The front door to No. 45 was magically opened from the inside just as Caledonia ran up the front step. “Are the constables already here, Withers?”

Toby didn’t wait for either Caledonia or the butler, but started for the stair. “Where is her room—where did your mother keep her jewels?”

“In here.” Lady Balfour answered his question from the top of the stair. “Thank you for coming so soon.”

“Show me.” Toby didn’t waste time on preliminaries—he reckoned he had less than ten minutes before the constabulary arrived.

“On the dressing table, there.” Lady Balfour pointed to a small table topped with a folding mirror. “I usually have my dresser lock them away in the strong box, but last night I thought it was enough to wrap the jewels I’d worn in their small cases and bags, and put them away in the drawers.”

“Was anything else stolen? Did they take only your jewels, or were any of Caledonia’s stolen as well?”

“Just mine, I think.”

“Be careful what you tell him, Mama!” Caledonia appeared at the door still in her coat and night dress. “I’m not quite sure if he isn’t playing us all for fools.”

“Is he?” The viscountess was remarkably composed for a woman who had lost her finest jewels. “If he is, what is he doing here now?”

“I don’t know. Angling for more information, certainly. Perhaps even returning to the scene of the crime in triumph,” her daughter answered while throwing looks like daggers his way.

“He doesn’t look triumphant to me,” the viscountess remarked. “He looks as if he’s seen a ghost.”

“Indeed.” Toby could only agree with her. “The ghost of my somehow not-forgotten past. Where does this door lead—”

He answered his own question by opening the curtained door onto a small balcony that faced the back garden—the dark side of the house, where they wouldn’t be seen. “They came over the roof and down onto this balcony. I take it the door wasn’t locked?”

“It’s some forty feet above the ground.” The viscountess’s tone told him she’d never considered the possibility that anyone could enter the house from such a height.

“At least,” he agreed. “It was neatly done, I’ll give him that.”

“Just as neatly done as you’ll be the moment the constable arrives,” Caledonia insisted. “I told Withers to send for them before I went to the inn. So you’d better make a run for it.”

“My dear Caledonia, I never ‘run for it.’ Or more correctly, I never, while I was a professional, ever ran for it. I was a professional—I simply disappeared.”

“Well, I shan’t prevent you from doing so now.” She snatched up the fireplace poker and waved it in his direction before she was forced to retreat to the bedchamber door in response to the sound of heavy tramping feet below. “Go on! If they find you, they’ll say they’ve got you red-handed.”

“My dear Caledonia. I am not red-handed because I haven’t got— Oh, bloody never mind.” And because Toby was still a professional, he disappeared himself out onto the balcony and up the iron railing and onto the roof before the constabulary had even gained the top of the stairs.

He lay flat, invisible against the gray slate of the roof tiles and the soot-covered chimney piece, and listened as a breathless male voice asked, “Where is he?”

“The thief? Gone before I woke,” the viscountess asserted. “Be a lamb, Cally, and fetch my dresser, and my smelling salts. And take those men out of here so I might make myself presentable enough to deal with them.”

Below, a door swiftly closed. And a soft female voice swore, “Bloody hell. Mama, you’ll never make a convincing liar—the book you’re pretending to read is upside down.”

* * *

Toby laid low for the next few days—with the constabulary and the Runners searching everywhere from Mayfair to Scotland for him, and Mrs. Caledonia Bowmont no longer quite so acutely fascinated by him, he kept quietly to himself, returning to Isleworth to live invisibly out of his own boathouse on the river, hiding in plain sight by fishing every day.

But his nights were taken by constant vigilance—during which he discovered several things. And several enemies.

One of whom was not Arthur Balfour, who came quietly to Isleworth to confirm a few things Toby was pleased to know. “The viscountess has been steadfast that it wasn’t you. Swore out a formal complaint in which she most particularly insisted that the thief was not Tobias McTavish.”

“How kind.” Arthur did not offer what the viscountess’s daughter’s formal complaint might have been, nor did Toby ask. “You can tell your lovely step-mama privately that she is quite right. And I’m going to prove it.”

“How?”

“I’ve been watching the Meecham mansion—and so has someone else. I’ve felt their presence in the night—heard them moving on the adjacent rooftops, trying to get closer, but not coming any closer because they know that I’m there.”

“So what’s going to happen?”

“They are going to rob it anyway—preferably over my dead body.”

“What?”

“They know I’m there, so are going to have to go through me to do so—the easiest way is to try to kill me.”

“How are you going to stop them? You are going to stop them, aren’t you?”

“Oh, I’ll try—I’ve gone to too much trouble to stay alive to roll over like a good dog now. But I need help—I need you to inform both the Runners and the constabulary to be on watch at the Meechams' town house tonight. The thief”—although he had a growing theory that this wasn’t simply a lone thief—“is angry. So he is going to make a mistake. But he is definitely going to make his move. I can feel it in my bones.”