Murder on Threadneedle Street (A Wrexford & Sloane Mystery #10)

Prologue

How strange that Beauty could come in so many unexpected guises.

A smile touching his lips, the man—the fissures gouged into his face and the crooked bones of his slumped shoulders made him look older than he really was—paused on the cobblestones to look up at the perfect crescent moon and savor the moment.

“I suppose the mystery lies in its chameleon-like nature,” he mused aloud to the stars winking down at him from the black velvet sky.

He had once seen the exotic little lizard from the tropics at a traveling display of curiosities, and had been astounded at its ability to change its appearance to fit into its surroundings.

“For I have come to realize that Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”

A chuckle, rusty from years of disuse, rumbled in his throat. Laughter was not a sound that came easily anymore. He had been too long in a place where emotions were best kept hidden.

But now …

Another smile. Emotions were slowly coming back to life.

He inhaled a lungful of the night-chilled air, enjoying the sweetly pure and innocent scents of the gardens he helped tend before locking the iron gate behind him and shuffling off to the south, toward Threadneedle Street and the long walk home.

A fluttery leaf, a rose-pink petal, the flight of a bee from plant to plant—he had come to realize that these little everyday things carried in them the seeds of the Sublime.

The gentle breeze caressed his cheeks, and the pearly moonlight teased a path over the stones for his muddy boots. Even the noxious smells of decay drifting out from the alleyways sparked a certain odd gratitude.

“Freedom,” he murmured. Ten years of confinement in a dark, dank hole of a cell made any sensory experience—even less than pleasant ones—something to be cherished.

He paused yet again to count his blessings.

Peaceful. His days and nights were blessedly peaceful now.

Weeding the specimen beds at the London Institution’s medicinal garden was physically hard on his aching bones, but there was something elementally soothing about soiling his fingers in the rich earth and coaxing the myriad different plants into bloom.

Life was precious …

Pulling a pipe from his jacket pocket, he struck a spark to the bit of tobacco left in its bowl.

As the pale puffs of smoke drifted upward in sinuous curls, he smiled in awe at all the little beauties that had eluded his eye for so long. He saw things so differently now—

An abrupt shove from behind jarred him from such reveries. Off-balance, he turned, only to find the point of a knife pressed up against his throat.

“My dear fellow, I’m afraid you’ve picked a sorry target,” he said. “I assure you, I have nothing of any value. But if you wish my purse, which contains naught but a few pence, there’s no need for violence. You are welcome to it.”

In response, the sharpened steel pricked into the man’s flesh, drawing a drop of blood, and a snarl cut through the night. “Where is he?”

The gentle breeze suddenly felt like a slap of ice, sending shivers down the man’s spine. But he managed to mask his reaction with a puzzled shrug.

“Who?”

His accoster pressed closer, overwhelming him with a myriad of split-second sensations—finespun wool, smooth as silk; bay rum shaving soap, rich with spice; buttery leather gloves, soft as a baby’s bottom. “Don’t diddle with me.”

But the voice was that of a devil from Hell.

“I’ll repeat the question. Where. Is. He?”

The knife cut deeper. A trickle of blood was now sliding down the man’s throat.

“I haven’t a clue,” he answered, abandoning any pretense of confusion.

“I was arrested on the same night as the rest of my friends. For all I know, he was hanged with the others or transported to the Antipodes.” His eyes closed for an instant.

“Or, like me, perhaps he was imprisoned in some hellhole workhouse to rot into an early death.”

“No. The authorities never found him. And I have reason to think that you had him spirited away.”

The man had always wondered whether his desperate plan had worked—and perhaps this was evidence that it had. The thought provoked another chuckle, this one far less tentative than the first one. “Then it seems he could be anywhere.”

The response drew a vicious slap.

“You think to play me for a fool?” snarled the Devil. “He was a bloody child. He couldn’t have eluded capture on his own—”

“A child, perhaps, but a bloody clever child,” interjected the man. “He was smarter than most of the adults around him.”

That earned the man a nasty punch to the gut, but he had suffered enough beatings over the years that the pain simply washed over him.

His accoster grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head up. “Do you know who I am?”

“I can guess.” The man had once inadvertently overheard his brother Archie conversing with the Devil and his partner in crime.

Archie had, at heart, been a good soul, but ambition and greed had silenced the better angels of his nature and seduced him into making a pact with Evil.

“You are the mastermind of the deceit and lies that have destroyed my family.”

“So you know it’s not wise to provoke my ire,” replied the Devil. Then, like a chameleon, he softened his expression and flashed a coaxing smile. “Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll allow you to walk free.”

Ha—and pigs may fly, thought the man. There wasn’t a chance that he was going to walk away from this encounter.

“Go to hell.” He lifted his chin. “I will meet my Maker with a clear conscience. While your God-benighted carcass will roast in the hottest pit of red-hot flames, damned for all eternity.”

A laugh erupted from the Devil, and all at once, the air seemed to turn foul with the stink of sulfur and brimstone. “Surely you’re not so na?ve as to believe that there is actually a God or such things as Right and Wrong?”

The man raised his hand in mock salute. “I’m merely an ordinary fellow, not a philosopher, so such abstractions are beyond my ken. But what I do know is that you’ll never find him without my help. So do what you please. I will go to my grave with no regrets.”

Silence. And then a low laugh. The knife flashed in the moonlight, its blade moving quick as a serpent as it cut through the flesh and sinew of the man’s throat.

“Which only shows that my intellect is far superior to yours.” The Devil crouched down beside the still-twitching body. “It turns out that I don’t need your verbal help at all.”

After peeling off a glove, he reached out, careful not to sully his well-manicured fingers with blood. “In your defiance, you just unwittingly reminded me of exactly how I can go about finding the damn brat.”