Page 61 of Seducing a Stranger
Chapter 13
Less than a handful of days later, it’d taken Prudence and Mercy the better part of three hours to comb over their father’s study, library, and personal belongings before they had finally stumbled upon the documents she’d been searching for.
Mercy was the perfect partner to rely upon for this assignment. She was fleet-footed, quick-witted, and always up for an adventure. Or, as she’d dubbed their vocation, acaper, a word she’d claimed to have purloined from the detective novels she was almost never without.
“Do you really feel like this will help clear your name, Pru?” Mercy worried. “I don’t see what father’s business could possibly have had to do with Sutherland’s death.”
“Probably nothing,” Prudence agreed, carefully filing the papers away in a case. “But if I can provide my husband means with which to further his investigation into the illegal goods being smuggled into the city—to find the truth about father—I think it’ll go a long way to establish trust between us.”
Mercy sobered, a glimmer of doubt reaching through her eyes. “Pru…what if the truth is that our father is guilty? It would kill poor Mama. And…the rest of us would be ruined.”
Prudence had abandoned the briefcase to gather her sister close. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of that,” she soothed. “Our father is many things, but he is a principled, law-abiding man. I’m hoping the truth clears the Goode name. And, in the unlikely event my husband somehow uncovers his guilt…”
Mercy stepped away, smoothing her smart plaid frock and adjusting her hair. “Like Detective Inspector Aloysius Frost says in his fourth novel,The Cheapside Strangler, ‘When the guilty escape justice, it is denied the innocent, as well.’” She wistfully locked the briefcase and handed it to her. “No matter how this plays out, Felicity and I will survive it. I mean…what’s the worst that could happen? We’re denied a season and end up as spinsters?” She shrugged. “Considering what you and Honoria are up against…I can’t say either of us are aching to be wed.”
Pru could have cried, but instead she kissed Mercy on the cheek and rushed to Number Four Whitehall Place.
She navigated the chaos of the infamous Scotland Yard with her briefcase clutched in hand, asking solicitous clerks, and a few gruff policemen, how to find the Chief Inspector’s office.
Several minutes and four stories later, she stood in the hall adjacent him, admiring her husband at work.
Prudence felt rather like an explorer on a safari, watching a magnificent beast in his native habitat.
Unlike the holding cells and general rank pandemonium of the first and second floors—or the secrets in the basement, one of which she had recently been—men of all sorts and sizes crammed around desks here on the fourth. They filled the room with the bustle of the more intricate and intellectual side of crime enforcement.
Men with important titles retained the line of offices along the wall, and Morley’s was the grandest.
He propped the door open to accommodate the tide of active lawmen marching about like worker ants. At the moment, he scanned documents of two uniformed officers standing at attention as if in front of a brigadier general. Oddly enough, he appeared more comfortable and casual than she’d ever seen him. His shirt brilliant white, and cravat tight as ever, but he’d shucked his jacket as a concession to comfort in the crowded and close air of the top floor.
Absorbed as he was, he didn’t seem to notice the distress of the officers when he reached for his pen, crossed something out, and corrected it in the margin. The younger one, a brawny but baby-faced chap, blinked several times as if he might dissolve into tears as his comrade’s shoulders slumped.
Prudence sympathized.
Another man in a somber suit and expensive hat barged into his office and Morley held up a finger, silencing him immediately without looking up.
Upon finishing, he signed the paperwork at the bottom and handed it back to the officers. “This was excellent. You’re both to be commended.”
The exaltation of the men brought a pleased smile to her lips as she took a moment to enjoy a triumph some might call trivial but was one she would give a limb for.
The approval of her husband.
Retrieving the papers, the officers nearly skipped out of his office and bowled her over as they turned the corner.
“Begging your pardon,” the young one breathed, unable to contain his brilliant smile.
She nodded and pardoned him, genuinely happy for the lad as he marched away.
Her husband now conversed more discreetly with the new man who, she assumed, was a detective inspector as he wore no uniform.
She took the rare opportunity to study him in a candid moment.
Chief Inspector Sir Carlton Morley. This man was as different from the Knight of Shadows as chalk from cheese. He would never deign to rendezvous with a woman in a garden beneath the early summer night sky. Not this exemplar with a tidy desk, an army of officers, and sober, restrained manners. He was more machine than man. A cog that couldn’t stop spinning lest the entire apparatus break down.
How strange that this was her spouse. This leader of men. This workhorse with a tireless back and fiendish reserves of strength and endurance.
Except. Did no one else note the grooves deepening in branches from his eyes, or the brackets of strain about his mouth? How could they not realize how isolated he was? How exhausted?
If he directed the force by day, and was a force unto himself at night… when did he rest? He’d no hobbies to speak of. He expressed no desires nor particular joys. She’d found nothing in their house to suggest any to her. No periodicals about riding or hounds. No cigars or much alcohol to speak of. Not even sporting outfits or antique weaponry.
