There had been warnings circulated by the Metropolitan Police several years earlier to be vigilant regarding individualswho might have arrived in London in the aftermath of those assassinations.
The first inquiry case with Mikaela in the disappearance of her sister, had exposed individuals with anarchist ties.
Brodie had thanked the priest and promised to keep the fact that the information came through confession a secret when he had first asked Alex Sinclair if there had been any recent information about a new threat or plot.
“Nothing,”Alex had replied at the time.“It’s been very quiet.”
Perhaps too quiet, Brodie thought and put out word to his friend, Munro, who often came in contact with merchants and workmen at the warehouses along the riverfront as manager of Lady Montgomery’s estates.
He’d also put out word with Mr. Conner who he’d worked with before he retired. Mr. Conner knew people at the docks from his time with the MET and often lifted a pint with them. Both were men he could trust to keep the information to themselves.
“Anything that might indicate any activity someone doesna want the authorities to know about, unusual shipments that aren’t on a manifest, names that might have surfaced again that might be familiar from previous cases.”
“Is there a particular person we’re lookin’ for?”Munro asked.
He gave them the name the tailor had overheard— Soropkin.
Conner had cursed.“I’m not fond of the upper classes and the hold they keep on the working man, as you well know,”he commented.
“However, I had hoped that Soropkin was no longer among the living.” Conner shook his head then continued.
“Too many good men have ended up dead because of him. And to my way of thinkin’ the change that he wants to bring about will cost too many lives of innocent people,” he spat out.
“It makes one wonder if that one was any better than those of the upper classes? In it for himself and only wears a different boot?
“Now you tell me that he may still be alive, and here in London?”
Brodie understood only too well, as did Munro. They both came from the streets. They had seen the poverty and crime every day. They had lived it, and there was the long and painful history of Scotland at the mercy of English authority.
A different boot, Conner called it.
“What about Miss Mikaela?”Munro had asked.“She might be able to learn something from those she knows. The man at the canal docks? He’s the sort who knows a great deal about what comes into the country.”
Captain Turner was a man who had served thirty years on merchant ships and was then forced to retire after a shipboard accident took his leg. He ran the canal boats that brought goods in from the country and took on passengers as well.
Captain Tom, as she referred to him from a past acquaintance, also operated a bit of smuggling according to what Brodie had learned about the man.
“No!”his answer was firm. At the look both men gave him he had added,“She’s not to be involved in this. She has another inquiry she is working at present.”
Munro nodded.“I wish ye luck with that.”
He knew Munro was right. He was going to need more than luck when it came to keeping her out of this.
Considering what the Agency had learned along with that conversation overheard by the tailor, it was safe to assume there was something planned that might have serious repercussions.Sir Avery had also shared that there had been more recent rumors from other sources that something might be planned against the Crown.
Was it the Black Hand? There was reason to suspect that it was a possibility.
Mikaela had spoken of the organization; it was the first he heard it was mentioned. There had been a deadly confrontation in Budapest between the anarchists and authorities on one of her travels a handful of years earlier.
That information had been useful at the time.
There was more to it now, of course, he was willing to admit. For him everything had changed with that simple ceremony in Edinburgh, a piece of paper with their names, a “contract” she had commented at the time with her usual penchant for being sarcastic. But for him, it was more than that.
Then weeks after those first rumors, and a piece of information passed to him by Mr. Dooley, a man he worked with in his years with the Met. The information came by way of a report filed by the officers on the watch the night before.
They’d been called when a body was found in Holborn. A man by the name of Anatole had been stabbed to death. He had been found in the back room of a tailor’s shop by the owner.
Robbery? An assault that ended badly? Common enough in parts of London. Except for the man’s name, a name that was familiar from the information Father Sebastian had given him.
