I FOLLOWED MY GRANDMOTHER out of the car, giving Nerissa a pat and telling her to stay put in the back. She seemed to understand that I was in good hands and that she needed to watch out for Lancaster because she climbed into the front seat between the two men. The car drove off and I turned to see my grandmother hand some money to one of the burly men as they led us to a small boat and started rowing us across the water. The port of Cardiff had once been a bustling one, but the coal industry had moved its trade routes after the Great War and we were one of only a few boats out on Cardiff Bay. Nonetheless, the men said nothing, but pulled up to a small white church on the opposite bank and rowed away as soon as we were on shore again.
“No one will bother us here,” my grandmother said, leading me in through a back door. I recognized it as a Lutheran church, possibly as much as fifty years old if the iron window struts were original. It was empty, but in good condition and I followed the older woman into the small kitchen where a fine meal awaited us. My stomach must have made an audible sound because my grandmother bullied me up to the table and would answer no questions until I’d filled a plate and made a start. The strawberries were bright red and sweet, the warm loaf of bread I recognized from my favourite bakery on Lidwell Street with the toasted sesame seeds, and the cheese tray was as diverse in flavour as it was colourful. There was even a tiny pot of homemade royal jelly made for the queen bee of a hive. I had missed real food on my escapades.
“I will not be staying,” she said finally, sipping at a glass of wine she had poured while I ate. She was wearing less makeup than usual, even for country life, and, looking at her boots, I noted the distinctive ash around the heels. I watched her use her pinky finger to tap a tiny amount of royal jelly at the corners of her eyes before she continued. “I must make an appearance in London to maintain this charade, but first we will take you to a safe house in Merthyr Tydfil. The city councillor there owes me a favour and will not betray us. Meanwhile, I have three lawyers on retainer working on your case in London.”
“My case?” I asked, nearly choking on my bite of cheese. “What case? Grandmother, you must know that I have nothing to do with the bodies at Paddington station.”
“Of course not,” she said, shaking her head at me, making it harder to read her lips. “But that odious man, Kell, cannot be dissuaded that you are involved with the bombing, neither by bribe, threat, nor truth. He’s been at three of my homes and he only released your friend Lord Beanstine yesterday morning after questioning the poor man overnight. Something about financing a weapons deal or something ridiculous like that. And I’m sorry to say that some government men have been picking through your Baker Street apartment looking for God knows what since you escaped into the Thames. The sooner we can throw them onto a new scent, the sooner you can come home.” She handed me a change of clothing as she spoke and I thankfully started pulling on the tweed pants, a blue sweater, and a vest. All three were new and of course, fit perfectly. I folded my old clothes into a bundle and shoved them into my satchel along with the new underclothes she had provided.
“Digby killed the constable at Paddington and then himself, poor man. The forensics will be clear at least on that,” I said, changing my socks and then putting my worn boots back on. “His daughter, Ilsa, is a whole other kettle of fish. I still think she’s involved in the bombing, though her death would seem to indicate that she at least had an accomplice.”
“Not to put too fine a point on it dear, but the dead are not as useful to us as a live suspect,” she answered, lighting her tiny ceramic pipe. “Surely you have one.”
I opened my mouth and closed it. I had so little evidence on the queen’s lady-in-waiting that even mentioning her felt ridiculous and O’Duffy was just a convenient suspect with all the right …
“Wait, Grandmother, where is Lancaster?”
“Who?”
I got up from the table, my appetite gone. “Where has Jenkins taken him?”
“Portia …,” my grandmother said, a warning in the tone of her voice and just as clear in her eyes.
“You mean to use him as a scapegoat,” I whispered, anger displacing the warmth of feeling safe. I grabbed the tweed hat that completed the outfit and was out the back door before she could stop me, but the men and the rowboat were long gone. I couldn’t see a car, boat, or person in sight of the church, and of course that was by design. Irene Adler had isolated me so that I couldn’t halt her plan. She might be planning to keep me isolated out here, but she wouldn’t leave us unguarded. If by some miracle the police found us, she would have an escape. She always did.
She hadn’t followed me outside at all, patiently waiting for me to come to the right conclusion that I had no choice but to allow Lancaster to take the fall for crimes neither of us had committed. I closed my eyes against the wind, smelling the rain that was about to douse the countryside and something else. Cheap tobacco. We weren’t alone. I opened my eyes, scanning the docks.
“The bread was too fresh,” I said into the wind, looking for an innocuous boat garage. I sprinted at the one closest to me and saw the trail of smoke coming up from behind it and the giggling sound of a woman he was spending his time with. I opened the door to the boat garage and found what I was looking for — an older model Ariel Red Hunter motorcycle with a generous side satchel for deliveries and a small silver key still in the ignition. I ran my hands over the controls, which weren’t exactly like the ones on the motorcycle Brian sometimes borrowed from the Yard, but were similar. I’d ridden on the back a few times and had tried my hand at driving it once, finding the weight of the machine the biggest deterrent to comfort.
I carefully walked the motorcycle out of the boat garage so as not to alert its owner and only started the machine up when I gained the main road. I glanced back at the church where I thought I could see the door opening. Perhaps my grandmother had come out to mollify my concerns, but she was about to be sorely disappointed. That said, I knew she would grudgingly cover the cost of this motorcycle with its owner rather than allow it to be reported stolen. I turned my face back to the wind, instinctively driving towards London, which would be a three-hour ride north and then east. But Jenkins was coming back for Adler … she had told him so in the car and she had said herself that she needed to return to London to maintain her charade of not being in league with me (which at this point she would not be lying about). That meant Jenkins was going to dump Lancaster somewhere closer than London. Sherlock’s maps had never tracked out this far so I didn’t know where the nearest police station was, but surely it would be closer to the town. I took St. Mary Street, looking for a sign to the nearest constabulary when I noticed a pair of teenagers digging through a rubbish bin in an alley, throwing half-eaten fruit over their shoulders. Instead of hightailing it when I slowed down next to them, they turned with snarls on their faces. The older of the pair had a makeshift cudgel at his belt, which he put his hand on when I took my foot off the pedal.
“I can tell you where your mates hid last night’s haul if you can direct me to the police station,” I said, looking to the older one. “Or you can try to rob me, find I have no money on me, and be no closer to finding your stolen booty.”
The younger boy’s mouth dropped open and he looked wide-eyed at his compatriot whose snarl changed slowly to an assessing smile.
“What stolen booty?” he asked, crossing his arms in a challenge.
“You’re not hungry, or you wouldn’t be throwing away perfectly edible food — I know that from personal experience. No, you’re looking for something you lost. Not sure what it is, but I’m guessing more than you could carry away last night when you robbed whomever you robbed against this wall. The scuffle is obvious in the way this dirt has been kicked around and there’s an eye tooth over there that I’m guessing your victim lost in the fight since you both have all your front teeth. Did the police surprise you? Is that why you dropped whatever you took?”
The way they glanced at each other confirmed my guess.
I nodded. “Well, whomever you worked with on this ill-advised caper hid what you dropped with the intention of coming back here by themselves to re-acquire it. Would you like to know where it is?”
They made their decision quickly, describing the two police stations in the vicinity, and I in turn advised them to look for the stolen goods on the second-floor balcony above us. The metal stairs had been let down sometime yesterday, from the condition of the mud on the struts, and left down, which meant someone had gone up and come back down (rather than climb up and open a window to perhaps gain entry to a locked apartment). Chances are the stolen goods were hidden up there rather than down here.
I climbed back on the motorcycle and headed in the direction of the police station that was further away. If Jenkins had dropped Lancaster at the first station, it wouldn’t take him this long to get back to the church. I pulled up far enough away from the building that I could hide the motorcycle in an alleyway and made my way across the street from the station, putting my foot up on the railing of a storefront to pretend to be tying my bootlace.
Nothing looked amiss from the outside — no consolidation of police cars indicating that the Yard had been called in, or at least if they had, they were still on the road from London. How would I get him out? How would I even ascertain that he had been brought here? I watched a skeevy-looking man exit the station on his own, holding a cigarette up to his nose as he came down the stairs, enjoying the smell. He turned left and disappeared into a pub a half a block away. That was my way in.
Fifteen minutes later I was wearing his clothes, my new tweed outfit tucked into my now bulging satchel and tucked under my borrowed shirt to act as a belly. I rubbed dirt on my cheeks to simulate a shadow of a beard, pulled his hat low over my eyes, and, my heart thundering in my chest, made my way up the stairs and into the station.
A constable stood just inside the front door replacing posters and information on a corkboard, and seeing myself in black and white, I fought the urge to turn around the way I had come; that would surely look more suspicious than continuing my entry. He wasn’t paying attention to me anyway. He kept stealing glances at the woman manning the front desk. The object of his attentions was a woman with rigorously dyed and styled blonde hair. No ring on her finger and a blouse that left little to the imagination, all of which gave me my next idea.
“Evenin’ doll,” I said, in what I hoped was a reasonable impression of a male voice. “I’m here to get the dinner orders for the prisoners.”
She barely glanced up at me, her gaze focused on a well-worn book. I took a chance and reached out, raising her chin so that she was looking at me. “Whaddyasay, gorgeous?”
She blushed at my attentions, glancing around to see if we were alone, and I removed my hand, giving her one of Lancaster’s looks this time, that flirty non-dangerous half-smile. I had no idea it would work, but she giggled nervously and said, “Sure, we only got one, but you know where the cells are?”
“I do,” I said with a tap of my hat. “Now, don’t you go anywhere.”
She giggled again and I walked down the only hallway that led away from the upper offices, down some stairs to find the jail area. In the farthest corner of the room sat a man I recognized. He was on his tiptoes, both hands grasped on the iron bars covering the tiny window of his cell.
“Lancaster,” I whispered, nearing his cell.
He turned and did a double take, “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
I carefully pulled a couple of hairpins out from under my borrowed hat, handing them to him through the bars. “Get ready to escape, I’m going to cause a disturbance.”
He grasped my hand on the bar. “You shouldn’t have come back for me.”
“My grandmother isn’t a bad person,” I said. “Well, she is a selfish person, but she’s got my best interests at heart. Honestly.”
“I find that easy to believe,” he said, his hand warm on mine. “Jenkins seemed like a decent fellow who was truly sorry for being put in the position to trade me for your freedom.”
“I half expected to find one of you bruised into unconsciousness,” I admitted, looking at his face and fists for any sign of a fight. Jenkins was, after all, a former boxer of some renown, and could hold his own against a man half his age.
“I would never strike a legend like Bruiser Jenkins. My dad used to take me to his fights!” Lancaster said, managing to look slightly shocked at the suggestion. “But the truth is, I think your grandmother might have the right of it. If I am taken into custody with the Yard, the pressure will let up on you, allowing you the freedom to actually find this bomber.”
“If it were the Yard who were coming for you, you’d be under guard, even here in your cell,” I replied, letting go of his hands. “But Kell, as you said, keeps his cards close to the chest and has told them nothing about your alleged crimes except to lock you up. Be ready to make a quick exit.”
I ran back up the stairs and slowed down as I walked down the hallway, winking at the woman behind the desk. “Meet me outside for a minute, won’t you?”
Her mouth dropped open, but I turned away, trying to be mysterious, and sauntered out the door in my best imitation of my ex-boyfriend’s cursed confidence. Gavin had a way of making every female in a space pay attention to him when he wanted the attention. I believe (after months of study) that it was all in his aura of confidence.
The constable who had been at the corkboard was now outside, smoking with a sergeant. Definitely not the actions of a station at high alert. Right on schedule, smoke started to rise out of the pub where I had changed into my disguise and I slapped a look of horror on my face and pointed at it.
“I will call the fire department,” I assured the two police officers. “I was in that pub for lunch and two teenage boys tried to accost me as I left.”
Knowing of the previous night’s criminality gave me the advantage and I described the boys so well that the sergeant actually clapped me on the back as they sprinted off towards the pub to capture the teenagers who had been reported last night. The woman I was waiting for came out the door at exactly that time and I grasped her hand, pulling her into the alleyway behind the station. She immediately pressed me against the wall, whispering something breathy and urgent in my ear. She pressed kisses against my neck and I had to step back to tell her that I was delivering a message on behalf of the officer who had been standing at the corkboard.
“Larry?” she said, her colour high, her confusion apparent.
“Yes, Larry,” I agreed, holding her at bay. “He couldn’t stop talking about you. How beautiful you are, how irresistible, how he’s been too shy to make the first move.”
She stopped trying to pull me close, her eyes wide. “I’ve known Larry since grade school. He’s never said a word.”
“I think you should talk to Larry, maybe invite him for a drink, but don’t tell him I told you any of this. He’s a gentleman after all,” I said, starting to run out of ideas as to how far I could extend this façade when I finally saw Lancaster steal out of the building.
“Fire!” I yelled, as if suddenly realizing the pub was alight, turning my would-be lover towards the danger. She covered her mouth with her hands in surprise, but I bustled her towards her home, assuring her that I would tell Larry that I had sent her to safety. I ran after Lancaster, catching up with him two blocks away, and leading him to the motorcycle. I had negotiated a tenner for the distraction and the disguise from the skeevy man, but I hoped that he didn’t actually burn the place down.
Lancaster got on the back of the motorcycle without an argument and we were London-bound once more.