The Custom House Murders (Captain Lacey Mysteries #15) - Ashley Gardner Page 0,67
men hulked behind him, no trust in their eyes. “If he says he will not speak to you, you must depart. You no longer work for him, Mr. Brewster.”
“Mayhap, but he’ll not thank you if he finds out what we have to tell him some other way. So go on up, and be quick about it.”
Gibbons had no fear in him. He gave Brewster a scornful stare and ascended the stairs, taking his time. He’d not ushered us into the reception room which left us waiting in the austere downstairs hall.
“Lewis,” Brewster greeted another of Denis’s men as he joined the first guards. “How goes the battle?”
Lewis, a smaller man than most Denis employed, shook his head. “He can’t step out the door. We run off assassins every day. We’ve caught one or two.” He closed his mouth and glanced at me as though not wanting to confess what they’d done to those they’d caught.
“He ought to go straight to Creasey and pull off his head,” Brewster declared. “Enough of this.”
“Creasey’s well-guarded,” Lewis said. “And he has magistrates and Runners in his pocket. Mr. Denis goes nigh him, he’ll be arrested.”
“Runners?” I asked. I thought of Timothy Spendlove, who’d do anything to get his hands on Denis. Would Spendlove partner with another known criminal to achieve his aims? I wasn’t certain. As much as I did not see eye-to-eye with Spendlove, I knew he despised men like Creasey.
Lewis nodded at me. “You’d be astonished, Captain, at the goings on in high places.”
I wasn’t as astonished as all that. I’d lived in London long enough to understand that corruption was rampant.
“He’ll see you.” Gibbons’s voice floated down from above. “For five minutes. Then you are to leave.”
“Five minutes should suffice.” I started up the stairs, my now-tired knee twinging. I reflected I might use up my entire five minutes climbing to Denis’s study.
Gibbons showed us, however, not to the study, but to another room in the back of the house. Denis’s bedchamber, I realized as we entered. A large bedstead with sumptuous velvet hangings stood between windows that overlooked the back garden—or would if the draperies weren’t firmly closed. Candlelight from a single candelabra on a writing table lit the room, while a small blaze in the paneled fireplace lent the only warmth.
“You ought to leave London,” I said to Denis as Gibbons shut the door and took up a place beside it. Another ruffian had been positioned near the windows. “It must be hell to live like this.”
Denis, who was seated at the writing table perusing a paper, did not glance up. “I see no reason I should flee. I will prevail sooner or later.”
“You are confident.”
Denis at last laid down the page and pinned me with eyes that had grown even icier in the last days. “Tell me, if someone threatened to turn you and your family out of your grand house on South Audley Street, would you go? Or if they were bent on chasing your father-in-law off his land, would you blame him for staying on?”
“Of course not.” Donata’s relations had once been keen on getting hold of her son’s estate, and I’d had them ejected. “Those are their homes.”
“And this is mine. It is not simply a house to me, but a symbol of all I have achieved. The boy who slept in a dung cart is not about to give up his soft bed now.”
“I do understand. But you can always return when it is over.”
Denis’s gaze held disdain. “You do not understand at all. If I flee London, it means I fear him, and then I am done for. Creasey is nothing to me. Will be nothing. I will win, Lacey, in the end.”
His assuredness was unnerving.
“Very well, I will cease arguing with you. I am here at Brewster’s insistence, though why he could not come to you with the information himself, I am not certain.”
“I am not certain that is praise,” I said. “However, it might be important.”
I told Denis of my visit to Fitzgerald, the optical illusion box, and Brewster’s certainty that it was an extremely valuable antique. I added Seabrook’s information of Fitzgerald’s receipt and what he’d paid for it.
Denis listened, Brewster and I remaining on our feet, as there was nowhere to sit. Denis frowned when I finished, the terrifying coldness in his eyes receding as interest replaced it.
“Mr. Brewster was quite correct. The boxes are rare and worth far