by Rebecca King
“Maybe Jemima’s murder is a warning to us that he is prepared to the victims if we stray too close.” Callum looked sharply at his boss. “Do you think he knows you are here? Might he have seen you?”
While he asked the question, Callum immediately dismissed the possibility. Sir Hugo was better than that.
“No. I think he might have heard that we have put several of his partners in crime behind bars and is worried about being caught with his victims on his property,” Sir Hugo sighed. “He might have killed Jemima as a warning to us, though.”
“Why would he know to warn us? How could he know that we have been anywhere near him?” Callum was starting to wonder if he had missed something.
“Have you not heard? Ranolph Squire has been killed,” Sir Hugo informed him. “Recently.”
“Ranolph Squire?” Callum scowled while he tried to remember who the man was but couldn’t ever recall having heard of him before.
Sir Hugo nodded.
Callum lifted his brows. “Is he related to Melrose?”
“They are best friends,” Sir Hugo replied. “Squire died suddenly in his sleep.”
“From old age?”
“Knife.”
Sir Hugo’s face closed leaving Callum in no doubt that Sir Hugo had had a hand in the man’s demise.
“Squire is – was – responsible for moving the kidnap victims around the country. He arranged for some of them to be kept below stairs in his friends’ houses. Squire employs – employed - some of the men who snatched the women; Melrose employs the men who move them up and down the country and hides the victims. Now that Squire has been removed, there is no chance that Melrose can move the victims on without having to move them himself. With Argent behind bars, and Squire now dead, people are warier about accommodating the victims. Melrose is running out of options. He might have killed Jemima because nobody would accept her; he had no place else to put her.”
“What about Mallory?”
Sir Hugo sucked in a deep, hissing breath.
“Time is short, Callum. There is no place for her to move to either, or she would have been moved by now. Unless Melrose plans to take her to London, and we have no reason to believe that he does, we must assume that her fate is likely to be the same as Jemima’s. Right now, she is alive. We must keep her that way.”
“Melrose will be prepared to kill his victims to stop them talking about him and his little organisation.” It wasn’t a question. Callum was stating fact.
“Wouldn’t you if you were in his situation? He is hardly going to leave her here to fend for herself and take a chance that she won’t tell everything to the authorities if they find her. She can identify people, names, those guilty of stealing her life.”
“She is a very credible witness no magistrate would ignore.”
Sir Hugo nodded. “Which is why we must keep her alive. First, we have to get her out of here.”
Callum hated Sir Hugo’s use of the word ‘we’. Bracing himself for what was to come, he leant his shoulders against the tree beside him and watched the patrol amble past, this time with a dog. The canine sniffed at something on the floor, but his ears didn’t even twitch in their direction. Callum knew that the dog would be back in about half an hour but hoped to be well away from the area by the time it did return.
Please God, let me be away from here by then. Don’t let Sir Hugo’s plans involve me any more than I already am.
But God wasn’t listening to Callum’s prayers. Indeed, the good Lord seemed determined to thwart them and Sir Hugo’s next words confirmed it.
“What’s the plan then?” Callum prompted when Sir Hugo made no attempt to tell him why he had been summoned to meet him in the woods at the back of Melrose House.
“We are going to bring her out of that house and get her away from here. We don’t have any time to wait because we don’t know what Melrose’s plans are,” Sir Hugo began.
“What do you want me to do?” Callum dreaded the answer.
His gut was warning him that he wasn’t going to like what Sir Hugo had to say and his gut instinct was never wrong.
“Go in and fetch her.”
Callum closed his eyes and mentally cursed again. An objection hovered on his lips in a way that was so tempting, Callum had bite his lip to stop them spilling forth.
“She doesn’t have any relations at home waiting for her, so it is going to be easier to make her vanish in the short term.”
Callum squinted at Sir Hugo. “Do we take her to a safe house, or keep her moving so Melrose cannot find her?”
“Both,” Sir Hugo hissed.
Callum sighed and puffed out his cheeks.
“Have you seen the patrol here? There is another patrol inside the house,” Callum growled. “It is tantamount to suicide to go in there to try to get her out. She isn’t going to know who in the Hell I am. If I turn up in the dead of night, she is going to scream the bloody place down.”
Sir Hugo shook his head. “Well, make sure she can’t.”
“I didn’t come prepared to drug her,” Callum snorted.
If he had known what this mission entailed, Callum wouldn’t have been so readily available to answer Sir Hugo’s summons.
“Why can’t you go in? You have been inside there, haven’t you?”
Sir Hugo looked at him but didn’t answer. “I have other things to do. I will cover you.”
Callum knew that further objection would be futile. When Sir Hugo gave his orders, they were essentially written in stone, and had to be carried out to the best of his ability.
“We will get her out, and tonight.”
Sir Hugo’s voice was so matter of fact that Callum didn’t doubt it had to be tried. What concerned him was what Sir Hugo intended to do with the woman once they had facilitated her escape.
“I don’t like the fact that Melrose is planning to move, and to London of all places.”
“It is a risk seeing he needs to hide his guilt,” Callum nodded.
“It is like walking into the lion’s mouth. He knows we are investigating him. If he does go back to London, he isn’t going to leave any trace of his crimes here,” Sir Hugo warned.
“But he might take her to London and leave her with one of his cronies,” Callum replied.
Sir Hugo nodded. “That might be so, but he is taking a risk that we aren’t following him and will just investigate his cronies.”
“He is likely to kill her before he leaves then.”
Sir Hugo nodded. “Now that he has dispatched Jemima off this mortal coil, I have no doubt he will turn his attentions to Mallory. I am not going to allow that young woman to die as well. We failed Jemima. We are not going to fail Mallory. We have to move now, tonight, and quickly.”
Callum felt a sinking feeling in his stomach and suspected he knew then why Sir Hugo had sent for him directly. It had been a bit of a shock when he had returned to the safe house to find a mysterious note waiting for him. Nobody had any idea how or when it had arrived. Even the men on guard hadn’t seen anything. Curious to know what it contained Callum had read it. It had only been Oliver who had recognised Sir Hugo’s handwriting and agreed that it was a legitimate message from him. The contents had been enough for Callum and his colleagues to defy orders somewhat so that when Callum left the safe house just an hour later, he took several of his colleagues with him.
I wish they were out here with me now, and not waiting in the nearby town for God’s sake. It is bloody freezing and I am going to need them to get Mallory to town alive.
“I need you to find a way into that house, Callum.”
Callum sighed but Sir Hugo was too busy plotting to notice.
“From what I can gather, Mallory’s room is in the basement, directly beneath the kitchen. To get to it you need to get to the servant’s stairs to the left of the main fireplace. Go down one flight and you will find a long corridor that is as black as Hades. It is lined with doors, each of which open to small chamber-like rooms the lowliest o
f the staff sleep in, namely Jemima and Mallory. Now there is just Mallory down there. There is nothing in the way of wall sconces or fireplaces. It is dank, cold, and like the deepest pit of Hell.”
“No wonder she is ill,” Callum whispered.
“It is positively inhumane to keep anybody in such a place. Prisoners have better conditions,” Sir Hugo snorted.
“Are the other employees being held captive as well?”
“No. The employees all help Melrose keep her captive. They don’t allow any mercy and are even more cruel and spiteful than their master. They are to have no mercy, Callum.”
Callum nodded. If any of them posed a threat to the mission, they would be cut down.
“They don’t treat the victims like people, do they?” Callum shook his head in disbelief and stared at the house. “What happens if something goes wrong?”
“Then you die. Then you both die.”
Callum pursed his lips. He sensed Sir Hugo watching him and knew there was more. Lifting his brows, he waited.
“She doesn’t trust anybody.”
“Can you blame her?”
“She knows that Jemima was murdered, slowly and painfully. Everybody could hear her screams, even out here,” Sir Hugo whispered. “It was a warning to everyone in Melrose’s employ not to defy him or think of escape. He will make you suffer a slow and violent death. I have seen and heard my share of brutality and cruelty in my time, and have heard things that I would rather forget, but for the life of me I shall never ever forget her screams that night. What was galling was that I couldn’t do a damned thing do to stop her murder. They would have cut me down where I stood if I had tried. I will provide back-up so you can get her away from the area, but I cannot promise you won’t be seen or unchallenged. The best route out of here is alongside the driveway but that is going to be the first place they will look. I am afraid you are going to have to take the more difficult, much longer route that is less obvious.”
“We cannot crawl out of here,” Callum snapped, pointing to the low stone walls surrounding practically all the fields on the estate.
“She will need to if she gets any sicker,” Sir Hugo warned. “The woman is going to die, Callum, either by sickness or murder. I cannot – will not – allow that to happen. In all the time we have been investigating the kidnaps of the women from Leicestershire and Derbyshire, this is the first victim we have found alive. Yes, there was that woman in London, but she became one of them. Mallory isn’t one of them. She never could be.”
“Who goes there?”
Both men froze.
Sir Hugo slowly and silently slid a knife out of his pocket. Callum remained frozen in place and listened carefully to the steady crunch of boots working their way across the forest floor toward them. He wasn’t worried because he knew both he and Sir Hugo were a ruthless force. However, he also knew that they were heavily outnumbered should the rest of the men on patrol be alerted to their presence.
The footsteps stopped.
Neither Sir Hugo nor Callum dare breathe while they waited for the inevitable shout. When none came, they waited for the crunch of boots to recede, assuring them that they were alone again.
“We must move tonight,” Sir Hugo announced flatly. “I don’t care where you take her, just get her away from here. Where is your horse?”
“Through those fields about a mile to the north of here.”
“Can you use it if you head that way?”
“If we can reach it, yes. But only if I don’t have to wrestle with an argumentative female,” Callum replied.
He turned when he saw Sir Hugo studying something over his shoulder. Callum knew it was the night patrol stalking closer again.
“We are going to have to out-run the dogs as well, aren’t we?” Again, that wasn’t a question.
“You could steal a horse to get you to Horace,” Sir Hugo suggested. “There are some in the field at the back of the barn, but you will have to be quiet and quick about it and hope that Mallory knows how to ride without a saddle.”
Callum mentally cursed. He knew it was a hopeless situation Sir Hugo was expecting him to wade blindly into.
Callum raked Sir Hugo with a searching look. He wondered briefly if this was all some sort of sick joke and that Sir Hugo fully intended to be the one to go into the house.
“I will do my best but make no promises,” Callum promised, and he would.
“Stay safe.”
Callum opened his mouth to ask Sir Hugo if they were to meet up in a nearby town in a few days or something only to look around the now empty woods in consternation. He huffed a snort of disbelief because, as swiftly and silently as he had arrived, Sir Hugo had vanished again. Callum just wished he could do the same.
Instead, he was compelled to turn to study the house, and look for the best way to get in.
CHAPTER THREE
Mallory turned over in bed and stared blankly at the ceiling. She was so cold she had lost all feeling in her toes. The only covering she had was a thin blanket, which was as useless as her still damp clothing. Her dress was cold and clammy and stuck horribly to her chilled flesh, but it was the only one she had.
“If only I hadn’t had to go back outside to fetch the washing in while it had been raining,” Mallory whispered forlornly.
While she said the words, Mallory knew that getting her soaking wet and uncomfortable had been Mrs Cummings’ plan. By the time she had retrieved all the sheets, everything was wet including herself. Mallory had been scolded mercilessly for not drying the washing. As punishment, she hadn’t been allowed to dry off beside the fire. Mrs Cummings had made it clear that the sheets had to dry before the fireplace now, and there was no space for Mallory. Instead, for failing to dry the sheets as ordered, Mallory had been commanded to return to work in the scullery where she had stayed for several hours in cold and damp clothing.
“I may as well be in a coffin,” she whispered as she stared blindly at the ceiling of the small chamber she slept in.
The windowless room was six feet in length and half as wide. For most it would be a cupboard, but for her it was the only place in the house she could truly be alone. Further, the quiet of the midnight hour gave her the ability to contemplate her situation without being interrupted. The constant moaning, criticism, and insults that flew at her in the scullery were a world away in the middle of the night when the culprits were mostly asleep. It was the only time of Mallory’s day when she allowed her guard to drop so she could contemplate what she was going to do about trying to regain her freedom.
“I have to leave here, of that there can be no doubt,” she murmured only to wince when her breath fogged out before her.
Mallory knew that if she continued to lie on the stone floor with nothing between her and the ground than a thin blanket she was going to die.
“I cannot just allow them to steal my life,” she whispered.
Again, the memory of Jemima’s screams shook her. They were enough to make Mallory stand up even when all she wanted to do was lie down. Even before she faced the work the day ahead had in store for her, Mallory was exhausted, but once upright, she began to pace backward and forced across the narrow enclosure. She moved so speedily that she eventually struggled to contain a wave of dizziness that made the room move about her.
Without giving much thought to what she was doing, Mallory quietly eased the door open. Her heart pounded. Her legs shook. She knew that if she was caught out of her room she would be beaten. It was only the knowledge that she didn’t have much time to make her escape that compelled her to move out of her room.
Once in the hallway, she rested her shoulders against the damp stone wall and waited. Not a sound could be heard, except for her own heartbeat. Her fear was heightened by the thought that someone would hear the harsh rasps of her breathing. Before someone did hear her, Mallory quietly as she could toward the kitchen door, and the faint wisp of light that filtered out beneath it.
“Onwards I go,” Mallory brea
thed.
And she did go. The entire length of the corridor, until she reached the kitchen. There, Mallory paused. She knew that Marcus, the kitchen boy and Mrs Cummings’s nephew, slept before the hearth. One sudden movement, or slight sound, and he would wake up.
“Well, you aren’t going to stop me either,” Mallory whispered.
Sucking in a deep breath, Mallory held it while she nudged the door open. A deep-rooted yearning to savour the heat emanating from the fireplace blossomed into life while at the same time it made her shiver anew, not least because she knew she couldn’t stop and savour it. Instead, Mallory had to force herself to ignore her current discomfort and focus on securing something far more important: her freedom.
“Just get it done, Mallory.”
Eyeing the door to the scullery, Mallory paused long enough to make sure that Marcus remained undisturbed. When she was confident that he wasn’t going to wake up, she tiptoed across the room.
Just keep moving. Don’t stop. Don’t dither, or you will get caught.
In three, four, five, ten, eleven, twelve steps, Mallory was able to step into the scullery. She closed the door and turned to look at the back door that would take her out to the kitchen garden. It was locked and bolted. She knew that without even looking at it not least because it was always kept that way to prevent her escape while she washed pots at the sink.
“The window isn’t locked, though,” Mallory mused.
She squinted through the darkness at the small room to the side of the scullery. The small square window in there was tiny but might be big enough for her to squeeze through if she was lucky. The only problem she was going to have to deal with was how she was going to reach it seeing as it was five feet off the ground and there was no stool she could use.
“It’s the only route out of here. I have to take it,” Mallory muttered as she crept into the frigid room.
She wedged a large box against the door, just in case Marcus did hear her moving about. When she was as secure as she could possibly be, Mallory turned her attention to the window, and how to get out of it.