“It will take some adjustment, but yes I am quite taken with her as well.”
“It would be a shame to risk her future if anything should happen to ye on one of our inquiry cases,” he pointed out.
Clever, irritating man. He had very skillfully brought the conversation back round to make his point.
“What of Mr. Mayhew? Do you know him?” I inquired of the man the chief inspector had put in charge of investigating the murders. “Might he have information that could be useful to us?” Two could play this game.
That dark gaze sharpened on me. “I know him.” He shook his head.
“He is Abberline’s man. He will hardly be willing to share any information. Most particularly in anything that involves me.”
Ah, so there was a history there. Possibly from the circumstances surrounding Brodie’s departure from the service of the MP?
I studied the chalkboard. We had additional information now after his conversation with the two constables who were on the watch the night Amelia Mainwaring’s body was found at Hyde Park, most particularly from Constable Browne. I also added my notes from my conversation with Davey Morris.
It did seem that Jefferson Talbot was the most likely suspect…
“What would be the motive?” I asked Brodie, thinking aloud as we often did.
“Motive?”
“Jefferson Talbot would seem to have had the opportunity,” I pointed out. “But what would be the motive to kill Amelia Mainwaring? An opportunity for a photograph that he might sell to the newspapers? And then Catherine Thorpe as well?”
That hardly seemed plausible since neither photograph had appeared in the dailies.
“A bit of notoriety? Perhaps some disappointment after he photographed the three Whitechapel victims?” I made additional notes in that regard.
I turned from the chalkboard when there was no immediate response to my questions. That dark gaze met mine.
“Has anyone ever told ye that ye have a most unusual mind, most particularly for murder?”
“There is someone who has mentioned that on more than one occasion,” I reminded him with a faint smile. “However, it is entirelyhisfault,” I added. “Hehas taught me quite well.”
“Aye, a mistake to be certain. The poormonshould be careful of such a woman. She might take it in her head to do him in.”
I did like these moments, when that dark gaze softened and there was the beginning of that smile at one corner of his mouth.
“Or perhaps…” he added. “She has already donehimin.”
How was it that he coulddo me in, as he put it with just a look and the way his voice lowered in just that way.
I was an independent, well-traveled woman accustomed to making her own decisions, taking responsibility for myself, answering to no one. And yet…
I wiggled my toes in my boots and turned back to the chalkboard.
“The London Museum,” I announced. “My sister mentioned there is a photographic exhibit there. It’s possible the curator of the museum might be able to tell me something about the photographs we have.”
“Aye. There is someone else I want to speak with,” he replied. “Someone the Mudger— Mr. Cavendish, mentioned. He knows a woman who frequents the area around the seamstress shop where Miss Thorpe was to have been the afternoon she disappeared.”
A woman? I could only imagine the sort of woman that might be in consideration of several I had met since my first encounter with Brodie.
He had a history, of course, before we met, as did I. Although my encounters could hardly be called a history— my very brief engagement which I ended before I made that dreadful mistake, and then there was the even more brief encounter on the Isle of Crete…
In Brodie’s case, it appeared to be quite different, as I remembered the woman I first encountered on the stairway quiteen flagranteat our first meeting. And he had assured me prior to our moreintimaterelationship that he was not in the habit of associating withworkingwomen.
He had been most forthcoming in that regard. And after our last inquiry case and what I had learned about his mother and how they had lived, I understood far more.
“Aye, he’s always been that way,” Munro had commented when he accompanied me to Edinburgh in the beginning of that inquiry case.
