by Anna Elliott
“Now, Lady Constance,” he said. “I have just finished telephoning to Claridge’s hotel, where I have booked a second room for myself to occupy while you and your husband are in residence there. I will be on hand at any time of the day or night, if you should need me.”
I thought Lady Constance looked less than delighted at the thought of being in constant proximity to the prosecuting barrister, but she hid it with a nod and another smile. “Thank you. I’m sure that is very good of you.”
She turned back to the window, and Mr. Phelps approached me, lowering his voice.
“Poor girl.” He nodded to Lady Constance. “She has lived such a charmed life until now—one might say like something out of a fairy tale, complete with marriage to a peer of the realm. And now to be faced with this—” he shook his head heavily.
“What do you think your odds are of winning a conviction for Mr. Linden?” I asked.
“With Lady Constance’s testimony?” Mr. Phelps pursed his lips judiciously. “I would say we have even odds. Mr. Linden is, unfortunately, the type of criminal with whom jurors tend to sympathise—witty, handsome, charming. That always goes down well. And the evidence against him is thin.”
“He attempted to murder Holmes,” I pointed out.
Holmes had disguised himself as another witness to Mr. Linden’s crimes, and Linden had attacked him in a hospital, with a hypodermic syringe.
“Yes, but attempted murder and murder aren’t the same thing, are they? And they each carry different sentences. It’s one thing to prove that Linden committed art fraud and tried to hush it up. It’s another thing entirely to prove that he slit one man’s throat, stabbed another, and shot one more.”
“Two more,” I said. “You’re forgetting the footman in van Rensburg’s establishment.”
“Yes.” Mr. Phelps’s mouth compressed. “Bad business, that. If it’s true that Mr. Linden committed the van Rensburg murder himself, then that footman—the one he bribed to leave an upper story balcony door open—would have been able to identify him even more positively than Lady Constance.”
The footman, Rodgers, had been taken into police custody and charged with aiding and abetting a crime. But Linden’s guilt had not even been suspected at the time, and thus no one had confronted him with a photograph to ask whether Linden was the confederate he had allowed inside Mr. van Rensburg’s home. And then the unfortunate footman had been found in his Holloway prison cell, shot through the heart on the very day of Linden’s arrest.
The prison guards had no explanation.
But the manner in which the execution had been carried out was merely one element of the case that gave me grave concern. Unless I was much mistaken, Linden’s crimes were merely the crown of the iceberg, visible above the water, with something deeper and far more deadly lying beneath.
I did not voice my worries to Mr. Phelps, however.
A rattle of carriage wheels sounded from the front of the house. Lady Constance startled, and in her nervous state clutched at the window’s roller shade, which rolled up with a violent clatter and flapping.
“It’s all right, Lady Constance,” I assured her. “It is only Holmes and Lucy and their party setting off.”
Lady Constance nodded, her hand pressed over her heart. “Yes, of course. How stupid of me, I’m sorry.”
She pulled the shade down again, although not before I felt another pang of uneasiness. The success of tonight’s plan hinged on our substitution not being discovered. Now, if anyone had happened to be outside the window whose shade had just gone up, they would have seen Lady Constance inside the house, as clearly as though she had stood on a lighted stage.
Mr. Phelps rubbed his hands together. “Yes, they’re off,” he said. He tilted his head, listening. “And I think I hear Lord Anthony coming down the stairs now, so we had best make ready for our own departure. Our police guard are already assembled outside?”
I nodded. I had already confirmed that the two dozen armed police constables who would protect our party like an ancient Roman phalanx were in readiness outside the kitchen door at the back of the Dale mansion.
“Good,” Mr. Phelps nodded. “It is indeed fortunate for our purposes, Lady Constance, that you and Lucy Kelly are of much the same height and proportions.”
CHAPTER 3: LUCY
With a crunch of wheels, the carriage rolled off of the Dales’ gravel drive and onto the cobbled street.
“At least no one can fault Lord Anthony for his means of transportation,” I murmured from beneath my veil.
The wheels were so well sprung that we’d hardly felt a bump. The interior was, like Sir Anthony and Lady Dale’s home, of impeccable taste and luxury: blue satin cushions, woodwork of polished mahogany. The four snow-white horses who pulled the carriage were clearly of the finest breeding, too, and perfectly matched.
Holmes nodded, his face abstracted. The truth was that we were both on edge.
A young man’s round, tow-haired face appeared at the window beside Holmes.
“Now, don’t worry about a thing,” Police Constable Lake said. “Like as not, this will just be a dull, nighttime drive in London traffic. And if anyone tries an attack, the Sergeant and I will take care of them, never fear.”
He nodded to Jack, who had leaned down to look through the window beside me. He and Constable Lake were our guards for tonight’s drive, riding on the running board platforms where ordinarily Lord Anthony’s footmen would have stood in readiness to help their employer and his wife from the carriage.
Now I saw Jack open his mouth, then close it again. He had chosen Constable Lake from among the officers under his command because Lake was strong, courageous, and loyal. But the constable apparently hadn’t yet realised that we were not in fact hoping for a quiet, uneventful drive to Claridge’s hotel.
If we weren’t attacked tonight, we wouldn’t have failed, exactly—but we would be no nearer to capturing the men who threatened Lady Constance’s life.
There wasn’t time for a full explanation to the constable, though. We were already rolling out of Eaton Square and onto Lyall Street.
“Just keep alert,” Jack told Constable Lake.
“Yes, sir.”
Lake straightened, but Jack lingered at my window for just a moment.
“All right?”
“Yes. The hat and veil I borrowed from Lady Constance are driving me out of my skin. But I’m fine.”
The hat and veil were both necessary, since without them it would be easy for an observer to see that I was not, in fact, Lady Constance. But the veil’s gauzy folds made everything around me look maddeningly blurred, especially in the dark. My fingers twitched with the urge to wrench the whole contraption off so I could at least see where any threats were coming from.
“Why?” I asked. “You don’t think this will just be a boring drive through Mayfair?”
My husband’s lean, angular face was as tense as Holmes’s, his gaze constantly flicking over the street both ahead and behind us for any sign of danger. But he gave me a brief grin. “You’re a lot of things, Lucy Kelly, but boring’s not one of them.”
Our carriage turned at that moment, swaying a little as we rounded the corner onto Park Lane. The road here ran along the edge of Hyde Park, and the trees that formed the park’s boundary patched our way with deep shadows. We weren’t alone on the road; a few other carriages passed us on the other side. But still, if I were going to pick a moment to attack—
A sudden gallop of horse’s hooves made me startle, my heart skipping in my chest. Holmes rarely carried firearms, but he was armed on his occasion—and as he straightened, the revolver he’d borrowed from Watson was already in his hand.
Something crashed into our carriage, sending it rocking, and I braced myself to stop from being slammed into the window. Someone was shouting outside, but I couldn’t hear properly because the carriage was still swaying and there was the thunder of more horse’s hooves, and with the veil wrapped around me, I couldn’t see �
��
A shot rang out, just as I finally yanked the hat and veil away and drew my own Ladysmith pistol.
The carriage had jolted to a halt, and I could hear the galloping horse’s hooves—but retreating, now, fading into the distance. And then a second later they were drowned out by Constable Lake’s despairing shout:
“They took Sergeant Kelly! He’s gone!”
“This is—” Holmes stopped and cleared his throat.
In the past few years since Sherlock Holmes had been a part of my life, I had known him to sound confident, irritated, animated, forceful, and—occasionally—kind. But I couldn’t ever recall hearing him sound … guilty.
Now, though, as he stood before the hearth of 221B Baker Street, his lips were tight and turned down at the corners. “You would not be unjustified in blaming me for tonight’s events. I formulated the plans, I picked the route—which was practically an invitation to attack—”
There was a block of ice under my rib cage that felt almost too solid for words to pass through. But I shook my head and forced my lips to move.
“No. This isn’t your fault. We all agreed to the plan. We all knew the risks involved and were willing to take them. Jack—”
I stopped, because my voice was refusing to stay steady.
“It’s just that we all thought that the attack would be made on me—or rather, on Lady Constance. We never for one moment imagined that Jack would be abducted.”
If we were speaking of guilt, my own was a bitter taste in the back of my throat. Jack’s first instinct would have been to put himself in between me and any threat. He would have been braced to defend me, not himself.
But that was why we were currently here, in the Baker Street sitting room, with the clock on the mantle ticking its way inexorably towards midnight.
Every single nerve in my body was vibrating with the urge to be outside, to search every inch of Hyde Park and all the rest of London for any sign of where Jack’s captors had taken him. But the police were doing that already. Jack was a Scotland Yard officer, and the other men of the force would strain every available resource to find one of their own.
Whoever had taken him, though, must have had a purpose—which meant that sooner or later, they would want to get into contact with us.
So we were here. Waiting.
Becky raised her head from the couch. I would have sacrificed almost anything to postpone telling her that her brother was now missing, even for just a few hours. But she had been awake, waiting, when Holmes and I had returned, and there had been no avoiding it.
Now her eyes were red and swollen with crying, but she said in a shaky voice, “Maybe Flynn managed to follow them.”
Holmes’ brows went up. “Flynn?”
Becky nodded. “He didn’t tell you, but he was planning on following you from Lord Anthony and Lady Constance’s house.”
I should have known. There were almost no other circumstances under which Becky would have agreed to stay safely here with Mrs. Hudson while Jack and I were in potential danger.
At the moment, though, I was willing to cling onto any hope, however small.
Becky wiped her eyes. “Will you tell me exactly what happened?”
I’d given her the bare facts as soon as we arrived, but there hadn’t been time yet for the full story.
“Are you sure that you want to hear?” I asked. I would have been happy to stop the memory of those few minutes from playing relentlessly over again in my own mind.
Becky nodded, though, her small hands tightening into fists. “Yes.”
“All right. But I can’t tell you very much. I was stuck inside the carriage.”
“We both were,” Holmes added. I could hear remembered frustration lacing his voice.
“And everything happened so quickly.” Less than a minute, and it had all been over. “Constable Lake couldn’t tell us very much, either, because he was knocked off the carriage by the first rider who came charging at us out of the park.”
According to Lake’s story, a lone man on horseback had ridden straight at our carriage, and with unnerving accuracy had flung a metal crow bar between the spokes of our carriage wheel, disabling it and dragging us to a stop.
The lurch had thrown PC Lake off balance, and then a second rider had come up from behind and knocked him down. He hadn’t lost consciousness, but his head had struck the ground with enough force that he’d still been dazed and dizzy when he told Holmes and me his story.
“Our driver—PC Meadows; he was another of Jack’s constables—tried to urge the horses on,” I told Becky. “But then one of the riders shot at him.”
That was the gunshot I’d heard.
“Is he going to be all right?” Becky asked.
“We think so.” Meadows had been lucky in that the bullet had penetrated his shoulder, not his heart. But he had been bleeding heavily and he, too, had fallen to the ground. “He’s at the hospital, under a surgeon’s care.”
“And Jack?”
The note of desperate worry in Becky’s voice and the look in her blue eyes made my heart crack, but I took a breath.
“PC Lake thinks he was knocked unconscious and then carried off by the first rider.”
“But he’s not sure?”
“They wouldn’t have killed him.” I was speaking to myself as much as to Becky, trying to loosen the cold, hard knot of terror inside me. “They knocked PC Lake down, and they shot at PC Meadows, not caring whether they killed him or not. But they took Jack. That means that they must want him alive for some—”
The shrill ring of the telephone interrupted me and made us all startle. I jumped to answer it, snatching up the receiver and speaking piece even before Holmes could reach for them.
“Hello?”
“Well hello there.” The voice on the other end was male, but higher pitched and with a sneering quality. “Is that Lucy Kelly?”
“Yes.” It was hard to speak over the hammering of my own heart. “Who is this?”
“Names don’t matter. Wot matters is, we’ve got something wot you lost. And you’ve got something wot we wants. I’m calling so’s we can arrange a trade.”
“What do you mean?”
“Now, don’t play the fool with me.” In an instant the sneering quality of the voice was gone, replaced by something sharp and hard-edged. “We’ve got yer husband. If you play nice, you’ll get him back in one piece. Play games, and we might return him missing a finger or two.”
I gripped the speaking piece hard enough to leave an imprint on my palm. “What do you want?”
“Now, that’s better.” The mocking tone was back. “I knew as how you could be persuaded to come to terms. We want Lady Constance Dale. Clever of you to try dressing up as her ladyship, but we saw through it right enough.”
“You can’t possibly think that we’ll just hand her over to you.”
“I think you’d better, if you ever want to see your husband alive again. If it makes you feel any better, our employer won’t hurt her none. Just wants to keep her safe and quiet for a few days.”
“Until Laurence Linden’s trial is over, you mean.”
“That’s not any of your concern. All you need to worry about is getting Lady Constance and handing her over.”
If I actually believed that the man on the other end of the line wouldn’t harm Lady Constance, I deserved to fall for the patter of one of the smooth-talking salesmen who tried to sell shares in London Bridge.
But I shut my eyes and forced my voice to stay level and calm. “Let me speak to him.”
“That’s not part of the deal.”
“I need to speak to Jack. Before I can agree to any bargains, I need proof that he’s still alive.”
I held my breath while there were the sounds of rustling and movement on the other end, and then Jack’s voice came on the line.
“Hello there, Trouble.”
My eyes burned. “I think you’re confused about which of us is in the more precarious situation r
ight now. Are you all right?”
“Fine.” Jack’s voice sounded a little blurred, which made me wonder how many times they’d hit him. “Tell Becky I’m all right and don’t forget to feed Prince, and I’ll be home soon—”
The last word was cut off, as though the telephone had just been yanked from his hand.
“All right, you’ve talked to him,” the man’s voice said.
I pictured him as having narrow features, with close-set eyes and thin lips. It was better than picturing what might be happening to Jack right now.
“Now listen here,” the voice went on. “You bring Lady Constance to the corner of Shadwell Basin tomorrow night, understand? Midnight. Be there.”
I hadn’t looked at Holmes since our conversation began, but he had come to stand beside me. I glanced up at him now, and he gave a fraction of a nod.
For now, he couldn’t think of any other options but to agree, either.
“All right.” I squeezed the telephone harder and went on. “And if you hurt Jack, I will personally hunt you down and make you pay for it.”
The man’s voice huffed a gravelly laugh. “You really think you’re in a position to make threats?”
“I’m not threatening. I’m promising: hurt him, and I will make sure that it becomes the single biggest regret of your life.”
CHAPTER 4: BECKY
Lucy hung up the telephone. She hadn’t cried before, and now her eyes were still dry. But the expression in them as she came back to sit on the sofa hurt Becky to look at almost more than if Lucy had been in tears.
“He’s all right.” She squeezed Becky’s hand. “He said to tell you that.”
There was a giant lump in Becky’s throat that kept her from speaking, but she nodded.
Lucy turned to Mr. Holmes, and her voice had a hard, angry sound to it. Maybe because sometimes it was easier to be angry than scared. “Which of them was it?”
“Which of them—”
Lucy made an impatient gesture. “Whoever telephoned to us tonight knew all about our plan for me to impersonate Lady Constance. He implied that they’d known of it even before we set out. That means that one of the people who knew of the plan must have talked—whether for money or because they were being blackmailed. So which of them do you think it was?”