CHAPTER ONE
ARMED WITH LACE, RUFFLES, rice powder, a hint of rouge, and a pistol in her pocket, Henry stepped into the smoky pub. The strange bounce of her heat-pressed curls caught the edge of her vision, distracting her. Her stomach churned mightily as she scanned the taproom for her prey.
He was there.
Her breath escaped, yet her relief was short lived.
He sat alone at a dark wood table meant to seat four or more, while most of the other seats were taken by working men. A plate at his elbow contained two slices of barely touched roast beef, a heap of mashed potatoes and a tangle of string beans. A newspaper and a couple of books lay open beside his plate, more in front of him than the meal. He stabbed the string beans with his fork, brought them to his mouth, then set down the fork and picked up a pencil.
He was the detective investigating the murder that she’d sworn to her editor she knew things about that no one else did. Even with her knowledge that there was a murder long before anyone else, the publisher hadn’t wanted to assign the story to a woman. But as she’d promised, their newspaper had scored a major coup by revealing the name of the victim and her aristocrat protector’s name before any of the other papers.
Now she had to prove her worthiness to continue to be a front page reporter. Otherwise she’d be writing about shoes forever—not that she didn’t love her shoes. But shoes, fashion, and cleaning tips were the last things Henry wanted to write about. She wanted to be a serious news reporter just like the rest of her male peers, not shuffled into a petticoat corner writing about fluff.
But that wasn’t the real reason that she wanted this story. This one was personal. Other reporters might not see how deep it ran or be scared off by the lofty name of the prime suspect. But she was determined to get this heinous murderer off the streets, no matter what it took. The man had destroyed too many lives already. More lives than most realized. He’d broken her family and might as well have wielded the razor that took her sister’s life and broken her mother’s heart.
Henry steeled herself with a deep breath. She desperately needed a new lead to follow. The best place to get new information would be from the Scotland Yard investigator himself. But Inspector Barnabas Harlow refused to talk to any member of the fourth estate. She’d watched other reporters ask him questions and be defeated by a cold look and stony silence. She was left with no choice but to question him without revealing he was being interviewed.
The inspector flattened the newspaper beside his plate and scowled at it, which probably said everything he felt about reporters like her.
Doing her job was so much easier when she just went straight up to a person, identified herself, and started questioning him or her. But Inspector Harlow wouldn’t give her so much as the time if he thought she was a reporter. What she needed to do was make him think an encounter was his idea.
Someone bumped her from behind.
The pub was filling with a Saturday night crowd and men started to look her up and down. Unattached women just didn’t show up in pubs alone. After looking around the room as if she were trying to find someone, she pulled out her watch and checked the time. Then she scanned around again as if impatient that an imaginary someone were late.
Her gaze kept returning to the detective. He’d occasionally take a bite or drink. Mostly he thumbed through one book or made notes in the other. What she wouldn’t give to get her hands on that notebook.
He never once looked at her.
How could an inspector be so oblivious? She couldn’t stand in the doorway all night waiting for him to notice her. So she should pretend she was meeting friends. Huffing out, she spied a couple of women at the counter. Maybe she knew them. She picked her way through the press of clerks, laborers, and off-duty servants. She rebuffed a couple of offers to buy her a drink. She regretted having to refuse, but if she allowed it, the buyer might think he had bought not just a drink, but her time and attention.
“Ladies, may I join you?” she asked the women at the counter.
The nearest turned on her stool and looked Henry up and down. Two bright spots of rouge colored her sagging cheeks, but it didn’t really substitute for the bloom of youth. She didn’t look the least bit respectable. No doubt, she was a working woman of another sort. Henry’s heart fell like a stone through her stomach.
“Dearie, are you sure you want to?”
“I do.” Henry smiled brightly ignoring the woman’s warning and the stab of dismay at the woman’s appearance. From the back she could have been a servant or any regular shop woman. Henry had thought there might be one or two other young women from the neighborhood, but there weren’t. But she wasn’t going to miss this opportunity just because there was no one suitable to sit with. “Do you mind terribly?”
The woman shrugged. “Suit yourself.”
“Just don’t keep all the men to yourself,” said the other woman, who seemed to have more than the usual allotment of teeth.
“I’m only here to meet one man.” She glanced over her shoulder at the man who still hadn’t seemed to register her presence. “I’ve business with him.”
She ordered ale and asked the women if they frequented the pub. They did. Her attention was only half on the women, who seemed to be well on their way to gin-soaked merriment. She carried on a half-hearted conversation with them.
Taking a sip from her tankard, she leaned to watch Inspector Harlow. A tan plaid jacket stretched over broad shoulders. His shoes were shiny and well kept. You could tell a lot about people by their shoes. Hers with their two and a half inch heels might suggest she didn’t like how short she was and she had a secret interest in being fashionable—not that she let it show. She risked a direct look at him.
His head jerked as if something had distracted him. She glanced toward the door trying to see if someone had entered. No one new had appeared.
Minutes ticked by and he never met her gaze. She was going to have to approach him or he’d get away without a single question asked.
“Do you know if that man from Scotland Yard comes here often?” she nodded subtly toward Harlow.
“Only since that poor woman was found with her throat slit,” the toothy woman confided. “An inspector, he is. He asked us if we’d seen the earl, ordinary like, Monday night.”
Monday night? He must know when Jane Redding was murdered. Well, that was something. “Did you?”
They shook their heads, but they exchanged a look. They knew something. She made a mental note. But she needed to make her move on the inspector before he finished his meal and left. Finding opportunities to interview the women further would be easier than getting another shot at Harlow.
“I’m going to ask him if he plans to let the earl get away with it,” Henry said.
Both the women rolled their eyes.
“He won’t never arrest a toff for that murder,” said the first woman.
“Them’s the kind what always gets away with things like that,” said the second.
Not if she could do something about it. Henry grimaced. After her investigation on the deaths of climbing boys in the chimneys of great houses where they refused to put out the fires, she knew that nobs often got away with loss of life when they shouldn’t. Nobs got away with all kinds of destruction of small people, and nothing was ever done about it.
She finished her ale and set the tankard down on the counter with a thump. Walking over to his table, her curls didn’t have as much bounce as they’d had when she’d entered the pub. At least they weren’t distracting her anymore.
It occurred to her as she stood at his elbow, she should have thought up a new plan before approaching him. Well, she’d come up with something. A concerned neighbor was close enough to the truth. “They say you’re the detective working on the Jane Redding murder.”
His eyebrows drew together for a second before he looked at her. His light brown hair had too much pomade on it, and he obviously never had a problem with his hair refusing to hold a curl—lucky rotter. His response was so slow in coming she wanted to shake him.
“I am,” he said and leaned back in his seat, his head tilted to the side as if waiting for her to show her hand.
“Do you plan to arrest the earl soon?” she blurted and had to stop herself from rolling her eyes. She was supposed to sound like a concerned citizen, not a dogged reporter. “I don’t know if any woman is safe while he is free.”
“No safer than they were before the murder,” he answered in an impassive tone.
“But most of the women who would normally be here on a Saturday night have stayed home.” She gestured around the pub where men outnumbered women by ten to one. “Women are afraid to step out after dark by themselves.”
“No woman should walk the streets alone.” His eyes narrowed. “After dark.”
“Unfortunately it is unavoidable at times.” In the winter months, she often didn’t leave the newspaper offices until after dark. Asking a coworker to escort her home would be tantamount to admitting a woman shouldn’t do the work.
“You should be careful.” He wiped his fingers on his napkin. “I’d hate to have to investigate a crime against your person.”
His chivalry surprised her and made a little flutter in her stomach go off. “Oh, I always take care when I’m out.”
He paused again, his gaze assessing. “I’m sure you do. But I’ve sent too many women to the coroner who’ve made the mistake of thinking they can defend themselves against someone bigger and stronger.”
She widened her eyes. “What woman would try to go toe to toe with a man?”—besides her—“That would be foolish.”
“Exactly. Better to not risk being without an escort,” he said.
Easy for him to say. He wasn’t the one who needed to make arrangements with others to go anywhere or do anything. Women were a lot less fragile than men believed. The frustration of the constant battle she fought to be taken seriously welled up into a tight knot in her neck. Women weren’t supposed to work in men’s fields because they were inferior in all ways. Supposedly, women needed protection and shielding from the rougher things in life. But that just reminded her that if he was like half the male population and thought she was brainless, she could take advantage of that. “Well, I avoid the earl as if he carried the plague.”
“He’s the last person you should be worried about.” He picked up his fork as if she’d been dismissed.“You aren’t the earl’s type.”
She took a stiff breath. Was that an insult that she wasn’t up to the earl’s standards? Admittedly, her figure was bordering on plump in spite of her walking everywhere and forgoing sweets. Her cheeks were far too chubby. Plus she was cursed with brown hair that refused to do anything other than fall flat against her skull.
She swallowed her pride with a healthy mental poke. Her feelings mattered not one whit. She was here as a reporter, no matter that she’d dressed to look as unlike a reporter as possible. “You’re right. I’m not the earl’s type. Nor would I want to be. Not since his type seems to disappear with alarming regularity.”
He tilted his head. “What do you mean?”
His mistresses. His wife. Ah, now she had him interested. “May I sit?”
He angled his silverware across the lower quarter of the plate. “Just so you know, I won’t pay for your services.”
“Wh-What?” A jolt so strong she nearly vibrated ran through her. “Do I look like a whore?”
Whores weren’t the current earl’s type. Although when she tried to fix upon a unifying detail about his parade of paramours, she could not think of anything they had in common.
The inspector raised his gaze and examined her. “No, but you’ve been trying to catch my attention this last half-hour.”
Her breath left with a dizzying fastness—or she’d laced her corset too tight. He was far more observant than she’d thought. He’d probably noticed the two women at the counter were less than they should be. Had he seen her following him in the last few days?
She wanted to slink away, but she needed this interview too badly to just leave. She just had to brazen it out. She forced a small smile. “I thought you might have been the man my friend arranged for me to meet.”
He leaned back and folded his arms, a corner of his mouth turning slightly up. “No.”
“Then when I heard you were the inspector investigating Mrs. Redding’s murder, I wondered if I should let you know that until a year ago, I lived only a few houses from the earl’s—er—place.” What did one call a house maintained strictly to accommodate paramours? “I might be able to tell you things.”
“Sit. Tell me about these women you think disappeared.” He gestured to the other bench. “Unless this gentleman you’re meeting won’t like it.”
She glanced to the door and tightened her mouth. “I guess he is far too late to expect him to show up now.”
“His loss,” offered the inspector.
Warmth crept under her cheeks at his offhand compliment. She tried to get control of her wayward pleasure at being flattered. The inspector wasn’t a flamboyant man, but there was a pleasing regularity to his features, strong jaw, intelligent brown eyes that held just a glimmer of amusement. He was probably laughing at her.
“Well, it is likely my fault.” It was a good practice to set people at ease by admitting a failing. She shrugged or tried to. Her shoulders went up in an uneven cadence. “I was detained. He may have given up on me before I got here.”
“Ah.” His mouth twisted to the side in a gesture of skepticism.
Her stomach lurched. She wasn’t certain he believed her. In any case she needed to flirt the truth out of him, not pile lie upon lie about why she was here. While she wasn’t a woman that attracted men by the bucketful, she had her assets, and she had spiffed up. She leaned forward so the lace yoke of her dress would allow a glimpse at the shadow between her breasts. She gestured at his books. “Do you know about all the other women?”
While his attention was on her chest, she tried to read his scratches in the notebook.
He closed the books and stacked the notebook on top of an almanac. “You know it is not uncommon for a man to end his relationships with his mistresses and send them on their way. Do you know anything that would indicate something else happened?”
“I just know that I was friends with Kathy and then one day she was gone with no warning and I’ve never heard from her since.” Although to call her acquaintance with Kathy a friendship might be a stretch. She’d had a few friendly conversations with her as they tended to run into each other in some of the neighborhood shops. Still, she had been concerned about her abrupt disappearance.
His eyes narrowed. “Who is Kathy?”
“Kathy Carter. The woman who lived in the house before Jane Redding. There were others.”
She leaned forward and the inspector’s eyes dipped. Ah, the lace across her bosom was effective. A shaft of awareness ran through her. But she jerked her thoughts back to the business at hand. It was one thing to distract him, another entirely to allow herself to be distracted. “How would anyone have known that Redding was murdered if her body hadn’t caught in the sewer? She could have washed out to sea and...”
His intense gaze had her biting her lips.
“It just seemed like they all dropped off the face of the earth.” She wasn’t supposed to be supplying him with answers, she was supposed to be getting information out of him. “I reported Kathy missing, but I never heard if the police ever found her.”
He opened his notebook to a blank page. “What is your name, Miss?”
“Brown. Henry Brown.”
He quirked an eyebrow at her, but wrote down her name in his notebook. Below it he wrote Kathy Carter. “Did you know Mrs. Redding?”
Her gaze jerked up. She shook her head. “I don’t think anyone did.”
“The staff?”
“Not well. They were...uh...not terribly welcome in the neighborhood.” They hadn’t particularly liked her either after what she’d said about them in a scandal sheet.
He exhaled and his mouth twisted to the side as if he was rather disappointed in her offerings. His gaze darted to the two prostitutes sitting at the counter. “What did you plan on doing with the person you were supposed to meet?” he asked.
She blinked three times and then wondered at it. More lies to provide an excuse for why she was here. She’d thought they’d moved past where she had to make up things. “I thought we’d chat and see if we liked each other enough to meet again. Perhaps you’d like to fill in.”
“Not now.” He raised his hand for his ticket. “I’m leaving shortly.”
Which left her flustered. But she had a job to do and she was used to men thinking she was not for them—they thought she was far too outspoken for a female and didn’t know her place. Not that she was trying to find a husband. “Well, that’s all right. There is no point in me staying longer anyway. Perhaps I could prevail on you to escort me to the omnibus stop that will take me home. I would be safe walking with you, wouldn’t I?”
His mouth tightened.
“I don’t want to keep you from anything. I can walk alone.” She tried her best to appear helpless and in need of protection. Usually she could make a man back off with a glare, but if that failed her, the pistol was loaded. “Although I had expected the man I was meeting to see me home.”
He squinted at her. “It’s dark tonight.”
That wasn’t an answer.
Her breath tickled her throat and her heart stutter-stepped. He intended to leave without her, and she had to ask him some pertinent questions or find a way to spend more time with him. “Do you think you’re getting close to solving the murder?”
“You and half the city have already decided the guilty party.” He tapped the newspaper beside his plate. The Times. Not the Southwark Chronicle, which she wrote for.
All the London newspapers were questioning the earl’s guilt thanks to her breaking the story and tipping them off to Coleraine’s involvement. Although none of the other papers had brought up the rest of the missing women. Yet.
“I don’t know how they found out about the earl’s connection to the victim so quickly or why they are all but saying he killed her.”
An uncomfortable jolt ran through her. Had he been trying to shield the earl? She squirmed. “He seems the most likely culprit.”
“Don’t take what is written in the newspapers as gospel.”
She swallowed her protest. Accuracy in what she wrote was a point of pride—and quite literally her job was contingent on factual copy. As a female doing a man’s job, they could dismiss her for any little error. She made sure she had none. But she needed to steer him away from thinking about newspapers or he’d stop talking. Did the inspector know something that made him doubt the earl’s guilt? “So do you just need more evidence?”
He rolled his eyes. “I need all the facts before I draw conclusions.”
Had he not seen enough to conclude the Earl of Coleraine was guilty of murdering his mistress? What other explanation was there for a woman murdered in the middle of the night at her lover’s second London house? Besides where were all the other missing women? “Isn’t it known she was murdered in the garden of the house where she lived?”
“I’m not at liberty to discuss—”
“I saw the blood on the fence.” A lot of blood, in a scalloped pattern she’d seen before. Her voice wavered. “No one could have bled that much and lived.”
“How did you see the fence?” Inspector Harlow asked sharply.
“I still live in the neighborhood.” She grimaced. “I saw the workers and I went to see what they were working on.”
His eyes turned speculative.
An unusual amount of activity around the earl’s house had drawn her attention, but not one person had said anything about Mrs. Redding being missing. She’d questioned the three former whores the earl employed as servants. Their lack of answers had been just as telling and it had left her with a sick feeling.
That had been on Tuesday. Coleraine’s steward had ordered the entire section of wooden fencing removed. That man had been incredibly closed mouth, too. Henry had never before encountered so many people unwilling to talk. She’d known there was a big story brewing, but her editor hadn’t allowed her to write it until the body was found on Thursday. Friday morning her story ran naming Jane Redding as the victim, even though the police hadn’t admitted as much yet. Her thoughts froze as it occurred to her—the inspector might not have seen the blood on the wood. “Did you know about the fence?”
“I have it,” he said grimly.
“That was where she was killed, in the garden behind the house?” Where her blood had sprayed the fence. Henry’s mind went spinning back to seeing her sister in the tub, blood on the walls in the same wavelike pattern. Their father’s old razor had been on the floor.
Her chest squeezed tight. She blamed Coleraine for Rachel’s death, too.
A clog in her throat threatened to rob Henry of her voice. Her vision turned watery. She rubbed the grain of the table and pushed away the memories of her sister’s untimely death. She was as responsible as Coleraine for deserting Rachel, knowing she had been despondent, but this wasn’t about Rachel. Nothing would be gained by exposing his role in her sister’s death. But there was a murdered woman, perhaps many.
“I knew when the body was found that it had to be Redding’s.”
His eyes narrowed. “You were there.”
“Wh-what?” Goodness gracious, he wasn’t accusing her of murder was he? “I wasn’t there.”
“When we pulled her body out of the sewer.” He tilted his head to the side. “You were there.”
Her stomach tumbled like a drunken acrobat. “I told you, I live close. A lot of the people from nearby were there.”
Did he remember she had questioned other onlookers and had taken notes? He’d seemed fairly occupied and she hadn’t thought he’d noticed her—just as she hadn’t thought he noticed her earlier when she was sitting at the counter. He was canny. Aware of things he didn’t seem to be paying any mind to.
She would have thought he was entirely focused on the body as he walked around it, then knelt and twitched down the stained nightgown that exposed the woman’s mottled calves. Then he’d gently scraped her tangled hair away from her face.
One of the other reporters speculated the inspector was looking for injuries. She almost wondered if he wasn’t trying to restore the dead woman’s dignity to her, but then the killing wound to her neck had been exposed. Still, his gentleness with a woman who was clearly beyond feeling had made him seem human and not the cold and distant detective. But somehow during his intense observation of the body, before he’d covered it with a sheet, he must have seen her in the crowd.
The barmaid gave him his tab and he paid it.
“I’m headed that direction.” He scooped the books off the table, fit them in a broad side pocket in his overcoat, stood and pushed his arm into a sleeve. “If you would like me to escort you home, you needn’t ride the omni if you don’t want.”
She had to duck her head to hide her pleased smile.