After sending Gren to keep Prue company, David finally caught up with Tolliver, and the meeting didn’t go well. Tolliver was furious David had told the jurors why Prue was in Miss Diamond’s house.
“You should not have interfered, Shadow. You have put my investigation at risk by disclosing the connection between the government and Mist.”
He also objected to David paying bribes at the prison to get better treatment for Prue. “You need not put the monies you’ve outlaid for a private room onto your expenses for the case. I will not pay them.”
“Mist could have been dead before morning, had I left her, Tolliver,” David said. “It would have been too late for you to get her out then.”
Tolliver shrugged. “Mist knows the risks. And she knows how to defend herself. I suppose you are expending your client’s money now on solving the murder and clearing Mist, instead of hunting her blackmailer.”
“The two are connected. The courtesan was probably killed because of what she knew.”
“Or because Hurley is a jealous man. Or because her partner found out her plans to abscond with Winderfield’s daughter. So far, all you’ve done is complicate the case. I should have you arrested. And you’ve involved Lord Jonathan. He’s a suspect, damn it. What were you thinking?”
“Come on, Tolliver. You don’t think he’s a traitor any more than I do.”
“That is not the point, Shadow. And you know it.”
They parted displeased with one another, Tolliver having refused to use his influence to get Prue released, and David having refused to drop the murder investigation, or his case for Lady Georgiana.
David’s next stop was Bow Street. He had a frustrating interview with Gifford, who refused to consider that Madame Dupont might have lied to him, and suggested several reasons for her disappearance, and that of the maid. When David told him that the two courtesans and the dresser were spies and in collusion, he just shook his head. “I’d need to see evidence of that, Wakefield.”
Rather than hit the man, David took himself off to the room where the Runners kept papers they had confiscated.
Milford was sitting at a table thumbing, page by page, through a stack of papers, making notes on each page before placing it on one of several piles in front of him.
On the floor to Milford’s right was a diminishing pile of unsorted papers in boxes: to the left, eight stacks of various heights, each secured from draughts by a paperweight, and three boxes of books.
He looked up when David came in.
“Shadow. Interesting papers.” He drew one of the piles on the desk towards him—a sheaf of pages covered with his tiny, neat handwriting. “See here. I’ve found ten categories of income, and four categories of expense in the account books, and eight different kinds of correspondence.”
He’d made list after list. Whoever kept the records in Miss Diamond’s household had been as meticulous as Milford himself. They’d used codes for both income and expense. Milford had listed them all according to code, detailing frequency and amount, with notes of his own suggesting patterns and possible interpretations.
“Blackmail paid in and also out, Milford?”
“Yes, I think so, don’t you? The income amounts grow steadily greater, and then some of them disappear, and another notation…” Milford’s hand hovered above the piles till he found the one he wanted. “Yes, this one, see? The same person code, LG. I’m almost certain this particular code designates the payee, but no financial amount. Instead, another code: W Ltr Pol Bri. And here…” He pounced on a stack and lifted a paperweight to retrieve a page. “Here is the letter. See? A letter detailing a political bribe, signed by someone with the initial W.”
David scanned it quickly. It was probably nothing more than an embarrassment to the duke whose initial was written in a distinctive flourish across the bottom. More than embarrassing, perhaps, to his daughter, Lady Georgiana, who had undoubtedly supplied it to her lover.
“With time,” Milford continued, “I’m sure I can work out the codes. But Shadow, I can already see there are gaps. Two of the account books, for a start, but here, this code refers to something from an H, a Ltr Fgd Bk, but I’ve been through nearly everything, and there is no such letter. And the same with all the codes from the page this one was on.”
Gifford walked into the room with no knock or preamble.
“Anything you find, you have to inform me,” he grumbled.
Milford began to explain his analysis. Gifford followed along, interrupting from time to time to ask a question. “Looks like you might be right about those females,” he told David, grudgingly.
“Gifford?” Another Runner came in without knocking. “Gifford, they’ve dragged a woman’s body from the river.”
“What’s that to me?”
“This one is yours, seemingly. One of the men who helped was on your coroner’s jury. He recognised her. It’s the whore’s dresser. The Frenchie you’ve been looking for.”
That caught David’s attention. “Dead?”
Dead, indeed. She had been fished from the tide by one of those who roamed the Thames collecting detritus that found its way into the water, called a dead man because his kind often brought in the bodies of those who had drowned.
David and Gifford shared a hackney to Brewster’s Quay near the Tower of London, where a small crowd of wharf hands waited to watch their examination.
David, circling the body where it still lay on the open wharf, felt a moment’s pity. The dresser had been hit in the face and then strangled, the bruises clear on her throat. “Didn’t know tides, he what dropped ’er,” offered the dead man. “Come upriver, she did. Dropped ’er off a bridge, I reckon, or mebbe a boat. She’d have gone down river and mebbe we’d not of found ’er, if’n he’d dropped ’er at the right time. But he didn’t know tides.”
“Or she,” Gifford suggested. “Could have been a strong woman.”
“Big hands,” David said. He put his own around the dresser’s throat, showing Gifford that he didn’t have the span to leave such bruises. Gifford then had to have a try, his bigger hands fitting quite neatly, much to the amusement of the onlookers, who suggested he should arrest himself.
“We’d better visit that other spy of yours,” Gifford said. “Fraser, or whatever her name is.”
Miss Fraser’s house, though, was still and silent. David stood on Gifford’s cupped hands to peer in at the parlour window, and what he saw made him suggest forcing the door. The body lay half in and half out of the parlour, the head and upper torso in the hallway.
“Miss Fraser?” Gifford asked.
“No,” said David. “But we have found the missing maid.”