“And she never did. Will you please not discuss my mother, Inspector? Let her rest in peace. She was doing the best she could in difficult circumstances.” “No, Mrs. Villiers wasn’t lucky like you,” Fellows said. “You have been uncommonly lucky. You married a respectable gentleman who took care of you. Then you became a companion to a wealthy old lady, so ingratiating yourself with her that she left you her entire fortune. Now you’re the guest of English aristocrats in Paris. Quite a rise from the workhouse, isn’t it?”
“Not that my life is any of your business,” Beth said stiffly.
“But why is it of such interest to a detective inspector?”
“It isn’t, not in itself. But murder is.”
Every limb in her body stiffened, like an animal that knew it was being stalked.
“I haven’t done any murders, Mr. Fellows,” she said, trying to smile. “If you are suggesting I helped Mrs. Barrington to her grave, I did not. She was old and ill, I was very fond of her, and I had no idea she meant to leave everything to me.” “I know. I checked.”
“Well, isn’t that a mercy? I confess, Inspector, I can’t imagine what you are trying to tell me.”
“I bring up your mother and father because I want to speak frankly with you about topics that might cause a lady to swoon. I am establishing that you are a woman of the world and not likely to faint at what I have to say.” Beth fixed him with an icy stare. “Rest assured, I am not prone to swooning. I might have the footmen throw you out, yes, but swoon, no.”
Fellows held up his hand. “Please bear with me, madam. The woman killed at St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, was called Lily Martin.”
Beth looked at him blankly. “I don’t know anyone called Lily Martin.”
“Five years ago, she worked in a brothel in High Holborn.”
He waited expectantly, but Beth shook her head again.
“Are you asking whether my mother knew her?” “Not at all. Do you recall that there was a murder of a courtesan at this High Holborn house five years ago?” “Was there?”
“There was indeed. The details are not pretty. A young woman called Sally Tate, one of the ladies of the house, was found dead in her bed one morning, stabbed through the heart, then her warm blood deliberately smeared on the wallpaper and the bedstead.”Beth’s throat tightened. “How dreadful.”
Fellows sat forward, on the very edge of the chair now.
“I know—I know—that Lord Ian Mackenzie did that murder.” Beth felt the floor dropping from under her feet. She tried to drag in a breath, but her lungs wouldn’t work, and the room began to ripple.
“Now, Mrs. Ackerley, you promised me you wouldn’t swoon.”
She found Fellows at her side, his hand on her elbow.
Beth gasped for breath.
“It’s absurd.” Her voice grated. “If Lord Ian had done a murder, the newspapers would have been full of it. Mrs. Barrington wouldn’t have missed that.”
Fellows shook his head. “He was never accused, never arrested. No one was allowed to breathe a word to the journalists.” He returned to his chair, his face betraying impatience and frustration. “But I know he did it. He was there that night. By morning, Lord Ian had disappeared, nowhere to be found. Turns out he’d left for Scotland, out of my reach.” Beth grasped at the straw. “Then perhaps he was gone beforehand.”
“His servants tried to tell me he’d returned home before two in the morning, gone to bed, and left for Scotland by an early train. They were lying. I know it in my bones, though his brother the duke did his best to block me from finding what Ian really did do. I wanted to arrest Ian, but I had no evidence to please my guv, and the Mackenzies are high-and-mighty lords. Their late mother was a personal friend of the queen. The duke has weight with the Home Office, and he made my superiors put me off it. Ian’s name was never mentioned—not in the newspapers, not in the halls of Scotland Yard. In other words, he got clean away with it.” Lights spun at the edges of Beth’s vision as she stood up and walked away from Fellows. She thought of Ian, his quick, flickering gaze, his intense golden eyes, his hard kiss, the pressure of his hands.
It occurred to her that this was the second time in a few weeks that a man had warned her away from another gentleman. But when Ian had told her about Mather, she’d easily believed him, whereas she wanted to deny all that Inspector Fellows said about Ian.
“You have to be wrong,” she said. “Ian would never do such a thing.”
“You say this when you’ve known him only a week? I’ve watched the Mackenzie family for years. I know what they’re capable of.”
“I’ve seen my share of violent men in my life, Inspector, and Ian Mackenzie is not one of them.”
Beth had grown up among men who solved their problems with their fists, her own father included. Her father could be perfectly charming when sober, but once he had gin inside him he became a monster.
Fellows looked unconvinced. “The girl, Lily, who died in Covent Garden worked in that High Holborn house five years ago. She disappeared after the murder, and I couldn’t find her no matter what. Turns out she’d moved into this Covent Garden boardinghouse, and a protector was paying her handsomely to live alone and keep quiet. Housekeeper says a gentleman used to visit her in the night from rime to time, well after dark. She never saw him. But there was an eyewitness who saw a man visit the house the night Lily got scissors stuck into her chest, and that man was Lord Ian Mackenzie.”