Chapter Twenty-Six #2
She did want to explore it. Explore every inch of him, in fact, which was the problem.
Although many other women who were her age and with no intention of marrying conducted discreet liaisons without damage to their reputations, Jack didn’t know if she had it in her to do that.
Though it wasn’t as if she lived in his world of the privileged, where a lady’s reputation was everything, even if a liaison with him would still cause a scandal, at least in some circles.
Perhaps she could have an affair with him?
It wasn’t as if she were still an innocent young lady, after Caleb’s promise of marriage.
And it wasn’t as if he would be looking for anything permeant with her, either, given he was an earl’s son and would be expected to marry a proper young lady, not some commoner’s daughter.
“You’re proposing a liaison between us, then? Nothing permanent or serious?”
He was silent for a moment, simply staring down at her. “You could call it that, I suppose,” he eventually replied.
His reply was a little ambiguous, but at the end of the day, it was her choice what she did.
Pressing her lips together, Jack inhaled a deep breath through her nose.
Her head was telling her to refuse, but her body was begging her to say yes.
“I’ll consider it. After our investigation is concluded, though. ”
Tobias nodded. “Very well. Let’s get this investigation done, then, shall we?” He motioned with his hand down the street, and Jack nodded, her legs feeling wobbly as she began to walk towards their destination again.
After another few minutes of silence, the air thick with tension between them, they arrived at Landers Lane.
The building was small with a red-bricked facade and an old brickworks sign hung off it.
There was a wooden entrance door at the front, which most likely led into a small office, with the warehouse attached to the back.
The front windows were covered in grime, and all had black curtains blocking any view inside the place.
“It seems abandoned,” Jack commented as Tobias tried to peer into the glass of the windows.
“Yes, looks like it was once an old brickworks factory.” Tobias straightened and walked over to the door, rattling the handle. “It’s locked.”
Jack smiled. “Nothing’s ever locked, Tobias.” She walked up next to him. “This is where you might wish to turn away and look elsewhere, as there’s a bit of bending of the law I need to do.”
He frowned at her but turned his body, crossing his hands over his chest. “I should have known you’d know how to pick a lock.”
“It’s a vital skill in the investigation business,” she answered, quickly pulling out her lockpicks and getting to work. “I can teach you if you’d like?”
“I don’t bend the law, Jack. I enforce it.”
“Lucky for me then that I’m not breaking the law.”
“A matter of interpretation,” he muttered under his breath.
“There we go,” she announced as the pin tumblers of the lock all clicked into place and she twisted the handle.
Tobias spun around, his eyes incredulous. “That was less than thirty seconds.”
She gave a half shrug. “The quicker you get in, the quicker you can get out. A useful skill for both a magician and an investigator.”
He shook his head but took the lead in pushing open the door and assessing the space before stepping into the gloomy interior.
Jack followed him in, noting the lone desk sitting in the middle of the room, with a few chairs stacked against the wall on the left of the room. On the far wall was a closed door, possibly leading into the warehouse space she’d spied from outside.
The room was dark and felt oddly oppressive.
A shiver ran through her. She strode over to one of the windows and pulled open the curtain.
The light streaming in revealed dust covering everything—the furniture, the floor, the desk—but there was a space in the middle of the room where the dust had been disturbed, the wooden floor underneath shining through and a trail leading around the desk to the closed door.
Tobias saw it too and crouched down to inspect it. “There’re some different footstep patterns in the dust.”
There were two smaller footprints and some larger footprints too. She walked over to the last curtain and pulled that open too, immediately spotting two footprints in the dust on the floor.
“Tobias, someone was standing behind this curtain.” Her eyes tracked the footstep trail, which led over to where he was crouching. She turned back, taking a closer look at the curtain itself and immediately saw the dual layer of fabric. Her heart sunk. “This curtain was made to conceal someone.”
Tobias glanced over to her then stood and walked across to where she was. “An ambush?”
Jack nodded. “This black fabric is used in a lot of magic shows to conceal the magician on stage from the audience. It’s how a lot of sleight of hand and illusions are done, because from where the audience is sitting, they can’t see through this fabric and it just looks like the black wall behind it. ”
“So presumably, if Miss Cartwright was here,” Tobias said, “she would have walked in to this office space without even realizing anyone was hidden inside the double layer of the curtain behind her.”
“Exactly,” Jack replied.
“It would have been very dark, though,” Tobias said, glancing around the room. “Unless of course the lights were on.” He strode over to the wall lamps and lifted up the glass lid of one. “There’s fresh kerosene in here.”