The Unaccompanied Widow

by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  She snatched up one and unfolded it. “An employment reference for Brian Cranston.” Disappointed, she put it aside.

  “What were you expecting? A different name?” Slane said, sounding amused.

  “Yes,” she admitted.

  His brows lifted.

  “He was quick, too prepared. Stepping into the next room is something a professional does.”

  “A professional what?”

  She picked up the next paper and unfolded. “A professional agent, Mr. Slane.”

  “A spy?” He snatched up one of the neatly folded papers himself and unfolded it.

  “Mine says Adrian Krantz,” Adele said quietly. “Yours?”

  “Thekla Größel.” Slane looked up. “What is going on here?” His face was pale.

  “Something much larger than a robbery gone wrong,” Adele said. “Quickly, Mr. Slane…did your brother ever tell you about the work he did for the British Government? Was he on any committees? Directing working groups? Something rather hush that he swore you must never speak of?”

  Instead of answering her, Slane grabbed another document and read it. “Theadore Krantz…” He tossed the sheet back in the drawer. “Eilish wouldn’t speak of such things. He nearly did, once, when he was relaxed. Then he remembered who I was and that we stood on opposite sides…”

  Adele picked up the documents, refolded them and pushed them into her reticule. Then she opened the next door and paused, her breath catching. Laying upon all the men’s underthings was a large knife with a sharp edge.

  “We really did catch him by surprise,” Slane said, his tone bitter.

  “Don’t touch the knife,” she said. “We’ll leave that for the police when they get here.” She carefully lifted and probed beneath the white linen and felt the hard edges of an object.

  She withdrew the little book and leafed through the pages, with Slane looking over her shoulder. The pages were filled with letters and numbers, most of them in long columns.

  “What is this? I can’t make sense of it at all,” Slane breathed.

  “I can,” Adele said. “This is a code book And look, that is the German see.” She pointed at the ß.”

  Slane’s gaze swung back to her. “German agents killed my brother?”

  She pushed the code book into her reticule. “I believe they may have, yes. The five hundred pounds would not have silenced them. Only His Majesty’s secrets would have satisfied them.”

  Slane hung his head. “God…!” he breathed.

  She heard a whistle, far off down the street. “We’re out of time.” She quickly searched the third drawer and found nothing more. She peered in the wardrobe, then reached up to pat the top of it, bent and peered under the bed. “I’ve got everything,” she decided. “Now we must avoid the Garda.”

  Slane roused from his thoughts. “Hm?”

  She pointed at the floor. “The Garda are about to come through that door, Mr. Slane. It won’t serve your brother or the King to have Adrian Cranston’s false or true nature revealed.”

  Slane looked ill. “No, it won’t,” he admitted.

  “I can make all this go away,” she added.

  He studied her and she could see the hope in his eyes, mixed with puzzlement. “You…can make this go away? You?”

  “I can,” she said with a great deal more firmness than she felt. “But not if I am found here by the Garda. Or you, come to that. And I believe the front door is the only door out of this house.”

  “But there are windows.” He picked up her hand. “Come.”

  As he led her to the same window Cranston had used and helped her through it to cling to the drainpipe next to it, she murmured, “I believe there is great deal more mischief in your past than any college professor has a right to claim, Mr. Slane.”

  “Assistant summer professor, Lady Adelaide. Now, let yourself slide a bit at a time. Go on.”

  She let herself slide to the bottom.

  THE FOOTMAN HELD THE NARROW door aside for her and Adele slipped into the room that was both office and bedroom. Pureton looked up from the desk and frowned. “I am afraid that this is not a good time, Lady Adelaide. Please excuse me.”

  “If this is about the robber found in Mountjoy this morning by the Garda, I can save you both time and a great deal of worry, Sir Godfrey.”

  He looked up sharply, his brow wrinkling. “By God, you were there…? Why did you not present yourself to the Garda? Declare your interests? The Chief Inspector is beside himself trying to sort this out…”

  “I left a large, ugly knife for him to find. What else must he know? It was the murder weapon, was it not?”

  “The Garda surgeon says it is, yes.” He sat back, his hand upon the pages he had been writing upon. “What else did you discover?” His tone was silky smooth.

  Adele squeezed her parasol handle. “You knew about Eilish Slane, didn’t you? That is why you did everything you could to make it look like a robbery. You didn’t want anyone looking closely into the matter.”

  He didn’t move. Instead, he just sighed.

  “The knife was not the only thing I found,” Adele added.

  Pureton stiffened.

  “Oh, I have the other items safely hidden,” she added and watched him relax. “I will present them to Melville. He will find them very interesting.”

  Pureton brought his hands together and squeezed. “It was that sort of business?” He looked aghast and ill at the same time.

  “It was,” she said. “It was fortunate I continued to turn over stones and look beneath them, instead of reburying them.”

  “But you let the man get away,” Pureton added. “The King is very upset about Slane’s death. He wants the murderer found.”

  “And you can assure Edward that we will find him.”

  Pureton laughed. “If the man is who you imply he is, he will be long gone by now. If you had only arrived here with this information sooner…”

  “I assure you it will be an easy matter to find him once more. Ask Chief Inspector McDermott to have his Garda check the hospitals, surgeries and doctors offices in the Mountjoy area. Look for a man who has been shot in the right calf. You’ll know you have your man when you find him. And with the knife among his clothes, he can be charged with murder.”

  Pureton got to his feet. “If this is true, you must excuse me. I now have a dozen other different matters to deal with.”

  “Of course,” Adele said. “I have a book to read, anyway.”

  She hurried out of the room, and down the long corridor and the narrow stairs to the level beneath this one, to the room she had been assigned at Holyhead. She swept past the room and turned into the little privy room, shut the door, bent over the bowl and was ill until spots danced in her vision.

  She flushed the evidence away and leaned weakly against the wall, staring at her reflection in the mirror, but not seeing it. Instead, she saw the astonishment in Pureton’s eyes. The flicker of pleased surprise.

  He had spoken to her as an equal, right there at the end. And he had looked at her directly, with sharp interest.

  Adele began to smile.

  ADELE THANKED THE GARDA OFFICER when he showed her to the row of chairs sitting along the green wall, buried deep in the basement of the Garda station. She wasn’t sure which station it was. The King’s footman who had escorted her here had offered no explanations short of Sir Godfrey insisting she come with him.

  She settled on the chair and arranged the skirts of her day dress around her ankles and studied the green-painted iron door opposite the upright chairs. She had worn a full-length skirt, for today she would join the King’s entourage for their second visit to the International Exhibition. Once the formalities were over, the royal yacht would be leaving Dublin to return to Holyhead by nightfall. The night train would return them to London by morning, a day earlier than had originally been scheduled.

  At least, that had been her plan when she rose this morning. The footman from the royal yacht, wearing a nor
mal coat over his formal wait jacket, had found her in the dining room at the Shelbourne and insisted she go with him.

  She had barely managed to gasp out a request to the desk clerk that her trunk be delivered to the yacht before the footman had shepherded her out to the waiting cab and brought her here to this dockside Garda station.

  Adele had only been sitting a minute when footsteps made her look along the corridor to see who approached.

  It was Torin Slane. He raised a brow as he drew closer. “Curiouser and curiouser.”

  “Said Alice.” Adele raised her own brow. “You quote an Englishman? Shame on you.”

  Slane grinned. “It sounds better in Gaelic,” he admitted.

  “You got marching orders and no explanations, too?” she asked.

  He nodded. “A Garda at my door, with the Chief Inspector’s compliments.”

  The green painted iron door opened and Chief Inspector McDermott stepped out. He glanced at Slane. “I thought that was your voice. Well, step in, both of you.” He moved back into the room beyond the door himself.

  Adele rose and moved through the door, Slane behind her.

  It was a front room with a desk and chair behind it, with another room through a door at the back. McDermott moved through the other door.

  Adele followed and found herself in an echoing stone-walled chamber with high windows, a concrete floor, and glass and steel cabinets. A table in the middle of the room told her where she was. It was a mortuary, and there was a body beneath the sheet on the table.

  Pureton stood at the head of the table, leaning on his cane. He looked very tired. A man in a white coat stood beside him.

  “Sir Godfrey,” Adele acknowledged.

  “Show them,” Pureton told the man in the white coat.

  The man moved over to the table and pulled the sheet down until the head of the body was revealed.

  “Is that the man?” McDermott said. “Cranston?”

  “It is, although when I last saw him, his throat had not been cut,” Adele said. She leaned closer. “Very sharp, whatever it was, too. Although he’s very clean, for a man who must have bled dry.”

  Slane swallowed. His throat clicked dryly. “That be him,” he said, his voice hoarse.

  “He’s clean because he was fished from Dublin Bay very early this morning,” Pureton said. “Whoever dumped him there didn’t know local tides and currents.”

  “Calf,” McDermott said to the surgeon.

  The man moved down to the other end of the table, and pulled the sheet back to reveal the lower right leg. “I canna lift it. Rigor is still in,” he said, his tone apologetic.

  “That’s quite alright,” Adele assured him. “I can bend.” She bent and studied the gouge through the flesh on the calf. “Hmm, deeper than I thought.”

  “It would have incapacitated him,” the surgeon said. “He wouldna been able to even limp for a good day or two.”

  “Someone found him to be a liability,” Adele said.

  “There were two of them,” Slane added, straightening from his inspection of the calf wound.

  “Yes,” she agreed, meeting his gaze.

  “Thank you, you may go,” Pureton said shortly.

  “Me or the lady?” Slane shot back.

  Pureton turned away and McDermott moved up to speak to him in an undertone.

  Slane offered his elbow to Adele and lead her back through the green corridor to the outside of the station.

  He paused upon the footpath to look up at the bright July sun and breathe in a great breath. “What are they hatching back there, do you think?” He looked at Adele as if she would know.

  She blinked. “I…suspect they are agreeing to continue with the story that your brother died in a robbery gone wrong, now their mess has been cleaned up for them. I removed any of the evidence from Cranston’s room that would have everyone looking for German agents, and the other one, whoever he is, made sure Cranston could not talk about himself.”

  Slane nodded. “So everyone will stop looking for the other one now, won’t they?”

  “Oh, no, Mr. Slane. That isn’t how it works at all. Now I and…others will be able to continue looking for such people, without the world tripping us up with tiresome questions.”

  “So you did make it go away.” He sounded impressed. “Did you twist Pureton’s arm, somehow?”

  “I merely explained to him what I told you. That he could go on letting the world think it was a robbery. That he could call off his dogs for nothing else would emerge to embarrass anyone.”

  Slane rubbed the back of his neck. “‘tis a different way of doing t’ings,” he admitted.

  “For a start, it does not involve shouting at people,” she admitted, with a smile.

  “Is it a woman t’ing?” he asked. “Thing,” he corrected himself, speaking carefully.

  “It is an Adele Becket thing, Mr. Slane. Oh, and I have something…” She opened her reticule, removed the book and held it out to him. “Your copy of Gulliver’s Travels. I finished it after all.”

  He looked pleased as he took it back. Then his smile faded. “Will you…can you let me know somehow, if you find the other one?”

  “If I can manage it, I will find a way to let you know, yes. I owe you that much, at least.”

  “And let me know if you…deal with him, too,” he said in a rush. “I long to get my hands on the bastard. If you do it, then I think it might feel almost the same.”

  “How blood-thirsty, Mr. Slane,” she chided him.

  He smiled ruefully. “‘tis the Irish in me. We are a blood-thirsty lot, just under the civilized veneer. I find myself offended that Germans are running around freely, killing Irishman who don’t deserve ignoble deaths.”

  Adele hesitated and turned to him. “Is that truly how you feel, Slane?”

  “Hell, yes,” he breathed. “‘scuse me, but yes.”

  She waved the curse aside. “If you really want to do something about them, it so happens I know a man in need of good men just like you…”

  And hot, hard hope flared in his eyes.

  _____

  The next book in the Adelaide Becket series will be released in mid-2021.

  In the meantime, browse more of Tracy’s historical fiction here, and her suspense novels here.

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  About the Author

  Tracy Cooper-Posey is a #1 Best Selling Author. She writes historical fiction and romantic thrillers. She has published over 120 novels since 1999, been nominated for five CAPAs including Favourite Author, and won the Emma Darcy Award.

  She
turned to indie publishing in 2011. Her indie titles have been nominated four times for Book Of The Year. Tracy won the award in 2012, and a SFR Galaxy Award in 2016 for “Most Intriguing Philosophical/Social Science Questions in Galaxybuilding” She has been a national magazine editor and for a decade she taught genre fiction writing at MacEwan University.

  She is addicted to Irish Breakfast tea and chocolate, sometimes taken together. In her spare time she enjoys history, Sherlock Holmes, science fiction and ignoring her treadmill. An Australian Canadian, she lives in Edmonton, Canada with her husband, a former professional wrestler, where she moved in 1996 after meeting him on-line.

  Other books by Tracy Cooper-Posey

  For reviews, excerpts, and more about each title, visit Tracy’s site and click on the cover you are interested in: http://tracycooperposey.com/books-by-thumbnail/

  Adelaide Becket

  (Historical Suspense Series)

  The Requisite Courage

  The Rosewater Debutante

  Scandalous Scions

  (Historical Romance Series – Spin off)

  Rose of Ebony

  Soul of Sin

  Valor of Love

  Marriage of Lies

  Scandalous Scions One (Boxed Set)

  Mask of Nobility

  Law of Attraction

  Veil of Honor

  Scandalous Scions Two (Boxed Set)

  Season of Denial

  Rules of Engagement

  Degree of Solitude

  Ashes of Pride

  Risk of Ruin

  Year of Folly

  Queen of Hearts

  Scandalous Families – The Victorians