Tommy was wrestling with the compulsion to check his watch, like that would give him any of the information he actually needed to know. All he could do for the moment was sit. Wait. Fuck sitting and waiting. They should have taken her by now. If they didn't, Solomon's man fell through, or they killed her on sight, but if they had done that, the Lees would have contacted us by now, like they were instructed to, or the police-,
"'Bout time to go, eh, Tom?" Arthur asked from the passenger seat of the car, clenching his hat in his wringing hands. Tommy thought he was lucky to not have picked a hat with a peaky brim, because his fingers would have been cut to ribbons by now. Tommy took the last drag of his cigarette, flicked it.
"About time, yeah," he said, and as he said it, Finn walked out of the front doors of the pub they were parked by. He lifted two fingers, his young face set. "And that's the signal." He turned the engine over, and it woke with a sputter. "Let's go get those fucking German bastards."
They had put a rough cloth gag in Tessa's mouth so that he couldn't speak, tied it around her head, kept her wrists tied together. She was close to choking, and the ropes were rubbing sharply against her skin, but she was alive. For now. She wondered which of her current companions was meant to be Tommy's inside man, and if that would make a difference if one of the others pulled a gun and decided to do away with their cargo. The men were silent, their conversation limited to a few clipped words in German. Tessa couldn't see any cars following behind them, and she knew that technically, that should be a comfort, but somehow still wasn't. She half wished to see a car in the rearview, Tommy driving up behind her, so that she could throw herself out and change her mind. But there would be no rescue on the journey. Otherwise the plan would fall apart. Otherwise she would never get to see her father again. Tessa stared down at her shoes, peeking out underneath her slate grey dress. A dress the same color of the sky that day, ominous and stormy. I will keep myself together. For my father, I will keep myself together. The car smelled strongly of corned beef, for whatever reason, and there was a crack in the windshield, and it was the identifying of these details that Tessa clung to as they drove out of the city, leaving the monochrome landscape behind. They drove, and drove, and drove on.
By the time, whatever it was, that the large German car rolled to a screeching stop, the rain had started to fall in earnest. Tessa had tried to approximate how long they had been driving, she guessed perhaps an hour, maybe a little longer, but she had no idea where it was in that vicinity away from Birmingham that she had been taken. Closer to London, but that was no surprise. The German who had grabbed her at the shops pulled her roughly from the car, but didn't cover her eyes, which Tessa knew was a bad sign. They didn't care if she saw where they were because they never meant for her to leave this place alive. She could see a farmhouse through the haze of mist and drizzle, large and battered, three imposing stories but looking like it had seen better days, the shutters hanging haphazardly from the windows. There were no other houses nearby, just trees and overgrown grass. She tried to peer back down the dirt road they had driven in on, but the German yanked her head back around again, pulling sharply on her hair.
"Hey! Watch your eyes," he said, and she winced as he let go of her scalp. "Get her inside," he commanded to the two others, both of whom gave him a salute. He got back into the car, drove off. An officer or a higher up, not one to deal with mere prisoners. Tessa looked back at the house again. Let my father be here. Please, god, let my father be here. The two men each took one of her arms, looking rather like they thought doing so was overkill. Her hands were still tied in front of her, her mouth gagged, the scalpel weighing down her right inside pocket ever so slightly. They frog-marched her up to the front door. One of the men, the scrawnier of the two, was incredibly twitchy, and his hands kept fluttering on her arm. No, not fluttering. Tapping. She did everything in her power not to let the realization show on her face. Morse code. She had learned it during a summer off of school, when loneliness and boredom had no other antidotes besides such trivial pursuits. Not so trivial now.
The Jews are coming. The Jews are coming. The Jews are coming. Were they?
The house was empty on the inside, its remaining furniture sparse and partially destroyed. An end table lay on its side in the foyer, dust covered the patterned tiles on the floor. A staircase led up, and another, past an open door, crept down into darkness like a living thing, a snake slithering back into it's hole. The men led her upstairs, and she tripped a little on the hem of her dress as they drug her forward, trying and failing to calm her erratic breathing. Past an old, abandoned washroom, past a bedroom she only caught a glimpse of a broken old four poster bed of inside, down the hall they went, only the murky outdoor light shining in through glass windows, yellowed and warped with age, to light the way. Who lived here? She wondered. Whose ghosts deserve to witness such violence? She thought of Tommy. She thought of her father. Her footsteps fumbled again.
"Get up," the German who was actually a German and not an undercover Jew barked, yanking on her arm. She did. "We've got someone for you to meet." And grabbed a key from his belt with his other hand, put it in the lock of the door in front of them, and swung it open. Tessa's mouth would have dropped if she hadn't still been gagged.
"Hello, Tessa," said Ada Shelby, softly, from inside the room.