He ducked out of the phone booth and walked on to nowhere in particular. London was busy with saunterers taking the air on this delightful June afternoon. Will set himself in the direction of Regent’s Park for lack of any better ideas, adjusted his cap to a jaunty angle, and tried to look like he didn’t have a care in the world.

He’d been set up. Someone had called pretending to be from Aveston to get him out of the shop, and that would be when they’d gone in and taken the Messer. They’d waited for him to return—God almighty, they’d been watching, hadn’t they? The telephone had rung just after he’d got in, and there was a public telephone near May’s Buildings. Someone had been hanging around, and gone off and telephoned once they’d seen him.

And then whoever it was had gone on ahead of Will, maybe in a motor—or perhaps there were two of them, one at Quiller’s rooms, the other waiting for Will and telephoning to confirm he was on his way. You’d want to time it tightly: the first man making sure Will had taken the bait before the second killed Quiller and made a call to the police. They’d pulled it off bloody well. Without the outraged landlady, he would have been caught red-handed, and he was very far from getting away clean since the Messer would be covered in his fingerprints.

Will didn’t have a lot of doubt about who was behind this, or why. Kim had set himself against the new master of Zodiac, and this was the counter-move.

They’d targeted him and not Kim directly. Doubtless that was because he was the easier target. And an obvious one, since Lord Waring had been aware they were lovers, and hadn’t kept it to himself, not to mention Will had been publicly identified as Kim’s henchman in the Press. He was Kim’s vulnerable spot, and Leo had exploited that to give him a nasty headache, with Will a mere pawn on the board. Again.

At least he’d got away for now. The maid probably couldn’t describe him, and his fingerprints weren’t on record with the police, which would slow things down a bit. Of course, a single anonymous phone call from Zodiac would give the Met his name. Maybe they’d put a bulletin out for him as a wanted man. That would be nice.

If he had to think about what he wanted from the future, he was definitely starting with “not being arrested for murder”.