Hel’s lips quirked, without taking her eyes from the train car. “I know the experience must be novel, but I strongly suspect no one is looking at you.”
It was true. The men were all focused on the door, from which Professor Moriarty would purportedly emerge. Even those who were supposed to be watching Hel. Still?—
“If I’d known fieldwork called for so much undressing...” Sam grumbled.
Hel raised an eyebrow. “You’d have worn something with fewer buttons?”
Sam blushed, remembering the feel of Hel’s hands undoing her, her dress sliding to the floor. With an irritated noise, she spun and got to work on her jacket.
Detective Thompson was shouting orders. “We’re going in! On a count of one... two...” On three, the terrified man with his back to the train pulled the door open, and two men shoved their way inside. The air was still, everyone’s ears cocked for sounds of a scuffle?—but aside from the footsteps that thudded up and down the train car, it was silent.
“It’s empty!” a man cried out from the doorway. “There’s no one here.”
“Sam?” Hel murmured as the men closed in around them, their rifles aimed at Hel’s heart. “You have it?”
“Sorry, sorry,” Sam said, turning around, all buttoned up again.
“He’s not there,” Detective Thompson said.
“Because you let him escape,” Hel said sharply. They had wanted to stay in the car with him?—it had been Detective Thompson’s men who required they exit and seal it up.
“It’s only your word he was ever there to begin with,” Detective Thompson said dismissively.
“What about the men who sealed the train car?” Hel demanded.
“They claim they didn’t see anything,” Detective Thompson said. The men who’d come, they’d beenhis. Professor Moriarty’s. He’d planned this the whole time. “You were warned, Moriarty.”
“We have proof,” Sam blurted before Hel could say something she regretted. “I captured photographs of Professor Moriarty on this camera.” And she offered the camera she’d removed from the bowler hat and sewn into her corset.
There was a pause as Detective Thompson considered this. “How are we to know they’re recent? That this isn’t part of some plan?”
“We stole this camera from one of my father’s spies,” Hel said. “There ought to be all sorts of interesting photos in there, aside from the ones he took of us. At least some of them you ought to be able to date. Besides which, the photographs are of him in that train car. You can take your own photographs of the train car and decide for yourself.”
“You might have faked the photographs,” Detective Thompson said.
“Photography fakes are done during development,” Hel said. “These are yet undeveloped.”
Detective Thompson snatched the camera out of Sam’s hands. “Very well. We will take this into consideration,” he said. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to stay in confinement until we can develop them.”
“But?—” Sam began.
“It’s all right,” Hel said, and passed Heathcliff to Sam.
But it wasn’t. Sam bit her lip as she realized exactly how much they were risking here, letting that camera go. Detective Thompson might do anything with that film?—burn it, lose it, manipulate it. Claim it never existed, like the men with the train car before them. It was the only proof they had.
“I’ll go with you,” Jakob said to Detective Thompson, his arms crossed, as he glared at Hel. “After what I’ve been through, I think I deserve the truth.”
Detective Thompson’s jaw tightened, but he nodded. What else could he do?
Thank you,Sam mouthed.
Jakob nodded tightly, and then he and the men were escorting Hel to her room at the Shelbourne, where she’d be held under watch until the photos exonerated her?—or didn’t.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Montpelier Hill, County Dublin (Cnoc Montpelier, Contae Bhaile Átha Cliath)
The Day After Samhain
