“Come along then,” I told Rupert as I turned off the electric, closed the door, then set the lock.
At the street, I waved down a driver, no small task as more people sought the shelter of a cab or coach when the weather set in.
A familiar driver pulled his rig to the curb, water washing up onto the sidewalk from the wheels of the coach
“It’s not a day to be out and about.” Mr. Jarvis squinted out from under his billed cap through the downpour.
“I did attempt to arrange otherwise with the weather, however…” I replied, as I climbed aboard his coach. And Rupert was there as well. He grinned at me, as he settled himself on the floor of the coach.
Mr. Jarvis nodded. He was quite familiar with the hound’s traveling about with me.
“Where will it be this fine end of day?”
“Mayfair,” I replied.
“Number ten, Hanover Square it is then, Miss Mikaela,” he replied and spoke to his team.
So much for any criticism about my conversations with Rupert, I thought, as the coach lurched away from the curb.
He watched from the darkened entrance of the tobacco shop beside the stairs to that office on the second-floor landing as the coach departed.
A surprise, he thought, having discovered the office of former inspector Angus Brodie. And an additional surprise in the scene he just witnessed—a woman.
Not the usual sort he would have expected of a former police inspector, now private inquiry agent, or the man who had tracked him through clubs and brothels and found him. But a lady by the way she spoke and her manner that he knew from his life…before.
It was gone now: his wife and son, his own father now dead these many years, friends or those he thought were friends.
They were all gone, including three of those who had taken it all from him. Now there was just one more, he thought, as the pain that he’d kept at bay reminded him of what the physician had told him at the hospital.
Time. It was slipping away as the pain tightened inside him. But there was still enough left to finish what he swore he would do.
He would take from Angus Brodie what the man had taken from him.
Mikaela, not a name heard often, but obviously someone important to Brodie. He had discovered that in that office on the second floor.
Slow, patient work on the lock, just the way a man in the next bunk over had showed him, a skill that would serve him well after he had served his sentence.
Thievery it was called, but time was against him with the cancer that grew inside him.
The disease that ate away at him was also the means for his freedom, brief though it might be. He would finish what he had vowed twelve years before as his sentence was handed down. She would help him do it. And then he would disappear for whatever time was left.
He gathered the coat tightly about him. He’d taken it from a table outside a seconds shop when he first left the hospital.
The knife in the waist of the pants, also taken from the seconds shop, would see it done.
The money in his pocket, taken from Chief Inspector Dawes, wasn’t much—no doubt part of the man’s retirement pension—but it was enough to finish this.
And then he would disappear for whatever time was left. Perhaps someplace warm, as the pain twisted like a knife.
He retrieved the vial of that sweet syrup from inside the coat, his only relief from the pain, temporary as it was.
He had wandered after escaping the hospital, hiding until he was able to find the clothes to replace his prison clothes.
That first night was spent in a vacant room in a crumbling tenement as far from the hospital as he could get. It was cold and miserable, but better than the prison block, where he had a pallet and blanket but nothing more.
In spite of his education and the position he’d once had in London society, he was not allowed in the “master’s side” of Newgate, where the wealthy were housed. The ward where he had lived the past twelve years was crowded, damp, infested with lice and vermin, and disease-ridden.
No longer, he thought bitterly. No longer would he be forced to eat the never-ending daily ration of stale bread, gruel, and rotten potatoes. When the cancer set in, it was fish and milk, until that came back up and it was decided that he needed to go to the hospital.
