At a quarter to twelve noon in the damp red-brick market town of Harrowby, England, rain tapped steadily against the plate-glass front window of Threadbare Alterations on St. Jude’s Lane. Inside the narrow shop, amidst bolts of Harris tweed, waxed Barbour cotton, and hanging rows of altered winter coats, sixty-one-year-old Jo Saye sat on her high wooden stool behind the cutting counter with her black rotary-dial landline telephone cradled against her ear.
The last afternoon, when Proctor Vane’s armed academy wardens had burst into Sister Merrow’s back kitchen to confiscate the Courtesy Arch and had tried to grab Jo’s sleeve as a “foreign material witness,” Jo had calmly pulled her red wrist-tab and stepped back into Yorkshire on the thirty-second autonomous revocation failsafe. Since ten o’clock last night, the small brass deep ring chime sitting on her sewing shelf had remained fully dark and silent.
On the other end of the three-way local telephone call, Ada Morland was parked in her white Ford Transit van outside a builders’ merchant on Station Road with her scarred left forearm resting in its leather brace on the steering wheel. Meanwhile, Imran Bell listened on the speakerphone in the back office of Bell & Bell Pest Management beside his cousin Sal’s dispatch board.
