Page 70 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

"Brookes's mouth twisted. "Grimshaw. The Reverend Mr. Grimshaw. Your father's clergyman."

Not a surprise, but good to have it confirmed.

"And the third man," I said. "The one who went to the girl."

"I saw him only as I went through the door. A glance. But I have that glance still." Brookes's gaze had gone distant, fixed on something twelve years behind him. "Black coat. White at the throat. I took him for a parson too, at first. But then I saw him cross to her. No parson alive ever moved like that. He did not kneel to comfort her. He took hold of her. He was—" He searched for it, and arrived, as Mainwaring had arrived, at the same flat and dreadful word. "Practiced. He had the look of a man arriving at work he had done before."

"Did you learn his name?"

"No. He was nothing to me." Brookes spread his hands. “The next day I left for London and then, eventually, came to Edinburgh. I have spent twelve years making very certain that I learned nothing further about a single soul who was under that roof. Ignorance has been my whole estate. It is the only thing that has kept me alive, and even that, it seems, is failing me now."

I believed him. That was the maddening thing—I believed every word. Brookes did not know the man's name. He had been running ever since that night. His ignorance was as complete as it was useless to me.

But I did not need Brookes to name the third man.

I already had the name. Aubrey Strode.

Harkness had given it to me before I left London, dug out of the registers and the directories and the quiet enquiries a careful solicitor knows how to make: the medical man whose signature appeared, year upon year, on the documents that committed women to my father's charitable establishment. A physician of standing. Rooms on Gower Street. The street where Lydia Gray had lived. The street where, on a clear afternoon, she had stepped—or been made to step—in front of a carriage and died of it.

"You have told me more than you know," I said instead.

"I have told you nothing you can use," he said, with a bitter accuracy that did him more credit than anything else he had said. "Croome is dead. Your brother is dead. Your father is dead. The girl is gone wherever girls like her go. And I will be in the Highlands by week's end. I will not come back. If you are wise, you will not look for me.” He rose from the trunk. "I am sorry for Lydia Gray. I am sorry for the girl. I am sorry, if it signifies, for you. You wear that night on your name. You did not earn it. I have always known it, but I never once spoke up. That is the whole of my courage, my lord. To express regret to the one man who already knows."

It was, God help him, an honest summation. I had heard generals give worse accounts of themselves.

"You will not be troubled by me again," I said. "Go north. Burn Mainwaring's letter. And if any other man comes to your door asking after that night—any man at all—you will not open it."

He understood me. The color, what little there was, went out of his face entirely.

"You think he knows about me."

"I think a man who would silence Lydia Gray would not overlook the others who were in the house." I took up my hat. "I think your trunk is the most sensible object in this room. Finish packing it."

I left him there, among his half-folded things, in the grey northern light. I did not shake his hand. There was nothing in it I wished to take with me.

By the time I left Brookes’s quarters, my leg was beginning to betray me. I caught a cab directly to Waverley Station, where I planned to take the afternoon train to King’s Cross. Somewhere between the jolting streets and the station platform, the ache sharpened into something vicious and hot beneath the old scar tissue.

The refreshment room provided tea and a plate of cold beef. I forced down enough of both to satisfy necessity rather than hunger before boarding the afternoon express south.

The journey passed in fragments. Rain streaking the windows. The rhythmic violence of iron wheels over rails. Sleep arriving in brief uneven stretches before pain dragged me back awake again. By the time the train pulled into King’s Cross close to eleven o’clock, my leg felt as though someone had buried a blade deep into the joint and twisted it slowly for the better part of eight hours.

For one humiliating moment, I was not entirely certain I could stand.

But London moved around me with its usual merciless indifference. Porters shouting. Steam hissing beneath the lamps. Carriages rattling beyond the station entrance.

So I stood. Somehow, I crossed the platform and, using what remained of my pride and very nearly the last of my strength, climbed into a waiting cab.

I scarcely remembered the drive home. Only Dawson opening the front door with immediate concern darkening his expression.

“I am perfectly capable of reaching my bed without assistance,” I informed him before he could offer any.

Whether he believed me or not, he stepped aside and let me proceed with my pain.

Chapter

Twenty-Eight

The Asylum for Inconvenient Women