Page 32 of Taken to the Grave
Norris came around the corner and pulled alongside the curb. Sir opened the door.
“One more thing, Sir,” Hugh said as Thornton climbed in. The boy paused on the step up. “In Vance’s office, I heard you say you didn’t know anything. What had he asked you?”
“Oh, that. He wanted to know who my father was spying on. Can you imagine? Him, a spy?” He snorted in disbelief.
However, the two men from Audrey’s vision had accused Givens of speaking out of turn.
“Did Vance say anything more about it?”
Sir shrugged. “No. But he didn’t like when I called him dicked in the nob for believing my father was an informant.” He touched his split lip tenderly then hopped up into the carriage.
Harlan Givens, a spy? Or at least believed to be one. It did seem highly unlikely. He’d been the furthest thing from discreet.
And that could have been why he ended up dead.
Chapter
Ten
Audrey slept unexpectedly well after returning to Violet House from Grosvenor Square. Her spinning mind should have kept her awake all night, but it seemed nothing could compete with exhaustion, not even the realization that a member of the Sanctuary had been eyeing her with blatant menace all throughout the dinner party. The moment she’d lain down in bed, she’d been asleep. She couldn’t even remember Greer taking her leave for the night.
Now, however, she sat on the sofa in her study at the back of the house, in her morning gown and robe, combing over the previous evening as she sipped her tea. After she’d first noticed Sir Oliver Pendleton glaring at her, she’d been met with several more of his hostile looks: across the drawing room, down the long dining room table, and just before he’d taken his leave, which had been much earlier than other guests. He’d been in a rush to depart.
Genie had only been able to tell her that Sir Oliver was a knight, had been granted the title for his service in the Napoleonic Wars, was a partial owner of a few London newspapers, and that he sat in the House of Commons. Audrey hadn’t drawn Genie’s attention to the cufflinks Sir Oliver wore;she hadn’t wanted to explain her interest in the inverted white cross emblem. However, on the way back to Curzon Street, she’d had no choice but to explain her interest in Lord Stromburg. Michael had, quite valiantly, resisted the urge to corner her before or after dinner and ask her what that nonsense with Prince Paul had been about.
“I will only tell you if you swear to secrecy,” she’d replied in the carriage, earning an exasperated sigh from him. He’d leaned back his head and closed his eyes.
“What have you gotten yourself into now?”
Audrey told them a variation of the truth, stepping carefully around anything that had to do with her vision while holding Harlan Givens’s flask. She’d explained that Mr. Givens wasn’t the only body to have been found at Vauxhall.
“It appears Lord Stromburg was also found there,” she said, then perhaps unnecessarily adding, “Deceased.”
Michael’s exasperation with her had severed. “I’ve heard nothing of this. It hasn’t been reported.”
“That is because Bow Street is handling the investigation quietly to avoid a public panic,” she replied. “Mr. Givens, Lord Stromburg, and a third victim, a…brothel madame, were all found at the pleasure gardens, and all had their left ears removed.”
Genie’s loud gasp of horror rivaled Michael’s exclamation of an obscenity.
“How are you involved in any of this?” Michael asked, but then shook his head and answered his own question. “Neatham.”
He said the name as if it abraded his throat. While the two men were civil toward one another, they were not exactly friends.
“He’s investigating another matter, a disappearance, and it’s beginning to look as if it could correlate to these killings.”
Mr. Comstock’s connection to the Seven Sins, and possibly Harlan Givens, was too loose for Audrey to be sure, but her mind kept coming back to it and sticking.
“I take it Sir Gabriel has asked Neatham to investigate,” Michael said.
“Discreetly,” Audrey replied.
“The man should know better than to involve a peer.”
“Hugh wants to help,” she argued. Her brother-in-law held rigid views on what peers should and should not do, and involving themselves in murder investigations was decidedly off limits.
“It doesn’t matter what he wants. What matters is his duty. He should leave the investigating to the officers at Bow Street. He is no longer a part of that world.”
Genie touched her husband’s arm. “It can’t be easy for him.”
