“I have no need of anything, but thank you for the good intentions. Miss Hepplewhite suggested something to me. I thought I would talk about it with you, since you may not think it as good an idea as she did.”
“Could be, although she usually has good ideas.”
“She said that there are times when she does not have much use of your services, and that if I do have need of such services then, perhaps you would like to make yourself available to my inquiries.”
Jeremy absorbed that. He frowned vaguely while he thought. “There’d be wages for this?”
“I will match whatever she pays you.”
Jeremy smiled at the floor and scratched his head. “I’ll be wanting a bit more than that, because she doesn’t pay me anything. Not yet. She feeds me and I live here, and she is like my family.”
“Then let us settle on wages that are suitable, since I am not like family.”
It did not take long to do so. Jeremy seemed pleased. “It could be complicated, what with you sending for me and I’m maybe not even here to know it because I’m somewhere for her.”
“We will see if we can keep it from being too complicated.”
Jeremy just looked at him with a half smile on his face. Something amused him, and Chase suspected it was he himself. “What?” he asked, when that gaze continued.
“I’m just thinking how Minerva is the smartest person I know, and you seem to have your wits about you too, but neither of you can see it.”
“See what?”
“Hell, if you are going to share workers and you are going to share a bed, why don’t you just share a business?”
The notion had never entered his mind. Yet it made some sense, especially because their methods complemented each other.
Ridiculous, of course. He could name five reasons why it would never work, and might well ruin too much. Still, he had to give Jeremy some credit for his own wits.
“I will go now. Oh, I had a question on another matter. When you would visit London with the Finleys, where was the house they let?”
“Old Quebec Street. Up a ways off Oxford. It is near Portman Square.”
Chase left Jeremy to go get his breakfast, and let himself out the side portal. The image he had seen when entering the bedchamber held steady in his memory while he mounted his horse. Before Jeremy had pulled on the shirt, while he bent to the basin, marks had been visible as raised lines on his shoulders. He had been beaten at some point. Chase had seen marks like that often enough in the army, only deeper and wider, on men who had been whipped.
These scars had healed better than most. Time had gone far to fade them. That meant they were quite old, and the back on which they were laid had been young. The mere act of growing up had changed them.
Finley had been a brute with more people than his wife, it seemed.
* * *
The caller came two afternoons later. Chase was not expecting anyone, least of all this man.
Mr. Martin Monroe, the card said. Private Inquiries.
Monroe entered the sitting room and looked around, as if taking its measure and assessing its worth. Chase waited for him to do the same thing with the apartment’s owner.
A big smile beamed on Monroe’s florid face. In his early middle years, he had thickened around the middle and a few gray hairs salted his dark hair. The smile made balls form on his cheeks. The blue eyes, however, showed more shrewdness than his bonhomie manner suggested.
“I’ve come on a professional matter,” he said once they had greeted each other and he had sat. “Professional courtesy, actually. I’m told you and I share a calling.”
“You have been conducting inquiries into me, I see.”
“Well, I saw you at the concert and asked my friend who was that there and he told me. He’s not a friend of yours, but he knows that box and the family that uses it.”
It all sounded innocent, but Chase heard the architecture behind the façade. “Why did you ask about me?”
“Ah, that is the whole of it, isn’t it? I’ve some information that may be of use to the man in that box and needed to know his name. Imagine my surprise to learn it was a duke’s relative, and one whose days are spent much like mine.”
“Of course if what you know is of some use, I will be grateful to hear it. Perhaps you should inform me of your fees before you share the information itself.”
Monroe was not insulted. He was in the business of information, after all. Still, his smile demurred before his words did. “No fees as such. My thinking is that if I do you a good turn, professionally speaking, that someday you will return the favor. Our sort needs to stick together, right?”
Apparently, Mr. Monroe had sought him out with the best of intentions. “I have been remiss as a host. Let us share some brandy while you visit.” Chase went to the decanter, poured two glasses, and brought them back.
Monroe sipped his, expressed delight, then set it down. “So, here it is. That woman you were with at the concert. I know her. And, to be honest, I’m wondering if you really do.”
“I think so.”
“She uses the name Hepplewhite now. But she was not six years ago Margaret Finley. That’s her real name. Married she was, to one Algernon Finley.”
“I am aware of that.”
“Are you now? Do you also know she killed the man? Came within an inch of hanging for it.”
Chase kept his reaction in check, but astonishment slowed time for a solid ten count.
Monroe saw his surprise despite his efforts to hide it. “I know of what I speak. This is not idle gossip.”
“How do you know?”
“I was in Dorset on another matter. When it finished, I stayed on a spell and did a spot of work for her husband. An inquiry. Into her.”
“Algernon Finley wanted your services regarding his wife?”
“He did indeed. She’d left him, and he was sure there was a lover behind it all. Had me looking into that. Not the sort of work I much care for, but there I was and I thought it would be an easy assignment. I was wrong. The woman was sly. She guessed I was watching and that lover never came to her house. Sometimes she would get out somehow without my seeing, and she probably met him then. I was working my way into a friendship with a neighbor who might know something, when Finley turns up dead. He went riding in nearby hunting lands on occasion, and one day he got shot there.”
Hell. Finley had not merely died. He’d been shot.
“A hunting accident, most likely.”
“So the coroner eventually said, but no man who dies by an accident ends up with a lead ball directly to the heart, does he?”
Hell. “Pistol ball, mind you. Not a musket. Who hunts with a pistol?”
Almost no one.
“She carried one, tucked into this shawl she wrapped around herself back then. I saw it once. She said she was in the market at the time it happened, but the market people didn’t know just when she was there seeing as how it was so busy. Could have been then, or earlier. I had learned about how she left, and knew her husband assumed the only way she got the money to live was from another man. I saw how that lover could have helped her or done it for her. I swore down that information.”
Minerva had told him most of this. Not about the pistol wound to the heart. Not about Monroe looking for a lover. She had to know she was being watched by Monroe, though. She was too good at inquiries to miss when one had her as the object.