Chapter 25
Quoth
Iforce my shift as Morrie leans back in the hedge and flips through my photos.
A blush creeps along Mina’s cheeks as I crouch, naked, in the scratchy leaves.
She looks away as she hands me my clothes.
I can’t stop looking at her reddened cheeks, at the slight tremble in her fingers when she holds out my shirt, and I shove my arms into it.
That blush gives me life.
I scratch my itchy skin. “He’s blackmailing Ribald, all right. But I doubt he killed Ashley. Look.” I stop dressing to flick through the photo album on the phone and hand it to Mina. She peers closely at the screen and gasps.
The vault had been filled with designer gowns – originals from designers with names even I recognise.
They must have been worth thousands. But Mina, with her keen sense of scandal, immediately sees what caught my eye – the wall of glamour shots of Roger Cox dressed in his various gowns, his bald head covered with an array of voluminous wigs.
There was even a photography studio in one corner of the vault for him to pose in his outfits.
Of course, Cox can and should express himself however he wants, and if this is something he loves, he shouldn’t feel he has to hide it away in a vault, but he does, which suggests…
Mina hands the phone back to me. “This proves Cox has something to hide, but not that he was a blackmailer or that he didn’t kill Ashley.”
“I found his book of secrets.” I zoom in on a large ledger book resting on a pedestal and show them both.
“It’s filled with stories of incest and ill-gotten gains.
There’s a file on every major designer in the industry.
It looks like he’s been getting free gowns off them for years in exchange for keeping secrets about their affairs, backroom deals, crooked contracts, and drug habits. ”
“Like Charles Augustus Milverton, the blackmailer,” Mina says. “It was one of Sherlock Holmes’ most famous cases.”
“Based, I believe, on the real-life master blackmailer Charles Augustus Howell,” I add. “An art dealer and infamous blackmailer who persuaded Dante Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife.”
“Ah, now Howell, I remember. He was found in a Chelsea public house with his throat slit and a half-sovereign coin shoved in his mouth. Such a tragic death for one so talented.” Morrie frowns at the images. “Unfortunately, Quoth’s correct. I think we have to discount Mr Cox from our inquiries.”
“What? Why?” Mina glances over Morrie’s shoulder at the images.
“Call it my criminal instinct. Cox is running a lucrative operation here. I don’t think he’d risk its future, nor his secret coming out, by murdering anyone. He wasn’t even blackmailing Ribald for his drawings.”
“What was it about, then?”
“According to Cox’s ledger, Ribald had affairs with several interns.” I shove my legs into the Holly Santiago jeans Mina got for me in London. “One of them could have been Ashley. The timing matches up.”
“Gross.” Mina wrinkles her nose adorably. “Does that mean Ribald’s our next suspect?”
“It would seem weird for him to go after Ashley instead of Cox. But I think we can definitely discount Cox.” I point to one of the photographs. “This little number is time-stamped for the night of the murder. He’s alibi’ed himself.”
“So we’re back to square one,” Mina groans, her head in her hands. “We have no idea who killed Ashley, and the police are going to arrest me and throw me in jail, and I’ll never eat a slice of pizza or get keratin treatment ever again.”
“Not necessarily.” Morrie helps Mina out of the bushes. I pick thorns out of her hair as we make our way back down the road to the bus stop. “We’re back to our original theory – the person buying Ribald’s designs is the killer. We find that person, we clear your name.”
I’m delighted that Mina chooses to sit next to me.
Morrie shoots her a bemused look that she doesn’t catch, and then he settles down next to an old gentleman to scroll through his phone.
Mina rests her head on my shoulder, and my heart flutters like the wingèd seraphs of Heaven are doing some serious coveting in my chest.
“Thank you for breaking and entering to help me,” she murmurs.
“It’s hard to break the law when the law doesn’t know you exist.”
She stares up at me, her eyes wide with curiosity. “Do you want to exist?”
I look away. I can’t bear to stare back into those eyes right now. “It doesn’t matter what I want.”
“It does to me. You did amazingly well yesterday in London, and today. You have more control than you think. What it—”
“Please,” I grit my teeth as the itch of feathers races along my arms. Hold it back, hold it back. Don’t shift. “Don’t talk about this. If I transform on this bus, I’ll be taken away to a laboratory for study.”
“I won’t. I promise.” Mina’s voice drops, her tone sad. I bury my head in my shoulder, but I can’t stop her thoughts from rolling over me.
And what she’s thinking about is us. Me and Morrie and Heathcliff.
She’s trying to untangle a web of desire that’s leaving her light-headed and confused.
She wants us. She loves hanging out at the shop and solving crimes together, and she’s enchanted by our fictional worlds.
But she’s beating herself up for not being able to make a choice.
She thinks it’s wrong to keep on flirting and feeling the things she feels because she can only have one of us.
Her thoughts are beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, because there’s a solution to her woes. To all of our woes. And it might just be crazy enough to work.
“We need to talk,” Heathcliff snaps as soon as Mina leaves the shop for her mother’s house. Usually, I’d follow her to keep watch over her on the walk home, but I needed to stay with the guys. We have something important to discuss.
“Yes.” I square my shoulders, ready for a strange conversation. I don’t know if I should share Mina’s private thoughts with them, but if they can see that there doesn’t have to be this competition between us… not if we don’t want it… then that could solve everything.
As much as I want Mina, I can’t bear the thought of ‘winning’ her if it means they lose. But maybe there’s a way…
Morrie will be down, of that I’m certain. Especially if it means that he might get closer to Heathcliff. But Heathcliff will take some convincing.
And from the scowl on his face, I sense that he already knows what I’m about to say.
But I’m proven wrong less than a second later when he says, “Look out the window.”
I step over a pile of Dan Brown paperbacks Mina is using for an art project to press my face against the glass.
“Oh no,” Morrie says behind me, his long fingers brushing the glass.
“Oh, yes,” Heathcliff scowls down at the street, where Lancelot kneels before Mrs Ellis, offering his back as a step so she can climb onto his noble steed for a walk to the shops.
The elderly troublemaker swings her leg over the horse and settles in, looking every bit like a regal queen while she instructs Lancelot on how to organise her shopping bags.
“But how—”
“He popped by earlier to inquire after Mina and said that upon his spiritual search, he realised that the grail was inside him all along,” Heathcliff says. “So now he’s returned bedecked with triumph to win her hand in marriage. His words, not mine.”
“This is bad.” Morrie rubs his chin. “If Mina sees his biceps and his giant sword, she’ll be his forever.”
“It’s not that giant.”
“We can’t believe that,” I say. “Mina has her own mind—”
“We can’t take the risk,” Heathcliff growls. “One thing I learned from my book is that women will stab your heart out for a man with a shiny waistcoat and an enormous sword—”
“But not Mina!” I cry. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you!
Do you know what she was thinking about on the bus today?
How much she’s attracted to and cares for each of us.
It’s doing her head in, wanting all three of us.
She doesn’t want to have to choose between us!
She imagined what it would be like if all three of us were with her… and it was quite imaginative.”
Morrie drops his phone. “What?”
I nod. “That’s what she thinks.”
Morrie and Heathcliff exchange a look.
My heart hammers against my ribs. In my excitement, feathers poke through the skin on my arms. But for perhaps the first time, I ignore them. I’m too excited, too nervous.
“Maybe we need to show her that all three of us is an option,” Morrie says slowly.
“Who says it is?” Heathcliff growls.
“What’s the alternative?” Morrie shoots back. “We can either force her to choose, and we all know who she will choose, aka, the one who has already made her come apart on his fingers, or—”
“We’ve shared everything since we came into this world,” I say quietly. “Our home, a bathroom, our secrets. Why shouldn’t we share the same girl?”
Heathcliff sighs. But when his stormy eyes meet mine, the storm in them is bright, excited. Magic crackles in the air between us, a sense that what we’ve just decided is bigger than us.
“Fine. But neither of you is touching my todger, or I will turn your kneecaps into bookends.”
“Noted,” Morrie says with a grin. “Now, how are we going to break the news to Mina?”