Convicted Innocent
Page 26
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Horace waited as long as he could, only speaking when he noted some of the heavies growing restive.
“I’ll need a knife.”
As soon as Horace said this, Nicholas Harker started forward. As the young man rounded the group of prisoners and their keepers, a blade thrown by the blonde clattered to the ground at the inspector’s feet.
Horace stooped slowly and picked it up, the weapon drawing his attention like a magnet.
The blade felt strange and almost awkward in his hand: heavier than his penknife, of a different shape from the knife he used at table, and nothing like the cavalry sabre he’d wielded years ago. This was a tool for quiet killing: not pretty, but deathly functional.
He dimly wondered if this was the same blade used to murder Frank O’Malley, for the appalling symmetry was twisted enough to fit the scene.
Nicholas Harker stopped a little more than an arm’s length away, and Horace forced himself to meet the young man’s gaze.
The inspector couldn’t remember ever really looking at Harker before – really looking at him; cases rarely required it. Certainly Horace knew the young man by sight, but in this short stretch of time before Horace was to kill him, every detail of the young man’s face burned itself into his brain.
Nicholas Harker looked so young. He was no more than 19 as it was. Silent and expressionless, he looked even younger.
Whether culpable for everything the script proclaimed or just a poor fool as entangled as were Lewis Todd, David Powell, and Conway Duke, the young Harker seemed strikingly innocent – even vulnerable – in that moment.
Yet he also seemed resolved to die at the inspector’s hand.
Delay. He must delay.
“Please,” Duke said quietly. “Help us! I—We want to go home.”
Horace half-turned toward the unfortunate spokesman, but after staring into Harker’s eyes, he couldn’t meet Duke’s. It was far easier to look at the man’s feet than his face.
A moment, though.
He chewed his lip.
“If I may ask a question,” the detective said, “how did you come back here, Mr. Duke? My men assured me they saw you safely home.”
When no one objected, Duke replied, “They nabbed me only a minute or two after the bobbies left.”
Horace finally looked up.
“You were injured?”
The other man shook his head. “They grabbed me from behind and used a rag with some sort of vaporous substance to knock me out. I came to when they were leading me down the tunnel here.”
The detective pursed his lips and pointed.
“Whose blood is that?”
Duke looked down. A dark, reddish smudge shown faintly under the shifting lamplight on the toe of the man’s right shoe. The uncle said nothing, only shook his head slightly.
Horace opened his mouth to ask something further, but the little papist began shouting then.
“Nicholas Harker is innocent!” David Powell’s words were hardly more than a rough, hasty shriek, but they carried easily through the chamber. “It’s a trap! This was all set up—!”
Then Horace saw a flash of metal in the hand of the burly, angry thug who’d thrashed the little fellow earlier. Powell’s shout ended abruptly.
The bruiser had stuck a knife in the priest’s back.
At that same moment, Lewis Todd, still supine on the floor, swung his legs around and knocked the blonde to the ground with a sweeping kick.