The Custom House Murders (Captain Lacey Mysteries #15) - Ashley Gardner Page 0,64

reasoning that Pomeroy likely had already spoken to Laybourne and Mr. Kingston, discovering that they were elsewhere when Warrilow died. Probably with witnesses, like the maid who’d tasted the tonic. Eden had no alibi, and therefore, Pomeroy had started the hue and cry after him.

“Thank you, Harry.” I fished in my pocket for a coin. “For your trouble.” I laid a shilling in his outstretched and very dirty hand.

“Thank you, sir.” Harry doffed his cap and bowed to me as though I were an aristocrat. Drizzle glistened in his hair.

“You go on practicing,” Brewster told him. “And you’ll be up to scratch in no time. The trick is, ye pick an opponent what is equal to ye. Too tough, and they’ll hurt ye. Too easy, and it’s not much of a victory.”

“Right you are, sir.” Harry happily returned to punching at the air.

Mrs. Beadle opened the door for us. “You ought not to have given him so much, Captain,” she said reprovingly.

“Nonsense,” I said. “He’s been very helpful. He told us a man called Kingston came about. Did you see him?”

“I did not. I was busy in the kitchen at the time. It’s part of Harry’s job to open the door to visitors when I’m elsewhere. Any rate, he didn’t stay, did he? Mr. Warrilow didn’t much want to see anyone.”

But he’d seen someone after ten that night. Had dressed himself, admitted them, and been killed for his trouble.

I thanked Mrs. Beadle, and Brewster and I departed.

MY NEXT DESTINATION was the Custom House.

Brewster halted in dismay. “You have an uncanny knack for going exactly where it is most dangerous. Mr. Creasey dragged you off to his lair yesterday when you went to the Custom House.”

“This time, I will have you at my side. I want to alert Mr. Seabrook that a potential smuggler of guns is living near where Warrilow did, and possibly killed him—or at least arranged for him to be killed. Laudanum and illness provide a good smokescreen.”

“Send Mr. Pomeroy to tell him. We’re too near Creasey’s even now for my comfort.”

“We will have a hackney stand by so we may flee as soon as I am finished speaking to Seabrook. Who knows? I might not even be able to see him. I am certain he is a busy man.”

So speaking, I turned my steps back toward Cable Street, which would, if the map I’d consulted this morning was correct, take me more or less around the Tower and south again to the Custom House.

When we reached the Mint, Brewster signaled for a hackney. He was tired of walking in the rain, he said, plus he didn’t want me nabbed by Mr. Creasey.

I’d been flagging and pretending not to be, so I let him help me into the coach with feigned reluctance. I admitted to myself that riding was preferable to tramping in the rain, but I so feared becoming what Laybourne had called me, a cripple, that I pushed myself to keep to my feet as much as possible.

The coach wound through a warren of streets north of the Tower and then back toward the Thames. This was a very old part of London, with such quaint street names as Seething Lane, Crutched Friars, and Pudding Lane, where London’s Great Fire had begun, destroying much of the area around us. The streets were so built up now with houses and businesses, a hundred and so years later, that I would be hard-pressed to tell what had gone.

When we reached Lower Thames Street and I stepped down, Brewster had a word with the hackney driver, promising I’d pay him a generous tip if he’d wait.

“I’ll have nothing left if I go on like this,” I grumbled. I did so lightly, however. The allowance that Donata’s man of business had insisted on made me a damn sight richer than I had been of old. Accepting the allowance had embarrassed me a bit but had assured Donata’s solicitors that I’d have no need to rob Peter of his inheritance.

Brewster was in no mood for my humor. “You’ll weather it.”

He followed me into the Custom House, which was as teeming as ever. The din was deafening. I pushed my way through the long room toward the large clock, trying and failing to catch any clerk’s attention.

“’Ere, you.” Brewster simply seized a hurrying man with papers under his arm by the coat tails. “We want Mr. Seabrook.”

The man glared at us, half-amazed, half-furious. “Make an appointment,” he snarled. He yanked himself away