Chapter Thirty-One. The Best Defense …
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Best Defense …
SNOW fell in torrents as we raced through the streets of Oxford back to the townhome.
Everyone with a lick of sense had long been asleep, leaving us alone in the night.
A lone dog howled in the distance as we crunched along in the newly fallen snow.
My teeth chattered. Neither of us said a word, both struggling to make sense of what we found in Julius Harker’s home.
No matter how badly I wanted to paint Frederick Reaver as the villain, something deep down told me he was not.
A dreadful man, yes. A cad of the highest order? Also yes.
But he wouldn’t harm Leona. That was the piece that did not fit. He cared for her, he would not have done anything to risk her. He’d more or less told me the same in his office.
The clues had been there all along. The tenderness in the way he touched Leona the night of the exhibition. The way that her name subtly affected him, even when he wore his chilly mask. “We have to find out who his buyer was…”
“His what?” Ruan asked incredulously.
“Regardless of whether it’s drugs or antiquities he’s dealing in, someone was buying from Harker.
” My sigh was visible in the night air. “We’ve been going about it all wrong.
I’ve been trying to figure out the why of the crime, thinking it would lead me to the killer’s identity.
But all that’s done is take us in circles.
We need to change tack and figure out who might have done it, then we can worry about why. ”
Ruan made a strangled sound in his throat before muttering something in Cornish that sounded an awful lot like a prayer to his old gods.
The townhome was the next street over. I dipped into a narrow alley to cut the distance.
It was dark between the tall buildings, and just wide enough I could touch both sides if I extended my arms. A fat rat scurried ahead, disturbed by our presence, and climbed up the wall, disappearing into the darkness.
There was a time when rats frightened me, but during the war I saw enough of the things that they’d become rather commonplace now.
“How do you think you’re going to find out who killed Harker, if we don’t know why?”
I paused, turning back to him, resting my hands on my hips ready to ask if he had any better ideas, when I noticed an unusual glow coming from the townhome.
Something large brushed my ankles. I glanced down half expecting to see the damn rat had returned, but instead it was Fiachna.
He butted his head against me and let out a throaty meow.
“What are you doing…?” I scooped him up into my arms. As I stood, I realized how he’d gotten out.
The door to the townhouse was wide open, all the ground-floor lights burning bright.
Panic climbed up my throat as I held onto my oversized housecat, running my fingers through his coat and struggling to make sense of the scene.
Mr. Owen and Mrs. Penrose were asleep when we left, and Annabelle was in no condition to be turning on or off lamps.
The house had been dark.
I broke into a run, cat in my arms, until I reached the doorway and came to a skidding halt. Fiachna wriggled his way out of my grasp with an aggrieved meow and hopped onto the cold floor.
Mr. Owen stood in the middle of the kitchen, clad in his long white nightshirt, his sturdy legs bare from the thigh down. My—well, his—revolver pointed at the chest of a man bound up with kitchen twine.
Mrs. Penrose, for her part, stood over the intruder with a heavy copper pan gripped in her hand.
Gauging by the knot already growing on their captive’s temple, she had already employed said pan at least once.
Fiachna purred loudly before hopping up on the table, his fluffy tail proudly flicking in the air.
“May I ask what happened here?” I stepped around Mr. Owen to get a better look at their prisoner and my heart sank.
Good God, this was bad.
I stared unblinking at the unconscious form of Inspector Beecham.
The same dreadful man from the police station who’d discovered me in Mr. Mueller’s cell and threatened the kind, young constable, Jack.
The same one who couldn’t be bothered to bring me back from outside the museum after my attack, and instead phoned for the constable to carry my insensate form back to the station.
I dropped my voice to a whisper. “Are you out of your minds? That man is a police inspector!”
“I don’t care if he’s the Almighty himself!” Mrs. Penrose exclaimed. “He was after the poor maid upstairs. What else were we to do, let him finish the job he started?” Mrs. Penrose gestured with her large copper pan to the upstairs floor where young Annabelle was recovering.
“Is Annabelle all right?” Ruan asked, closing the door behind him lest any passersby discover we had a man held at gunpoint in the kitchen.
Mr. Owen gestured with the revolver. “She is. I went up to check on her in the night—you know how I have trouble sleeping—and found him in her room trying to smother the poor lamb. We got into a bit of a tussle.”
“This certainly explains how Mr. Mueller was killed under the nose of the police.” I watched Beecham’s unconscious form, running a rough hand over my face.
It also explained who accosted me in that alley.
While I couldn’t fault Mr. Owen for his actions, a wave of nausea struck. How the devil would we get out of this?
“I think we have to assume that this Beecham fellow killed Mueller.” Ruan crossed the room, pouring water into a kettle before putting it on to heat. “Perhaps you can ask him when he wakes up?” he added dryly.
“Very amusing. I suppose we found our killer, haven’t we?” I folded my arms.
The muscles in Ruan’s jaw worked slowly as he watched me across the chilly kitchen.
“Ruan, go see to Annabelle. Be sure she’s not harmed. I doubt much will be happening down here until Beecham wakes up.”
“This is bad, Ruby. Very bad.”
Oh, I knew that all too well. “Mr. Owen has this all in hand, we’ll muddle through.”
Ruan made a gruff sound of disagreement before running up the stairs after the poor wounded girl.
“Lass … there is something else.”
I turned slowly to face Mr. Owen. “What else happened tonight?”
He inclined his head encouragingly to Mrs. Penrose. The older woman reached into the pocket of her thick woolen housecoat and withdrew a very familiar scrimshaw comb from her pocket. She hesitated, offering it to me on an outstretched palm.
This day got stranger and stranger. Mrs. Penrose was holding the comb from Harker’s Curiosity Museum. The same one that captivated Ruan when we broke in the first time. I reached out with a cautious hand, taking it from her.
It was cool to the touch, unnaturally so.
Perhaps it was the material it was made from, but the object seemed to absorb the air around it.
Up close it was even lovelier than it had been under glass.
I closed my eyes, wrapping my fingers around it, and the scent of salt and a bone-deep longing for home grew in my belly.
“Where did you find this?” My voice cracked.
“In his pocket. It’s an odd piece, isn’t it?” Mr. Owen asked, his dark brown eyes lingering on my face. “Yet you seem to know what it is.”
“It was in Harker’s museum. Ruan was fascinated by it.”
Mrs. Penrose’s breath hitched softly as she darted her gaze to Mr. Owen, who looked a shade paler than he had a moment before.
“Does it mean something?”
Mr. Owen rubbed his bristly white beard and gave his head a shake. “Of course not, my lamb.”
“Pay it no mind, my lover,” Mrs. Penrose quickly added.
“He must have stolen it from the museum.” I turned the comb over in my hand.
Ruan had been transfixed by it. Such a small object, to hold his attention.
Ruan’s response to the little comb had unnerved me at Harker’s museum, but even more now that I knew of his ties to the Radix Maleficarum as well.
Inspector Beecham was most certainly in league with whoever killed Julius Harker—if he wasn’t the killer himself.
First the book, now the comb. There were a growing number of questions that led back to Ruan and I didn’t like that one bit.
But any questions about why Beecham had taken the comb would have to wait until the inspector had awoken—for he certainly wasn’t answering anything in his current condition.
RUAN SAT BESIDE Annabelle on the narrow mattress, talking to himself in Cornish as he changed the bandages on her belly. I sometimes wondered if he even realized he did it.
“You were right.” He finished removing the soiled dressings from her abdomen, exposing the damaged flesh beneath.
“About what?”
“That her attacker meant to finish the job. We cannot leave her unguarded again. It was a mistake to do it tonight. We are lucky that the inspector didn’t come when we were at Lord Amberley’s with only Dorothea here.
At least she had Owen with her.” Ruan applied a strong-smelling liquid to a small piece of cloth and began gently cleaning around the stitches.
An herbal scent flooded the room. “If you’d listened to me and put her in the hospital, she’d be as dead as Mueller. ”
“You must have more faith in Mrs. Penrose and her skill with copper pots. Dorothea Penrose is a woman not to be trifled with.”
Ruan shot me an unamused look and I sobered immediately. “Mr. Owen would never let any harm happen to her. Do not blame yourself for this evening.”
“He’s an old man. Dorothea isn’t much younger.”
I raised my brows. “And the pair of them together saved her life. But I agree with you. She must be the key to understanding what happened, otherwise Beecham would not have risked coming here to kill her.”
He nodded, casting his eyes to the whitewashed wooden ceiling. “We need her healthy enough to tell us what she saw.”