The secret rear portion of the Liar's Club had gone dark, even as the false front business began to heat up.

It must be quite late. Clara looked tired, and Elliot's rear was getting rather weary of his chair. Or vice versa.

The first drawing was now changed and updated. Elliott held it by two corners and tilted his head, gazing at it critically. Not critical of Clara's talent, for that could not be denied. Her alter ego, Mr. Underkind, was not a famous political cartoonist for nothing.

Elliott just didn't feel as though he'd managed to convey his target's delicate features. “Her face is perhaps a bit thinner.”

Clara raised a brow. “If her face is any thinner than this, then I fear for her health. She already looks as though she would arm-wrestle Kurt for a biscuit.”

Elliott turned to her in alarm. “She's ill, do you think? Did I chase her through the cold when she is ailing? Did I lay out a sick woman in the snow?”

Clara drew back from his forcefulness. “I don't know, did you?”

Elliott looked at the drawing again, worry creasing his brow. “She certainly fought well. If she was ill, I should hate to face her when she's feeling better.”

He tore his gaze from those haunting eyes and examined the rest of the drawing. “Yes, that's the necklace exactly. I saw it very clearly when I had her pinned.”

“And what necklace is that?”

Elliott and Clara looked up to see Sir Simon Raines leaning in the doorway.

He grinned at them, a flash of white in a somewhat somber face. “What have you been up to Elliott? Did you steal something new?” He dropped his pose and strolled into the room, seeming like a man at loose ends.

Clara smiled at Simon. “If you're looking for Agatha, I believe she's in the kitchens, testing out Kurt's recipes for Christmas dinner.”

Simon's face lit up as it always did in anticipation of seeing his darling Agatha. Elliott shook his head. The man was besotted.

Simon was just turning to go when his gaze fell upon the drawing and he halted. He frowned slightly and tilted his head sideways to see the portrait straight on. “That's odd…”

Elliott and Clara looked at each other. “Do you know her?” Elliott asked.

Simon shook his head slowly, still gazing at the drawing. “No. Not the girl, not really, although there is something familiar about her. But that necklace…”

Simon and his wife, Agatha, ran the neighboring spy academy. He'd once been the spymaster himself, so Elliot had no qualms about filling him in.

Clara stood and handed the drawing to Simon. Simon held it closer to the light and looked at it for a long moment. Then his blue gaze shot to meet Elliott's curious one. “You saw this very pendant, correct? And Clara drew it?”

“I did my best,” Clara said.

Elliott nodded. “It's the very one, I'm sure of it. Of gold and amethyst. Why?”

Simon had the strangest look on his face. “If this is correct, if this is an accurate representation... I do believe this is the first thing I ever stole on a mission for the Liars. I never knew what became of it. I assumed it was sold on to fund the club.”

He looked up with a bemused expression on his lean features. “I couldn't have been more then nineteen. In fact, it was the job where I met Jackham. We ran into each other in the dark, coming at the strongbox on the same night.”

He looked back at the drawing, his expression gone sad. “He was my friend, you know. Before. We started the gaming hell together, as a cover for the Club. I...owed him.”

Clary peered down at the drawing. “What could this girl have to do with Jackham?”

Elliott looked back and forth at the two of them. He knew who Jackham was, of course. Every Liar did. Jackham the Jackal, Jackham the Traitor, Jackham the man who had sold the secrets, identities and very lives of the Liars to the highest bidder. Good men had died. “He wasn't...trained, by any chance, was he?”

Simon looked up vaguely. He was clearly still lost in the past. “What? Trained? No, not in the way that a Liar would be trained. He might have picked up the odd trick, I suppose. He taught a few fellows in the club, the finer points of the Nuremberg strongbox, that sort of thing. In his day, he was a better thief than I ever was but it was his job to run the house in front. He knew it was a gaming hell and cover, but he thought it was a ring of criminals, not Crown spies. We kept him out of Liar business. I suppose I never really trusted him, not entirely. He was a secretive fellow. If I had listened to my instincts, I could have saved many lives.”

Clara bristled. “Your instincts were correct. You did your best to keep him from Liar operations. What Jackham did, he did on his own. No one held a gun to his head and made him sell your lives to the Chimera. You have nothing to feel guilty about!”

Simon's lips twisted in a half smile. “Yes, milady. Very well, milady. Absolutely, milady.”

Elliott smiled along with them at Simon's half-hearted joke, but the thick gravity that had fallen upon the room remained. He didn't want it to be true. He didn't want his lovely red-haired thief to have anything to do with the Jackal. But he had to ask.

“You said there was something familiar about the young lady?”

Simon looked up and nodded. “Yes, she looks a little bit like Dorothea...I don't recall her last name. Perhaps I never knew it. She was a woman Jackham was mad for when I first knew him. I never met her but he carried her miniature everywhere. 'My Dottie,' he called her.”

Simon looked back down the drawing in his hands. “As I recall she looked a bit like this, but not as thin. And of course, she would be much older now.”

“I saw this woman today.” Elliott felt sick. “This is the thief that I believe is the Vixen.”

Shock washed over Simon's features. “Oh hell. That bastard. So many damn secrets. He had a daughter all along!”

“Oh no.” Clara's soft voice reflected the horror that Elliott felt. A traitor's daughter, rifling through the strongboxes of London. Her training had come from her father no doubt, a man who'd known so much more than anyone had imagined. A young woman in possession of information that could only have come from the Liar's Club, on the loose.

Dalton, when they reported to him, lined up before his desk like mortified schoolchildren, said nothing for a very long moment. Then he pushed back his chair and stood. “It makes sense. Too much bloody sense. And we let her get away.” He looked narrowly at Elliot. “Twice. She knows you are onto her. She could be long gone. You said she was selling the jewelry.”

Elliott writhed a bit inside but fought not to show it. “I saw her come out of the pawnshop and she didn't look pleased. If she did sell it, I don't think she got what she wanted.”

“We have no other way of finding her.” Dalton looked them all. “We cannot allow her to remain at large while in possession of such sensitive information. We could lose years of work should the contents of that list make it to the remaining offenders. They could pack up their operations, clean house, and hide the evidence! We'll never catch them if they have warning of our intentions!”

“I think she needs money.” Elliott felt like a traitor for speaking, though not speaking would make him even more of a traitor, wouldn't it? “She's thin and threadbare. She tries hard to hide it, but I think she's on the edge. If she is about to run because of me, I don't think she'll get far on what she has.”

Dalton nodded shortly. “Then it's possible she'll go out one more time. One last haul from the list, and she'll be looking for a big one.”

Clara cleared her throat and raised her hand. “I know where I'd strike.”