The inspector shared his cab with a Kensington constable and a sergeant. Tennant rapped the cab’s roof, and the hackney slowed to a stop near “the Grandy,” the Marquis of Grandy public house on the High Street. A second cab carrying four other constables rolled up behind them.
Tennant and the young sergeant took a quick look behind the pub. Ramshackle wooden houses with rotting clapboards and missing roof tiles ringed the courtyard.
“Must be hell in the cold and wet,” the copper muttered. “The pigs on my uncle’s farm live better than this.”
“There’s a back door from the Grandy into the court, Sergeant. We’ll need to cover the exit.” They headed back to the waiting officers.
Tennant gathered them. “Before we go into the pub, remember. It’s information I want. Cracking heads and turning over tables is the surest waynotto get it. Your sergeant agrees with me, I know.”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
Tennant assigned the sergeant and two coppers to the back-court to “grab any bolters.” He gestured to the others to follow him. When the inspector and three uniformed constables walked through the front entrance, half the drinkers froze. The others scrambled out the back door. Tennant delivered his message and then made his way to the building’s rear.
Two men sat with their backs against the Grandy’s rear wall. A third twisted and squirmed in the sergeant’s grip.
Tennant said, “Stop resisting, or the officer will apply his truncheon to your head. Which will it be?”
The man’s shoulders went slack. When the sergeant releasedhim, he slid to a sitting position at the base of the wall and glared.
Tennant looked around the backcourt at the careworn women with soiled aprons knotted over tattered gray dresses, their faces as colorless as their clothing. They stared, looking up from basins, pots of peeled potatoes, and piles of washing. The inspector hoped his message might register with them.
“I am Detective Inspector Tennant, and I’ll tell you what I told them inside the Grandy. The Yard is looking for two men. One is English, tall and thin, fair-haired, and with pale blue eyes. The second is a Kildare man named Patrick McGrath, dark-haired and of middling height. In his early forties. He served in the Crimea and has been to America. I’m offering five pounds for useful information. No questions asked.”
No one spoke, but Tennant hadn’t expected them to inform before an audience.
“You know the bobbie on this beat. A quiet word to him, and he will pass it on to me.”
Tennant didn’t know it, but he had driven by the house where his quarry hid. McGrath was a world away from the squalor of the Jennings Rents but closer than the inspector imagined, holed up in comfortable quarters. He stretched out on a hay bed and eased off his new boots. The narrower toes pinched a bit.
McGrath waited for his “host” to return, knowing he’d worn out his welcome. The man was desperate to get him out of his carriage house loft. McGrath had reminded him that coppers would swarm the rail stations and ports at Dover and the south. He’d head west to Bristol, where he had friends. But McGrath had to wait until the storm blew over and proposed to hide in the last place on earth anyone would expect to find him.
His host’s first reaction had been, “You’re mad.” But McGrathsaw the calculation in his eyes: the scheme might work, no matter how unlikely. He’d looked McGrath up and down and said, “Can you sound like something other than a bog-trotting Irishman?”
“Don’t get yer cob on, mon. Lived a few years in Liverpool,” he said in a Merseyside accent.
The man left, and McGrath waited. Then he heard the scrape of boots on the ladder’s rough wood, followed by the sounds of a second man who handed McGrath a sheet of paper. It was a letter addressed to the head groom and signed with a flourish.
“He’s given you an English-sounding name, Marcus York.” The man’s smile didn’t touch his pale blue eyes.
“How do I get there?”
“No worries, boy-o,” the thin man said. “I’m old mates with the head groom.” Then he dropped to his knees by a wooden crate, lifted the lid, and sighed. “Shame, that.”
McGrath said, “What is?”
“These.” He pulled out a rifle and fixed its bayonet. “They’re worth the better part of a hundred quid, but it’s too risky to flog the last lot now.”
After the men left, McGrath lit a Havana, a luxury he hadn’t indulged in since his time in the States. He blew smoke ring after smoke ring, watching them rise, blue halos that wobbled and vanished as they drifted toward the ceiling. McGrath thought through his final moves on a chessboard in his head. The knight was nearing his last jump. As for the pawn, the newly christened Marcus York had an endgame in mind for him, too.
Susan heard the crunch of carriage wheels. A moment later, she opened the street door.
“I’m early, I know.” Sir Lionel angled his shoulders and pointed his walking stick at the pavement. “I could circle for twenty minutes.”
“No need. I’m nearly ready. Come in, take off your coat, and have a seat.”
He did as she instructed and searched her face. “How are you today? After that appalling experience.”
“Better. Better after talking to Doctor Lewis at the hospital this morning. Harriet is … well, she’s holding her own.”
