by Will Thomas
“I thought she was with Mercier.”
“No, that was Anatole, who was murdered. This is Alphonse.”
“That’s right, there were two of them in the tunnel! Two bombers who smoked French cigarettes.”
He smiled, and set his own pint down on the ringed table. “You’ve been a busy little fellow, Thomas Llewelyn. According to one witness, you were seen, you and that American, not two streets away from where the Frenchman was stabbed.”
“Have you been following me?”
McNaughton sipped his ale. The foam had dissipated. “We were following Caleb Barker. As you recall, the American government is very interested in his whereabouts. He’s a very interesting chap. He led a few plainclothesmen on a merry chase. And of course, we’ll follow anything named Barker. Something is bound to happen.”
“I confess I’ve been going about London asking questions. In fact, I’m paid for it. You may clap the darbies on me, Chief Constable.”
“Sarcastic little fellow, aren’t you? I have half a mind—” He stopped, waiting for me to step in and make some remark. For once I remained silent. Wisdom comes with experience. “I could bring you in on a number of minor charges. However, since we are both working on the same case, I thought we would give it to you. After all, it was your offices they bombed, not ours, thank god. Good luck to you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He lifted his pint and clinked it against mine on the table.
“You’re welcome.”
“I’ve got work to do,” I said, rising.
“Stay out of trouble.”
“I’ll try.”
“Try harder.”
I walked back and entered our office, still thinking about lying. How can one love a profession that causes one to go against one’s own principles?
Jenkins eyed me critically when I returned even more dazed than when I left. He placed a salver beside me with an envelope on it almost as soon as I sat in my chair. I glanced at it, thinking that I wasn’t Barker, and did not deserve the salver. I am a humble workingman. However, I lifted it and cut it open with the Italian dagger the Guv kept on his desk, which survived the bombing. I pulled out the telegram. It read:
Dr Nevil Lewis
Burberry Institution for the Criminally Insane
Matley Bog
Hampshire
Wish to inform you that Dr Pritchard found hanged in his cell this morning STOP Local police are investigating the matter STOP N Lewis
END
I scratched my head. It’s hard to run an enquiry when your suspects are dying one by one.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I bought flowers in Covent Garden. They were not for Rebecca. After the dozen or so bouquets I had sent her it ceased to become a novelty, and she told me to save my money. This bouquet was for Sarah Fletcher, the woman who had nearly lost her life doing what I had asked of her. It was a wonder that I did not have to buy lilies.
She was still in a private room in the Priory of St. John, having been taken there at Barker’s request. Once inside, I sat in a chair near her room and waited for a nurse to come by. When one finally did, I asked if Miss Fletcher was able to receive a visitor. A few minutes later I was invited in.
Both of her eyes were black and the bridge of her nose was swollen. One arm was wrapped in gauze, and the other in a sling. Her hair was combed back severely and looked damp. There was a bottle of laudanum in the nurse’s hand. I suspected they did not keep it within reach of the patient.
“Good morning,” I said, giving the flowers to the nurse, who left to get a vase. “I’m so sorry you were hurt.”
“Don’t,” she answered, waspish to the last. “If you in any way claim that I should not have been where I was, or have done what I did, I shall ask you to leave.”
“I’m sorry that I have not had the opportunity to visit earlier. There have been several developments with the case.”
She closed her eyes and sunk into her pillow. I began to wonder if the laudanum was taking effect. “Tell me all of it. Tell me everything. This place is deadly dull. I cannot hold a book. I am trapped in my own thoughts.”
“Very well,” I answered, settling back in the hard chair, exactly like the one Mrs. Ashleigh had endured for many days. “I would like to consult you, as a colleague. I should like your opinion. I have formed my own, but it is subject to change. Mr. Barker has given me his, but that does not mean that I would find yours less valid.”
“I appreciate that,” she murmured.
I cleared my throat and began to inform her of some of the facts of the case. It took nearly a quarter hour. My natural inclination would have been to make my efforts sound heroic and my deductions sage, but she would have seen through that. When I finished, there was silence in the room for nearly half a minute.
“You’ve had a narrow scrape,” she finally said.
“The beating in the alley?”
“No, with your fiancée when Camille Archer went to her home. For the briefest of minutes she was in real danger. It was a mercy this was Mrs. Archer’s first salvo, or there would be no wedding at all. As for the second event in her home, if she cannot forgive you, she doesn’t deserve you, not that you are a prize. She knew she was about to become an enquiry agent’s wife. She now knows what it is you do as a profession; the worst of it anyway.”
Miss Fletcher was a kind of loofah sponge, rubbing the epidermal layers until one was raw, but the better for the rubbing.
“You would have shielded her from that. Confess.”
“Yes, I would have,” I admitted.
“Don’t. She needs to know. She has a right to know. Mrs. Cowan has a decision to make.”
I considered the matter, and could find no fault with what she said, at least to a point.
“And furthermore, Mr. Barker was right to warn you about his brother,” she continued. “Do not trust him. There’s something going on there that bears investigation. He has no valid reason for following you about. You are not that entertaining.”
I laughed, and a slight smile came to her thin lips.
“Granted,” I said. “Continue.”
“This entire business could be at his instigation.”
“Perhaps, but to what end?”
“We don’t know. It’s possible we may never know. I’m sure he would never tell you. I approve of Mr. Pinkerton’s methods. He has great respect for female operatives, and has made fine use of them. However, he must work with what he has, and some of his agents are or were cattle thieves and train robbers.”
“They are desperate men, but Pinkerton cannot afford to be particular.”
“Precisely.”
“And what of Mrs. Archer?” I asked.
She shifted on her pillow, still in pain.
“Either she is well organized or someone is giving her orders. She changes hotels every morning, always with one of the men along as a bodyguard: a tall fellow with an absurd mustache.”
“Mercier. Yes. There are, or were, two of them. Anatole is dead, not Alphonse. That’s one fewer person helping her. One of them posed as Barker to withdraw from an account.”
“She’s young,” Miss Fletcher said. “That isn’t to say she is incapable of plotting all these machinations.”
“But more likely she’s following after a man, someone like Caleb Barker.”
“Yes.”
“Tell me of your work,” I said. “What happened when you followed Mrs. Archer?”
“I observed her for a few days. Do you know what she was doing?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“She was buying a trousseau!”
“What are you talking about?”
“She was preparing for a wedding.”
“I know what a trousseau is, Miss Fletcher. The question is why would she prepare for a wedding?”
“You are the enquiry agent, Mr. Llewelyn, not I.”
“There isn’t a possibility that she believes she is going to marry me
, is there?” I asked, incredulous.
“She did sign the register ‘Camille Llewelyn.’ Who knows what’s happening in that mind of hers. I don’t know if you noticed it but there is something in her eyes. Dangerous. Possibly even mad. But I digress. She was buying clothes.”
“And she didn’t notice you?”
“No,” she went on, “and that was the problem, you see. Men don’t notice other men, but women notice everything. I suspected she knew she was being followed. I left and went to Mrs. Ashleigh’s house, where, as you know, there was an altercation and I sent Mrs. Ashleigh out the back to go to Mr. Barker’s. I don’t know if the attack I suffered was a result of following Camille Archer or not.”
“What do you remember about the attack, if you are able to talk about it?”
“I was pulled into an alley and set upon.”
“How many men?”
“Two.”
I leaned forward in my chair. “What did they look like?”
“East Enders, rough-looking men. Donkey-fringe haircuts.”
“Part of the Hobson gang, sure enough.”
“And then?”
“I woke up several hours later in the rain, unable to move.”
She closed her eyes again.
The nurse came in with the flowers in a vase and gave me a look, like a constable does when he tells one to move along. She set the vase on a table beside a more lavish arrangement.
“That’s from John,” she said.
“John?”
“Hewitt.”
“Oh, J.M.”
“He’s angry with you, for letting me be injured. He has proposed, you know.”
“Has he?” I asked.
“There are entirely too many weddings afoot. I have no intention of marrying him, but he doesn’t seem to notice. He’s out there somewhere trying to solve your case for you in order to ‘get the blighters that did this.’ Mr. Llewelyn, do you think I could have a drink of that water, please?”
I poured water from a glass pitcher into a tumbler, and raised it to her lips carefully. She sat back again and I returned to my chair.
“He wants me to give up my detective work, as if it were a hobby, like collecting paperweights. He does not believe a woman should be in this profession.”
“He means well,” I said. “He just doesn’t understand you.”
“Mr. Llewelyn, there may be hope for you yet.”
“So what else have you gleaned about Mrs. Archer? What impressions and facts have you collected?”
Miss Fletcher sat up in bed, warming quickly to her subject. “She is a very interesting study. First of all, as you must know, her name is not Archer. I am certain that is an alias.”
“What of her character?”
“She is erratic, self-indulgent, and manic. Quite the flibbertigibbet, and very spoiled. I would say she is on a spree with someone else’s money.”
“I believe I know whose money,” I remarked. “Continue.”
“She flits from hotel to hotel. It took a few days to find her trail, but I have been able to follow her because she sends her growing luggage to each new hotel.”
“Ah.”
“She gorges on sweets. I’ve rarely seen her have an actual meal. She buys herself trinkets and visits old curio shops. She went to a merchant who deals in medical supplies once. I saw her speaking at length to a corset maker. She is quite a spendthrift.”
“Thank you for following her and getting this information. It may prove to be useful.”
“Mr. Llewelyn, there is more. She was in a tearoom stuffing herself with cakes. I was near a window watching her. A waitress dropped a spoon and she practically screamed at her. Everyone in the room reacted to the loss of decorum. She had the poor girl in tears. And then she returned to her tea cakes as if nothing had happened.”
“Do you get the impression that she herself is capable of violence? Was the waitress in any danger, for example? Apart from her being very spoiled, that is?”
“Oh, decidedly. She acts as if she were sweet, but there is something alarming about her, and if she isn’t dangerous, her companion is.”
“Tell me about him. I assume we’re talking about Mr. Mercier.”
“Yes. I’ve tried to decide whether he is her bodyguard or her handler. He watches everyone around her. He’s kept me at my best this week. He’s not a brute. In fact, he’s elegant, but I think he would kill without a moment’s hesitation or concern. He carries a black walking stick that is heavy. I heard it fall and clang once.”
“Yes, I am familiar with it. Excuse me, Miss Fletcher. May I bring you more water or get you anything?”
“No, sir,” she answered, pulling the blanket up to her chin. “But could you do a favor for me?”
“Anything.”
“Could you address me as Fletcher? Think of me as just another detective. I do not wish to be treated differently than anyone else merely because I am a woman.”
“I’ll try. Fletcher. I’m sorry, I interrupted you. Continue your narrative. It’s very interesting.”
“That’s all I have to say about Mr. Mercier, or should I call him Monsieur?”
“What is his Christian name? Anatole?” I asked.
“Alphonse. I heard her call him that. Why?”
“Because his brother, Anatole, is lying in the morgue at Scotland Yard. He was killed in an alleyway by Newgate Prison. I saw the corpse in the body room myself.”
“Are you joking?” she asked, sitting up straighter. “No, you’re not, are you? Were they twins?”
“I’m not sure, but I suspect they resembled each other enough to fool people. One was able to move about as he pleased, as long as the other one stayed behind to maintain an alibi.”
“Very clever,” she said.
If I was going to treat her as a colleague, I would begin by not standing around. I dropped into a chair beside her bed.
“Tell me about Mrs. Ashleigh.”
“We created a schedule between us,” she began. “I arrived at dinner and she fed me. It was a wonderful meal. I stayed dressed and armed all night.”
“Fletcher, I didn’t expect you to work round the clock.”
“I’m a light sleeper, but I returned early to the front room. They came on the third night.”
“What happened, precisely?”
“I was in the front of the house and Mrs. Ashleigh was in the back, talking to the cook about the next day’s meal. When the ruffians burst through the front door, I hid my pistol and confronted them to give Frost enough time to help her out the back entrance. I told them I was Philippa Ashleigh and they believed me. Obviously, they were sent by someone, possibly Mrs. Archer herself.”
“Tell me what happened next.”
“There isn’t much to tell. I didn’t like the look of the fellows, so I started a fight.”
“You started a fight?”
She tried to grin, but her lip was split and swollen. “It was preferable to what I suspect they had in mind.”
I had to smile. “There’s a question Barker always asks me. ‘Gave as well as got?’”
“Oh, rather!”
“Good, then.”
Her smile faded.
“Listen,” she said. “I’m sorry for what I said to you the day I was hired. It was rude. I suppose I was jealous. The nice office, the mansion, the training under a first-class detective. I live in a flat with three other women.”
“The fault was mine,” I told her. “This case was more difficult than I’d anticipated and I suppose I’ve been a bit ill-tempered.”
“I don’t think Mr. Barker made the wrong decision.”
We paused and looked at each other.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you very much.”
I returned to the office and sat in the chair, or tried to. Jenkins delivered another letter on the salver. This was growing tiresome. I took the envelope and cut it open. The message was written in a feminine hand. It said, “Go.”
CH
APTER TWENTY-NINE
I offered the cabman double the fare if he would take me to Camomile Street as swiftly as possible. Mercury he wasn’t, but we arrived soon enough for him to earn his fare. Once on the ground again, I shook out my suit, shot my cuffs, and tried to beat down my tangle of curls. Then I swallowed, said a prayer, and knocked on the door.
Aunt Lydia answered it at once. The maid had been put off, I think. She arched a brow in my direction and I wondered if my actions had made her friend or foe.
“Come inside, young man,” she said, waving me into the house. “You have a good deal to answer for.”
The atmosphere inside seemed oppressive. When invited into the sitting room, I avoided the spot where I had shot two men on that very rug. I removed my hat, and began turning it in my hand, a habit I reveal when I am nervous.
“How is Rebecca?” I asked.
“Do you mean Mrs. Cowan? You shall see for yourself presently.”
My Adam’s apple suddenly felt like a bone lodged in my throat. I did my best to swallow, but coughed instead. She took pity on me and unbent a little.
“What a to-do,” Lydia said, putting a hand lightly on my arm. “None of us slept a wink since it happened. I still cannot believe it.”
“I would take it back if I could,” I assured her. “I was merely trying to defend you both. It was instinct.”
“Thomas, you killed a man!”
“It wasn’t my intent. I was firing in two directions at once. But watching him die at my hand was appalling.”
“Are you involved in such altercations often?”
“No, not often, but occasionally,” I admitted. There was nothing for it but to tell the truth. “I knew that your lives were in danger. That’s why I sent Mr. Briggs on an errand, to watch the very men who burst through the door.”
She looked away, deep in thought. Again I saw Rebecca’s looks in hers.
“Save the rest of your explanation for Rebecca,” she said. “Don’t think I am unsympathetic, Thomas, but it was a blow.”
“Is the wedding canceled, then?”
“It teeters on the brink. What you say in the next half hour shall probably determine it. And you aren’t making matters better by appearing unshaven at the door.”
“My hand was shaking, ma’am. I did not trust myself with a sharp instrument.”