Bodice Ripper

The directions were good. It was a scant thirty minutes' walk, and the place was just where he'd said. Good lad.

When he arrived, James saw that it wasn't actually a single building at all, but rather a line of buildings, all in a row, and over one of the doors was written "Law Office." James's heart stopped when he looked at the door beneath.

Someone had kicked it in, hadn't even bothered to hide it. The frame was utterly destroyed. That the police hadn't arrived yet meant that either it was very recent, or that the police were very slow.

He stood outside the door and called in. He didn't receive an answer. Calling out again, he stepped inside. The front room was a wreck. Papers all across the floor, a table flipped. There was a hole in the wall that was sized for a large man's shoulder.

James frowned. This was all wrong. Pearl had been a secret. Nobody knew except him and Mary. Neither of them would have given it away, and even if they had, James wondered, who could have gotten here before him?

He took a deep breath and looked around the room. Two doors, plus the one he'd taken in. He tried the first and found it locked. The second was a water closet.

There was an office on the end of the row of buildings, and James went inside. A woman was there, reading a magazine, and she didn't look up when he came

in.

"Excuse me, is this the landlord's office, for this row of offices?"

She hummed in agreement that it was.

"May I speak to him?"

She set her magazine down unhappily and knocked on the door.

"Yeah?" A voice boomed from behind the door.

"Someone to see you, sir," the woman croaked out with a voice like a toad's.

A moment later, a portly red-faced man opened the door.

"I think there's been a robbery."

"What?" The man said it as if he needed James to repeat it, but he turned and grabbed a ring of keys from the wall and motioned for James to lead the way.

He stepped in cautiously, calling out for a third time, and for a third time there was no answer. The landlord, who James had learned was called Marley, had little patience for these sorts of antics.

"I'm worried there might have been some sort of struggle, the room's in a terrible state. There's a locked room in the back, and I thought perhaps someone might be hurt in there."

Marley gave him a sideways look. A look that asked how he knew this or why he cared. Then he shrugged and unlocked the door. The knob turned, but the door was stuck, as if something were propping it shut. James had to put his shoulder into it before it would move.

There had been something propped against the door. A man in his middle ages, who the landlord identified to police as Pearl Langdon, a lawyer of no particular renown. He'd been shot twice in the chest, and had apparently locked himself into the room.

James had been brought in. They'd thought his story seemed awfully strange, at first. He had to admit that it sounded odd to him, as well. The fact that he had to adjust the truth to keep Mary's name out of it made the story stranger.

In the end, though, he'd had no gun, and the body was still warm when they'd found it. It seemed he'd been shot some time that morning. When James offered that he had been speaking to a concierge forty minutes before he'd spoken to the landlord, and they went to the hotel to confirm, they let him go without much fuss.

James was glad they'd done it that way, because he had a train to catch back to Dover. He didn't know what Oliver Geis was involved in, and he didn't know how he'd found Pearl Langdon.

What James did know, and what sent a chill racing down his spine, was that he wasn't just throwing money or threats around any more. A forty three year old bachelor was lying on a slab somewhere in a morgue in Canterbury.

He was dead because he'd known a Baron named Thomas Geis, and it was possible that Lord Geis had told him some dangerous information.

And to James, the most important thing in the world was the safety of the baron's daughter.

21

Mary

The door closed behind James. He sounded angry, but to her extreme relief another moment later the doors opened, and back in walked her uncle's goons. She said a silent prayer, and started slowly toward her own bedroom. When she got there without anyone seeing her, she said another.