Page 123 of Babel

‘The girls are here,’ said Ramy. ‘Time to get up.’

‘Here?’

‘In my sitting room. Come on.’

Robin washed his face and dressed. Across the hall, Victoire and Letty sat perched on Ramy’s sofa as Ramy passed around tea, a burlap sack of scones, and a small pot of clotted cream. ‘I assumed no one felt like going to hall, so that’s breakfast.’

‘These are very good,’ Victoire said, looking surprised. ‘Where—’

‘Vaults, just before they opened. They always have yesterday’s scones out for a fraction of the price.’ Ramy had no knife, so he scraped his scone directly against the cream. ‘Good, right?’

Robin sat down opposite the girls. ‘How’d you two sleep?’

‘All well, considered,’ said Letty. ‘Feels strange to be back.’

‘It’s too comfortable,’ Victoire agreed. ‘It feels like the world should be different now, but it’s... not.’

That was how Robin felt too. It seemed wrong to be back among his creature comforts, to sit on Ramy’s sofa and have their favourite tea with scones from their favourite café. Their situation did not feel commensurate to the stakes. The stakes, rather, seemed to demand that the world be on fire.

‘So, listen.’ Ramy took a seat beside Robin. ‘We can’t just wait around. Every passing second is one that we’re not in prison, and so we’ve got to use them. We’ve got to find Hermes. Birdie, how do you contact Griffin?’

‘I can’t,’ said Robin. ‘Griffin was very adamant about that. He knew how to find me, but I didn’t have any ways to reach him. That’s how it always worked.’

‘Anthony was the same,’ Victoire said. ‘Although – he did show us several drop points, places where we left things for him. Suppose we went and left messages there—’

‘How often does he check them, though?’ Letty asked. ‘Will he even check if he’s not expecting anything?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Victoire, frustrated. ‘But it’s our only option.’

‘I do think they’ll be looking out for us,’ said Robin. ‘After what happened that night we were caught – I mean, there are too many loose ends, and now we’re all back I assume they’ll want to be in touch.’

He could tell from their expressions that this was no great reassurance. Hermes was finicky, unpredictable. Hermes might come knocking in the next hour, or they could go silent for six months.

‘How much time do we have, anyway?’ Ramy asked after a pause. ‘I mean, how long before they realize dear old Richard isn’t coming back?’

None of them could know for sure. Term was not due to start for another week, at which point it would be very suspicious that Professor Lovell had not returned to teach. But suppose the other professors had expected them all back earlier?

‘Well, who’s in regular contact with him?’ asked Letty. ‘We’ll have to tell some kind of story to the faculty, of course—’

‘And there’s Mrs Piper,’ said Robin. ‘His housekeeper in Jericho – she’ll be wondering where he is, I’ve got to call on her as well.’

‘Here’s an idea,’ said Victoire. ‘We could go to his office and look through his correspondence, see if there are any appointments he was due to keep – or even forge some replies if that buys us a little time.’

‘To be clear,’ said Letty, ‘you think we ought to break into the office of the man whose murder we covered up and rifle through his things, all while hoping no one catches us?’

‘The time to do it would be now,’ Victoire pointed out. ‘While no one knows we did it.’

‘How do you know they don’t already?’ Letty’s voice rose in pitch. ‘How do you know we won’t be clapped in irons the moment we walk into the tower?’

‘Holy God,’ Robin muttered. Suddenly it seemed absurd that they were having this conversation, that they were even in Oxford at all. ‘Why did we come back?’

‘We should go to Calcutta,’ Ramy declared abruptly. ‘Come on, let’s escape to Liverpool, we can book a passage from there—’

Letty’s nose wrinkled. ‘Why Calcutta?’

‘It’s safe there, I’ve got parents who can shield us, there’s space in the attic—’

‘I’m not spending the rest of my life hiding in your parents’ attic!’