Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
The Broker
Rosalynd stood next to me, her arms folded, her gaze fixed on the window that faced Grosvenor Square.
“A man of action,” she said. “Who could not sit still with his grief.”
“It is a theory. Nothing more.”
“It is a good theory, and you know it.” She turned from the window.
“We have been asking ourselves why anyone would kill the men who were making him rich. The consortium had no reason to murder Hale or Davenport—they were the source of the profits. But a man whose son was killed by the consortium’s weapons? That man has every reason.”
She was right. I had arrived at the same conclusion in the silence after Mrs. Ashford’s departure, though I had not yet committed to it aloud.
The motive was not financial. It was not political.
It was grief—grief transformed into purpose by a man who had the training and the temperament to act on it.
“We need the regimental records,” I said. “The 14th Hussars, India. Every officer who served alongside Colonel Ashford. Finch can—”
A knock at the door. Honeycutt appeared with a note on the salver.
"From Steele House, Your Grace."
I broke the seal. Milford's precise hand, economical as ever. Lord Nicholas had arrived and requested my presence at my earliest convenience. The matter was, in Milford's understated phrase, "of some significance."
Nicholas. The Foreign Office enquiries. The foreign gentleman at the consortium dinner—the man I had tasked my brother to identify days ago.
“I must go,” I said to Rosalynd. “Nicholas is at Steele House.”
“I’ll go with you.”
“There will be talk.”
“It is eleven o’clock in the morning, and Steele House is forty yards across the square.” She was already moving toward the hall. “The neighbors will survive.”
The neighbors, in my experience, catalogued, judged, and reported their findings to anyone who would listen over cards and sherry. But Rosalynd had donned bonnet and gloves and moved through the door before I could mount a coherent objection.
We crossed Grosvenor Square in the late morning sun, walking at a pace that suggested purpose without urgency.
She had taken my arm, which was proper. She had also positioned herself on my left side.
A tactical maneuver. It placed her between me and the windows of Lady Swithton, the square’s most dedicated observer of other people’s movements.
“Windsor,” she said, as we walked. “What did Her Majesty have to say?”
“The Queen has heard the rumors concerning the Prince. She wants the investigation concluded quickly and the personal matter kept out of the press.”
“Is that all?”
“That is the substance of it.” I kept my gaze forward.
There were things the Queen had said—about Rosalynd, about the nature of my intentions toward her—that I had no intention of repeating.
Not now. Not when she was walking beside me in the sunlight with her hand on my arm, and the memory of the lake was still so close to the surface that I could feel it in the spaces between my ribs.
“You’re holding something back,” she said.
“I am always holding something back. It is one of my more reliable qualities.”
Rosalynd was not amused. “Steele.”
“Later,” I said. And meant it. There would be a reckoning—with the Queen’s words, with the kiss, with everything that had shifted between us at the lake. But not now. Not in the middle of Grosvenor Square.
She accepted this, which told me she understood precisely what I was not saying.
Milford opened the door before we reached the steps. As always, he’d been watching from the window—a habit he denied categorically and practiced without exception.
As Rosalynd stepped in, his gaze registered her presence without the slightest indication of surprise. “Lady Rosalynd.” And then, almost as an afterthought, “Your Grace, Lord Nicholas is in your study. I have taken the liberty of providing coffee and sustenance.”
“Thank you, Milford,” Rosalynd said, sweeping past him into the entrance hall with the serene authority of a woman who had been at Steele House enough times to claim that privilege.
Milford looked at me. I looked at Milford. Neither of us said anything. There was nothing to say.
Nicholas was standing at the window, a cup of coffee in his hand, looking considerably less polished than his usual self.
His collar was slightly askew, his hair showed signs of having been pushed back from his forehead repeatedly, and there was an energy about him—a tightly wound alertness—that I recognized. He had found something.
As he turned from the window, there was a brief hike to his brow at the sight of Rosalynd. But he recovered quickly enough and bowed. “Lady Rosalynd. What a pleasure to see you.”
“Lord Nicholas.” She took the chair by the desk as though it had been reserved for her.
My brother gazed at me, a hint of humor in his eyes. “Warwick.”
“Nicholas.” I took my usual seat behind the desk, the one that conveyed I was in command, all evidence to the contrary. “What did you find?”
He set his cup on a tray where but a few crumbs remained of the repast Milford had served, then took the remaining chair in front of my desk.
“The Foreign Office has been aware of an arms broker operating through Liège and Antwerp for the better part of three years. A Belgian named Lucien Verstraeten. He began as a middleman for the small arms manufacturers in the Meuse valley—matching buyers to workshops, arranging transport, and taking a commission. But he outgrew that quickly. By ’87, he was running his own operation—purchasing weapons in bulk, arranging shipping through intermediaries, and selling to buyers in East Africa and the Arabian coast.”
“The Foreign Office knew this and did nothing?” Rosalynd asked.
“The Foreign Office knew this and watched,” Nicholas said.
“Verstraeten was not breaking Belgian law. He was barely breaking anyone’s law.
There is no international prohibition on the sale of arms to Africa—not yet.
The Brussels Conference is underway, but nothing has been signed.
Until it is, men like Verstraeten operate in the gap between what is legal and what is moral. ”
“And his connection to Hale?” I asked.
“Direct. Verstraeten brokered the arrangement. He sourced the weapons, arranged the Belgian end of the pipeline, and took a commission on every shipment. Hale provided the ships and the London infrastructure. Davenport managed the money. Verstraeten was the third leg of the stool.”
The third leg. I turned this over. Three men. Two dead. The third presumably alive and probably aware that someone was removing his partners.
“Do we know where Verstraeten is now?”
“The Foreign Office believes he was in London as recently as six weeks ago. He attended a private dinner—”
“The consortium dinner,” Rosalynd said.
Nicholas nodded. “He arrived quietly, attended the dinner, and left England within days. The Foreign Office tracked him as far as Calais. After that, they lost him.”
Silence. The study clock ticked. Through the window, Grosvenor Square went about its morning—carriages, nursemaids, the ordinary machinery of wealth operating in perfect ignorance of what was being discussed forty yards from its center.
“So,” Rosalynd said. “We have two possible murderers.”
I knew what she was about to say. I had constructed the same framework.
“The first,” she continued. “Verstraeten. He brokered the deal, took a commission—but perhaps the commission was not enough. Perhaps Hale and Davenport were taking a larger share than he believed was his due. He comes to London, attends the dinner, and confronts them. And in doing so, he exposes the entire enterprise.”
She paused, letting the implication settle.
“The investors at that table discover,” she continued, “perhaps for the first time, precisely where their money has gone—not into legitimate trade, but into arming conflicts in East Africa. That alone would be enough to terrify them. But it is worse than that. They are now sitting across the table from a man who traffics in weapons, who is making threats because he has not been paid what he believes he is owed. The leap from selling arms to using them is not a great one. And when the dispute cannot be resolved, he kills Hale at the opera and arranges Davenport’s death to eliminate the only man who could trace the money back to him. ”
“It fits,” Nicholas said. “A man operating outside the law, with no loyalty to his partners beyond profit. If the arrangement soured, he would not hesitate.”
“The second possibility,” I said, “is a grieving father.”
I told Nicholas what Mrs. Ashford had revealed.
Colonel Ashford’s investment in the consortium.
His discovery of the arms trafficking and the ivory trade.
The friend from his regiment—the 14th Hussars, India—whose son had been killed in East Africa protecting elephants from poachers armed with the consortium’s weapons.
Nicholas was quiet for a long time after I finished.
“Both motives are strong,” he said. “But we have Verstraeten’s name. We have his movements. We have the Foreign Office’s file. The father is a shadow—no name, no regiment match yet, nothing to pursue. At least, not yet.”
Before we could settle on our next steps, Milford appeared in the doorway.
“Mr. Finch, Your Grace.”
Finch entered looking as though he had not slept in some time, but with the energy of a man who had found what he had been looking for. He nodded to Rosalynd and Nicholas before turning to me.
“Found Jessop. Hiding in a boarding house in Southwark under his mother’s maiden name. Never left London. Took some persuading, but he talked.”
“And?”
“The dinner. He was there—not as a guest, as an employee. The Belgian confronted Hale and Davenport directly. Told them his share was to be increased, or they would all pay the price. His words, not Jessop’s interpretation.
” Finch paused. “After Hale was killed, Davenport summoned Jessop and ordered every document from the last six months destroyed. Jessop burned the lot. Then he ran.”
The missing records. Six months of correspondence and accounts, gone—not lost, not misplaced, but deliberately destroyed by a man who understood exactly what they would reveal.
“Did Jessop give you anything else? Names, dates, movements?”
“Nothing beyond what he heard at the dinner. He was a clerk, not a confidante. But he knew enough to be frightened. That’s why he ran.”
“It fits,” I said, nodding. “But something else has come up. I need you to look into the regimental records of Colonel Ashford. Fourteenth Hussars, Indian posting. Every officer who served alongside him. A friend of the colonel’s—a fellow officer—lost a son in East Africa.
The son was killed protecting elephants from poachers armed with the consortium’s weapons.
The father may have decided to settle the account himself. ”
Finch did not ask why a grieving father with military training made a plausible suspect. He would have figured it out for himself. “I’ll need help. The regimental records won’t be quick.”
“Take whoever you need. I want it done in two days.”
“You’ll have it.” He gave a brief nod to the room and left.
After the door closed, Nicholas turned to me. “So who do we pursue? Verstraeten or the father?”
“Both motives are strong,” I said. “But Verstraeten is the man we can find. We have his name, his movements, the Foreign Office’s file. The father is a shadow—no name, no regiment match, nothing to pursue until Finch pulls those records.”
"But how will we find Verstraeten?" Rosalynd asked. "He could be anywhere."
"If he is the killer, he will not be far. He wants money. And he can’t get it if he retreats to the continent. He stays close and watches for an opportunity to obtain it."
“From the dinner guests who heard his threats?”
"Exactly. He knows their reputations would suffer if word got out about their investments in an arms trafficking scheme. He would likely blackmail them."
“But what if he is not the killer? What if he’s the next victim?"
"Then finding him becomes more urgent, not less."
“We should be pursuing both leads with equal force, Steele,” she said.
“We can’t chase the father until Finch gives us something solid from the regimental records. Verstraeten is the man we hunt now. The father is a thread we follow when we can.”
Rosalynd looked at me with an expression I knew well—the one that meant she disagreed but would not press the point. Not yet.
Somewhere in London, a man named Lucien Verstraeten was either a killer or the next victim. We would find him. And when we did, we would have an answer. And then, God help us, if he wasn’t the killer, we would have to chase a ghost.