Secret Admirer by Michele Jaffe
She gave a strange, mirthless laugh. “I should imagine it would be slightly harder than this. With all the evidence to overlook.”
“What evidence?”
Keep your whore mouth shut! the voice from her dream screamed in her head. She said, “You know as well as I do that I am not the murderer.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The murderer is a left-handed man with brown hair and a limp.” She said it as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
“What?”
“It was clear just looking around the place where Curtis’s body was.”
“Explain.”
“You told me that only you and your assistant, Tom, had gone down the hallway. But there were three sets of footprints leading away from where Curtis was killed. And one of them was heavier on the left side than on the right, showing the man had a limp.”
“Left side. That is how you know he is left-handed?”
Her eyes narrowed, like she suspected he was putting her on, but she continued her explanation. “No. I suspected it from the way the blindfold was knotted, and then I saw the handprint. On the wall. It was of a right hand, and Curtis had one finger shorter than the others on the right hand, so it couldn’t have been his. From the angle, it looked like it was made when the killer was steadying himself while he—while he leaned over the body. Since it was of his right hand, he must have been using his left.”
“And the hair color?”
“Didn’t you see the brown hairs caught in the boards above where you must have found the body? The killer must have leaned against them, hard, and some of his hair came out. Certainly you noticed this, too. It was all there, in plain sight.”
It is not what you take away that matters, it is what you leave behind.
Staged. That was what the crime scene had felt like, Lawrence realized. Like it was somehow planned. To lead him to certain conclusions about the murderer. Just like her behavior here. His eyes went back to her white knuckles, the only part of her performance she seemed unable to control. “That is very clever but—”
A loud knocking on the door interrupted him, followed by Tom bursting in, his face red. “You are wanted at your office, sir. Urgent.”
Tuesday could have kissed Tom for the effect this news had on Lawrence. He was on his feet and at the door—his back to the painting—in an instant. With his fingers on the handle he said, “Tom, did you come with the guards?”
“Yes sir. They are right behind me.” Two large men each armed with a sword entered the room then.
“Excellent. I want you two to insure that Lady Arlington does not leave this room.”
The urge for kissing left Tuesday. “Are you imprisoning me in my own home?”
Lawrence turned to face her. “Would you prefer Newgate?”
“Newgate? On what charge?”
“Murder, Lady Arlington. Good day.”
“Murder? But I told you! I am not—You are going to be sorry for this, Mr. Pickering. You are going to owe me an enormous apology.”
“Feel free to wait for it.” And then he was gone. She stood facing the two guards and listened to Lawrence’s footsteps recede down the hall.
Ha ha ha, they seemed to say.
She walked over and slammed the door behind him.
It was then, as she faced the closed door, that it hit her. Curtis was gone. Curtis was never ever going to walk through the door again. He was never going to come home. He was never coming back to her. The waiting was over.
Her hand reached behind her for something to lean on, and not finding anything, she stumbled slightly. She felt drunk, light-headed, dizzy. Black spots flickered in front of her eyes. Blindly she moved to her work table and set the box down with an accidental jerk that sent her brushes careening to the floor. Then, guiding herself with her hand, she crossed the room toward the easel with the painting on it. The painting someone had deliberately left there for her to see. The painting of Curtis’s last resting place.
No! This could not be happening. Her mind fought for ways to deny it, deny the morning, the dreams, her failed marriage, but there were none.
She looked at the painting and knew there could be only one conclusion: the killer had been in her room. And he had wanted to be sure she knew it. Leaving the gift, the macabre box, was not enough. He left the painting out so that the evidence of their collaboration—
my Heart is your Heart is my Heart is your Heart is
—their inescapable union, would be in plain view.
With fingers she fought to keep steady she lifted the picture and carried it to her bed. Using the canopy to screen her from the direct observation of the guards, she leaned over and fumbled around alongside the wall for a moment, biting her lip. When she withdrew her hand she held a parcel that had been tied together with a tattered silver satin ribbon.
She untied the bow, opened the makeshift portfolio, and slipped the painting back inside. But even as she did, she heard the unmistakable voice whispering, You are mine now, Tuesday. Mine.
Chapter 8
“That is Salome. And Susannah,” the man said. “And over here, Eve and Delilah. I have all the temptresses.”
Grub Collins wiped the back of his neck with his sleeve and nodded at the four gold cages politely. “Nice birds,” he said.
“Oh yes, they are,” their owner agreed. “You have no idea. Do you know what Salome did this morning?”
Grub Collins could hardly guess, nor did he much care. What he cared about was finishing up this last visit and getting down to the tavern below where it was cool. And where he could enjoy a tankard of ale and the sight of Kate North’s bodice at the same time. “She came and danced on my face!” the little man announced gleefully.
Grub eyed the bird. There were a few birds of a different, ah, breed who he would gladly have dancing on his face, but the scrawny black one in the cage did not interest him in the least. “Must have been nice,” he said noncommittally. The man spent too much time with his birds, that was a fact.
“Actually, to tell you the truth—” the man got confidential, cocking his head like a sparrow, “—it hurt a bit. Don’t tell her, though, it will make her ever so sad. But I finally had to get up and put her in her cage. That is when I saw him.”
That grabbed Grub’s attention. “Who would that be?”
“Big Joe. The mean cat who terrorizes the neighborhood. Even the dogs are afraid of him.”
“Must be quite a cat,” Grub said, not as politely as he might have. He did not take disappointment well and he had been sure this man was about to reveal having seen something useful. Like the killer. Not a damn mouse-eater.
“Oh yes. Usually he stays in that abandoned house and leaves us alone, doesn’t he—” this was addressed to the birds, who all began to twitter deafeningly, “—but he must have left when the man went in.”
Grub stopped hearing the birds. “What man?”
“The man who was in the alley last night. Skulking, that is what he was doing. Then, when I got up to put Salome back in her cage, I saw him going into the abandoned house.”
“Did you happen to catch a glimpse of him?”
The little man had reached into one of the cages and removed a small red bird, whose beak he was kissing. “More than a glimpse, seeing how he was down in the alley, practically outside my window all day. I could have used less of him. The ladies did not like him one bit. Did you Susannah?” This addressed to the bird again.
Grub cleared his throat. “What did he look like?”
The little man gazed at Grub over the head of the red bird as if surprised to see him still there. “Look like? Oh. I don’t know. A man. With dark hair. And he walked with a limp. I noticed because Eve has a slight limp, you can see it from how she is standing, and I am always curious—”
For the first time that afternoon, Grub wanted to smile, but he knew better. “You sure about that? Dark hair and a limp?
“Oh yes. Quite sure.”
“Interesting. See anyone else?”
The man thought for a moment. “No. It is very quiet here.”
“Ah well. Thank you, Mister—?”
“Marston,” the little man supplied helpfully. “Albert Marston.”
“Mr. Marston. You have been extremely helpful. Will you be in later today if the boys or I have any other questions?”
“Oh, I am always in. Where would I go? The ladies need me. Don’t you my precious ones?” The birds all began to squawk in unison, and Grub headed hastily for the stairs.
He should probably rush right back to Pickering Hall and tell his boss the good news, but didn’t a man deserve a reward? Besides, what difference would a few minutes on Kate’s bosom make? He felt positively triumphant. It had worked. How his Lordship had hit on the exact description of the killer so quickly was a mystery to him, but he was not really surprised. He’d spent some time studying his boss and knew that overestimating him was pretty much impossible. Like every member of Lawrence Pickering’s staff, Grub Collins regarded his boss as a sort of god—omnipotent, omniscient, and invulnerable.
Almost, anyway.
The man who had introduced himself as Albert Marston watched Grub saunter down the alley toward several of his colleagues, and frowned. There was something—
Ah, never mind. Turning from the window, he reached into Susannah’s cage and adjusted the pebbles on the bottom for a moment. When they were exactly even, he slipped her back in and stepped away, murmuring, “The ladies always need me.”
Chapter 9
Lawrence stared at the gently lit windows across the street, tossing the gold coin in his hand and reviewing the events of the day.
She was innocent. He tossed the coin.
Heads.
She was guilty.
She was, according to her neighbors, the sweetest, most docile creature on the planet.
She was, according to the reports he had seen that day, the most dangerous woman he had ever encountered. He had sent two men to interview her: one had come back with a story about her being a Portuguese countess; the other with her having a twin sister who was locked in a tower by an evil Spanish count and needed desperately to be rescued. Both had believed her entirely. When he sent a third man she had told him innocently that no one had specified that the answers to the questions needed to be true, only true sounding, and her life was so dull she did not want to bore them. Didn’t he think being a Portuguese countess was much more interesting? Did he know that in France they had special locks that bit the hands off of people found trying to pick them?
All three of them came back talking about what a sweet, docile creature she was. They had all been fired.
Miles Loredan, Viscount Dearbourn and Lord High Commissioner for the Security of England, had looked across his desk at his friend earlier that day. “So what you are saying is that you don’t like her much.”
“No. What I am saying is that unless we find a way to make her work with us, I am not going to have any staff left.”
“Sounds like a puzzle. Just your thing. According to the news sheets, you kept sane in that Spanish prison by doing puzzles. Puzzles and riddles. You love them.”
Lawrence grunted. “You know as well as I do that was all made up—probably better than I do, since you wrote it.”
One small part of Miles’s work during the war with Spain had been to make sure the Spanish knew only what the English wanted them to, which often meant well-placed stories in the daily news sheets. But part of what Miles had caused to be published about Lawrence’s time in Spanish prisons was true. Lawrence had stayed sane when locked in solitary confinement not by solving hard mathematical problems and logical conundrums, but by dreaming up an escape plan. An escape plan so perfect that it allowed him to evacuate two hundred British soldiers and half the Spanish underground with the loss of only three men. The Spanish still didn’t know how he did it, but thanks to Miles’s efforts, they assumed it had something to do with isosceles triangles or Plato, or both.
The two men were meeting in Miles’s secret offices, on the attic floor of his London town house. Miles’s occupation as the Lord High Commissioner was a national secret, known to almost no one, as was Lawrence’s position as one of his top men. Although most of the population of England would never be aware of it, the success of the English war effort against Spain could almost exclusively be laid at the feet of these two men. And if the frown on Lawrence’s face was anything to go by, he would rather have been battling the entire kingdom of Spain than Lady Tuesday Arlington.
Miles studied the ruby red wine in his glass for a moment, then said, “Does she have something to do with the smuggling?”
“I am almost positive of it. The way she reacted to my questions—it was strange.”
“Yet you do not think she did the murder? Despite the fact that you threatened to have her arrested for it? And despite the fact that she asked you about evidence at the crime scene that she should not have known existed?”
“I just threatened her with arrest to make her nervous, you know that as well as I do. As to her knowing about the rose petals—that was probably just a coincidence,” Lawrence said, shrugging it off, to Miles’s utter stupefaction.
“Have you started drinking again? You don’t believe in coincidences.”
In reply, Lawrence gulped down the remainder of his glass of lemonade. “Anyway, we found a witness. The killer appears to be a left-handed man with brown hair and a limp.”
“How did you find him?”
“Lucky, I guess.” Miles openly gaped at him, but Lawrence just went on. “And they found some brown hair both at the crime scene and clutched in the victim’s hand. But even with this, we aren’t anything like close to catching him. I am working on the assumption that the murder and the smuggling are related. Lady Tuesday certainly has information about one of them, if not both, and I need to know what it is.”
“Fine. Why don’t I send some of my men to question her? They have all had special training and—”
“I don’t think it will work and I would not ask you to risk it. There is something about her, something that exudes from her. Wherever she is, people behave insanely.”
“Insanely?”
“Yes.” Lawrence made it definite, entirely unaware of the amusement in his friend’s voice.
“I see. So we need to learn what information she has without interrogating her.”
“Precisely.”
“Then we have to make her think she is working with us. That our goals are the same. Let her ask the questions rather than us. And then, from what she asks, we will be able to figure out what she is thinking and, hopefully, what she knows.”
“That is an excellent plan,” Lawrence said with a touch too much admiration.
Miles eyed him closely. “It was your plan. You had it in mind before you came here.”
“No,” Lawrence said, shaking his head slowly. “It was all your idea.”
Miles stared at him for a moment, then put his head back and laughed. It was an extremely rare occurrence those days. “I see. She is as fond of you as you are of her.”
“Fonder. If I might suggest, just as an adjunct to your plan, that the way it works is you assign me to stay with her, at all times, for her protection. I will make it clear that I find the assignment displeasing, which will cause her to leap at it.”
“You just happened to come up with this spur of the moment, sitting right here.”
“Yes.” Lawrence nodded feverishly.
“Liar.” There were only five men in the world who could call Lawrence a liar without risking death. Fortunately Miles was one of them. He sighed. “What if you are right about her not being a killer but wrong about how to motivate her? What if she really is a nice, sweet woma—” Lawrence’s snort interrupted Miles. “Fine. She is not sweet. But what if she doesn’t leap on the opportunity
“Then you threaten her. Subtly—” Lawrence added as Miles began shaking his head, “—threaten her subtly with public exposure. Feel free to phrase it however you wish. She will do anything to keep her name from being bandied about because it will upset her father.”
“What are you not telling me, Lawrence?”
“Nothing.”
Miles knew better than to call Lawrence a liar twice, which was what Lawrence was banking on. “I’ll help you,” Miles said finally, “but I don’t like it. I’m only doing it because I want to meet the sole woman in London not in love with Lawrence Pickering.” Then, with a hint of a frown: “I hope you know what you are doing, Lawrence.”
“I do,” Lawrence had assured him with a smile, like he meant it.
Now, eight hours later, stationed outside her window to keep an eye on her, he tossed the coin. Do I?
Do I have any idea what the hell I am doing? What I am doing here in London? What I am doing in this charade where I pretend to be a hero? What I am doing every single day I wake up when I should be dead? Do I—
Despite the heat of the summer night, his right shoulder suddenly got very cold. Then his arm. Then his hand, until he could not feel his fingers. No, he commanded himself as his fingers went totally numb.
She needs you, Lawrence, my friend.
He pried open the freezing fingers of his hand and flexed them. For a moment he stared at the coin lying on his palm, clammy now; then, despite the pain, he made himself toss it into the air and catch it overhand: He put on his smile.
He was just fine. He knew what he was doing.
He looked at his knuckles, still white from the strain, and remembered Tuesday’s earlier that day. She needs you he heard again in his head, and frowned. Since his return from Spain, his mind seemed to operate on two distinct and entirely separate levels, one which was sane and the other—the one sending him this message—which was absolutely untrustworthy.
He had never met a woman who needed him less than Lady Tuesday Arlington. Or who interested him less.