Chapter 4
Miles stood beside Higgins outside the door of Lawrence Cowgill’s ground-floor flat in Carey Street. It was difficult to believe that, only a short time ago, he’d been on the verge of proposing marriage to a lady he’d compromised. And now here he was about to commit what was inarguably a crime.
Then again, Miles had always been good at compartmentalizing.
His life was organized into rigid boxes—work, friendships, women, cats. Everything orderly and methodical. Thus far, only the cats had managed to escape the confines of their category. Nothing else threatened to do so. Certainly not a lady who was still virtually a stranger to him.
A stranger whose stocking-clad limbs he’d been privileged to admire. One he’d held close against him, feeling the narrow, corseted curve of her waist in his hand and the soft fullness of her rounded bosom pressing to his chest.
Penelope Trewlove.
The recollections of her nagged at Miles, threatening to divert his attention.
He mentally consigned her to one of his many boxes. Not the cobweb-strewn one labeled Women. That derelict space had been empty for ages, and even before that, it had never been occupied for long, and never by anyone who truly mattered to him.
In any case, it wouldn’t do for her. She required a box of her own, one marked Nell. He would return to it and the inevitability of their engagement at a later time. For now, it was work that must take priority, just as it always did.
“I really do think we should have notified the police,” Higgins said for what had to be the hundredth time.
Miles gave his clerk a distracted glance.
Higgins was young, but he was trustworthy.
More importantly, he knew how to follow orders.
Miles had returned to his office only long enough to fetch him—and to dispatch a reporter to track down Pettiman—before proceeding to Cowgill’s lodgings without further delay.
They hadn’t taken Miles’s carriage. They’d used a series of hansom cabs to convey them as far as Portugal Street.
The remainder of the way had been traversed on foot, much to Higgins’s consternation.
“We will,” Miles assured him. “But first—” He rattled the doorknob.
“There’s no one here, sir,” Higgins objected. “I came myself only yesterday, on your orders, and Bob the day before that. The flat was empty.”
Miles stepped back from the door to examine the strength of its hinges. “You didn’t go inside.”
“Of course not. There was no one to admit us. As for Mr. Cowgill, why…he might even now be in the gravest of danger. Scotland Yard would—”
“Cowgill is dead,” Miles said. “And once the police are involved, we’ll lose any opportunity to find out why.”
Higgins’s face went ashen. “Forgive me, sir, but isn’t that a question best answered by them?”
Only half listening, Miles glanced down the street, first to the left and then to the right, keeping a lookout for anyone who might raise the alarm.
It had been a long while since he’d stooped to breaking into someone’s house.
Decades, in fact. Then, he’d gone in quietly, usually through a window, in company with Gabriel and the other street children who haunted the alleyways of the St. Giles slum.
Miles had grown up among them. Had circumstances been different, he might have ended up as Gabriel had—a dangerous underworld demigod, possessed of questionable wealth and a flexible sense of morality.
But there was a fundamental difference between Miles and his childhood best friend. Unlike Gabriel, Miles had had a mother.
A formidable mother.
Catching him shimmying down a drainpipe one evening, she’d dragged him home by his ear. “We may be poor, Miles Quincey,” she’d scolded him, “but we aren’t thieves. We don’t go into strangers’ houses. And we don’t steal from anyone.”
“It was only a lark, Mum,” Miles had answered back. “Gabriel—”
“And do you do everything Gabriel Royce tells you? Have you no mind of your own? No reason?” She’d shoved him into the single room they’d shared at the end of a fetid alleyway.
It was where she’d raised him on her own since his birth, teaching him to read and write at her knee.
“As soon as I can scrape up the remaining funds, you’ll be gone from here for your apprenticeship. It won’t be a moment too soon.”
Miles well remembered both her words and the sharp sting of her smacks.
Rose Quincey had sacrificed everything to get him out of the Rookery and to ensure that he became a respectable, educated gentleman. She would turn over in her grave to see him now.
Miles sent up a silent apology to her as he forcefully applied his shoulder to the door. It gave on the first attempt, bursting open at its hinges.
“Mr. Quincey!” Higgins gasped. He shot a horrified look at the street behind them as though expecting a policeman to materialize out of thin air and haul them straight to Newgate.
“Don’t just stand there,” Miles said, entering the flat. “We haven’t much time.” He waited only long enough for Higgins to scurry in after him before propping the door shut.
The apartment was dark and dismal, but even in the dim light seeping through the cracks of the curtains one could see the state of the place.
Drawers had been pulled out of a large bureau and turned out on the floor.
The bookcase had been cleared, cushions slashed, and pictures removed from the walls.
Clothing and books lay in heaps all over the green-and-blue floral carpet.
Higgins collected himself. As an office clerk, he wasn’t accustomed to braving danger in the field. He was nevertheless possessed of good sense. “I’ll light a lamp.”
Miles scanned the cluttered room. It was composed in a largish square, with a bedstead, a sitting area, and an approximation of a kitchen, complete with a cast-iron range.
A small part of him had expected to find Cowgill’s body here, but there was no sign of it.
Nor was there any evidence of blood. Not that Miles could yet discern.
Higgins managed to locate a tinderbox and used it to light the glass oil lamp that stood on a table beside Cowgill’s sofa. “What are we looking for?”
“Something that might tell us what he was working on,” Miles said.
“You believe his death is connected to it?”
“When someone cuts out the tongue of my gossip columnist, I can only presume.” Miles stooped to pick up one of the books from the floor. He was flipping through the pages when a faint movement caught his eye from across the room. It was a breeze softly stirring the curtains.
Walking to the window, Miles pulled back the drapes. He wasn’t entirely surprised to discover the glass cracked open and the latch on the casement broken.
Higgins wrinkled his nose at a heap of clothing on the floor. “I wouldn’t have guessed Mr. Cowgill would be this untidy.”
“He wasn’t.” Miles let the curtain fall closed. “Someone’s been here before us.”
Higgins blinked in dismay. “They broke in?”
“And turned the place over.”
By the looks of it, they’d shaken out every book, rifled every drawer, and examined the innards of the pillows and the mattress.
They had also checked the backs of the pictures and mirrors, likely looking for a notebook or a sheaf of papers containing whatever damning evidence Cowgill possessed against them.
There were few places left to search.
Miles’s gaze once again drifted over the room, recalling everything he’d ever learned during a childhood spent fraternizing with the criminal elements of the Rookery. “Focus on the floor and the baseboards,” he said. “Look for loose joints or cut sections of wood.”
Higgins got straight to it, though not without grumbling. “Seems no point to me. They’ll have already found what Mr. Cowgill had hidden here.”
“They haven’t,” Miles said. He rolled back the carpet as far as he was able. “Doubtless they believe I have it.”
Higgins paused in the act of feeling along the baseboards behind the sofa. “I don’t quite—”
“They sent his tongue to me as a warning. They obviously think I know something. If they didn’t, they’d never have risked exposing their crime. Cowgill’s disappearance could have remained a mystery.”
“With all respect, sir, it still is one.”
“Only until we piece it together.”
Higgins furrowed his brow. “Is that why we had to come here in such a roundabout way? Taking those hansom cabs and cutting through those alleyways on foot? You suspected we might be followed?”
Miles continued searching under the carpet for any sign of a loose floorboard. “I wouldn’t rule it out.”
Higgins’s lips thinned. “We’re not police inspectors, Mr. Quincey.”
“No,” Miles said. “We’re investigative journalists. And some stories are more dangerous to report than others, as Cowgill clearly discovered.”
“But Mr. Cowgill wasn’t a reporter. He wrote harmless tittle-tattle about nameless lords losing their fortunes and unidentified ladies having love affairs. That isn’t serious journalism.”
“Yet Cowgill took it seriously. He was a veritable vault when it came to his methods. He wouldn’t divulge them to anyone, not even me.”
“There’s some who say he cultivated relationships with the valets and ladies’ maids of the gentry,” Higgins said.
It wasn’t the first time Miles had heard the rumor. “He may have done,” he acknowledged. “The point is, he protected his sources. I don’t expect he’d have been any less protective when it came to his notes.”
“The notebook we found in his desk at the Courant didn’t contain anything of value,” Higgins pointed out. “Only three dates, as I showed you—two already past, and one next month.”
Miles remembered. They had been written in an ink-splattered line: 19th March, 28th March, 3rd September.
He hadn’t paid them much attention at the time.
He’d been too irritated not to find a draft of an actual gossip column tucked away in Cowgill’s desk—something they might run in the cursed man’s absence.
A few scrawled dates had been useless, as well as meaningless.