I reached out and covered her hand with mine.
“We will do everything we can to learn what has happened.”
“How?” she asked, looking up at me with tear-filled eyes.
“There are ways…” I thought of Brodie’s skill in such matters, as well as those who had assisted us in the past. It was as much as I could give her for now.
I had learned little more in my meeting with Helen Bennett, but that little amount might provide a valuable clue as to the good doctor’s movements that last day.
It required a return visit to the hospital where he was part of the staff. But first I needed to make a visit to Mr. Brimley, the chemist in the East End who had been helpful with matters in the past.
He had studied at King’s College and initially pursued the profession of physician. Although circumstances had changed his path so to speak, he still had a very close association with his fellow students who were now among the most prominent physicians in London.
Mr. Brimley had a shop in the poorest part of London where he administered to the needs of the people there— dispensing powders and pills, seeing to the needs of women and children, and occasionally stitching a wound.
I could attest to his expert skills in that regard. There were only two small scars from the bullet when I was shot in the course of my first investigation with Brodie.
The hound sat up as I left the Bennett residence, quite surprising me that he was still there given his wandering ways and with new streets to scavenge.
“Good boy,” I told him. He fell into step beside me as I went to the corner of the square to find a cab.
Mr. Brimley always had a good specimen for the hound.
Four
THE AGENCY, TOWER OF LONDON
Angus Brodie rolledhis head against the stiffness in the back of his neck from too many hours going back through everything that was known, and a great deal more that wasn’t known.
It was very near midday, and he had been at it for verra near twenty-four hours with the latest information Sir Avery had received from Luxembourg.
The information was regarding a man named Soropkin who was supposedly responsible for several incidents on the continent, the sort of individual who lived in the shadows, until he was ready to strike.
Soropkin was Lithuanian by birth but called no place home. He was the sort of person with no loyalty to any place or anyone. He moved in the shadows in whatever city he happened to be in, constantly moving about, never in one place longer than it took to plan the next attack against those in power. Sir Avery’s people on the continent had been working with their sources regarding an obscure bit of information they had received months earlier in that shadowy world most people didn’t know existed. Where alife was worth less than the mud on the bottom of a man’s boot, and anything and anyone could be purchased or disposed of.
“Do ye trust the information?” Brodie had asked Sir Avery at the time.
“I trust our sources and the amount of money they receive for the information they provide.”
“What about others who might pay more for that information?” Brodie had asked, having experience in such matters.
“That is where you come in. You know people on the street. You need to find those at the lowest levels who would have knowledge of this.”
That was over two months ago, before he left for Edinburgh. It was an obscure piece of information that might have meant something. Or nothing.
He had passed what he had learned on to Sir Avery before he left London, unaware of its importance at the time and with little concern over it— a rumor among dozens of others heard on the street. There were other matters that pulled him back to Edinburgh, that had been waiting for verra near thirty years.
That was then, this was now.
There was a new urgency as the latest information the Agency had received from Luxembourg and decoded was verra near two weeks old with a warning about something that had been described as dangerous with far-reaching consequences.
Only another rumor like so many others the Agency followed up on?
However, Sir Avery wanted him to check with his sources on the street. More than that he wouldn’t say. It was an aspect of the work the Agency did that he found to be off-putting.
Sir Avery provided just enough information to send him off in a particular direction with little more to go on— that“little more”could be dangerous.
It was like being in a street fight with one hand tied behind his back, and something he didn’t care for. It was Mr. Sinclair who had provided more information in a hastily whispered comment.
