Whatever the butler might have said to this was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“If you will excuse me, ma’am.”
He set the tray back down and left the room. Julia strained her ears to identify which of her guests had put in an arrival, however tardy, but the faint voices that reached her seemed to be masculine. Suddenly there came the sound of scuffling feet.
“Andrew—!” Rogers shouted for the footman, but his voice broke off abruptly, followed in rapid succession by a dull thud and a crash.
“Rogers?” Julia called, hurrying into the foyer. “Rogers, are you—?”
She stopped, staring. Rogers lay in a heap on the floor, bright red blood running down his graying hair to pool on the white marble tiles. A man stood over him, a man of about thirty clad in rough clothes and holding a stout wooden cudgel.
“Who are you, and why are you here?” Julia demanded with more bravado than she felt.
“Never mind,” he said in an accent she couldn’t place. “You just come with me, and no one will get hurt.”
“It’s a little late for that, don’t you think?” she retorted, gesturing toward the butler’s still form. “Leave this house at once!”
“Not without you, I won’t.”
With his free hand, he seized her by the arm. She tried to twist out of his hold, but he was too strong. When the sound of running footsteps on the stairs heralded the imminent arrival of Andrew, her attacker wrapped his other arm—the one holding the cudgel—around her and began dragging her toward the door. Julia fought with every weapon at her disposal, kicking at his legs and even sinking her teeth into his arm, but to no avail.
“I hate to cosh a female,” he grumbled to no one in particular.
Then the cudgel came down on her head, and Julia knew no more. The man hefted her over his shoulder as if she were a sack of grain and carried her out to the waiting carriage.
Andrew arrived just in time to see the vehicle bowling away down Curzon Street.
8
In Which the Investigation
Takes a Most Unexpected Turn
“Carson!” Pickett hissed, shaking the slumbering form beside him with enough force to cause the pea-shuckings beneath him to crackle. “Carson, wake up!”
“Huh—what—?” Gradually Harry’s sleep-fogged brain registered the owner of the hand closed about his shoulder. “Confound it, Mr. Pickett, do you have any idea what time it is?”
“Just past three, if the clock over the stable is correct,” replied Pickett, unrepentant.
“Oh, is that all? And I suppose you think it’s a good time for a stroll before breakfast,” Harry grumbled, preparing to roll back over and resume his interrupted slumber.
“No, but I think it’s a very good time to make the acquaintance of Mr. Edward Gaines Brockton.”
“If he has any sense, he’ll tell you to go to the devil!”
“On the contrary, I don’t think he’ll tell me anything,” Pickett predicted.
“Then why bother knocking him up at all?”
“You said yourself that you wondered if he might be dead,” Pickett reminded him. “Wouldn’t you like to find out?”
Yielding to the inevitable, Harry sat up with a sigh, casting one longing glance back at his pillow before reaching for his breeches. His superior, he noticed, was already dressed, albeit sketchily, with a dark coat and breeches pulled on over his shirt. He wore no cravat, and his feet were bare.
“I want to make as little noise as possible,” Pickett explained, apparently conscious of this unflattering appraisal. “Put on your stockings, if you like, but no shoes.”
“If you can go capering about in your bare feet, I suppose I can,” Harry said without enthusiasm, standing up to stuff the tail of his shirt into his breeches. “Although if you should find yourself confronting an angry man in his nightshirt, it’ll be no more than you deserve.”
“If that should prove to be the case, I’ll hide behind you.” As Pickett stood fully half a head taller than his colleague, this promise drew a reluctant grin from Harry. “Besides, he’s the one who sent for us, remember? If he won’t open his door during the day, he can hardly blame us for trying our luck at night.”
“All right, chief, you’ve convinced me. But it seems to me that you could do the thing just as well by yourself. Now that you’ve dragged me out of bed at this ungodly hour, what do you want me to do?”
“No, not that yellow monstrosity you wore on the stage,” Pickett objected as Harry began to shrug on his mustard-colored coat. “Wear something darker.”
“ ‘Monstrosity’? I’ll have you know this coat is the height of fashion—well, as much fashion as you can get for three and six,” Harry amended, reluctantly reaching for the blue coat that constituted part of his uniform. “We don’t all have a viscountess ready to turn us out like a tulip of fashion, you know.”
Pickett knew. In fact, the wardrobe Julia had seen fit to bestow upon him had been a considerable bone of contention between them, but he had no intention of making Harry Carson a gift of this information.
“Stubble it, will you? I’m about to open the door,” he said, and suited the word to the deed.
Nothing moved in the corridor, and no light showed beneath any of the doors. He motioned silently for Harry to follow, and stepped out into the corridor. They traversed the short distance to the next room, but when Harry raised his closed fist to knock on the door, Pickett put out a hand to forestall him.
“I don’t want to give him any warning,” he whispered.
“Yes, but we have him trapped,” Harry pointed out. “There’s no other exit.”
“There’s a window, with a tree growing right outside it,” Pickett reminded him. “Now, keep an eye out for anyone coming up the stairs.”
In spite of these instructions, Harry stared in bewilderment as Pickett dropped to one knee and inserted a long, narrow instrument—a lady’s hairpin, by the looks of it—into the lock and put his ear to it.
“What are you—?”
“Shh!” Pickett silenced him. “I’m trying to listen—there it is!”
And so saying, he eased the door open.
“Now, there’s a neat trick,” Harry said in grudging admiration. He jerked his thumb in the general direction of London and, presumably, magistrate Patrick Colquhoun. “Does the boss know you can do that?”
“He knows,” Pickett replied cryptically.
“Can you teach me how?”
“Shh!” Pickett said again.
He stepped into the dark little room and moved aside for Harry to follow, then closed the door behind them. The moon was a couple of days past the full, but enough moonlight filtered through the thin curtain to reveal that the bed was empty.
“Our friend Mr. Brockton keeps late hours,” Harry grumbled. “Still, I suppose it’s better than discovering him lying in the bed stabbed to death. So, chief, what happens now? Do we wait for him?”
“I think we’d be waiting a long time,” Pickett said, groping on the bedside table for the flint. He found it, and a moment later the candle in its brass holder flared to life.
“Meaning?” prompted Harry.
“I don’t think he’s ever been here at all.”
“But—but the innkeeper said—”
“I don’t doubt that there’s someone listed on the inn’s registry as Edward Gaines Brockton,” said Pickett, readily conceding the point. “But does it not strike you as a bit odd that no one recalls actually seeing the man, or speaking to him?”
“Nan told us this morning that he’d gone to church,” Harry reminded him. “She must have got that information from somewhere.”
Pickett shook his head. “She speculated that he must have done so, based on the fact that he wasn’t in his room on a Sunday morning. But when you pressed her for details, she admitted that she’s never actually seen him.”
He turned back to the candle and picked it up. Weird shadows danced on the walls as he held it aloft
, bathing the corners of the room in a yellow glow. No valise stood against the wall, and no personal effects had been arranged on the wash stand.
“Let’s see what we have here,” he said, crossing to the clothes-press in three strides.
“You don’t intend to go through the fellow’s undergarments!” Harry protested.
“I wish I could, but I have a feeling I can’t,” Pickett replied, and opened its doors.
Several round wooden pegs had been affixed to the inside walls of the clothespress, but no garments hung from them. Nor did Pickett hold out much hope for the three drawers in the bottom of the piece, but he had to try.
“Here, hold this,” he said, handing the candle to his colleague.
“Well, if that don’t beat the Dutch!” exclaimed Harry, taking the candle nevertheless. “There’s such a thing as privacy, you know!”
“Let me remind you that he sent for us,” Pickett said, not for the first time. “If one summons a Runner—much less two!—from Bow Street, one should expect that some information is going to be required. If he won’t, or can’t, give me the information himself, no one can blame me for getting it by whatever method I have at my disposal. At least, they can’t blame me much,” he amended, trying not to think of what Mr. Colquhoun might think of this particular method.
While Harry pondered this claim, Pickett eased the top drawer open. The piece was old, and the groan of ill-fitting wood sliding against wood sounded unnaturally loud in the darkness.
“Empty,” he pronounced with a sigh of resignation, if not surprise.
The other two drawers proved to be no more helpful.
“I’ve heard of traveling light, but surely no one travels that light,” Harry complained. “If he did—if he’d been wearing the same clothes for, what, three days, to say nothing of not shaving—surely the good people of Dunbury would smell him coming at twenty paces.”
“Think, Carson,” Pickett chided. “You’re not stupid, although it amuses you sometimes to pretend to be. I doubt anyone has been in this room at all for the past week.” He ran a finger along the top edge of the clothespress, and examined the fine coating of dust that covered it. “It’s for certain no one has cleaned it.”
“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Carson pointed out. “Not every hostelry is as fastidious as you seem to expect.”
“No, but if anyone had been staying in this room, don’t you think he would have touched something? If not the clothespress, then surely the bedside table.”
Carson glanced toward the article of furniture in question. “You can see it from here? I know the room is small, but surely—”
“No one’s vision is that good,” Pickett said, amused in spite of the circumstances. He almost hated to admit it; he needed all the ammunition against Harry Carson that he could get. “I noticed it when I picked up the candle It left a clean circle where no dust could reach.”
“All right, then, I guess you’ve convinced me,” Carson conceded the point, although it clearly went against the grain with him to do so. “Where does that leave us?”
“I’ll have a word with the innkeeper in the morning. Until then, we should get what sleep we can. Tomorrow may be a long day.”
He could not have known how prophetic the words would prove.
HAVING RETURNED TO his bed, Pickett lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling and listening to the faint sounds of Carson snoring. He was missing something; he was sure of it. He just couldn’t think what it might be. Finally, abandoning all attempts at slumber, he threw back the bedclothes and padded across the room to where his coat hung over the back of the chair drawn up beneath the writing table. He groped until he located a folded sheet of paper in the inside coat pocket, then sat down in the chair and lit the candle, positioning it so that his body blocked the light from reaching Carson. Not, he reflected bitterly, that anything less than an exploding grenade was capable of rousing Carson once sleep had claimed him.
Here, however, it appeared Pickett had misjudged him.
“What’re you doin’ now,” Carson asked sleepily.
“Nothing,” Pickett said. “Just testing a theory.”
“D’you always test your theories in the middle of the night?”
“Only when they keep me awake. Go back to sleep, Carson.”
Moments later, the heavy breathing emitting from beneath the bedclothes gave Pickett to understand that his subordinate had taken these instructions to heart. Pickett, meanwhile, had spread the paper open, and now studied the message written upon it.
To Patrick Colquhoun, Esq., it read, I am writing to request that you send two of your best men to attend me at the Cock and Boar in Dunbury regarding a matter of some delicacy. I further request that one of these men be Mr. John Pickett, who distinguished himself last winter in the matter of the jewel thefts occurring at the Drury Lane Theatre. The second man I shall leave to your own choosing. If Mr. Pickett is on assignment elsewhere at present, please send word to me at the aforementioned hostelry so that I may arrange to meet with him at some future date. It was signed, Yr Most Obedient Servant, Edward Gaines Brockton.
Perhaps he should have been flattered, Pickett thought, that the writer had asked for him so specifically, even to the extent of delaying his request until Pickett should be available. And yet, he didn’t feel flattered, and he didn’t believe his uneasiness could be attributed only to modesty.
Obeying the whim that had roused him from his bed, he held the paper over the candle flame until his hands grew uncomfortably warm, then peered closely at the letter. No faint brown markings emerged to indicate a hidden message communicated in a secret code. The letter was exactly what it appeared to be: a request for two men to investigate a case of sufficient sensitivity that the writer refused to commit it to paper. It might be anything from the theft of the family jewels to the elopement of the man’s daughter to Gretna Green with a fortune-hunter.
But no, Pickett reasoned, surely if that were the case, the man would take whoever might be available to travel at a moment’s notice, and be thankful for him. What sort of case would be of sufficient importance to require two men, but of so little urgency that it might wait upon his own convenience?
Pickett had no answers. He refolded the letter, but as he did so, his gaze fell upon the man’s signature. Edward Gaines Brockton. Surely it was only a coincidence that the initials were the same as those in the letter that had summoned him to the Lake District: E. G. B. In that earlier case, the initials had not represented a name at all, but Éire go Brách—the rallying cry of those who supported the cause of Irish independence. But there was nothing in the letter to suggest that Brockton had any interest in the Irish, and the man who had written that earlier letter was now imprisoned in Carlisle, awaiting execution for treason. The similarity was no more than an unsettling coincidence.
It had to be.
The alternative was too terrible to contemplate.
THE FOLLOWING MORNING, Pickett awoke from a troubled sleep and tarried only long enough to dress, shave, and eat a rudimentary breakfast before approaching the innkeeper.
“No trouble with your lodgings, I hope,” said this worthy, no doubt seeing the thoughtful crease puckering his guest’s brow and assuming the worst.
“No, not at all,” Pickett assured him. “But we came from London to meet with a Mr. Edward Gaines Brockton, and neither we nor anyone else appears to have seen him.”
Their host shook his head. “I’m afraid you must add me to the list. I haven’t seen him, either.”
“Was your daughter minding the desk when he arrived, then?” asked Pickett, baffled. “I believe she gave my colleague the opposite impression, when he questioned her on the matter. A misunderstanding, perhaps?” Of course, at the time of the questioning she had been either defending her virtue or assisting Carson in relieving her of it, but he had no intention of pointing this out to the girl’s father.
“There was no misunderstanding,” the innkeeper said. �
��I was minding the desk at the time, but I never saw the fellow, for he didn’t come in and hire the room himself.”
“Oh? Then how—?”
“A lady came in and asked that a room be kept ready for her friend who would be arriving, what, four days ago now—this Friday last. Give me half a crown in advance, she did, for holding the room until he arrived. So I wrote his name down in the book and told my Nan not to be giving that room to no one else.”
“I see,” Pickett said thoughtfully, although this explanation didn’t answer all his questions, not by a long chalk. It might account for how the elusive Mr. Brockton had managed to procure a room without ever showing his face, but it offered no clue as to why the room was empty, four days after Brockton had supposedly taken possession of it. “And did he arrive last Friday, as expected?”
The innkeeper scratched his chin. “I suppose he must have. Neither me nor Nan saw him come in, mind, but the lady stopped by that morning to fetch the key to his room.” He glanced over his shoulder at the wall behind him, upon which had been mounted a wooden structure divided into some half-dozen pigeonholes. Some of these were empty, while others held what appeared, at this distance and from this angle, a single brass key in each compartment. “I expect he was a relation, and intended to stop at her house first. Or maybe he didn’t expect to reach Dunbury until late, and didn’t want to rouse the house.”
“And the lady who requested the room?” Pickett prompted. “Do you know her name?”
“Aye, that I do. It were Mrs. Avery.”
“Mrs. Avery?” Pickett echoed, dumbfounded. “The widow, Mrs. Avery?”
“Aye. You know her?”
“We’ve met,” Pickett said tersely. “Thank you for the information. I’m obliged to you.”
He didn’t bother to go back upstairs to inform Carson of his discovery, but set out at a brisk walk for Mrs. Avery’s house at the opposite end of the High Street.
“Why, Mr. Pickett, what a pleasant surprise,” she purred when the housemaid—who had been conspicuous by her absence the day before—showed him into the parlor.
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