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Private Investigation
ISBN #978-1-78184-013-9
©Copyright Fleur T. Reid 2012
Cover Art by Posh Gosh ©Copyright June 2012
Edited by Laura Hulley
Total-E-Bound Publishing
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
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Published in 2012 by Total-E-Bound Publishing, Think Tank, Ruston Way, Lincoln, LN6 7FL, United Kingdom.
Warning:
This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers. This story has a heat rating of Total-e-burning and a sexometer of 2.
This story contains 47 pages, additionally there is also a free excerpt at the end of the book containing 4 pages.
PRIVATE INVESTIGATION
Fleur T. Reid
In a Victorian world of clockwork and conspiracy, private investigation gets personal...
In another London, not entirely like our own, Miss Elizabeth James is one of the new Victorian working women.
She answers an advertisement placed by inventor John Dermott for someone to bring order to the life of his companion, flamboyant private detective Lucien Doyle.
She can sort out the shocking state of his paperwork, but the weird contraptions and unexpected explosions weren’t on the curriculum at the Metropolitan School for Shorthand. And while she can type, file and take dictation, she didn’t expect to have to take a string of apparently motiveless murders in her stride. She’s an expert at finding lost files, but how does one deal with the lost souls of the bewildered dead?
Lilly’s life becomes even more confusing when she discovers that Lucien and John plan to do a bit of very private investigating—of her person.
Dedication
For the lovely Laura, who was a wonderful editor. All my love and best wishes for the future.
Trademark Acknowledgement
The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmark mentioned in this work of fiction:
The Times: News Corporation
Chapter One
Miss Elizabeth James upset her cup and swore in a most unladylike fashion as hot tea splattered her hand and wrist and soaked into that morning’s copy of The Times, obliterating the advertisement for Professor Mainwaring’s Patented Nerve Tonic. It was her own fault of course—she had been trying to breakfast and gloat at the same time. She had graduated from the Metropolitan School for Shorthand in Chancery Lane, and what’s more she had graduated top of her class in typing, shorthand, filing and arithmetic. And she had been the only girl in the class to master the stencillographic oscillator—a complicated clockwork device that transcribed dictation, although sometimes the spelling was a little suspect.
She sucked her burnt fingers. She was so happy and distracted that she had already spooned marmalade into her tea and tried to sip her toast. As one of London’s new Typewriter Girls, she would be able to find work as a secretary or an author’s assistant. Even as a copying clerk for a government official. Although perhaps not that last. To become a typist in a government department, a girl had to be at least five feet in height without boots or shoes. Lilly might just squeak through under that requirement if the person doing the measuring was lax with her tape measure and counted her rather wild, frizzy hair. Still, she had a whole world of options open to her—all perfectly genteel. Given that these days girls were running off to be explorers and fly dirigibles and goodness knows what else, she felt practically prim and proper in her choice of career.
The five guinea fee had been a struggle. She had managed to scrape her rent together, but had subsisted during the course of her training mainly on the breakfast of toast and tea her landlady grudgingly provided each day. But now she was a professional woman, and could expect to earn anywhere between fifteen shillings and two or three pounds a week.
She mopped ineffectually at the spilt tea with her handkerchief, and sighed. Perhaps she might even be able to move to lodgings where the taps didn’t scream and clank and dispense brown, brackish water, where the bed wasn’t lumpy with a spring that dug into the small of her back no matter how she tossed and turned, and where the landlady didn’t look at her with chilly disapprobation every time their paths crossed.
Mrs Langley did not approve of working women—but then Mrs Langley did not much approve of anything. A skinny, middle-aged woman with a pointed, rather red nose that she enjoyed poking into other people’s business, she had lost her husband after twenty years of childless marriage—which was probably something of a relief to the poor man, since it meant he could finally get some peace. Except, of course, he couldn’t—every Thursday evening at six o’ clock, Mrs Langley trotted off in her respectable coat and her sensible button boots with her capacious handbag tucked under her arm to visit the shade of her late, lamented husband at Doctor Moriarty Caine’s House of Spiritual Solace. When she got a message from the other side, she came back in good humour. When no message was forthcoming, she was even more officious and sour-faced than usual.
Lilly suspected that the night before the late Mr Langley had not appeared at the séance, because this morning Mrs Langley had brought up lime marmalade with the breakfast things. Lilly cordially detested lime marmalade, and had told her landlady so many times.
Her suspicions about Mrs Langley’s mood were confirmed when the landlady swept in, sniffed disapprovingly at the tea-saturated newspaper and the toast crumbs in the butter, and gathered the dirty crockery onto her tray with a series of pointed crashes and clatters.
She scowled at Lilly, snatched the soaked newspaper off the table with a haughty sniff, leaving its sopping remnants clinging to the surface of the table, and marched out of the room without so much as a ‘good morning’, head held high.
Lilly rolled her eyes, then allowed them to drop to the sad, soggy scrap of newspaper the landlady’s cursory housekeeping efforts had left behind. Then she narrowed her eyes as an advertisement caught her eye. She squinted to make out the words, the ink of the newsprint having bled and smudged into the surrounding white space, which in any case was now stained with tea and half-dissolved marmalade. Perhaps she needed eyeglasses. Perhaps she’d even invest in a pair of those new-fangled inspectacles all the fashionable girls at Chancery Lane had been swooning over lately. Not that she had much in common with them—in her opinion they would benefit from devoting more time to their studies and less to chattering, gossiping and obsessing over the latest style in hats.
She picked up the sticky, soggy remnant, holding it carefully so that the wet newspaper didn’t come apart in her hands.
‘Wanted, a young lady, of good habits and clean in her person, with a facility for filing, typewriting and shorthand, to bring order to a gentleman’s papers and effects. Remuneration will be to the sum of six pounds a week, for as long as the task requires of her. Enquiries should be made of Mr John Dermo
tt at 43a Jermayne Street’.
Six pounds a week! Six pounds a week would enable her to find new lodgings, and to have whatever she liked for breakfast. Perhaps even to expend a little money on new gloves and handkerchiefs and underthings—little extravagances she had had to forego while undertaking her training at Chancery Lane. Her needlework frankly wasn’t up to much, and some of her clothes were beginning to look distinctly careworn and shabby. She wasn’t obsessed with fashion like some of the featherbrains in her typing classes, but really, there were limits.
She determined to go to Jermayne Street at once and speak to this Mr Dermott. A few moments in front of the mirror tucking in an errant strand of her rather frizzy, dark hair and perching her hat fetchingly in place on the back of her head—holding it in place with vicious jabs of a number of wicked-looking hatpins—and she was on her way.
Chapter Two
Jermayne Street proved to be a reasonably well-to-do area, the sort of place where men rented living quarters or professional consulting rooms from genteel widows.
Lilly dodged a velocipede-made-for-two, its pistons working, the gentleman at the front cranking the valves, his lady friend bouncing uncomfortably in the saddle behind him as the machine juddered over the cobbles, belching steam. The lady was wearing what looked like gentlemen’s trousers and her hair was tucked under a tight leather cap that Lilly supposed was meant to protect it from soot and from getting too windblown. She looked less than thrilled by the experience as she clung grimly on to her companion, and Lilly thought that the whole experience looked utterly ghastly.
A discreet brass plaque by the smart, black-painted front door of number forty-three read, ‘Mr Lucien Doyle, Consulting Detective’. Lilly raised her eyebrows. Even Mrs Langley couldn’t disapprove of such an association. Of course, she imagined consulting detectives sometimes got involved in rather dangerous situations and had a certain amount to do with the criminal element, but Mrs Langley was a devotee of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. Indeed, on one occasion Lilly’s landlady had met Dr Doyle himself at a meeting of spiritualists. She had come home pink-cheeked and in high good spirits despite the fact she had had no message from her husband that evening. Since then, on the rare occasions when she felt in the mood for conversation, she had blushingly referred to him as ‘Dear Dr Doyle’.
Perhaps Lilly wouldn’t have to find new lodgings after all. A hint that she was working as a clerk for a consulting detective and a modest increase in rent might work a change in Mrs Langley’s waspish nature.
Of course, the advert had said she should enquire of a Mr John Dermott, not of this Lucien Doyle, so perhaps the position was nothing so intriguing. The detective might well share the house with another professional gentleman—a lawyer or a medical man, perhaps. After all, Sherlock Holmes shared his lodgings with the long-suffering Dr Watson, did he not?
Suddenly, she realised that, if anyone was watching from the net-curtained windows of the house, standing on the doorstep and dithering would not give the impression of decisive efficiency she thought a professional woman should project. She straightened her shoulders, took a deep breath, and rapped the doorknocker.
It was answered almost at once by a rather flamboyant man with curly hair, a distracted expression and a brass-and-leather contraption on his head that magnified his right eye through a series of aligned lenses. His iris looked like a pale goldfish swimming behind thick glass. Inspectacles were the latest advance in clockwork technology, and seemed to be halfway between an elaborate monocle and a ghastly fashion mistake, though Lilly understood that despite their bizarre appearance they were all the rage. He adjusted a dial near his temple, and one of the lenses revolved in its fitting with an alarming mechanical whirring sound. He peered at her.
“John!” he called. “There’s some sort of woman at the door. I expect she’s for you.” Then he whirled on his heel and bounded up the stairs two at a time, leaving Lilly standing with her mouth half-open and her hand extended.
By the time another man came down the stairs, she had composed herself enough to withdraw her hand and school her features into an expression that looked slightly less stunned.
This man was shorter, without the gangling, long-limbed flamboyance of his fellow. He moved with a smooth, assured gait and, when Lilly held her hand out again, he took it in a firm, warm, reassuring grip. “John Dermott,” he said with a smile. “Please excuse my associate—he was raised by wolves.”
Lilly started. “Not really?” she blurted, then blushed to the roots of her hair.
He laughed, but she didn’t feel like she was being mocked—more as though she was being asked to share a joke, as between friends. “Not really, of course, but given his grasp of the social graces it would be as good an explanation as any.”
Lilly smiled, still feeling somewhat bewildered and off-kilter, but finding herself disposed to like this man. “My name is Miss Elizabeth James,” she said. “I saw your advertisement in The Times this morning.”
“Splendid—splendid!” Mr Dermott beamed at her. “Tell me, Miss James, are you well-organised, efficient, hardworking?”
“Why…yes.” Lilly handed him an envelope. “I have here my certificates from the Metropolitan School of Shorthand, and a letter of reference from Miss Caffrey, who instructed us in typing, filing and mechanical contrivances for office use.” The reference, she knew, talked about her in the most glowing possible terms.
Mr Dermott scanned the reference and nodded approvingly. “Forgive me,” he said. “I am being unforgivably rude. Won’t you come inside? We’re lacking a housekeeper at the moment, but I daresay I can scare up some tea and biscuits while we discuss the role.”
Lilly’s stomach grumbled its approval at the mention of food and she felt her cheeks go pink again as she hoped fervently that Mr Dermott hadn’t heard the gurgling over the clanking and whirring of the vehicles passing by on the street.
Lilly followed him up the narrow stairs, wondering quite what she might have got herself into here. John Dermott seemed perfectly agreeable, but the first man—Lucien Doyle, presumably—had seemed downright eccentric. She shrugged to herself as they reached the door of 43a. John Dermott paused with his hand on the handle and turned back to her. He eyed her critically. “Your reference describes you as meticulous, Miss James. Does that mean you’re likely to be distressed by a little…mess?”
Her lips twitched at the corners. “I have younger brothers, Mr Dermott.”
He hesitated. “By a lot of mess, then?”
The twitch became a smile. “Six of them. I’m not afraid of mess, Mr Dermott. Mess is afraid of me.”
He nodded his approval. “Nevertheless, Miss James, gird your loins.”
She wasn’t entirely sure it was appropriate for a gentleman to be talking about her loins, but in any case she followed him as he opened the door and ushered her through…into a scene of absolute chaos.
Papers lay in bundles and piles on every surface, and as Mr Dermott closed the door quietly behind them, the muffled click was enough to start an avalanche in one of the stacks, which slid with a rustle to the floor.
Any surface that wasn’t covered with papers and books held weirdly bubbling contraptions of brass and blown glass, machinery Lilly could not immediately identify, bottles and jars containing…well, she glanced briefly at them, mentally classified them as ‘specimens’ and decided to ignore them. The curled, pale shapes in the cloudy formaldehyde made her feel slightly queasy.
“Well,” she said, with a brisk efficiency she judged would not offend Mr Dermott, who had already shown himself to be a man of great good humour. “I take it these are the papers and effects that need to be ‘put in order’.”
He smiled again, and she found herself warming to him even more. “Please take a seat, Miss James. I will see about the tea I mentioned.”
As he left the room, Lilly glanced around for somewhere to sit. The man with the wild hair and the bad manners was reclining on the s
ettee with a pained expression that suggested he didn’t want his papers put in order, and didn’t intend to move for anyone who seemed to be of a paper-ordering disposition. The overstuffed armchair was occupied by a half-assembled machine she couldn’t identify, but which was a worrying combination of wires, springs, dials and what looked like a boiler. She eyed it warily, decided she didn’t want to risk moving it, and perched uncomfortably on the arm of the chair instead. It wasn’t the most ladylike position, but this didn’t seem to be the sort of establishment where one stood on ceremony.
When John Dermott returned with two cups of tea and handed one to her, she gave him a grateful smile. He went over to the settee and prodded his friend gently until he sat up, scowling. As soon as Mr Dermott was settled on the settee himself, his friend lay straight back down again with his head in the other man’s lap.
Good gracious. Perhaps he really was raised by wolves.
He certainly didn’t conform to the usual standard of etiquette.
But six pounds a week was six pounds a week. And it seemed as though there was enough work here to keep her going…well, indefinitely, really. She had to weigh up oddity against lime marmalade…and she really hated lime marmalade.
Before long, she and John had agreed to use each other’s Christian names—at least when they were at Jermayne Street. The detective was introduced, as she had suspected, as Lucien, whereupon he gave a dismissive little salute without ever opening his eyes or lifting his head from John’s lap. He looked as if the whole idea of having his papers sorted out made him feel unbearably weary and put-upon.
Private Investigation Page 1