Chapter Twenty-One
A dank fog drifted above the river, spreading its heavy, clinging tentacles across surrounding streets, expanding and thickening.
Janey could smell its foulness in her nostrils, taste it in her mouth, and now that it was dark, she could barely see the hand in front of her face, let alone someone approaching to rob them.
Sounds were so muffled and distorted that she couldn’t tell whether an approaching carriage was in this street or the next, whether the bark of a dog or a plaintive cry were anywhere near them.
Janey kept close to Lenny, holding tight to the heavy reticule in her left hand.
It was a trick she had learned from Constance, so simple she should have thought of it herself.
Keep stones in the otherwise harmless little bag that most men discounted.
Janey knew from experience that such harmlessness could deliver a very nasty blow.
And if they stayed out here much longer, they were going to need it.
She was sure they were being followed, and in this kind of area, that could only mean one thing.
“Let’s go home,” she said abruptly. “We’ll never find him in this.”
They had been looking for Henry Hope since the afternoon, inquiring at the various clubs and alehouses that, according to Tulip and her informant, he usually frequented.
As a result, Janey knew he would be alerted to their search by now.
He might choose to find out what they wanted.
He was just as likely to send someone to kill them for asking questions.
Lenny glanced at her and nodded at once. But she could feel his frustration in the stiffness of his posture and the jerky way he peered around him. He was disappointed to fail in their quest.
She squeezed his arm. “He might find us tomorrow, and in safer surroundings.”
In the pale glow from a dirty window, Lenny’s rare half smile dawned, making her heart skitter.
Which was when a large, hulking figure loomed out of the mist beside him.
Instinctively, Janey tugged Lenny to the left and quickened her pace, but someone else stopped right in their path, forcing them to halt.
He carried an old lantern that only just pierced the fog.
Janey, ready to protect Lenny at all costs, tightened her grip on the reticule just as something yanked at it hard. She wrenched it free, swinging it high.
A third man loomed out of the murk beside her, close enough to make out his features and the fit of his clothes. Someone who regarded himself as a cut above the ragged thugs who encircled them. Beside her, Lenny had gone very still. No wonder. Their quarry seemed to have found them.
And he held all the cards.
She lowered her arm, hugging the reticule to her chest to keep it away from him.
“That’s quite a grip you got on your bag, miss,” the well-dressed man remarked. “Just as well around here. Not a safe place to be.”
“Thanks for caring,” Janey said. “We’re just leaving.”
“So soon? People so fond of safety shouldn’t ask so many questions.”
Janey knew better than to show fear, but the man’s curiously soft voice, surrounded by the fog and filth of the street, chilled her blood.
They could be murdered here and their bodies left unseen in the street for however long the fog lasted.
Even tripping over them, no one would stop to look, and she very much doubted the police constables patrolled this area.
“Got any for us?” Lenny asked cheerfully.
Hope—she knew it was him—turned his gaze on Lenny. “Any what?”
“Questions. Only fair.”
Hope showed his teeth. It was not a friendly smile. “I like a fair-minded man. Who are you and who’re you from?”
“We work for an agency engaged to find a missing gentleman,” Lenny said.
Hope laughed while his two henchmen remained alarmingly straight-faced. “No gentlemen round here. But I’ll bite. What’s his name?”
“Percival Harvey. Someone told us he knew you.”
Hope considered. He took what appeared to be a toothpick from his pocket and began to dig inside his mouth. He removed the pick. “So he did. But who told you?”
“Can’t remember,” Janey said. “Thing is, nothing happened to this gent round here, where you might expect it. We know he went home to the country. And we think someone might have followed him there. Don’t suppose it was your people?
” Deliberately, she gave him a fiction to latch on to, of an overzealous underling.
She doubted it would save them, but it was worth a try.
Hope had another go with his toothpick before he pocketed it.
“It was me,” Hope said. “Cove owed me, see? So I followed him to a dull little place called Channing. Where I discovered over two pints of ale that he owed everyone else too. Dead men don’t pay, and since I found out where his family lived, I had a threat to force his hand. ”
“Did you use this threat?” Lenny asked.
“No point till he got the readies from his devoted da, wouldn’t you say? I walked back to the town and stepped on a boat right back to the Regent’s Canal and London. Smooth, pleasant way to travel.”
His story made sense. The fact that he’d troubled to tell it to them didn’t.
Lenny said, “Good enough. We’ll see you’re not bothered further by our people on this matter.”
Hope showed his teeth again. This time, he seemed genuinely amused. “Very decent of you. Thing is, my curious friends, you’re bad for business. Good night.” And he simply walked away into the swirling, evil-smelling fog. His muffled footsteps faded.
The man in front of Janey seized her wrist before she could swing the bag. The hulking man lunged at Lenny, the blade in his hand suddenly visible.
This is it. We’re going to die here. Desperately, she grasped for Lenny’s hand, and his fingers closed around her. It was all she needed. They wouldn’t go down without a fight.
A metallic click, easily recognizable, sounded unnaturally loud in the shrouding fog, paralyzing everyone.
“No one move, or I’ll shoot.” A man pointing a pistol at Janey’s attacker stepped out of the mist. “Police.”
He wasn’t in uniform, but he carried a lantern, brighter than the one now abandoned on the road, and it dimly lit the tableau before him. The knives clattered to the ground. And, with some amazement, Janey recognized their savior.
One of the more unpleasant detectives from Scotland Yard—Napier was his name, and he was no friend of Silver and Grey.
He jerked the pistol, his hard little eyes unwavering, and the two thugs melted into the mist.
“This way,” Napier said. “Fast.”
Did he know he had made the only safe move?
If he had fired the gun or tried to arrest the thugs, the whole street would be alive with desperate, murderous people…
Janey and Lenny stumbled after the striding policeman, who led them around the corner into a broader street.
They sped, semi-blind, along to the end and around another corner, up some steps toward where the fog was better penetrated by street lights.
Napier kept his pistol in his hand until they reached the top of the steps.
“What the devil were you doing there?” he demanded furiously. “Don’t you know better than to be asking questions in a place like that? With no protection?”
“You’re not exactly with a large force yourself,” Janey retorted.
“I have the protection of the law and the Metropolitan Police,” Napier said with dignity.
“No you ain’t. You got the protection of that gun,” Janey said. “And we’re grateful for it. Thanks.”
Napier blinked in the light of his own lantern. For once, he looked flummoxed.
“Were you after the same cove?” Lenny asked.
“Part of our investigation,” Napier said reluctantly. “What’d he tell you?”
Constance was all in favor of fostering good relations with the police, so Janey obligingly told him.
“You do know,” Napier said, “that he only revealed that much because he meant his men to kill you?”
“Yes,” Lenny said. “That’s why we believe him. We owe you, sir.”
It might have been the sir that flattered him, or the tight situation they’d all escaped together, but Napier neither insulted them nor told them off, merely nodded curtly and muttered, “Go home, you pair of lunatics.”
Janey gave him a cheery wave until she could no longer make him out. “Bloody hell. I’ve never seen him so human before. Normally, he hates us.”
“Why?” Lenny asked.
Janey shrugged. “Whores. Brothels. Anyone who doesn’t look like him or think like him. But, dammit, he saved our bacon tonight. Maybe there’s hope for him after all.”
“And we need to take more care,” Lenny said grimly. “I couldn’t protect you.”
She took his arm again. “We stayed too long, just ’cause we don’t like to let themselves down. Mr. and Mrs. Grey wouldn’t thank us for getting ourselves killed.”
“It’s a lesson. Come on, we can get a hackney here. I’ll take you home.”
Janey thought of her new lodgings, of waking her roommate by throwing stones at her window and facing the wrath of their landlady. And then the understandable resentment of her roommate who had to be up at the crack of dawn for her own work.
“I ain’t going home,” Janey said. “It ain’t home. I only been there a few days and I hate it, Lenny. I’ll go and stay at the establishment.”
“Your landlady might evict you for immoral behavior.”
Janey snorted and felt him smile in the darkness.
“You can stay with me,” he said casually, “if you like.”
“Thanks,” Janey muttered. “Wouldn’t be proper, would it?”
He looked at her. “And staying at a brothel is? I thought that was why you moved out?”
“What do I care? Look, I don’t want to set your neighbors’ tongues wagging. You’re settled into a good place there, where they know you work hard and do well.”
“It could be better. If we got married, you wouldn’t need to worry about where to stay on late nights.”
Janey’s heart thumped. And ached. “I ain’t getting married for a roof over me head. I got two of those already. Sort of.”
Lenny halted beneath a streetlamp. By its glow in the gloom, she could see the vital, almost desperate gleam of his eyes. His hand covered hers on his arm.