by Nic Saint
Thomas’ words stuck in his throat as he flicked an astonished gaze at Glynis. This time, she noted with satisfaction, the smugness had all but disappeared.
CHAPTER 8
Thomas shuffled uncomfortably in his seat for the first time since being led into the study. Sir Hugh, rather a scrawny old bird, with milky eyes and a head like a scarecrow, seemed harmless enough, he’d decided when first laying eyes on his host, and, even though the daughter was pretty hot under the collar, a bit of smooth talking would see him out of his predicament in no time. They had no proof that he was involved in any of this. No proof at all.
He now understood what was going on here. Somehow, they’d gotten word that he was the one who’d relieved them of their little trinket, and had decided to get it back. Staunch denial had always been his defense against these types of situations, and he applied it now. Successfully, too, he thought, until the woman was revealed as a cop. The Yard, he knew, possessed no sense of humor when it came to matters of mine and thine, and his cool composure began to crumble when he stared into the cool blue eyes boring into his.
“That’s right, Mr. Spencer,” continued the old man, “Glynis has been assigned to your case for quite some time now, and last night retrieved the final piece of evidence needed to have you arrested, indicted and shipped off to prison for an indeterminate period of time.” He pursed his lips and fondled a ratty mustache, contemplating the ceiling for a moment. “How many years is our guest facing, honey?”
“I’d say fifteen? At a minimum. All depends on the judge, of course.”
“Yes, I think a public trial would be the only way this case could go, Mr. Spencer. Your fate in the hands of a jury of your peers. And I’m afraid they don’t look very kindly upon your brand of thieves these days. Stealing precious items of jewelry from British nationals and selling them to the Russian oligarchy? They would clamor to send you to jail for a very long time indeed. Oh, yes,” he added when he noted the surprise on Tom’s face, “we know all about you, Thomas. Or at least,” he gestured to his daughter, “Glynis does. She’s been on your case for a long time, haven’t you, honey?”
“Years,” bit Glynis, who was staring at him like the avenging angel she apparently thought she was. “Ever since you stole Mama’s pearls.”
Thomas didn’t like the direction this interview was taking, then thought he detected a chink in the lady’s armor. “If you’re so keen on having me arrested, why did you bring me here? Why didn’t you simply take me to headquarters?”
“Ah, now we’re getting somewhere,” Sir Hugh said. “You see, this isn’t merely business. For us, this is personal.”
“I could have you arrested,” agreed Glynis, who’d taken a seat on the edge of her father’s desk and was staring at Thomas as if she was about to sink her nails into him and rip him to shreds. “But you’d simply get an ace barrister, and have your oligarch buddies get you out on bail. By the time the trial rolled around, we would find you’d skipped bail, and were hiding out in Russia, protected by your friends in the Kremlin.” She shook her head, her blond hair swaying about her lovely face as she did so. “That simply wouldn’t do. I decided a long time ago that the only way to get the pearls was to abduct you and force you to hand them over.”
Her fingers seemed to itch to grab him, and he watched them with mild trepidation. “I can’t tell you where they are,” he quickly said, deciding that coming clean was the best way to deal with his self-appointed judge and juror.
“You can’t or you won’t?” asked Sir Hugh.
“He’s lying,” Glynis decided. “He knows exactly where they are. He simply won’t tell us out of spite.”
Those hands were twitching again, he noticed, and she’d spoken through gritted teeth. Then he remembered the gun. And the pepper spray. The pain had been quite excruciating. Not something he wanted to experience again. He decided not to provoke her ire any more. Every minute he spent in this place, his life was in jeopardy. And he valued it simply too much.
“I’m telling you the truth,” he stressed. Her eyes were shooting blue ice straight into his soul. He held up his hands in a gesture of defense. “I sold that piece to Rostislav years ago. I have no idea what he did with it. All I know is that it went into his private collection and will never be seen by anyone other than the man himself.”
At the mention of the name, Glynis’ face had twitched, so he knew she recognized it, as well she should if she was a detective worth her salt.
“Who is this Rostislav?” asked her father, confused.
Glynis drew her hand through her hair. “Rostislav Mamykin. Yes,” she added as her father blanched at the mention of the name, “the Rostislav Mamykin.”
Thomas raised his shoulders a fraction of an inch. “Sorry about that,” he murmured. “As you well know, I merely provide a service. My customers place an order, and I fulfill it. A simple matter of supply and demand.”
“Not simple!” she suddenly roared. “This is now a matter of life and death, you tosser!”
In spite of his predicament, Thomas raised his head imperiously. There was an aspect of personal pride involved in the business he’d mastered for the past decade, and he didn’t enjoy being subjected to this kind of vilification. “I’ll have you know that if it’s money you want, I can put you in touch with Mr. Mamykin. I’m sure he won’t mind compensating you for the trinket.”
As he remembered, the oligarch had initially contacted the Foxes and requested they sell him the pearls. He’d intended them as a gift to his wife on the occasion of their wedding anniversary. When the family had bluntly refused his most generous offer, he’d contracted Thomas to retrieve the gem in a more… discrete way.
Glynis shook her head in disgust. “Mama is dying, you arsehole, and if we don’t get her pearls back before it’s too late…”
He frowned, the personal note failing to grip. “What do you mean?”
“What my daughter means to convey, Mr. Spencer,” continued Sir Hugh, appearing distraught, “is that my wife was very much attached to those pearls. As I explained to you before, they were an heirloom, and had been in her family for generations. When she lost the pearls, she took the blow very hard. Her mental health…” The man’s voice broke.
Thomas swallowed away a lump of uneasiness. He didn’t enjoy being subjected to these sob stories, and he had the distinct impression he was about to be subjected to the sob story to end all sob stories. “Yes?” he prompted, though he feared the man hardly needed encouragement.
“Mama’s health has declined since she lost the pearls. If we don’t get them back soon, she doesn’t have much longer to live,” stated Glynis succinctly.
“Can’t you, you know, hand her some fake ones?” Thomas suggested, failing to see the point. “I’m sure she won’t notice the difference. Most people don’t,” he added when Glynis turned her baleful eyes on him yet again. He was getting used to that death ray stare, though it still rankled. It didn’t do, he felt, for one as beautiful as she was to look at a man with so much hatred.
“We’ve tried that approach,” said Sir Hugh in a hoarse voice. He shook his gray head, his mustache drooping. “She knows those pearls intimately, and unless we can bring her back the originals, she will keep pining away.”
“Well,” said Thomas, at a loss as to how to respond to all this, “I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done. I know Rostislav, and he’ll never agree to part with the pearls.” He rose to his feet and gave his host and hostess his most mournful look. “So if there’s nothing further, I’m afraid I have some business to attend to.”
As Glynis had said, even if the Yard chose to arrest him, he’d soon find his way to Moscow, where he could lay low, then return to Britain under an assumed name, and resume his old business as if nothing had happened. Or he could search out new vistas. He’d heard France was a nice country to work in. Lots of old money and new money there, which he’d found such a profitable mix.
To his surprise, Glynis suddenly spir
ited that good old gun from the recesses of her costume and pointed the business end at him. Such a nasty habit.
“I should just kill you right here and now,” she growled, pushing him back into the chair he’d just vacated.
He held up his hands in feeble defense. “I assure you, my dear, that you will regret this bitterly. My clients don’t take kindly to people who shoot holes in their most valued supplier.”
Though he tried his darndest to keep the fear from creeping into his voice, he was staring into the woman’s eyes now, and saw she wasn’t kidding. She was going to kill him, and she was going to enjoy every second and every drop of blood.
CHAPTER 9
There’s nothing to it, Thomas thought as he closed his eyes and waited for the inevitable bang that would end his life. It doesn’t even hurt, he told himself. It will go so fast that your life will be over before you know it. Then, as the big bang didn’t come, he gingerly opened first one eye, then the other. The gun was still aimed at his face, and the woman still glaring at him.
Clearing his throat, he inquired, “What seems to be the delay?”
“You’ve got some nerve,” she growled.
“Honey,” a voice spoke softly beyond Glynis. “If you kill him now, Mama will never get her pearls back.”
“But I will have the satisfaction of watching her executioner die a gruesome death,” she countered.
“That may be so, but it won’t help Mama.”
Too true, he felt. “Would it help if I offered an alternative?” he interjected the father and daughter crosstalk.
“What could a rat like you have to offer?” Glynis wanted to know.
“Let’s hear the man out,” suggested her father, and he mentally commended the man for his sangfroid.
“I’m sure that Rostislav would never want to return the pearls if you asked him, or even if I did,” he began.
“So what good would that do us?” demanded Glynis.
“But perhaps there are other ways of obtaining the desired object,” he continued as if she hadn’t spoken. He had to admit that the presence of the gun aimed at his head made his brain work a little faster than usual. But even if he hadn’t been under the threat of imminent death, he still would have found the idea that had suddenly come to him a real pippin.
“What ways? Speak, man, speak!” urged Glynis.
Christ. The woman was so bossy! He wondered if she was married. If so, he would love to see the man who could stand to live with this harridan of her sex.
“I urge you to come to the point, Mr. Spencer,” interjected Sir Hugh. “Glynis has never been very good with delays.”
“You could task someone to retrieve the pearls from Rostislav Mamykin the old-fashioned way.” He spread his arms when he stared into nonplussed eyes. “By purloining them, of course. Theft. Robbery. You simply pay someone to steal them back.”
The father leaned back in his chair, visibly intrigued. “There is a certain irony in the plan that I can’t help but admire.”
But Glynis shook her blond curls adamantly, and he could see from the way she pursed her lips that she wasn’t smitten with the idea. And if her expression hadn’t alerted him of her strong opinion on the matter, her next words did. “I don’t believe in crime. For goodness’ sake, I’m a cop! How can I plan a burglary? It’s simply out of the question. Absolutely impossible.”
“Do it for Mama, honey,” spoke her father gently. “Bend your principles this one time. Think of all the good it would do. And besides, it’s not as if it’s really stealing. One can’t call stealing from a thief a crime. You’d simply be righting a wrong.”
“But going about it all wrong,” she countered, swinging around to face the author of her being. “How can I live with myself if I go about breaking into people’s homes to steal priceless gems? I’d be going against every principle I believe in. Every oath I ever swore. And, what’s more, if this ever came out, I’d be finished. I’d never work in law enforcement again. Not to mention I’d spend the rest of my life in jail.”
“Not the rest of your life,” Thomas countered easily. “You’d probably be out and about in five years. Tops.”
When she swung that gun back at him, he mimicked locking his lips and throwing away the key. He’d come to realize she wasn’t a woman to be trifled with.
It was obvious she was at war with herself, then suddenly seemed to have an idea. He noticed from the way her liquid eyes flashed. “You know, I can’t possibly go through with such a scheme. I mean, I can’t condone it under any circumstance, but you could.”
Thomas looked up to find that the ‘you’ she was referring to was, in fact, him. “Mh?” he inquired.
She emphasized her words with the gun. A very unnerving habit. “You’re the one who stole the damn necklace in the first place; you should be the one getting it back!”
“For the right price, I’d certainly be willing—” At the sound of her teeth grinding and the twitch of her gun hand, he amended his speech. “I would most certainly be prepared to look deeply into the matter. Free of charge. Naturally.”
Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t trust you,” she told him as if she’d just arrived at that conclusion.
“Well, I can’t very well blame you,” he returned amiably. “However, I can assure you I will do everything in my power to—”
Her eyes narrowed even more, and were now mere slits. “No, I mean, I really don’t trust you. The moment we let you out of our sight, you will probably hop on the next flight to Moscow, and we’ll be left empty-handed.”
He plastered his best salesman smile on his lips. “I assure you, dear lady—”
“Don’t dear lady me!” she roared with surprising vehemence. The members of the Yard must receive vocal training, he decided, in order to stop suspects from fleeing the scene by the mere volume of their command.
“I’m truly sorry,” he said softly, wondering when she would finally remove that infernal gun from his face, “but I just want to stress that now that I’m fully aware of your predicament, I feel it’s only natural that I should offer you my services.”
“We do this together,” she decided abruptly, nodding as if to herself. “I won’t let you out of my sight for one second, you viper!”
He closed his mouth with a click, the number of insults she’d hurled at him starting to annoy him. He was merely a supplier of a popular service. A very popular service, with perhaps a smidgen of illegality attached to it, but a service nonetheless. Words like viper seemed hardly called for. “Look, you really don’t have to keep an eye on me.”
“Oh, yes, I do.”
“If you must know, I work alone.”
“Is that why you hooked up with Lord Crocket’s daughter?”
“That—that is merely the result of a very unfortunate misunderstanding.”
“We do this together, thief.”
“I thought you wanted nothing to do with this… crime?”
“I changed my mind.”
Thomas sighed. Retrieving those damn pearls was going to prove a nuisance, and he had absolutely no intention of going through with it. In the first place, Rostislav kept his valuables where no one could find them. In the second, the man was notoriously cranky. Prison was like a trip to the Bahamas compared to what the oligarch would do to him if he were caught.
“Look, I’ll get you your pearls, all right? But you have to let me do it my way. I can’t work with…” He gestured vaguely to Glynis. “… you looking over my shoulder.”
“I’m going to be there every step of the way,” she announced quite nastily.
He was starting to see that his plan to step on the first flight to Moscow was going to prove unworkable. If this female planned to attach herself to his person, he’d have a hell of a time escaping to the airport and fleeing the country. His mood soured considerably when he realized he was actually going to have to go through with this cockamamie plan after all.
The joke was on him, of course, for suggesting it in th
e first place.
He sighed. It was time to face facts. He gave her his most earnest look. “I’m afraid I may have spoken rashly, my dear. This idea of stealing from Rostislav Mamykin?” He shook his head sadly. “It simply can’t be done.”
When Glynis grinned at him, he was induced to follow her example and plaster a similar expression on his face. So she did understand. Of course. This was sheer foolishness. No one stole from the richest man in Britain and got away with it. Her next words chilled him to the bone, and quickly wiped the grin from his face.
“Then you had better think very, very hard, genius. Because we are going to do it, whether you like it or not.”
“But I just said—”
“You are going to get those pearls back, or else…”
“Or else?”
“Or else you’re a dead man, Thomas Spencer.”
He rolled his eyes in exasperation. “Oh, for crying out loud. Very well then!”
CHAPTER 10
It was a new beginning, Glynis thought as she watched the man before her squirm in his seat. If they could get her mother’s pearls back, they could finally return to a semblance of a normal family life. Ever since Thomas Spencer had stolen them, Mama had been but a shadow of her former self, the rotten thief having taken away her most precious possession.
They’d consulted with the best specialists in the land, who all said the same thing: the loss of something so dear to her heart had been a blow the kind-hearted woman had been unable to overcome. Even though the love and devotion of her family might have seen her through, the theft had coincided with the loss of something else she’d greatly valued: her fortune.
When Papa had married her, Lydia had still possessed a minor fortune, the Moorhouse family trust. Because of the complicated nature of the legal construction, Papa hadn’t been allowed to manage it for her, and through sheer incompetence, the law firm in charge had squandered the money, leaving nothing in the family coffers but the crumbling skeletons of old money.
