Sweet Revenge Page 22

  “They only scatter as far as the nearest hiding spot,” Torbel told her, dusting off.

  Oswyn jumped from the roof to land beside them. “I wishyou’d spotted that old chimney earlier, Torbel,” he said breathlessly. “We could have been run through, the pair of us.”

  “But we weren’t.” Torbel watched Merdin’s receding back, then fixed Victoria with a wary stare. “Why Fox?”

  “He said he was searching for Clover. Old favors have to be repaid, you know, especially to a tyrant like Augustus Hollyburn.”

  “There’s Ron.” Oswyn indicated the top of the alley. “What kind of favors?”

  “That,” Torbel said flatly, “is what we need to find out.”

  Victoria’s keen legal mind had no trouble running with that, more so than Torbel might realize in light of the doubts that had been building inside her today. She rubbed the chill from her bare arms, unwilling, for the present, to dwell on such a disturbing thought. Later she would discuss her theory with Torbel. When they were alone and dry, with a bottle of wine, a mock fire and a large, soft, cushy bed beneath them.

  Ron marched down the alley like an irritable Scottish soldier. “Women,” he declared in disgust. “First this one disappears, then Zoe up and does the same. You look put out, Torbel. Was there trouble here?”

  “Nothing we couldn’t handle,” Torbel told him. “What’s this about Zoe?”

  “We lost her,” Inspector Fox said from underneath a large green garbage bag.

  Naturally a fusspot like Fox wouldn’t want to get wet. Victoria shook tendrils of dripping hair from her eyes and glowered at Ron. “If you bothered to look behind you every now and then, you wouldn’t lose people. Where did you last see her?”

  “Near Hangman’s Lane.”

  “Where’s that from here?”

  He glowered back. “About five alleys over and six down. How you got here’s a mystery to me.”

  Was it also an annoyance? Victoria still didn’t trust him. He could easily have poisoned the tea in Zoe’s flat, written the note and locked Torbel and Oswyn inside the Black Sheep Alley torture chamber. Unfortunately the same could be said for Zoe. Ditto for Clover and Inspector Fox, and maybe, just maybe, Augustus Hollyburn, as well.

  “Pure blind luck, it would seem,” she answered Ron levelly.

  Removing his black cotton jacket, Torbel wrapped it around her wet shoulders. The look he cast Ron and Fox held little patience. “Zoe’s no piker, but I want her found before we leave. It’ll be full dark in another fifteen minutes. She’s no match for Merdin and his crew.”

  Fox, whose face Victoria couldn’t see under his makeshift umbrella, came to life. “Merdin,” he repeated. “I thought he was in prison. The justice system in this country needs a good going over if you ask me.”

  Not that anyone had, but his ugly tone brought a resistant lump to Victoria’s chest. Edging closer to Torbel, she offered a reasonable “Why don’t we just accept that Merdin and others like him are out there in force and start searching for Zoe?”

  “We’ll split up,” Torbel agreed, setting a disconcerting hand in the small of her back. “Ron, you and Oswyn backtrack to Hangman’s Lane. Go all the way to Gooseberries if you have to. Victoria, Fox and I will keep going toward the Thames.”

  Fox’s eyes came up. Odd how someone who normally came across as a brownnosing wuss could suddenly seem so unpleasant. “I’m sure,” he said slowly, “that I’m not the least bit interested in locating Zoe. I came here to find Clover.”

  On a more menacing note, Torbel replied, “Then you’d be as well to stay with us.”

  Ron nudged Oswyn. “Let’s go, then. We’ve a fair bit of ground to cover.”

  Fox shifted the plastic covering his head and suit. “I need to place a quick phone call,” he said briskly. “Back in two shakes.”

  “Pompous ass,” Victoria remarked in his wake. “Why did you let him go, Torbel? He won’t be back.”

  His face etched with lines of fatigue, Torbel reached into his jeans pocket and removed a square of paper. “This was attached to one of the spikes as it came out. Can you read it?”

  Not well in the darkness, but a silvery light filtering downward from one of the windows above helped.

  Baa, baa, Black Sheep,

  Your time is past to die.

  Still, though, I know,

  Your Irish luck is high.

  Bring Vickie; save Boots,

  A fair enough exchange.

  If you survive: the Pierpont,

  Tonight, in Blue Fish Lane!

  NOTES EVERYWHERE. Nursery-rhyme threats. Robbie had loved nursery rhymes. He’d memorized most of them by age four.

  More disquieting thoughts pressed in. Irish luck—Welsh magic. Boots. Another death. Fresh corpse in the river. This was beginning to be too much.

  There’d been a number of different personae during the past few weeks. Sweep, beggar, cop. Yes, you could call that last one a disguise of sorts, certainly. It would all end here, tonight. Not a chance that Torbel and his new lady love would escape justice. Too bad old Goggy was going to miss the culmination of two years’ hard work and planning.

  Street was gone; Torbel and Victoria, for all their blind luck, were as good as gone; Lord Hobday was dead; so, apparently, was his courtroom assistant.

  Robbie would rest easier after this night passed.

  And so will I, thought the person who waited in the sanctuary of the old lair. An evil smile appeared. Just let Blodwyn’s magic try and save her son tonight. It would be done at last. The “eyes” would have it. The stain of birth had been erased, so that could be overlooked. But the eyes. How was it they’d never noticed the eyes?…

  Chapter Eighteen

  “You’re not coming,” Torbel declared. “I didn’t fall in 1—” He caught himself. “I didn’t bring you to Stepney in order to watch you die. I’ll deal with this alone.”

  Victoria glared at him across the floor in Zoe’s flat. Ron had located Zoe. They’d met at Gooseberries, had an unrevealing confab and gone their separate ways.

  It was past nine o’clock now, far enough into the night for Torbel’s nerves to be stretched taut. He wanted this nightmare finished. If Victoria would quit being so stubborn about accompanying him to the old Pierpont Hotel, he might stand a chance of achieving that goal. On the other hand, he was enough of a realist to understand that, backup or no, he might also wind up dead.

  “You think if you go there with Ratz and Tristan lying in wait on the docks that I’ll be safe?” she demanded angrily. “Think again, Torbel. This whole thing started with me coming down here. It isn’t going to end with me trotting back to my legal practice unharmed. You could die down there.”

  “I’m not going to die.” Torbel ran an exasperated hand through his hair. “Dammit, Victoria, this is—”

  “Serious?” She snatched a folded newspaper from the bookshelf. “Do you think I’m stupid, Torbel? Sergeant Peacock was a seasoned police officer. Read the article on him. Even Fox had nice things to say.”

  Torbel glanced at the newspaper she’d tossed onto the table. Peacock’s photo, unsmiling and typically stuffy, stared back at him. The bags under his eyes must have come from overwork. To Torbel’s knowledge, he’d had no personal life.

  Not unlike Oliver Fox, or, he reflected with a twinge of disdain, himself. But his own jaded past wasn’t in question here. Sophie Hollyburn’s “even foxier” lover very well might be. He regarded a poster of Sherlock Holmes in The Spider Woman contemplatively. Unless, of course, the answers resided in Clover. Or Zoe.

  He didn’t realize that Victoria had moved closer until her towel-dried dark hair brushed his arm. “What are you thinking?” she asked. Was that an edge of suspicion in her voice?

  “Nothing that makes me happy.”

  He sensed she wanted to pursue that statement but couldn’t bring herself to do it.

  “I’m coming with you,” she repeated, crankily stubborn. “I know Ratz and Tristan will be th
ere. You’d still need eyes in the back of your head to cover all the angles in that decrepit old hotel. Backup’s bull in the end. You could be bushwhacked on the doorstep. In case you hadn’t noticed, this person does not fight fair.”

  He was also crazy. Torbel grimaced. Or she.

  Cursing his train of thought, he leveled a glare at Victoria. “I need to know you’re safe.”

  “That’s what you said this morning. I wasn’t any safer here than you were out there.”

  His temper began to mount. The force of it no longer concerned him. He’d never become so angry with her that he would lose it. “This is different, Victoria.”

  “The hell it is. I know we’ll be walking into a trap, but if worse comes to worst and one of us gets caught, the other can distract him until Ratz and Tristan move in. That’s logical, Torbel. We both know there’s no point calling the police. For one thing, neither of us trusts Fox, and for another, any authority figure would send our psychotic note writer scuttling for cover. But only temporarily. He wants us dead, and he means to have his way. He’ll try again, sooner or later.”

  Her blue eyes flashed electric in the soft apartment light. “You’re not putting me off this time. I’m coming and that’s that. On the way, you can tell me what it is about your temper that sends blowhards like Merdin scuttling for the shadows. And what,” she added, more determined than Torbel had ever seen her, “made you decide to leave Scotland Yard.”

  WRONG. IT WAS ALL WRONG. Dangerous and stupid, a mistake. The Rag Man was too clever by half. He wouldn’t die easily, not even caught like a stuck pig. Of all people, Augustus Hollyburn knew that. For years he’d tried his influential best to beat the man or at least beat him down. What had his efforts gotten him? Not a blasted thing.

  Scum, it seemed, rose. No doubt it would rise again. And yet, he thought, clinging to that one remaining thread of hope, what if this time it sank? How gratifying that would be…unless his family name wound up besmirched in the process…

  The very idea of public humiliation made his knuckles go white on the arms of the chair. He would love to see the Rag Man burn, but would he not risk losing his remaining grandchild over this? Why, oh why hadn’t he considered that unacceptable eventuality sooner?

  Because he’d wanted Torbel’s head on a platter, that’s why. Hatred for the Rag Man had blinded him to the more-agonizing consequences of this vengeful act.

  Augustus’s breath grew hot and painful in his chest. He refused to lose either a grandchild or a knighthood. It must not come to that.

  “Chivers!” he bellowed, crumpling the note about sheep and Irish luck on his lap. “Get in here.”

  The butler appeared, placid and quiescent as always. “Yes, sir?”

  “Put on your coat and hat. I’ve an errand for you.”

  “At 9:00 p.m., sir?”

  It was the first time Chivers had questioned an order. Augustus’s hackles rose. “Yes, at 9:00 p.m. You’ve served me for more than fifty years. You’ll do as I instruct, or you’ll find yourself another position. And another pension, as well.”

  The butler’s expression remained bland. “As you wish, sir.”

  “Bloody right,” Augustus said huffily. “I want you to take that old black Mini of Sophie’s. It still runs. Remove the license plates. Keep the headlights off, and drive carefully to the river.”

  “The river, sir?”

  “Yes, the river. Do you know the old Pierpont Hotel?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His impatience forgotten, Augustus scowled. “I want you to go there, Chivers, and wait.”

  “For what, sir?”

  The scowl dissolved into a brutish twist of Augustus’s thin lips. “A man and a woman.” His blue-green eyes, hard as ice and just as cold, strayed to the fire. “Damn you to hell, Blodwyn,” he growled. “This was your doing, your curse. I had no part in the outcome. But this I will affect. For the sake of my grandchild and justice, this thing must be done correctly.”

  “YOU LEFT SCOTLAND YARD because of your temper?” Victoria repeated, incredulous.

  “My temper and Augustus Hollyburn.” Torbel led the way carefully along the foggy dock to Blue Fish Lane, where the old Pierpont stood in all its dark, decrepit gloom. “A guy I’d worked with briefly at the Yard turned up dead. His name was Tom Potts. I discovered the body. We’d had words on several occasions. Someone with clout tried to frame me for Potts’s murder. I’m sure Fox helped him. I found out who was behind the frame and—” his eyes darkened at the memory “—dealt with it.”

  Victoria shivered, more out of fear for their current situation, he suspected, than his past. “What did you do?”

  He moved a vague shoulder, tightening his grip on her hand. “I went to his house in the middle of the night and confronted him.”

  “With your fists?”

  “I was tempted. Old Goggy wasn’t as frail ten years ago.”

  “Why would he want to frame you?”

  “He liked Tom Potts.”

  “That’s a pretty feeble reason, Torbel.”

  “It’s as much of a reason as Augustus Hollyburn needs. But, yes, there was more to it than that. He was an unethical judge, and I knew it. He took exception to my having that knowledge.”

  “How did he know you had it?”

  An ironic smile played on Torbel’s mouth. “I told him.”

  “Well, that’s one way.” Her smooth forehead wrinkled. “How did you obtain this so-called knowledge?”

  “Street recruits have plenty of resources at the Yard.”

  She eyed him warily. “What aren’t you telling me, Torbel? Does this have anything to do with—No, that wouldn’t work. You’d have been too young.”

  “For what?”

  “To have had an affair with Sophie Hollyburn. Unless she was an extremely perverted woman, which I don’t think she was.”

  “And always assuming that I was a horny adolescent.”

  “Lots of young men are,” she retorted, her mind obviously still shuffling through the possibilities. For the present, Torbel preferred that she not shuffle too close to the mark.

  “Priorities, Victoria,” he reminded, nodding at the misshapen black monstrosity directly in their path. “That last note implied that our coming here tonight would save Boots’s life.”

  She blew out an exasperated breath. “You don’t believe that Boots is alive any more than I do. It’s a trap. The only reason we’re here is to spring it and hopefully bag the homicidal creep who’s behind all of this.”

  That was putting it bluntly. Torbel admired her grit if not her unwavering resolve to accompany him tonight. It took guts to walk into a death trap, because if the person behind the threats didn’t kill them, the hotel itself very well might.

  In the poor light cast by the dock lamps, he surveyed the mist-shrouded husk before them. No one would ever have called the place grand, but it had probably possessed a certain air of old London charm once upon a time.

  “Yeah, like Charles Dickens’s Marshalsea,” he muttered dryly.

  “His what?” Victoria asked.

  “Debtors’ prison. Little Dorrit.”

  She summoned a faint smile. “Good book.” She squinted at the building. “What’s that?”

  He followed her index finger to a second-floor room. A speck of light no bigger than a snow pea passed over the window, then was extinguished.

  “Bait,” he said flatly, and forced the tension from his muscles.

  He didn’t dare signal Ratz or Tristan. He would have to trust in their presence nearby. He shouldn’t have brought Victoria, though. If he’d had to tie her to a chair in his flat, he should never have exposed her to this kind of lunatic danger.

  Their footsteps echoed on the wet pavement. Fog slithered in ghostly tendrils about their heads. The outline of the old Pierpont wavered eerily in the ever-thickening mist. The heat of the previous few weeks had vanished with the light of day. The traditional fog and dampness that was London had returned, br
inging with it an aspect of horror that would have done a Gothic filmmaker proud.

  They entered by the front door, for the simple reason that front doors made for the easiest avenues of escape. In this case, it also gave them the broadest view of things to come, although in typical British fashion, the lobby was a small affair, the staircase narrow and set well away from the door. Ten psychotic killers could be lurking here, and they wouldn’t know it until they crossed the inner threshold.

  “I saw a Sherlock Holmes mystery like this one,” Victoria whispered, her breasts pressed disconcertingly against his arm. “The villain was an old actor. He wore clothes tinted with phosphorescent paint and ran across the moor like a ghost. Holmes and Watson cornered him in the abandoned hotel.”

  Torbel forged a path across the sagging floor. “Did they capture him?”

  “Not there.”

  “Good story,” he said with more than a trace of irony.

  “I wasn’t trying to make a point,” she retorted, her tone testy. “This place gives me the creeps. I thought conversation might help.”

  They’d reached the stairwell—if you could call it that. A good one-third of the steps were either broken or so severely cracked that the slightest pressure would splinter them.

  Surveying them, Victoria shrugged. “If he got up, so can we.”

  Torbel squinted into the musty darkness. “He might have used one of the rear stairwells.”

  “I can’t believe they’d be in better shape.” She wrinkled her nose. “This place defines the word rot. It’s moldy and cobwebbed and probably overrun with termites and rats. I can’t imagine what’s holding it up.”

  “Faith,” Torbel replied, testing the strength of the first step. It screamed beneath his weight. “You ready?”

  “No, but let’s do it.”

  Even as they climbed, Torbel couldn’t make out the top of the staircase; however, logic told him it would be fifteen, maybe twenty steps up. The trick lay in not falling through and spraining an ankle, or worse, having their attacker catch them in that vulnerable position.

  “Hug the wall,” he instructed Victoria.