Sweet Revenge Page 15

  “Very soon,” he insisted. She noticed that his hands were trembling now as he rearranged his cabbages.

  “I promise.” She kissed him again. “It’ll be fine,” she whispered. “Torbel’s good. We’ll figure it out.”

  “I’ll hold you to that, lass. I don’t like the idea of loony car bombers chasing my daughter about London.”

  As Torbel’s fingers curled about her upper arm, she let her gaze stray to the flower stall. “Neither do I, Da,” she replied with a mounting sense of dread. “Neither do I.”

  “One, two, a note for you.

  Three, four, open the door.

  Five, six, pick up sticks.

  Seven, eight, lay them straight.

  Nine, ten, you lose, I win…”

  Augustus heard Clover’s voice through the closed parlor door. Pick up sticks? His old face hardened as he barged inside.

  He’d taken her unawares. Her face mirrored her surprise at the intrusion. Twin spots of color appeared on her normally pale cheeks.

  She balled the paper swiftly in her lap. “Grandfather,” she exclaimed to cover the crinkling sound. “I thought you and Scratch were having lunch today.”

  “He stood me up. Had another matter to attend to.” He stabbed an accusing finger at the wad of paper. “What’s that?”

  “It—it was on the floor inside the mail slot.”

  “Chivers collects the mail. He’s been double-checking lately. Why didn’t he find it?”

  “This one had no postmark. It must have been hand delivered. It’s nothing really, Grandfather. A childish prank. Harmless. We get these all the time at the station. Jack the Rip—”

  “I don’t give a flying fig about a century-old nutball. Let me see that note. When did you—?” He faltered but thrust the thought away. “When did you find it?” He emphasized the word “find” and watched for her reaction. She gave him nothing except the wadded paper.

  “Five minutes ago. Your name was on the envelope. No address. It’s chicken scratch on ordinary writing paper. Standard issue.” Her eyes came to rest on his face, ingenuous eyes if not entirely innocent in Augustus’s opinion. “What’s it doing here, Grandfather? What does it mean?”

  He gave an inelegant snort. “Don’t hand me that, girl. You’re a member of the London police force—though why you should choose an assignment in Stepney is beyond my comprehension.”

  “You know why,” she returned in a low voice.

  “It doesn’t matter what I know or don’t know,” he snapped. “What matters is this note. I want to know who wrote it.”

  She looked him straight in the eye and said placidly, “I should imagine the person who’s trying to kill Torbel and Victoria Summers.”

  He turned away, sickened to hear the words spoken, yet oddly delighted inside. It was the pleasure he strove to conceal.

  He skimmed the note, another altered nursery rhyme. Why rhymes?

  He pondered that question consciously but knew his subconscious was working on a far more frightening question. Who was behind all of this?

  The answer, too, lay buried deep inside him. One of two people, it said. More likely one than the other, but he would still say one or two for the moment.

  His eyes fell on a picture of Robbie on the mantel. Dark, soulful eyes, slender features, tiny scar under his left cheek. Where had that come from? Augustus couldn’t remember. Or maybe he didn’t want to…

  His chest began to hurt. He’d pay the devil good money to finish this nightmare for him. Mete out justice without revealing an unpleasant detail that must surely be fact—even if his brain chose to deny it.

  But he would deny it. He must. This horrible thing was not possible.

  But he knew. Deep down, he thought he knew who it must be. For all his faults, and as much as Augustus despised him, Torbel was too smart to be deceived for long. He’d figure it out. If he knew what Augustus did of the nature of the family, he’d have figured it out long ago.

  Stuffing the note in his waistcoat, he faced his silent granddaughter. She resembled a solemn angel sitting there on that ottoman in her creamy caftan. But there were no angels in the Hollyburn ranks. Except maybe Robbie, who’d been too young and idealistic to understand.

  “Have my, er, missing documents been located yet?” he asked in a cautious tone.

  “No, but I have a plan.”

  Pain like a lightning bolt shot through his chest. “Not infiltration, I hope.”

  Her chin came up. “Can you think of a better way? You say it’s imperative those documents be retrieved. Maybe Peacock got hold of them, maybe he didn’t. Maybe they burned with him, maybe they didn’t. Or maybe someone else has them, and she’s planning to show them to Torbel.”

  Augustus’s breathing grew thready. He mustn’t die. Not yet. Not until justice was served.

  “Do what you have to,” he gasped with a cranky flap of his hand. “Just get those papers back.”

  An eerie little smile crossed her lips. “‘Three, four, open the door…Nine, ten, you lose, I win…’” she quoted from the note in his pocket. “Who knows, Grandfather. Maybe I won’t have to do much at all.”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Excuse me—ouch!” Victoria snatched her foot out from under a worn clodhopper.

  The man wearing it merely scowled at her. He would have stomped off, but Victoria tried again to waylay him. “Excuse me, have you seen someone called Boots? He used to come to this spot a lot.”

  The man cast her a mistrustful look and muttered an unintelligible response.

  Victoria sighed. No one she’d talked to had seen Boots for days. And now this scruffy old man in a red bowler hat had joined a brown-shoed woman poaching on his territory.

  The man was no friendlier than his female counterpart. All he did was march away when she asked him about Boots. And neither the man nor the woman really looked her in the eye.

  She was considering returning to Zoe’s flat and going through more of Sophie’s diary when Tito emerged from a nearby alley to hail her.

  “You’re harder to find than a pocket of lolly,” he panted, fanning himself with his cap. “I got a note for you from Torbel. One of his people gave it to me half an hour ago.”

  Victoria read the message out loud. “‘Meet me in the storehouse—fourth floor, west side. I think I’ve found something.’ Typical,” she said, stuffing the paper in her backpack. “No time mentioned. No hint of what he found.”

  “That’d be his Scotland Yard training, miss,” Tito told her. “They do stuff like that. Real cloak-and-dagger. Torbel said nothing’s ever straightforward at the Yard. Those what work there always talk in code. Have to watch their backs, too, I’m told.”

  “Sort of shakes your faith in the legal system, doesn’t it?”

  Tito grinned. “Wouldn’t know, miss. I never had any faith to start with. You spotted Boots yet?”

  “No, just two old grouches usurping his spots.”

  “Ah, he’ll turn up. Boots goes off sometimes.”

  “For four days?”

  “For three last year. He’ll be back.”

  Tito left with a cheery wave, and Victoria started for the storehouse. High heat and humidity combined with the bank of black clouds overhead to lend a macabre aspect to the area. The usual crowd of people swarmed the streets, but they were abnormally subdued. Hushed, as if they knew the storm was about to break but didn’t want to be the cause of it.

  A group of men in suits scurried by, a pack of oily little entrepreneurs. Victoria had seen them before. Their office building stood across from the storehouse. She wondered what Torbel thought of them. Probably not a whole lot, she decided in amusement.

  She cut through Potter’s Lane to the agency. One of many small side doors allowed her to enter unseen. The last thing she felt like doing with so many other things on her mind was bumping into Ron and company.

  The rear and central staircases merged on the second floor. She passed three agents on the way up, but they we
re absorbed in files and didn’t notice her.

  “Fourth floor, west side,” she read again.

  Winded from the heat, she climbed on, ever more reliant on the handrail to pull herself along. She felt as though she’d been on her feet for seven days instead of seven hours. Why on earth, she wondered, with an aggravated look upward, had Torbel chosen this place for a rendezvous?

  Because he didn’t want an audience? So he could seduce her in private?

  The second was a tantalizing prospect, but not very likely. She’d hardly seen him since he’d followed her to the Puddleby Market two days ago. She’d seen precious little more of her roommate, she reflected wearily.

  “Zoe has a touch of feline in her, all right,” an easygoing Keiran had told her yesterday. “She comes and goes at will. As long as she does her work, Torbel doesn’t mind what hours she keeps. He’s stricter with Ron and some of the others, but they need rules.”

  Interesting, Victoria mused. Had those rules become too confining for Ron? She stepped across the fourth-floor threshold. Was he thinking about moving up at the agency?

  She shivered, partly at the grimness of her thoughts and partly because a full inch of dust covered the floor and clung to the centuries-old fixtures before her. The tarnished candle sconces adorning the wall had to be the originals. Obviously this part of the storehouse was no longer in use.

  Rows of footprints, indistinct after numerous comings and goings, led from the door all the way down the jagged passageway. To the west end, she presumed.

  She proceeded cautiously, mindful of the dark patches that concealed dangerous piles of old brick and mortar. The walls appeared more or less intact, but several of the windows were broken. Also a number of heavy timbers had found their way in here. They lay at odd angles, together with chunks of yellowed plaster on both sides of the corridor.

  “Torbel?” she called, then jumped as her hand passed through a large spiderweb. “Are you here?”

  She received no answer, nothing but a weird howl of wind swirling about the eaves. If it hadn’t been for the footprints, recently made by someone wearing larger shoes than her, she would have turned back.

  “Torbel?” she said again in a firmer voice.

  She heard a sound at the far end of the passage on the other side of the only intact door.

  Stopping in front of it, she tried the knob. Despite years of neglect and a latch so rusty that several flakes dropped onto her sneakers, the thing turned.

  Her courage bolstered, she pushed hard, using her shoulder and much of her body weight. Why she hadn’t expected it to open easily she couldn’t have said. Possibly because the latch had taken a certain strength to shift. Not so the door. It swung back on oiled hinges so readily that it might have been yanked open from the other side.

  Except that that was impossible, her startled brain realized, because there was no other side. There was only air and a sheer, four-story drop into the alley.

  Victoria fought frantically to regain her balance. Whether she would have done it or not, she never knew. She was still combating her forward momentum when a pair of hands planted themselves squarely in the small of her back.

  Her fingers scrabbled for, and thankfully caught, the knob. The door swung open wide, taking her with it. She watched in numb horror as the floor disappeared beneath her. And everything from Dickens’s storehouse to cluttered alleyway became a terrifying blur.

  “TRUST A FEMALE,” Torbel stated angrily. He tossed the scrap of paper in his hand onto Keiran’s makeshift desk and swore volubly. “She sent me a note telling me to meet her in Blackheath of all places. Said her da had his cart there today.”

  “And he didn’t?” Keiran inquired from the floor, where he’d been tinkering with a raft of sound equipment.

  “No, he bloody did not. And Victoria never showed. I swear, Keiran, when I get hold of her I’m going to—”

  “Torbel!” A breathless Oswyn burst through the side door. “She’s there!” He pointed upward, panting hard. “I was in the knacker’s yard—I mean, Tom Froggett’s butcher shop—and I saw her hanging by her fingers.”

  Torbel frowned. “Who?”

  “Victoria!”

  He reacted instantly, grabbing the boy by his shirtfront and hauling him upright. “Where, Oswyn? Where did you see her?”

  “Up there, on the west side. Top floor. She’s—she’s holding on to the doorknob. Swinging from it.”

  “Jesus,” Keiran breathed.

  Torbel dropped Oswyn and started for the staircase at a dead run. “Find a rope and get into the alley,” he ordered over his shoulder.

  He took the stairs three at a time, envisioning all the while Victoria losing her grip and plunging to her death in the alley.

  No, not death. She wasn’t going to die. He wouldn’t let that happen. But someone sure as hell would.

  They’d never used the fourth floor or gotten around to fixing it up. It was a rubbish heap in its own right—and somebody intent on harm had known it. Because it was no accident that Victoria was in this predicament; Torbel would stake his life on that.

  He swore under his breath when he spied the open door at the far end of the corridor. She was clinging to the worn knob, but God only knew how long that rusted bit of metal would support her.

  He reached the threshold at the same moment as she caught sight of him.

  “Torbel,” she cried, struggling to pull herself higher.

  The hinges gave a frightening creak. Torbel’s stomach gave a matching lurch. “Don’t move,” he warned her. “Keep as still as you can.”

  He zeroed in on the hinges. They were going, he realized. He’d never get to her before they gave out.

  “I can’t hold on,” she whispered desperately.

  “Just a few more seconds,” he promised. He looked around, his mind racing. He could see Keiran and Oswyn in the alley below. Keiran had a rope, but there was no time to jury-rig a pulley.

  One hand almost lost its grip. “Torbel…” she gasped.

  “Stop squirming,” he yelled. He hadn’t meant to snap at her, but it was the best thing he could have done.

  She twisted her head around just far enough to hiss at him. “As easy as that, huh? Stop squirming—ahh.”

  He reached out a hand as she almost lost her hold completely. His eyes scoured the alley. Piles of refuse lay everywhere, the largest pressed against the building across from the storehouse. Cardboard mostly, he reflected without a great deal of optimism, but who knew what might lurk beneath it. And yet, what other hope did she have? He could see her fingers slipping on the knob, and the hinges were pulling out farther with every passing second.

  “Listen to me, Victoria,” he called to her. “We’re both going across the alley to that pile of rubbish. When I grab you, let go, duck your head and make yourself go limp. Do you understand?”

  “I…yes.”

  He could hear her arm muscles screaming in agony. Closing his eyes, he backed up, took a deep breath and, using all his strength, lunged.

  The cry he let out was nothing more than a release of adrenaline. His attack cry, Keiran called it. He only hoped this attack would be successful.

  The instant his arms circled her, she released her hold on the knob. Hot air rushed past them on all sides. God help them both if his aim was off.

  The rubbish pile came up to meet them, a sea of corrugated boxes, green plastic bags and old newspaper. Torbel had to wrench his body around in midair to avoid landing on her. But he realized he’d misjudged the time required to complete the turn when his sore arm impacted with the cardboard—and something much more solid directly beneath it.

  Victoria must have experienced the same jolt, for he heard her grunt of surprise and pain right before she slipped from his arms.

  He was alive, though, and alert enough to set his teeth against the pain that shot upward into his shoulder. Victoria must be alive, too, because he’d cushioned a large portion of her fall with his body.

  Dis
regarding the blood that seeped through his jersey, he groped for her among the bags. “Victoria!”

  She emitted a weak groan. “It’s like being hit by a train,” she mumbled, then roused herself and added a stronger “Torbel! Are you all right? Where are you?”

  Buried, it seemed. Either that or he’d gone blind. Freeing his sore arm, he rolled over, shoving the layers of cardboard aside and wincing at the white-hot arrows that tore through his entire body. He saw Keiran’s face beside him and felt his steadying hand. As much as he appreciated his friend’s gesture, however, he shook the help off. “Where’s Victoria?”

  “Oswyn’s there. She’s got a small bump on her temple. You’re the one who’s a mess, my friend.”

  He wasn’t really, but he probably looked it. He’d been in worse shape many times during his days at Scotland Yard.

  A red haze colored his mind when he thought back to how those days had ended and why—and at whose autocratic hands.

  “Torbel?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine.” He banked the unpleasant thought, far in the past now, and crawled out of the rubbish, his eyes immediately locating Victoria. She knelt to one side with Oswyn, rubbing her temple.

  A large drop of water hit his head, then another and another.

  “Here it comes,” Keiran said, motioning to Oswyn. “Get her inside.”

  But Torbel stopped the boy. “Leave her. You and Keiran go ahead. Batten down if you have to. This storm’s gonna blow. Keep working on that tape, Keiran. I want to know whose voice it was.”

  “I’ll do my best, but I don’t think it was electronically distorted. Whoever left the message at Zoe’s knows something about fixing sound.”

  “Do your best.” Torbel’s expression hardened as his gaze flicked upward to the swinging door. “I want this bastard identified. Now. Because whoever he is, I swear to God I’m going to kill him.”

  “THIS IS WHERE YOU LIVE?” Victoria was both shocked and delighted, despite a sore head and a lingering sense of fear that even Torbel’s reassuring presence couldn’t erase.