Drew leafed quickly through the file then snorted. “Her footman, Whiggens. According to this, he’s elderly. Nearly blind, hard of hearing. Apparently he thought it was unusual for his lady to spend nearly an hour in the millinery shop, so he went inside to check on her.”
“Didn’t find her, then sent for a policeman, right?”
“Exactly. The officer on the corner came running, but the trail had already gone cold. In less than an hour.”
“And this is all they found at the scene.” Ross reached into the box and pulled out a gaudy blue bonnet, a large kid glove, and a folded, crumpled man’s handkerchief.
“Virtually identical to the evidence they found at the first two abductions.” Drew lifted the bonnet by one of its ribbons and set it on a table stand. “Though surely not this same style of hat.”
“We won’t know that until Scotland Yard sends over the rest of the evidence.” Ross took a magnifying glass from one of the forensic cabinets and peered through it at the bonnet. “So, they found this in Regent Street.”
Drew checked the file. “In the alley behind the shop; lodged between two barrels, but in fairly plain sight.”
“And Lady Wallace had been wearing this very hat when she entered the shop?”
“According to the footman and three of the sales clerks.” Drew was already busy creating a case file from the few pages of the report, the familiar, metal-cornered box that would contain the particulars of the crime as the Factory investigated the details.
“What color is Lady Wallace’s hair?” Ross pulled a glittering strand off the line of stitching that attachéd the wide blue ribbon to the blue velvet brim of the hat.
Drew gave another quick scan of Callis’s report. “Dark brown, almost black.”
“Interesting.” He held the strand up to the sharper light of the gas flame. “Because this belongs to a redhead.”
He plucked two more from the rusching at the nape, and was struck by the softness of the scent.
A wisp of the familiar.
“An imposter?” Drew had asked the very question Ross had been considering.
“Except that all the witnesses identified Lady Wallace in the carriage as well as in the shop.” Ross dropped onto a tall stool, sniffed at the handkerchief and grimaced. “Definitely chloroform. Found in the dressing room.”
“And this glove found at the end of the alley. Also tinged with the slight smell of chloroform.”
“Which could mean that Lady Wallace was chloroformed in the dressing room, taken outside into the alley, then put into a vehicle.”
“We need to see for ourselves, Ross. Otherwise I might be forced to believe that Lady Wallace truly did disappear without a trace.”
Leaving only the most bone-chilling possibilities.
“That’s what disturbs me the most,” Ross said. “Because people don’t usually disappear completely, for no reason. Without a threat of blackmail or a ransom demand. This makes three, Drew. What the hell’s going on?”
“A professional criminal?”
“Clever enough to best Scotland Yard at least twice in the last four months. No wonder the Lord Mayor wasn’t going to leave it to the Yard this time. Though I don’t mind saying I’m completely stumped.”
Not a common feeling here in the Factory. It sprawled for three blocks in all directions beneath the elegant rooms of the Huntsman and other, more ordinary buildings. Its catacombs filled with workshops and laboratories, libraries of information, communication systems, every possible invention and some impossible. Every government agency at their beck and call.
Yet sometimes even they were left completely at sea.
“And the Austrians, Ross? How did that go?”
Ross snorted and lifted the blue bonnet off the stand. “Playing games with the Great Powers, Drew. Dangerous games. With dangerous toys.”
And yet suddenly Ross felt he was looking at the most dangerous weapon of all.
Richly scented and marked with strands of strawberry gold hair.
All of which made his brain ache.
And the ache only worsened after he left Drew in the lobby and reached the small, shared sitting area in front of his suite where he found Lord Tuckerton fast asleep in a high-backed chair, a newspaper draped across his knees.
“Lord Tuckerton?”
Ross touched the old man’s bony shoulder and he woke with a snorting start. “Yes, yes, what?”
“Sorry to startle you, Lord Tuckerton, but you seemed to have fallen asleep.”
“Ah, good, Blakestone. Just the man I wanted to see.” The old man struggled to rise, but Ross bent onto a knee to save him the effort.
“What can I do for you, Tuckerton?”
The old man lifted his watery gray eyes to Ross. “You can help find my lass.”
“Your lass?”
“My grandniece, Lady Wallace. She’s missing.” The whole of his body sagged against the back of the chair.
Bloody hell. “Lady Wallace is your grandniece?”
“My brother’s granddaughter.”
“I didn’t realize.” Poor old Tuckerton. Never married. Rarely left the Huntsman for anything more than Sunday services at St. Paul’s or the opening of Parliament.
“How did you find this out?”
“That husband of hers, Wallace. He came by here asking if I’d seen her today. But I hadn’t, had I? Not since Monday last when she picked me up and we went for a drive in the country.”
“When did Wallace come by?”
“Just after lunch.” After the abduction. “Can you find her for me, Blakestone?”
“I promise to do my best, Lord Tuckerton. But let’s keep this between the two of us.”
“Oh, thank you, lad. Thank you.”
“But in the meantime, let’s get you back to your chamber.” Feeling like a heel for having nothing at all to tell him that would buoy the grieving old man’s spirits, Ross stood and slipped his hand under the old man’s elbow. “Things will look much better in the morning.”
Chapter 5
What mighty ills have not been done —by woman!
Who lost Mark Anthony the world?—A woman!
Who was the cause of a long ten years’ war,
And laid at last old Troy in ashes?—Woman!
Thomas Otway, The Orphan, 1680
“You look every inch the elderly spinster, Lady Ellis!” Elizabeth grinned as she straightened the woman’s dowdy black fichu. “Eighty-five, if you’re a day.”
“I feel a hundred.” Lady Ellis sent a skittish glance toward the bustling mid-morning traffic clattering along Threadneedle Street. “And so … exposed.”
“You’ve nothing to worry about, my lady.” Though Elizabeth remembered being just as frightened the first time. Certain that everyone had guessed at her secret plans. That the police were on their way, ready to clap her in irons.
But now it seemed that the more often she braved the hazardous undertaking, the easier the job became. And the more she shamelessly craved the challenge.
“Is my wig on straight, then?” The woman grimaced and tugged on the black ribbon tied below her chin. “It feels loose.”
“It’s fine. Besides, no one will suspect a thing, because no one is paying the least attention to us. A pair of helpless, elderly ladies.”
“You do look positively ancient, Miss Elizabeth.”
“Then we’re both well armed!” Elizabeth pushed her spectacles up her nose, then tapped the tip of her cane on the cobble. “Are you ready?”
“If you think we are …”
“I’m quite sure of it.” And quite proud. “I’ve pulled off this stunt dozens of times, without a single hitch.”
And she was about to do it again!
They were standing in front of the Bank of England, garbed in their frumpish battle armor, prepared to mount a full frontal assault on the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.
An indignity that never failed to raise her hackles.
Leave it to men to
give an impregnable male institution like the Bank of England a feeble, feminine nickname. While at the same time denying married women the right to open accounts of their own without their husbands’ permission.
Their permission! As though women hadn’t the sense to manage money on their own!
“Now remember, Lady Ellis,” Elizabeth said, tamping back that tic of anger as she hooked the woman’s arm and adjusted her aged hunch, “you are Miss Althea Moore.”
“Althea Moore. I like the name.” The woman started up the wide stairs beside Elizabeth, tottering like an expert toward the bank lobby.
“You’ve never been married. And you live alone in Pickering Place.”
“Never married. Pickering Place. Pickering Place.” Lady Ellis sounded perfectly doddering with all that muttering.
“You have inherited the rents on a green grocer and a small boardinghouse, and will be adding to your account regularly.”
“Green grocer and a boardinghouse. A regular account.” Lady Ellis was gripping Elizabeth’s arm in a vise of fear. “I hope I can remember all that.”
Elizabeth patted her hand. “Just follow my lead, no matter what, and everything will go swimmingly.”
“But what if it doesn’t?” Lady Ellis paused as they reached the wide porch and peered at Elizabeth through her wiry spectacles. “What if they catch us?”
“They won’t.” They can’t. She couldn’t let them. Because the penalty for conspiracy and defrauding a bank was too many years in a dank, dark prison to endure.
But this time there’d be no meddlesome earl to interfere with her fate.
The footman nodded a bow as he opened the great, glass door for them, and Elizabeth led the trembling woman into the cool air of the vast, vaulted, marble lobby of milling people and bank officials.
The enormously tall windows streamed sunlight across the floor and up the front edge of the rich, oak half-walls of the elevated teller’s counter, which spanned the back wall of the room. The faces of the bank clerks peered down on the lobby from between the short wooden struts, putting the customers at a distinct disadvantage.
“So this is the Bank of England!” Lady Ellis had stopped in the center of the marble floor, staring in open-mouthed awe at the pompous, overly masculine atmosphere. “Imagine, Elizabeth, I’m nearly fifty years old, and in all that time I’ve had no cause to come here!”
“Because your husband has taken care of everything.”
“Including the substantial inheritance left to me by my father, which I’m not allowed to touch because I’m a woman.” Lady Ellis harrumphed, her eyes now snapping, her mouth set in an irritated frown. “After all, I couldn’t possibly be intelligent enough to manage my own personal finances. Though not two months ago my husband insisted that our fifteen-year-old son open his own account. And I wouldn’t trust that boy to know a horse from a hairbrush.”
“Exactly, my lady.” A sobering, hard-fought admission for most women.
Lady Ellis gave a defiant grunt, then tugged Elizabeth toward the wall of teller cages. “Come then, my dear. I’m ready for a little independence.”
Brava, Lady Ellis. Elizabeth leaned on the crook of her cane, and then hobbled up to a waiting clerk.
She had to crane her head to see up over the counter and through the short bars to the needle-nosed clerk in a crisp white collar and a staid gray neckcloth.
“May I help you, madam?” the man asked with a long, doubting drawl that made her want to give him a good whack on his balding head with her cane.
“Let’s hope you can, sonny,” Elizabeth shot back with a goodly amount of disdain, patting the stoop-shouldered Lady Ellis on the arm as though they were fusty old comrades. “My friend here has come to your bank to open an account.”
“Indeed, madam.” The man rose up off his perch as though the effort pained him, then peered down at them through his pale brows. “However, according to company policy, opening an account here is a matter for your husband to—”
“Miss Moore is unmarried, young man.” Elizabeth rapped the tip of her cane against the foot of the counter.
The man gave a satisfying flinch and then narrowed his eyes at her. “Indeed.”
“Indeed, yes. She has come into some money and would like to deposit it and any future gains in the Bank of England. Unless, of course, you do not want her money.”
He studied Lady Ellis for another moment, his brows pinching together into a single wriggling, caterpillarlike object. “Indeed, madam.”
He hemmed and hawed then spoke in hushed tones to the teller beside him, but when the man finally, grudgingly, poked a card through the bars and growled at his new depositor, Elizabeth knew they were going to win—again.
“Fill this out, Miss Moore. Over there at the counter.” He pointed to a slanted writing space at the side of the lobby. “Then bring it back here.”
“Thank you, sir.” Elizabeth gave the frowning clerk an elderly grin then led her hobbling companion to the desk. “Good work, my lady.”
“Dear Lord, Miss Elizabeth! If I’d known it was as simple as that, I’d have opened my own accounts years ago and saved myself from my dear husband’s constant carping about every farthing I ask of him. I ought to be able to collect quite a pot over the course of a year. Do whatever I want with it.”
Fifteen minutes later the deed had been successfully done; Miss Althea Moore was the proud owner of her very own account at the Bank of England, and Elizabeth was leading her out the door onto the porch of the wide steps.
******************
“This is the tidiest damned back alley I’ve ever seen.” Drew stood frowning at the dry cobbles and the row of barrels against the back of the row of shops.
“No sign of a skirmish anywhere along here.” Ross had walked the length of the alley, looking for indications of a scuffle etched into the granite. But there wasn’t a single sign of iron wheels scraping against the stone for a quick getaway. No drag marks leading out of the open back door of the millinery shop.
Not a single window looking out onto the alley. The bulk of a carriage would easily mask the commotion of an abduction from the streets at either end.
He’d awakened early to set the Factory’s best forensic experts onto the evidence. They would search out the haberdasher who made the bonnet, the chemist who formulated the chloroform, and the glovemaker. Simple tasks that the Factory’s experts did on a daily basis.
Walking through the methods and madness of a criminal required an altogether more refined set of skills.
“Find anything, my lord?” The plump-cheeked clerk watched them from just inside the back door of the shop, her brown eyes a familiar mix of concern, horror, and curiosity.
“The police report says that Lady Wallace was here for nearly an hour. Was that normal for her?”
“Normal for most all of our clients. Miss Verdon encourages her customers to take all the time they need. Attends to them herself, while we girls help out with fetching feathers and trimming and ribbons and such from the boxes.”
“Did she seem different? At any point? Fearful, distracted?”
“Not any more than usual.”
“Meaning?”
“I shouldn’t really say, my lord. Miss Verdon doesn’t like us to speak about her customers.”
“This is a police matter, Alice. Anything you tell us, no matter how inconsequential it may seem, might just be the information that saves Lady Wallace’s life.”
“Oh, dear. But it’s nothing much, sir. Only that the lady wasn’t ever very happy. Seemed afraid all the time.”
“Not just yesterday?”
“That’s right.” Alice leaned out the doorway. “Always jumpy, you know. Fretting about what her husband might think of her hats.”
“And that’s odd?”
“Most husbands don’t care. Wouldn’t know a poke from a leghorn.”
The one thing Ross knew already about Lord Wallace was that the baron was opinionated, unbending. The sort of
man who attempted to control every moment of his existence, and all the people who crossed his path.
“I see. Did she meet up with anyone in the shop? A friend, perhaps? An acquaintance?”
“Sometimes customers meet someone they know. And they chat and gossip while they try on hats.”
“But not this visit?”
“We only had three other customers while she was here. I gave their names to the officers yesterday.”
“I’ll check on those, Blakestone.”
“Thanks, Wexford. Now if we could go back inside.”
“Yessir.”
Ross let Alice precede them through the back door, then he stopped in front of the dressing room. “It says here in the report that Lady Wallace went into the dressing room with her bag and the blue hat she’d come in with, and then she never came out.”
“That’s right. As though she just turned into a ghost and vanished into thin air.”
Drew swung the door open and peered inside. “How long before you noticed her missing?”
“Five minutes, my lord. Maybe a little longer.”
Ross stepped inside the windowless, ten-by-ten room, noticing the barest hint of chloroform that still clung to the chintz. “Did anything strike you as unusual at any point after Lady Wallace stepped inside here?”
“Odd noises?” Drew prompted. “Smells, voices, a demanding customer?”
“The police asked us that yesterday, but I don’t remember a thing.”
“All right, then, Alice, what happened next?” Ross asked as he knelt to inspect the pristine area around the door latch.
“The footman came in asking about the lady. I knocked on the door here, and there was no answer. So Mrs. Verdon opened the door and there was nothing. No Lady Wallace.”
“Nothing but a folded handkerchief on the floor, right here, according to the report. Near the dressing table.”
“That’s right, Lord Blakestone.”
“And her bonnet outside in the alley.” Ross ran the flat of his hand along the floor at the edge of the wall. Three small, blue glass beads stuck themselves between his fingers.
“Miss Verdon says it was a good thing it wasn’t a hat from our shop.”
Marry the Man Today Page 5
