same wavelength. “Eudora mentioned it at the talk, the one at The Langham.”
Humphrey laughed, a little joylessly. “No. Because I’ve known him longer than anyone, I can tell you the man’s a god-awful sore loser and a cheat at that. I had to take him here every night for a week and ply him with fine liquor to get him to smile again.”
“That was very nice of you to do,” Sloane said, laying her hand on his arm. Humphrey touched it, held it, stared at us with real vulnerability.
“Thank you,” he said. “Current members of my marriage disagree.”
I snorted, nodded at Reggie. “What’s the disagreement here? Unless there are other members in this sacred union I’m unaware of?”
“Just one,” Reggie said dryly. “I adore Bernard. We all do. But I tell Humphrey all the time that the man uses him.”
Humphrey’s pale face blushed—he seemed as innocent as a schoolboy. I couldn’t, for the life of me, parse Humphrey’s moral code. Good or evil? Thief or innocent?
“Some people in this world are more difficult to love than others,” he said. “Do they not still deserve to be loved?”
Sloane let go of Humphrey’s hand, sat back. Slid her hands down her thighs, but not before I caught her fingers trembling.
“Tell me how you met,” I said. “Knowing him for sixty years is an incredibly long time.”
He brightened. “Bernie and I grew up in Canterbury and went to school together there. My grandparents raised me, and I was a wily and rambunctious thing, always prowling the streets looking for trouble. Bernie was the same, although we often got into less trouble once we had each other.”
“Is Humphrey still rambunctious?” Sloane asked Reggie.
“Only where it counts, love,” Reggie said. Her laughter rang out like a bell, and I was completely enchanted by it. Did everything she do have a kind of magical spell attached to it?
Humphrey leaned in close. “Bernard once orchestrated a street-wide game of hide and seek. All the kids he could wrangle, sent us off running into the woods and behind cars and every nook and cranny we could imagine. A large field ran the length of our street, and we couldn’t help but head there as Bernie yelled out the numbers. He gave us a full minute, which set us off laughing. And then the lad couldn’t even find us.”
My eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
He paused, preparing to deliver a punchline. “The bastard slipped into every single one of our houses and stole our toys.”
Sloane laughed—this time, it sounded forced. “How very devious for a child.” I could feel her body’s reaction next to mine; that blood-in-the-water response so closely mirrored my own.
“How did you find out?” I asked, feigning lightness.
“Well, he did a crap job of hiding them.” Humphrey chuckled. “And after about twenty minutes, we went lurking back across the field in search of him, unsure of what had happened. When we found him in his room, he was surrounded by toys like a little king.”
This boyhood image didn’t resonate with youthful innocence for me. It resonated with the sense of ownership that Bernard Allerton must have been born with.
“Were you angry?” Sloane asked.
“Of course. Although also we were damn well impressed. He did give them back to us, although I always told him it made him a right bastard from such a young age.”
I raised a brow his way—he anticipated my next question. “He was eleven.”
“You don’t say,” I muttered.
Humphrey sighed, clinking his glass against mine and Sloane’s. “Here’s to Bernard. He does always get what he wants.”
17
Sloane
An hour later, Abe and I had to place Humphrey and Reggie in a cab. Together, they were adorably drunk. As the cab had prepared to drive off, Humphrey had called back, “Thank you for a magical evening, enchantress. Have fun bewitching Mr. Fitzpatrick. Remember, valiant!”
Abe and I waved them off—looking, I was sure of it, like a couple. The more drinks they enjoyed, the sloppier their stories became. And while Bernard was in quite a few of them, no other relevant information was revealed, other than the confirmed fact that the man was a self-centered asshole.
The Kensley auction in four days had become my primary investigative focus, given what Humphrey had revealed in there. If Bernard was going to make any moves while in hiding, it would be to steal those private papers for himself. I just needed to figure out how I was going to handle a giant auction with tons of guests and multiple exits and entrances.