limb until he feared it would no longer hold his weight, and vaulted over the gate, expertly avoiding impalement on the iron spikes.
Morley landed in silence among the shadows and kept to them as he stalked along the circumference of the property. He waited and watched, his entire body attuned to danger, to a possible threat. A villain or a murderer.
A couple strode nearby, and he melded with the dark as a tall and elegantly handsome man bent to whisper something scandalous into the ear of a woman ten years his senior and two stone his heft.
She tutted, flirted, and then her companion swept her into his embrace, pressing her against the column of a gazebo. He kissed her passionately before he grappled with the latch of a small outbuilding and shoved her inside.
What the devil?
A tree branch snapped around the corner of a hedge. Morley drew his knife, took two readying breaths, and burst from around the corner, dropping into a fighting stance.
Only from this angle could he have seen the gagged and blindfolded woman beneath the tree, holding its lower branches for purchase as a man brutally thrust into her from behind.
Something in the muffled sounds she made froze him in place. They were yips and mewls of encouragement. Unmistakable in their ardor.
Bemused, Morley sheathed his knife and blinked rather doggedly at the fornicating couple until the man noticed him and made an impatient gesture for him to go.
His hips never lost their rhythm.
The woman was enjoying herself, but the gentleman checked his watch as though… he kept track of the time?
Morley backed away, turning to the garden and seeing it for what it truly was.
If someone had told him he’d already died and gone to Elysium, he might have believed them. For this resembled something of a pagan paradise. Friction and fornication hinted at everywhere, if not flagrantly happening.
No one exactly fucked in the open, but neither was a gazebo, a sheer tent, a hedge maze or a copse of carefully placed trees considered a proper place for a romp.
Even the air was sweeter here, whispering of lilacs and gardenias rather than the singular smells of the city. The garden sparkled like the very stars might visit to watch the debauchery. It was a dream crafted by honey-hued lighting and fluttering fabrics.
Of all the bastardly bacchanalian bullshit.
Morley retreated to a borderline pornographic fountain and crouched behind a hedgerow, grateful that the sound of the water covered the thinly veiled noises of carnal revelry.
A small mercy that, because his body was beginning to forget how exhausted he was and respond to the wickedness of the atmosphere.
It was how they got you, these places. Inundated one with sex and fantasy until instinct took over and a man forgot who he was. Became a needful, terrible creature, one led around by his cock rather than his reason, until he found his pocketbook emptied by his own weaknesses.
A brothel. He grimaced. He’d broken into a brothel of all places whilst searching for a killer. He must have taken a very wrong direction, or he’d stumbled upon another humungous clue.
Either way, he couldn’t exactly begin an interrogation at—he looked at his watch—half one in the morning. Tucking the watch away, he scrubbed at his face with both hands before adjusting the mask over his eyes.
God’s blood but he was tired.
He’d been waylaid on his way here by a contingent of the High Street Gang, who’d taken one look at his darkly elegant attire and decided he was an easy mark.
He’d kicked nine shades of shit out of four men and had left them tied to the corner for the next copper on his beat to find.
With a note, of course, as was courteous.
He’d broken up a domestic brawl that’d spilled out onto the streets, and gave a boy on the cusp of manhood a pence to sleep beneath a different roof than his ham-fisted father.
A man on Wapping High Street had mistaken a charwoman for a nightwalker and had been about to force his attentions upon her when Morley had picked up a palm-sized stone, and made a spinning slingshot of his cravat. The rock to the temple had felled the attacker, and Morley didn’t stay to check if he was even alive. He’d shrugged off the woman’s cries of gratitude and had been on his way.
He was no hero. These were just things he did, sweeping up small crimes while he chased nightmares through the night.