by Merry Farmer
“Fine,” Inspector Craig said at last, clearly aggravated. “But the same rules apply to you that apply to him.” He gestured to Malcolm. “Stay quiet and stay out of the way.”
Katya agreed with a nod. It must have been good enough for Inspector Craig. He had one last, quiet word with one of his men, and within minutes they were in motion.
“I’d tell you to listen to Craig and stay behind, but I know it wouldn’t do any good,” Malcolm grumbled as they fell into line with the policemen speeding through the shadows.
“So you have learned something in all these years after all,” Katya replied, too tense with anticipation to grin or tease him further.
“I’ve learned that you’re as stubborn as—”
“You?” Katya finished his sentence. “We both already knew that.”
“Quiet,” Inspector Craig cautioned them as they crossed the street and made their way along the side of the club.
Christopher was already at the door, knocking in a peculiar pattern to gain entrance. The door opened and he stepped inside as Inspector Craig’s men strode closer, as if they were merely uninterested passersby. One of them climbed the steps after Christopher, stopping the unseen attendant from closing the outer door. Katya knew from her girls that there was a second, inner door that would be much harder for anyone who wasn’t on the inside to get through, but before she and Malcolm had reached the steps leading to the entrance, there was a shout, and in a coordinated burst, Inspector Craig and his men surged forward.
Within seconds, everything was movement and pandemonium. Katya was caught up in it as she and Malcolm stormed the club alongside the police. As soon as they stepped into the outer foyer, it became obvious that whoever was attending the inner door had opened it to allow Christopher in, and once that barrier was breached, the club was infiltrated by sheer force.
“Where is Lord Shayles?” Inspector Craig was in the middle of demanding from the sinister, wiry butler as Katya hurried into the heart of the club.
“He’s not here, he’s not here,” the butler insisted.
Katya didn’t believe him for a moment, but she wasn’t interested in Shayles. She searched the front hall for a familiar face, finally spotting Bess, one of her girls, peeking around a corner to see what was going on.
“Bess.” Katya marched right toward her. “The police are here. We need to get the girls to safety immediately.”
“Yes, Lady Stanhope,” Bess said, her eyes going wide. She dashed around the corner, and Katya followed her deeper into the club.
Malcolm roared into The Black Strap Club, fists balled, ready to fight anyone, including Craig, who would keep him from exacting his final revenge on Shayles. He was immediately assailed by old memories of his early days, right after returning from the Crimea, when his mind and heart had been so damaged by the devastation he’d witnessed and been part of on the battlefield that he was willing to do anything to distract himself. The scent of the place hadn’t changed—candle wax, exotic spice, sex, and fear. It sent a chill down his back that had him trembling with bottled-up energy.
But his own fear burst wide open when he saw Katya disappear around a corner.
“Katya,” he called, starting after her.
He stopped dead when he heard Craig saying, “Arrest every man you find in this building. High and low, I don’t care. And find Shayles.”
Teeth on edge and heart beating in his throat, Malcolm turned away from the hall Katya had run down to march up to Craig’s side. “I know where he hides,” he said.
Craig glared at him, but the man’s frustration was eclipsed by determination. “Take me there.”
It had been decades since the dangerous days when Malcolm had called Shayles a friend, since Shayles had first purchased and refurbished The Black Strap Club, but Shayles didn’t change the way he thought or his core actions. Malcolm launched ahead of Craig and his men—barely noting that the idiot, Dowland, followed with them—taking a small set of spiral stairs that led down. Shayles left the grandeur of his club for his customers, saving the underground warren of passages and dungeons for himself.
“What the devil?” a man asked from one of the dank side caverns as the parade of policemen whipped past. A middle-aged lord Malcolm knew all too well from the halls of Westminster stepped into the doorway, naked and erect. A woman’s pleading cry came from the room behind him.
“Arrest that man,” Craig said with barely a sideways glance. “Help the woman. Arrest every man you find down here.” Disgust and fury were thick in his tone, but he marched on.
Within seconds, the dungeons exploded with shouts and panic as half a dozen dungeons were split open and their occupants dragged out into the hall. Shouts and thumps sounded from above as well. Malcolm could only imagine that the entire club was disgorging every manner of evil. He only hoped the men Craig had brought with him were enough to sweep up the mess.
“Down here,” Malcolm said, pushing on to a small, arched door at the end of the hall. “This is where he hides.”
Craig pushed ahead of Malcolm as they reached the door, three burly men behind him. He didn’t stop to knock, and a fiery sort of fury blared from him that gave Malcolm pause. Craig tried the handle of the door, and when it seemed to catch, he took a half step back and kicked the door so hard it clattered off its hinges.
The sight that met them in the small dungeon room was everything Malcolm could have hoped for and more. Shayles was there, and he was engaged in an act so foul—and with a young woman who was barely more than a child—that half of Craig’s men turned away. One burst into a sob. But it wasn’t the act Shayles had been caught in or the age of the girl, or even the humiliation of Shayles being completely naked, it was the way the bastard’s eyes went wide with fright and his body snapped rigid with fear. They’d caught the blackguard completely by surprise.
“Lord Theodore Shayles,” Craig said, gesturing for his men to grab Shayles and hold him, “You are hereby under arrest, by order of Her Majesty and the Metropolitan Police.”
Chapter 11
“You can’t arrest me,” Shayles shouted, attempting to pull himself together, but looking ridiculous as he scrambled for something to hide his arousal. He edged sideways, to where his clothes were strewn over a wicked-looking iron chair with leather straps in key places. “I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Malcolm barked a laugh. “Nothing wrong? Look at you, man. Look at that poor girl.”
Shayles barely spared a glance for the weeping, shivering girl. One of Craig’s men had thrown his jacket around her shoulders and was trying to coax her to get up and leave the dungeon with him. She was too traumatized to move.
“Since when was it a crime to pass the evening with a willing partner?” Shayles asked, chin tilted high. He continued to creep toward the side of the room.
“Check that girl’s age,” Craig ordered, crossing the room to intercept Shayles. “Interview her. I’d wager she isn’t here willingly.”
Shayles sneered. “You can’t believe a word a girl like that says. She’s trash, you know. She parted her legs for a scrap of—”
Shayles never finished his sentence. Craig threw a punch that snapped his head to the side, bloodied his lip, and jolted him out of the grip of the officers holding him. Malcolm wasn’t sure which surprised him more, the usually cool Craig losing his temper or the fact that he himself hadn’t been the one to throw the first punch. The former was satisfying, but the latter made him unaccountably angry.
Craig turned to Dowland, rubbing the hand he’d used to punch Shayles. “Sir Christopher, can you positively identify this man as Lord Theodore Shayles.”
“Yes, I can,” Dowland said, looking a little green around the gills as he stepped forward.
“And can you confirm that he offered you a variety of illegal services, as detailed in the document you presented to Scotland Yard—” Shayles’s eyes went wide with alarm, “—including service by underage girls and practices that could be classified as tort
ure?”
“Yes,” Dowland answered, then swallowed and glanced away.
A creeping sense of wrongness slithered down Malcolm’s back at the exchange. Craig should be turning to him for that kind of confirmation. He was the one who had spent the greater part of his life in the last several years making the case against Shayles. But for all Craig and Dowland were concerned, he wasn’t even in the room.
It was Shayles who noticed Malcolm, appealing to him with, “You aren’t going to let them do this to me, are you?”
Malcolm was so taken off-guard by the pleading in Shayles’s question that he was slow to respond with, “You’ve brought this on yourself.”
“How long have we known each other?” Shayles went on, forgetting his sideways pursuit of clothing to approach Malcolm. “Since university,” he answered his own question. “You and Gatwick were some of my closest friends, some of the first members of this club.”
Malcolm’s chest tightened as it filled with rage. “I know what you’re doing, Shayles, and it won’t work. You won’t implicate me in this mess.” Though he stopped short of defending Gatwick’s innocence. Who knew if Gatwick was innocent or not? “I have had nothing to do with this filthy hellhole for decades and you know it.”
“We shared such good times,” Shayles went on, a clever spark in his eyes. “Very good times.” He glanced to Craig. Craig shifted to study Malcolm with narrowed eyes. “You met your dear wife, Tessa, here.”
Even though he was standing in the middle of the room, Malcolm felt backed into a corner. “Craig knows all about Tessa,” he told Shayles, then turned to Craig. “He treated her no better than that poor girl.” He nodded to the shivering form that Craig’s man was carrying out of the room. “I got her out of this place and helped her to obtain a divorce.”
“And that’s as far as your association with the club goes?” Craig asked. “You know your way around awfully well.”
Malcolm wanted to throttle the inspector as much as he wanted to put a bullet in Shayles’s brain for the agony he’d caused Tessa, and every other woman unfortunate to fall into his clutches in the last two decades. “That was a long time ago,” he growled. “Before this place turned into a nightmare.”
“Lord Campbell,” Craig began with brittle respect. “Perhaps you should wait outside while we continue with police business.”
Behind Craig, Shayles burst into a wry smirk.
Malcolm saw red. “I’ve devoted my life to this. How dare you shut me out when the hour of triumph is here?”
“I understand your desire to see justice, Lord Campbell,” Craig began, approaching Malcolm in a way that was designed to back him toward the door.
“I will be a part of this,” Malcolm shouted.
“Yes, I’ve heard that before,” Shayles muttered, loud enough to catch Craig’s attention. When Craig turned to him, Shayles went on with, “Strange how you’ve known about the club for decades, and yet it’s only now that Mr. Craig here has accosted me.”
Malcolm’s eyes went wide with fury. “I’ve been working to clear away the corruption within the police force that has shielded you for so long, you miserable shit.”
“One must question how hard you have tried,” Shayles drawled, crossing his arms. Even naked, he had the easy stance of a man who was winning his point.
Craig let out a frustrated breath and rubbed a hand over his face. “We’ll sort this out when we’re through here.” He turned back to Shayles. “My men are rounding up your clients and getting the girls to safety as we speak. Put some clothes on.” He turned away from Shayles, who had gone white with sudden fear. “Gather up as much documentation as you can find,” Craig went on. “Bring in the photographers to document—”
He didn’t get any farther. As soon as he turned his back, Shayles leapt toward the chair where his clothes were. He didn’t reach for them, though. Instead, he tore at a small cabinet on the wall, wrenching open the door and pulling a series of levers.
For about five seconds, there was a sinister hiss. Malcolm frowned and glanced around. It came from the narrow pipes that lined the floor and ceiling of the room. The faint scent of gas filled the air before a second, louder whoosh filled the air, followed by a booming explosion. In an instant, the room was on fire.
“The place is rigged,” one of Craig’s men shouted.
“Get out,” Craig shouted. “Get everyone out of here as fast as possible. Don’t let him out of your sight.” He thrust an arm in Shayles’s direction before leaping toward the door.
Malcolm shot into motion. Shayles’s dungeon room ignited like a tinderbox. The hem of his trousers was singed as he passed by one of the leaking gas pipes. There was no telling how long they had to claw their way back to ground level before the entire dungeon exploded.
His flight was made worse by the rush of panicked men who jumped into the halls from the side rooms. Screams echoed around the dungeon caverns as Shayles’s clients pushed their way toward the narrow staircase and up to the ground floor. Craig’s men were caught between trying to arrest them, save the unfortunate women who had been abandoned in the dungeon rooms, and getting to safety.
“Evidence,” Craig shouted somewhere behind Malcolm. “We need evidence.”
Malcolm would have laughed, if the smoke filling the crowded corridor wasn’t choking him. Shayles wasn’t stupid. He must have known a day would come when his wicked endeavors would be discovered. The entire building must have been piped with gas that was set to explode. It was a wonder the whole place hadn’t burned to the ground by accident before.
The thought brought Malcolm up short as he reached the top of the stairs and dashed out into the club’s main hall. Everything was on fire, even on the ground floor. But the genius of the system was instantly forgotten as a much greater thought rushed to the front of Malcolm’s mind.
“Katya,” he shouted, sprinting across the hall to the corridor she’d disappeared down. Dowland followed on his heels, but he hardly noticed. One thought superseded all else: Katya was in danger.
Her girls had played their parts well. Katya hadn’t been able to inform them of the raid, not when it had been organized so swiftly, but her girls were always alert. Those that could had abandoned their clients to let Inspector Craig’s men into the building at the first signs of the raid. By the time Katya made it upstairs to the halls that held private rooms, the building was swarming with policemen who were in a mood to arrest anyone and everyone male, regardless of how lofty their title or position in society.
“Lottie,” Katya called out when she spotted one of the girls who had been working covertly for her for the longest amount of time. “What’s the situation here?”
Lottie skittered to a halt at the end of a hall where three blustering men in various states of undress were being carted out of rooms by policemen.
“Lady Stanhope,” she exclaimed in surprise, then changed direction to meet Katya. “Are you responsible for this, m’lady?”
“Only indirectly,” Katya said. She glanced up as a woman screamed, only to find one of the policemen yanking her into the hall, looking as though he would arrest her as well. She swore under her breath. “I was afraid of this.” She left Lottie to march down the hall to the officer. “Keep your hands off the girls. They’re innocent victims in this whole enterprise.”
The officer stared at her with shock and indignation. “They’re prostitutes,” he argued. “They’re no better than the blokes.”
“You ignorant dolt,” Katya scolded him, her voice shaking. “Most of them are here against their will. They are victims, not criminals.”
The officer gave her a look of such condescension that it was all Katya could do to keep from slapping him. “Begging your pardon, ma’am,” he began.
“That’s Lady Stanhope to you,” Katya cut him off, turning back to Lottie. “Gather up as many of the girls as you can find and get them to safety. I don’t trust this lot to treat you with the respect and compassion you all deserve.”
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“Yes, m’lady.” Lottie bobbed a quick curtsy before dashing off, hollering for the girls to follow her.
“You’re interfering with official police business,” the officer yelled at her, an edge of uncertainty in his eyes when she didn’t immediately back down. “Inspector Craig will—”
“I’m here with Inspector Craig’s full authority, and I will not—” She stopped abruptly, sniffing the air. The sharp scent of gas had suddenly filled the hall. Faint hissing came from all around her. “What the devil?”
Seconds later, an explosion reverberated through the hall that nearly knocked her off her feet. It was followed by a second explosion that threw her against the wall as a sudden ring of flames roared around her. The suddenness of the heat enveloping her knocked the air from her lungs and filled her with panic of a sort she had rarely experienced. Screams and shouts erupted around her.
The raw instinct to survive took over after the initial thunder of the explosion. Everything around her was on fire—the walls, the floorboards, the ceiling. The hallway had become a tunnel of flame. She dashed for the end of the hall where Lottie had headed.
“Lottie,” she called out, her voice strange and choked. “Get the girls out.”
“I am, m’lady,” Lottie’s voice came through the fiery hallway.
The burst of relief it brought was short-lived, though. Katya backpedaled, rushing for the end of the hallway where she’d entered from the staircase. But once she reached it, instead of fleeing downward to get to safety, she charged up.
“Get out,” she cried when she reached the top hallway. “Get out at once.”
She threw open the door nearest her, hoping to find someone she could help get to safety, but the room behind the door was filled with fire. Male and female screams echoed through the conflagration. She raised a hand to shield her eyes from the intensity of the flames as she peered down the hall, praying that the girls were making it to safety, but not sure how they could. They knew the building far better than she did, though. They must have known ways out.