2. Divided Loyalties
Divided Loyalties
HDivision headquarters smelled the same as it always had: ink and coal smoke, wet wool and old coffee, the accumulated sweat of men who spent their nights chasing criminals through Whitechapel’s darkest corners.
Reid had worked here for twenty years. He knew every creak in the floorboards, every stain on the ceiling, every mood that passed through these rooms like weather.
Today, the mood was storm-dark.
Sergeant Williams met him at the door, his expression carefully blank, which meant bad news. “Sir. Chief Inspector Abberline wants to see you.”
Reid hung his coat on the hook by his desk. “Now?”
“Immediately, sir.” Williams lowered his voice. “There’s been inquiries.”
The word landed like a stone in Reid’s gut. Inquiries. In twenty years of police work, he’d learned that word rarely preceded anything good.
He’d slept three hours at Eleanor’s townhouse, Charlotte’s fingers brushing through his hair as she woke him. Three hours of dreamless unconsciousness that had done nothing to prepare him for this.
“What kind of inquiries?”
Williams glanced around the bullpen, where a dozen constables pretended not to be listening. “Parliamentary committee, sir. They’re asking about your recent cases. About your... associations.”
Reid didn’t let his expression change. Associations. They meant Charlotte. They meant the Holloways. They meant the entire hidden world of magic he’d stumbled into three weeks ago and refused to walk away from.
“Thank you, Williams.” Reid straightened his collar. “Tell the Chief Inspector I’m on my way.”
Abberline’s office was on the second floor, a cramped room that smelled of pipe tobacco and old paper. The man himself sat behind a desk covered in case files, his mustache bristling with irritation. Too many years navigating politics had left their mark.
“Reid. Close the door.”
Reid did. The click of the latch sounded louder than it should have.
“Sit down.” Abberline gestured to the chair across from him. “We need to talk about this Ashworth bill.”
“Sir?”
“Don’t play innocent with me, Inspector.” Abberline leaned forward, his eyes sharp beneath heavy brows. “I’ve known you for fifteen years. You’re a good officer, one of the best in the division.” He shook his head. “But lately there have been questions.”
Reid kept his hands still on his thighs. “What kind of questions?”
“Questions about your involvement in the Whitmore investigation. Questions about why Sebastian Whitmore, a man connected to three unsolved murders, vanished into thin air while you were leading the case.” Abberline’s voice hardened.
“Questions about Miss Charlotte Vance and her sister Mrs. Holloway, and why you’ve been spending so much time in their company. ”
“Miss Vance is...” Reid stopped himself. She’s everything, he wanted to say. She sees truth as other people see colors, and when she looks at me, she sees someone worth loving. “Miss Vance is a witness in the Whitmore investigation.”
“A witness.” Abberline’s tone made clear what he thought of that explanation. “Reid, I’ve had a Parliamentary investigator in my office this morning. Lord Ashworth’s people want to know if Scotland Yard has any officers with... unusual sympathies.”
The euphemism settled over them both. Unusual sympathies. Magical connections. Relationships that bridged the line between the mundane world and the hidden one that Parliament was trying to regulate.
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them my officers investigate crimes, not politics.” Abberline’s jaw tightened. “But that won’t hold them off forever. Ashworth’s bill has support in the Home Office. If it passes, there will be hearings. Examinations. Anyone connected to spiritualist practitioners will face scrutiny.”
Reid met his superior’s gaze evenly. “I have nothing to hide, sir.”
It was the truth. He didn’t have secrets, not in Abberline’s sense. He had Charlotte, and he had the knowledge of a world most people couldn’t imagine, but he had no crimes to answer for. No sins that would survive examination.
Except his heart. Except the choice he’d made three weeks ago to stand with Charlotte instead of walking away.
“Reid.” Abberline’s voice softened, and Reid glimpsed the mentor beneath the administrator. “I’m telling you this as a friend. Keep your head down. Don’t give them ammunition. Don’t let anyone, no matter how important they are to you, put your career at risk.”
“And if I can’t do that?”
Abberline studied him. Whatever he saw in Reid’s face made him sigh. “Then God help you, Inspector. Because Parliament won’t.”
Reid walked out of H Division and turned east on Leman Street without deciding to. His feet knew this district. Twenty years of working it had worn paths into him that operated independently of conscious thought.
He passed the corner of Goulston Street and registered it as evidence.
A decade ago he’d stood at that corner at four in the morning with Constable Long, waiting while a surgeon finished with a body.
The case had closed but the corner hadn’t changed: same lamp post, same worn kerbstone, same narrow passage running south.
The street remembered nothing. He remembered everything.
Twenty years in one place accumulated. Not as sentiment but as knowledge, the kind that lived below language.
The angle of a doorway that told you whether the occupant was hiding a secret, the quality of silence that meant a crowd was about to turn.
He knew Whitechapel as he knew his own hands, as any man knew a thing he had worked with long enough.
The knowledge was not separable from him.
He could not resign it along with his warrant card.
Three weeks ago, on a night that had begun as an ordinary inquiry, he had watched James Holloway step through a shadow and disappear.
He had watched Charlotte read the residue of a crime from the objects left behind.
Not as intuition, not as inference, but as fact, direct and incontrovertible.
He had understood, standing in that room, that the world was larger than the framework he’d spent his career operating within.
The law he served had no language for what he’d witnessed.
No category for it, no statute, no procedure.
That knowledge was not knowledge he could put back.
Reid stopped on the pavement. Let two men in heavy coats and a woman with a market basket go around him. Stood still and looked at the grey length of the street.
He knew what he was keeping and he knew what it would cost. That was enough.
Twenty years of service.
Three weeks of love.
He knew which one he was choosing.
Reid started walking again, faster now, with purpose.
The war council was at noon. Charlotte would be there, and Eleanor, and all the others who’d chosen this fight.
They would face Parliament’s bill together, the way they’d faced Cornelius Ashworth and Sebastian Whitmore and every other enemy who’d tried to tear them apart.
Williams caught him at the station entrance, falling into step beside him with urgent determination. A man who had more to say and no time to say it.
“Sir. A word.”
Reid slowed. “Walk with me.”
They moved away from the entrance, into a narrow alley between buildings where constables wouldn’t overhear. Williams looked both ways before speaking.
“I know you’re in trouble, sir.”
“I’m aware.”
“I mean I know.” Williams met his eyes squarely.
“I’ve seen things, the past few years. Cases that didn’t make sense.
Evidence that couldn’t exist. People who moved in ways that shouldn’t be possible.
” He paused. “I’m not asking questions I don’t want answered.
But whatever you’re involved in, whoever you’re protecting?—”
“Williams...”
“Let me finish, sir.” The sergeant’s jaw set with determination. “I’ve served under you for twelve years. You’re the best officer I’ve ever known. If Parliament comes for you, they’ll have to go through me first.”
Reid read his sergeant’s face.
Williams was not a man who made declarations.
Twelve years under Reid’s command, and he’d produced competence as other men produced paperwork.
Steadily, reliably, without annotation. He did not volunteer opinions on matters above his rank.
He did not speak unless the situation required it.
He was, in Reid’s lifelong experience of him, a man who considered before he acted and acted without theatre.
Which meant this was considered. Williams had not walked out here on impulse.
He had received the message from Eleanor’s man, understood what it signified, mapped the available positions, and chosen this one.
He would have understood what the choosing entailed.
Being seen in private conversation with a suspended officer during a Parliamentary inquiry was not a neutral act.
Constables gossiped. Inspectors noticed.
A man’s associations became part of his record in ways that personnel files never fully captured.
Williams had come anyway.
Reid thought about what that meant as evidence.
Not as a gesture, he was not by disposition a man who processed gestures, but as data.
He had spent three weeks noticing that the people who knew the truth about Charlotte and the council and the hidden world underneath the visible one had, in the main, made the same choice he’d made.
Not because they were instructed to. Because when given accurate information about what was at stake, they arrived at the same conclusion through independent routes.
Charlotte’s council had their own reasons.
James Holloway had his. Now Williams, standing in a cold alley, had his.
Reid had believed, for most of the three weeks since that night in Whitechapel, that he was standing alone. He had not been counting correctly.
“That could cost you your career.”
“Careers come and go.” Williams shrugged. “Principles don’t.”
Reid stood with that for a beat. The cold settled around them. Somewhere on the street behind them, a cart horse stamped once on the cobbles and went quiet.
“Thank you.” The words came out more level than he’d intended. “That means more than you know.”
Williams nodded. “War council at noon, sir?”
Reid blinked. “How did you know?”
“Mrs. Holloway’s man brought a message while you were with the Chief Inspector.” Williams allowed himself a small smile. “I may not know the details, sir, but I know a battlefield when I see one. And I know which side I’m on.”
Reid clasped his sergeant’s shoulder, a gesture that said more than words could manage.
Then he turned toward Eleanor’s townhouse and the woman who was waiting for him there.
The woman who was worth every risk he was about to take.