland was a perfect mark.

Gin’s pulse raced as she processed through the catalog of evidence. Sidney was studying her like a bomb that needed defusing, and she didn’t want to alarm him. With a few more minutes to think, she was sure she could work it out. And if there was one area in which she excelled, it was blathering on her feet.

Slowly, Gin turned toward the people gathered around Leland. “Professor, I think I should apologize.”

Leland’s eyes were bleary with despair. “For what?” he said dully.

“For insisting you held further secrets.” Gin hesitated, waiting for the others’ attention to shift toward her. “I see now I was fooled by a very clever plan to implicate you in a new round of treasonous activity.”

Leland’s eyebrows shot up in surprise. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“Someone has been sharing sensitive information with the Kremlin,” Gin said evenly. “They’re feeding it through a KGB man named Grigor Olenev, and the trail of breadcrumbs leads to you.”

At the name, the three people around Leland stiffened. The kitchen fell silent, but the steady beat of rain against the window pattered as fast as Ginevra’s heart.

“What?” Leland spluttered. “Why?”

“I think you have more enemies than you realize, Professor.”