Their paths had diverged over the past few years, missions taking them hither and thither, but Hugh had never forgotten the debt he owed him. Had vowed to repay him someday.
Hugh’s lids closed.
But now that day would never come.
His friend and mentor had been found dead in his locked study eight months past by his butler, a glass of arsenic-laced whisky at his side along with a note – supposedly in his penmanship, though Hugh had not seen it – admitting he’d beenselling Home Office secrets to the highest bidder, that he could no longer live with the guilt…
Hugh’s nails bit into his palms.
Incriminating documents had also been discovered in the study, evidence overwhelming, and after mere days it had been decided by the upper echelons of the Home Office to hush up the entire affair, to shake their heads and mutter of rotten apples. But that was to ignore Ross’ sixteen years of service as though it were naught, to not even consider there might be another explanation.
So along with Crown missions, Hugh had begun to look for one.
He’d pieced together Ross’ last movements – where he’d been seen and what he’d been working on. According to the records, he should have been documenting the whereabouts of a vicomte in Mayfair, yet one of their shared Rookery informants told a different tale. All too often, Ross had been seen in St Giles, asking questions and supping ale with the rag, tag and bob tails who frequented those alleys.
Why?
What had he been looking for?
Another department of the Home Office had searched the Thornton household top to bottom, yet Hugh knew Ross better, so with Phoebe under the roof of her great-aunt Rebecca, he’d conducted his own search.
The study had been locked from the inside, but the Home Office search had missed minuscule but tell-tale scratch marks to the keyhole of the terrace doors. The lock had at some point been tampered with. Had someone entered and poisoned Ross? Or taken him there already lifeless?
Hugh had rifled through papers in the study, library and chambers, searched every single room in the damn house until a small portrait on the wall of Ross’ wife had produced what he’dbeen looking for: a niche behind the wood panels, hiding a tatty notebook.
Most of it had been devoted to past missions, some they’d been on together, but then, on the last pages…
Ross had written a list of names.
At first glance, Hugh had recognised only one, that of a colleague murdered at the coast whilst pursuing wreckers, but on further investigation, he’d found that all the names had a connection with the Home Office, and all of them had come a cropper in the previous year: a woman supposedly under safeguard discovered with her throat cut; an informant at the bottom of the Thames…
Ross had clearly realised this was no coincidence. That the sole explanation for the spate of murders was some traitorous lickspittle passing on reports and intelligence from within the Home Office.
Then on the next page had been a handful of further surnam–
“Number Five!”
Hugh snapped his eyes open, launched himself from the bench and dashed to the door, nigh colliding with the man departing.
Big nose but it wasn’t Wellington.
His superior’s office was rather ornate for Whitehall. A lavish crystal chandelier hung from a ceiling of elaborate plasterwork, and the walls were lined with gilt-framed portraits of all the previous spy masters who’d dignified these rooms.
“You wished to see me, Sir Edmund?”
“Ah, Number Five, take a seat.”
Hugh did so, the leather still warm.
Papers were strewn across his superior’s desk, maps of – Hugh tilted his head – Derbyshire covered the floor, and folders spilled their contents on the cabinet.
In the post for eighteen months now, Sir Edmund Twyford had white locks, stooping shoulders and perpetually bloodshot eyes. On first acquaintance, one might have thought him scatter-brained – and Hugh oft thought it on second acquaintance too – but the methods he’d brought from the admiralty yielded results and his memory for facts wa–
“Damnation!” Sir Edmund yelled. “Thomas!”
A clerk with a bilious cast about him came dashing through the door. A clerk Hugh had not seen before – the transferred chap from Records, perhaps?
“Yes, Sir Edmund.”
