by Rebecca King
‘He won’t hurt you, you know,’ Daniel murmured as he studied her thoughtful frown.
‘He is incredibly persistent,’ Tabitha whispered.
Daniel didn’t stop to think about the wisdom of placing a comforting hand over hers. He made no apology for that human touch even in the presence of Ronan and Mildred. He flicked a look at Mildred, but she didn’t pay them any attention. When Daniel did eventually remove his hand and return to his meal, Tabitha began to pore through some more of the factory’s paperwork.
A folded piece of paper sat amongst several invoices. At first glance, Tabitha expected it to be another bill but when she opened it she found a note, poorly written, which said: ‘This won’t be ignored any longer. You have two days to decide.’ Once she had re-read it, Tabitha held it up for Daniel to read.
Daniel had rarely taken his eyes off Tabitha. He did so only when he had been forced to cut his pie or help himself to another mouthful of bread. While he munched, he read what she was holding up to him. ‘Is there anything on the back?’
Tabitha shook her head but turned it around to show him. ‘To decide what?’
Before Daniel could offer any suggestions, Tabitha dropped the note onto the table and returned to rummaging through the rest of the pile but didn’t find anything. Together with Ronan and Mildred, she checked pile after pile until every piece of paper had been searched.
‘Is that the end of the box?’ Mildred asked slapping the papers she held onto the table in disgust.
‘Yes. No. Wait.’ Tabitha lifted one last piece of paper out of the box. It looked like the note she had found a few moments ago. Carefully unfolding it she read: ‘The damage will continue. There is no escape. Decision made. It’s done.’ She checked the back and sighed in frustration.
Ronan leaned back in his seat. ‘Someone was blackmailing him then.’
‘Not necessarily,’ Daniel argued. ‘The note doesn’t request a meeting or demand any money. It just says that the damage has been done, and that a decision had to be made within a specific time period. There is nothing to suggest that either note is suspicious or even very threatening.’
‘They are very vague, aren’t they?’ Tabitha re-read them.
‘But Muldoon must have understood what they meant, which suggests that there must be more letters somewhere,’ Mildred added.
‘Maybe there are more papers in Muldoon’s office. Another note, or possibly an explanation as to what was going on.’ Tabitha placed the notes on the table side-by-side and studied the writing. ‘They both look like they have been written by the same hand. This doesn’t look like any of the ledger entries, though. They are neat and compact.’
‘These notes look to have been written by someone who was either in a rush or barely literate,’ Daniel mused.
‘The damage,’ Ronan said. ‘Might that be the damage to the factory’s sales?’
Daniel was already nodding by the time Ronan finished talking. ‘It might be that someone had blocked the sales somehow?’
‘I will go and see the owners of Harrington’s in the morning. You must stay here, Daniel. Lynchgate will be back at first light, if not before.’ There was a warning look in Ronan’s eye that told Daniel he didn’t want to talk in front of the women. ‘Come on. Now that you have finished your meal you can come and lock up after me.’ Ronan then bowed politely at the ladies. ‘Thank you for your hospitality but I have to get back to work now. I shall see you soon enough, though. Stay safe.’ With another courteous bow, Ronan left the room but, rather than leave through the back door like Mildred or Tabitha would have, he disappeared into the hallway. The second he vanished everything went quiet. There wasn’t the scrape of a door closing, the hushed whisper of a cloak being dragged on, not even a faint creak of a floorboard, despite Daniel being behind him.
‘How do they do it?’ Mildred breathed in consternation.
Shaking her head, Tabitha returned to searching the papers. She was just glad that Daniel was going to stay with them for a while. She would sleep better knowing that he was not only safe but nearby. Without even realising it, at some point over the past day or so she had already started to rely on Daniel in ways she had never expected to rely on any man. It felt natural to turn to him if she wanted to share something, or needed someone’s opinion, not least because he seemed to know so much and was so capable of dealing with difficult situations like the one that she was in.
However, it is foolish to get used to it because he won’t stay. I will then be left to deal with my problems without him.
Tabitha shrugged off the faint ache that flourished to life somewhere in the region of her heart and forced herself to focus on doing something more useful with her time. Together with Mildred, she began to go through the ledgers again. She picked up the uppermost one, an accounts book for the past year. The second she lifted the hard cover a small piece of notepaper fluttered onto her lap.
‘There is another one,’ Tabitha whispered, gingerly picking it up.
‘What does it say? What does it say?’ Mildred gasped impatiently.
Tabitha tutted and sighed and flapped the paper before she unfolded it. ‘Give me a moment,’ she chided. ‘It says: It won’t be long now. The rest will follow the damage.’
‘What do you think it all means?’ Mildred demanded. ‘What is ‘the rest’? How can it follow the damage?’
‘It is too oblique to understand,’ Tabitha sighed. Even so, she carefully placed the note onto the table beside the other two.
Tabitha then turned her attention to the second ledger in the pile. This was far more important than the stock ledger she had just read – in her opinion at least – because it gave her an idea of the company’s financial situation. At the beginning of the financial year, everything appeared to be going well.
‘It is odd that all of the invoices were paid and there was plenty of money in the bank about six weeks before Muldoon died. Where did it all go?’
‘Keep looking,’ Mildred ordered, barely looking up from the papers she was re-reading for the third time. ‘I am going to put the pile of insignificant bills over here and then we won’t have to keep handling them. They aren’t relevant and so don’t need to keep being searched.’
Tabitha barely heard her. She was concentrating on the ledger entries. All income and expenditure had been meticulously detailed to the point that she knew that whoever had made the entries had been very careful about what they did. When she turned the next page, she was immediately able to identify when things had started to go wrong.
‘Wait. It’s here, look.’
‘What’s here, dear?’ Mildred asked absently, distracted by her sorting.
‘This page is just like the previous one,’ Tabitha murmured. ‘Until about the fourth of April. Then the invoices that used to be paid regularly were suddenly paid erratically. In this ledger, the invoices are paid every day, which points to the fact that a manager or supervisor if not Mr Muldoon himself put the entries into the book as part of a daily routine. But after the fourth of the month, the entries become irregular. There are a couple of entries on the fifth, but none on the sixth, seventh, or eighth. There is just one invoice paid to that company, Harrington’s, on the tenth.’
‘Wait. What? Why would Muldoon be paying Harrington? Whatever for? I mean, Harrington’s was a customer. Harrington’s didn’t provide a service, did it?’ Mildred’s voice was sharp which proved that she had been listening to Tabitha after all.
‘There aren’t any invoices from Harrington’s before the tenth, no.’ Tabitha quickly ran through the next couple of pages but didn’t find any more entries either to or from Harrington’s.
‘Do you think that something went wrong with one of the orders? Might it have been stolen or something? How much is Harrington’s invoice for?’ Daniel asked from the doorway.
Tabitha jerked. She hadn’t been aware that he had been listening to their discussion, but she didn’t mind, especially when he came to sit beside her and offere
d her an intimate smile.
‘Two hundred pounds,’ Tabitha said somewhat absently as she returned his smile.
‘That is one heck of an invoice,’ Daniel growled when the figure registered on him.
Rather than move the book toward him, Daniel leaned closer and tipped his head so he could read the figures over Tabitha’s shoulder. He was so close that Tabitha could feel the warmth of his breath brush over her. It elicited a shiver from deep within that felt as if it was drawn straight out of her soul. Goose bumps broke out on her skin. She couldn’t bring herself to move because she quite liked this new sensual awareness her body seemed to relish. It called out to something she suspected only Daniel would be able to recognise and understand; something he would know how to vanquish. But she couldn’t tell him about it. Even if she had the nerve to Mildred was sitting directly opposite and was watching them like a hawk. Besides, this was personal to her. Until she could understand it a little better Tabitha had no intention of discussing it with another living soul, not even Daniel. Especially not Daniel.
‘It must be in the box somewhere,’ Tabitha murmured.
Mildred reached behind her for the pile of invoices she had gathered and began to rifle through them. Moments later, she placed a Harrington’s invoice on top of the notes.
‘It says here that it is for-’ Tabitha frowned and flipped the invoice over. ‘It doesn’t say. It just states a total of two hundred pounds.’
Daniel frowned. ‘Why would Muldoon pay Harrington two hundred pounds?’
‘The payments Muldoon received from Harrington for the orders came to about fifty pounds each give or take five pounds. Nothing ever cost two hundred. Why, it’s a veritable fortune even in business,’ Tabitha cried. ‘Why would Muldoon pay him back two hundred pounds?’
Daniel struggled to concentrate. There were so many possibilities rattling through his head he didn’t know where to begin. He knew that he had to take what they had found to his colleagues so they could contemplate the problem but first, he needed to see if the answer was right before them but they just couldn’t see it because of the number of clues.
‘Right, so we have two bodies. One who was an ordinary worker who had been murdered and was found sitting at Muldoon’s desk at the factory. The other body was Muldoon who we now must assume was also murdered, but his death was staged to look like he had killed himself. We have three notes all making oblique references to someone having to decide about damage of some sort although there is nothing to prove the notes are sinister. Moreover, we have an odd, very high payment to a customer of Muldoon’s, a purchaser not a supplier, of two hundred pounds. We have two intruders who have tried to kill you, Tabitha, and who attacked me but didn’t kill me while I was unconscious. We have a mysterious man who watched you in the factory when you were alone Tabitha, but didn’t stop you from leaving or try to kill you again once the thug had failed. We have two keys to something, but we don’t know what, and we have a greedy Lynchgate who appears in the middle of it all, and who has a history of being physically violent. To make himself look even more suspicious, he has arrived with thugs who are very similar in manner if not looks to the ones who accosted us in the factory last night.’
‘Might it be the keys we found in the safe that Lynchgate keeps asking for, not the factory’s keys?’ Tabitha asked. ‘Maybe we misunderstood him?’
Daniel froze and stared hard at her. ‘Did he expressly demand the factory’s keys?’
Tabitha shrugged. ‘He demanded the factory keys over.’
‘Did your friends find anything in Muldoon’s lodgings, or any of Muldoon’s personal property in the factory?’ Mildred asked with eyes full of hope. Those hopes were dashed swiftly when Daniel shook his head.
‘We have been through everything. There are no hidden cupboards, secret compartments, or anything tucked away in boxes that shouldn’t be in the factory.’
‘So, what could the keys be for? And where have Muldoon’s personal belongings gone?’ Tabitha cried in frustration.
‘We didn’t find another safe. The desks that have locks need keys that are considerably smaller than the large iron ones in those boxes. Those keys don’t fit any of the locks on the doors or windows either,’ Daniel reported.
‘But they must belong to Muldoon,’ Mildred huffed. ‘Or else why would he have them?’
‘Are you sure he didn’t have any other property? Might the landlady have been incorrect?’ Tabitha asked. ‘Do you think the solicitor might know?’
‘The solicitor has said that he has handed over all of the relevant paperwork now. He gave it to you in that package,’ Daniel replied.
‘I have been through it. The package contains the deeds for the factory, and copies of the papers the solicitor had me sign.’
‘Are you sure there is nothing more?’ Daniel prompted.
‘Well, I didn’t go through them too carefully because of the notes and the keys we found in this trunk, and the possibility that there might be more,’ Tabitha reasoned.
Without another word she hurried off to her bed chamber to fetch the package. As she turned to leave movement out on the otherwise empty street made her stop. Tabitha crept toward the window and stood behind the shutter while she studied the road. After a few moments, when nothing stirred, she turned to leave only to notice a faint puff of smoke emerge from under the heavy overhang of an old oak tree a little way down the street. It was too dark to see who it was, but someone was there, and they were watching the house.
‘Daniel!’ she called frantically. ‘Daniel! Come quickly!’
Daniel raced up the stairs with his gun drawn. ‘What?’
Tabitha showed him. Daniel watched but the smoke had gone. ‘I don’t doubt they will be out there. They are probably waiting for me to go out there to look for them.’
‘They who?’ Tabitha cried.
‘Whoever wants the paperwork we have, or those keys. It might be the thugs who accosted us last night, or it might be your father, it might be the mysterious man you saw,’ he announced grimly.
‘What do we do?’ Tabitha whispered with a worried look out of the window.
Daniel slid the shutter closed and heaved a sigh of disgust when they were immediately encased in an impenetrable blackness that made seeing anything virtually impossible.
‘Now, we carry on searching those papers and wait to see what they do overnight. You are to go to bed as normal and let me get on with why I am here.’
Tabitha frowned at the sharpness of his voice. She knew it was foolish to be hurt by it because he did have a job to do, but it flourished to life anyway. ‘Is that the only reason you are here, Daniel?’ Tabitha whispered, hoping that he would give her some hint that there might be an alternative reason for his reappearance in her life – her.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Daniel paused at the door and looked back at her. ‘I confess that I was not altogether upset when I heard that your father is suspected of stealing funds from the workhouse. Until then, I truly believed I wasn’t the kind of person to hold a grudge over anybody but when I heard your father’s name, I was suddenly glad for the opportunity to bring him to justice. I thought of you, of course I did. In my youth, you and Master Carpenter were the only two people who saw me as a person. You never defined me by my lack of money or the uniform I had to wear. I knew that our investigation would bring me to your door. Even if you hadn’t inherited Muldoon’s factory, or your father hadn’t gotten involved in it, I would have had to come to talk to you about your relationship with him.’
Seeing the hurt in her eyes, Daniel mentally sighed. He knew that stepping closer wasn’t a wise thing to do but his feet moved before he could make himself stop. Gently, he ran a thumb across the silken smoothness of her alabaster cheek; a cheek which was considerably paler than it had been yesterday.
‘I wanted to come and see you, but I knew it would be difficult given I have to keep my mind on my work with the Star Elite. What we do is dark and dangerous. If one o
f us has a lapse in concentration it can get any one of us killed. You are most definitely a distraction.’
‘You love what you do, don’t you?’ Tabitha had no idea why she felt the need to get him to confirm it. When he smiled at her and nodded a small part of her began to weep because she knew that he wasn’t ever likely to be the kind of man who would be content to settle down and spend his life raising a family. He preferred the darkness, fighting criminals and dancing with danger.
‘I think I have been destined to be a part of the Star Elite,’ he murmured. ‘We are all the same. Everyone in the Star Elite loves what they do. We all have a specific personality and similar backgrounds. I think that is why we work so well together. We always seem to know what the others are thinking and likely to do. I have saved their lives and they have saved mine on several occasions over the years. We rely on each other. This is more than a job, or something to do. It is a way of life for us all.’
‘But that doesn’t mean you cannot have anything else in your life, does it?’ Tabitha had no idea why she was pushing so much. Until the day before yesterday Daniel had been a part of her past and someone she never expected to meet again. Now, his future was important to her because what he did with it now affected her. She couldn’t tell him; wouldn’t tell him that in the space of two short days he had become as important in her life as her Aunt Mildred; that his presence in her life was as essential to her now as the air she breathed. Tabitha couldn’t tell him that she wanted him to want her in his life for the same reasons and not because he thought she needed his help.
‘There isn’t much time for anything else.’ Daniel felt awful for saying this to her not least because he saw the longing in her eyes and hated to hurt her, but he couldn’t allow her to continue to have false hope where there really was none. Yes, he loved her, but knowing how he felt and acting upon it were completely different things. What he had said was the truth and that meant that he had to walk away when the investigation was over, no matter how much it hurt either of them. Tabitha had to stay with her Aunt Mildred. It was where her life belonged, not his. ‘Try and get some sleep, eh? I am going to be on watch. Because we don’t know what is going on right now, I am going to be armed, so please don’t go wandering around at night. Take drinks and anything else you might need to bed with you, so you don’t have to get up again. I will see you in the morning.’
