Which was good, since Camden said from the window, “Elton and his nursemaid are coming this way. I take it we’re having another cozy lunch for four?”

“Unless you’ve decided to be our spare wheel today.” She offered a cheeky grin, knowing well he wouldn’t even consent to being in the same room as Holmes, though she still wasn’t certain why. She’d asked, but he’d only made a snide comment about some people having no sense of humor.

Holmes couldn’t always manage to get away from the factory for a lunch hour, but when he did, he’d taken to swinging by the flat for Drake on his way to meet Dot.

She’d be glowing afterward. And Margot didn’t exactly mind the company either, but she could be fairly certain her face didn’t shine over it—if so, the chaps would never let her live it down.

Margot pulled her lunch sack from under her desk and looked over to the station by the door, occupied now by a thirty-year-old secretary who’d been with them for two years. Margot pressed her lips together. Six weeks wasn’t enough to obliterate a habit of three years, apparently. Maybe eventually she’d stop looking for Maman there. Maybe eventually the ache would subside at least a little. Maybe eventually she’d be able to accept that all her theories, all her leads, all her mathematics had led her nowhere in the question of what really happened.

She ought to be glad there was no evidence that anthrax had been smuggled into the country. It meant no one else was in danger of being infected with it.

As long as it didn’t instead mean that they’d just missed something.

“Ask the nurse what I ought to do about—”

“Shut up, Camden.” She fell in behind Culbreth, who was making his way to the corridor with his lunch. Camden’s chuckle followed them out.

Culbreth sent her a look over his shoulder. “You’re a brave soul, talking to him like that.”

“He isn’t so bad. He just does a good job of hiding that fact.” She wasn’t quite sure who he was behind the wall of pain that stood behind the towers of rudeness, but she knew that once a week he went to play chess with Drake during his lunch. And he came back quieter and less surly. Evidence that, under it all, he appreciated his friend.

“Miss De Wilde, your lieutenant is here.” One of the secretaries strode by with a grin, her arms full of files she must have been bringing up from a lower level.

“He isn’t my . . .” She cut herself off with a huff when the young woman laughed and passed her. The other girls never listened when she insisted they weren’t a couple.