Sylvie sat down in the study, exhausted and spent. The sun had started to come up over the horizon and there was still no sign of Jane. She did not know where she could possibly be. Jane was not a silly child. She was inquisitive and curious and always up for an adventure but she was not the sort to disregard rules and put herself in undue danger.
She put her head into her hands and forced herself to take large deep breaths. Raphael was right. Crying and panicking were not going to help at all. Sylvie had already summoned and spoken to some constables, the neighbors, the men in the stables and no one had seen a thing. Raphael had sent some of his staff over and they had tried their best to help, but no one could find a single trace of Jane. They were out now, scouring the streets near Thomas' home for Jane.
Think.
Think, think, think.
Jane knew better to go somewhere without her notebook. She knew she could not communicate with someone without it. But she had left hers right here, next to her toys? She needed it to talk to Thomas; though Jane was usually decent at reading lips, his own proficiency with sign language left much to be desired. She picked up the notebook and flipped through the pages until she came across the empty ones. A page had been torn out.
Which was not unusual, Jane sometimes tore a page if she felt as if she had not expressed herself well enough.
There was nothing nefarious going on. Her tired mind was conjuring up fantasies.
She began to pace.
Deep breaths. Calm yourself. Think.
Where would she go?
She was playing with Thomas. And then....?
Wait.
Thomas.
Thomas had invited them to stay with them.....only to take his own life? He had begged and argued and cajoled until Sylvie had given in.
No. Something did not sit right with her at all. The other two times Thomas had taken an attempt on his life, he had made sure no one was around. He would not want to make a horrifying spectacle, especially not in front of Jane.
She walked to his chair and sat herself down, thinking the change in perspective might spur her mind down a new path. Thomas had been sitting right here, Jane had been playing near the table. Her toys lay scattered on the floor. Was she just making things up in her tired mind or did the toys look tossed away haphazardly? As if a child was rushed to abandon them?
Stop it.
Jane was hardly a clean child and Sylvie was always scolding her for forgetting to put her toys away. It was a coincidence. Just a coincidence.
But why was Thomas' farewell note to her right?
She was going mad. She needed to stop it. She needed to thin-
Sniffle.
Sylvie's head swerved to the bookshelf beside the desk. Had she just heard something coming from...behind it?
She rose and walked to the wall, pressing her ear flat against the wall beside the shelf, and waited. And waited. And waited. And then, just as she was about to chastise herself for her insanity, she heard it again; a soft whimpering cry. The sound of a child weeping.
Jane!
A relieved cry escaped her as she hastened to the bookshelf, noticing for the first time that just a fraction of it was sunken into the wall. There was some sort of space behind the bookshelf! And the shelf itself was, Sylvie realized as she tugged it with all her might, sealed into the wall somehow. She pushed and shoved and pulled, but to no avail. The light of the lamp glinted off the floor as Sylvia noticed something she hadn't before; faint skid marks on the floor.
Meaning the bookshelf could be moved.
But how?
There had to be something she was missing. A lock or mechanism somewhere?
Don't worry, Jane. I'm coming.
Rafe's entire body thrummed with tension as he entered Thomas' house with The Major in tow. How had he found out about Thomas' death? He had summoned Raphael and had berated him for neglecting to inform him about the situation, particularly when it involved a missing child. The Major had lost both his sons, one to war and the other to disease; he was always impassioned whenever a child was involved in a case like this.
Truth be told, The Major would have been the first person Raphael would have sought out if the situation had been slightly different, but he just could not bring himself to allow anyone else into the fold. Not with Thomas' ominous warning ringing in his head.
You cannot trust The Collective.
Did that imply there was more than one person behind the murder?
The Widow, The Viper, and The Doctor had been in Belgium when Thomas had been captured. Who would have betrayed Thomas? Why would they have done that? What could their motive possibly be?
The operatives of The Collective were a nefarious bunch with dubious morality, but as the saying went; there was honor among their den of thieves. The Viper had taken bullets for him twice, The Doctor had helped Rafe find his humanity after he'd been recovered from the clutches of the French, and the Widow had been the one to run the rescue mission that had seen him freed after weeks in captivity.
He was supposed to believe that one of these people had killed Thomas in cold blood?
It made no sense.
"Raphael! Is that you? Come here, please!" The twinge of desperation in her voice had him hurrying to the study. She looked tired, her hair frazzled, her hand bleeding, and dark circles under her eyes. His poor girl, he had sent her word to go to his father's home and get some rest but he should have known that she would never have listened. "She's here! She's here but I can't get to her!"
"What?" Raphael strode forward to where she was, on her knees in front of one bookcase, staring up at it as if it were some kind of puzzle.
"She's behind the bookcase. I heard her! Look!" She pointed to where the shelf met the wall.... And if you looked closely enough you could see it was slightly sunken into the wall. It was more advanced than the average concealed room, but Raphael had seen enough variations of it to recognize it for what it was. Thomas had been clever, it was very discreet indeed. "I couldn't move it out of the way, so I thought there must be a different sort of mechanism. There are skid marks on the floor so there must be a way to move it! I looked and looked but I could not find any hidden levers or plates or cranks, but then I noticed- oh, hello, sir, who are you?"
"Major Fitzgerald at your service, Miss Heartwood," The Major introduced himself with his choice alias, the only one he ever used in public. Even Rafe did not know his true name and identity. "I served on the same regiment as your brother. Lord Carlisle enlisted my help to locate your niece. Please do carry on."
"So, I noticed that there were five books on the shelf that had covers that were far more worn than the others. I can't seem to understand any connection between them," she handed Rafe the stack of books. The Phantom of Philsbury Castle, The Widow of Winchester, The Memoirs of Major Elliot Wright, Doctor Artswort's Observations and Remedies for Female Melancholia, and A Study On Viper Species in India And Their Mating Habits. "Some of them are memoirs, some gothic novels, one is a medical tome? I could barely make sense of it, but it must have had a meaning to Thomas. I tried to think of anagrams or anything hidden in the titles, but I'm drawing a blank. Now, when I put these books back into place, I heard a clicking sound."
She demonstrated and Raphael felt that stirring in his heart once more at the evidence of her intelligence. What a clever thing she was, figuring all of that out by herself. Pride rose in his chest, warm and pleasant, even as his mind warned him of the obvious danger. Of all the things that he found deathly attractive about Sylvia Heartwood, her mind was a poisoned-tipped arrow aimed straight at his heart. But his refusal to fall in love with her was a secondary matter; Jane was the priority.
"So I believe we have to push these books into place in a specific order. I've tried alphabetical, reverse alphabetical, and then by the number of letters; ascending and descending, even the date of publishing-but they didn't work."
While it was true that an ordinary person would not notice the secret message behind the titles, the pattern to Raphael was clear enough. A look exchanged with The Major told Raphael that he understood too.
It could be no coincidence that four of those names were the people who had been deployed in Belgium.
"Well done, Miss Heartwood," The Major smiled at her kindly. "Even the most seasoned soldiers might not have been able to keep a cool head with their child in danger. If you would please show me the original places where these books were placed, I have several ideas. We used a similar way of coding some information in our regiment, you see and I think I may be able to help you."
Eagerly, Sylvia slipped the books into place and then stood back, wringing her hands as The Major began to press the books in order of the ranks of the members they referenced. When that failed to show any result, Sylvie's shoulders slumped in defeat. Before he could stop himself, Raphael had reached for her hands and twined his own with hers.
The Major tried again, this time in order of their recruitment to the upper echelons of The Collective, the date that they would have been given their codenames. Something hissed and the shelf groaned as it moved slightly to the side. With a cry Sylvie rushed forward but The Major halted her. "Let me make sure there are no other traps or mechanisms on the other side, Miss Heartwood."
He pushed the shelf with relative ease and then disappeared into the chamber behind it, emerging just a few seconds later with a sleeping Jane in tow, her chest rising and falling slowly.
"Thank God! Oh, thank God!" Sylvie's body sagged into his as the relief crashed into her. The Major eased Jane's body onto a sofa and smiled reassuringly at her. She knelt beside Jane and began kissing her checks and her hands, her lips trembling as if she were just on the verge of bursting into tears again.
"Sylvie, why don't you go upstairs and pack some things for you and Jane? We'll go to my father's townhouse and figure out the rest of the arrangements from there."
"I- yes. I think that is a good idea. I don't want to stay here."
After Sylvie had left, The Major sat down with a sigh and leveled Raphael with a gaze that saw altogether too much.
"You think someone killed him. That's why you didn't inform me." He reached into his pocket and withdrew a folded paper, handing it to him. "Here, this was inside the room. I had a look, but there was nothing else of interest.
Jane knows where to look.
Rafe gritted his teeth against a sudden flash of anger. That stupid son of a bitch had involved Jane!
Fuck! For God's sake, Thomas! She has no place in this lethal game!
"Yes. A job this clean.... It was one of us," Raphael sighed.
"Viper, Widow, and Doctor; they were in Belgium when everything happened. The Viper is dead, which leaves the other two. You think it was one of them?"
"It has to be," but even that admission was bitter in his mouth. These people......Raphael had relied on them for years. Push come to shove, he would have said he could count on them with his life on the line. They were not friends of his, but The Collective was loyal to those within its ranks.
Or so Raphael had thought.
"If it's true, we've had a traitor in our ranks for eight years. Jesus. The amount of sensitive information available to these people is downright dangerous. It's the kind of information that can bring down our operations all over the world." The Major grit his teeth. "Find out what you can. All my resources are at your disposal. Do what you must, I will handle any trouble. Keep me appraised of your findings."
Rafe inclined his head in an exhausted nod.
This was not going to be an easy investigation.