Page 79 of A Murder at Kew Gardens

“I know who you are and who you work for. Where has he taken her?”

“No preliminaries, I see. Very well. Lady Rosalynd was taken out of Bond Street at about three.”

“I know that, damn your eyes. You have ten seconds to tell me where Harcourt has taken her.” I pointed my other revolver at him. It wasn’t loaded, but he didn’t know that.

“I will, but first listen to what I have to say. I have turned on him.” He said it as another man says the time. “Papers were delivered to Chief Inspector Graves at Scotland Yard at half past two, by hand, in a locked case. Every account. The payments to Marsh, and to Crane, and to the man who shot Crane. Names, dates, and the amounts against them. And all the other rotten business his hands were involved with—the drug trade, the house on the Thames, and more. Twenty years of it. I kept all the records because that’s what a sensible man does.”

I didn’t believe a word he was saying. “Why would you turn on him?”

“Because I am forty-six and I should like to see fifty.”

He wanted to live, and the only way he could make sure of that was to have Harcourt put away permanently. “You want Harcourt dead.”

“I do.”

“Why now?”

Something came into his face then. It was not shame, but the contempt of a tradesman for spoiled work. “Twenty years I kept his hands clean. There has not been a thing done in that time that could be laid at him—not a payment, not a body, not a signature. And this afternoon he walked into a shop in Bond Street with his face uncovered and took a woman in daylight, before witnesses, in Mayfair.” He let out a breath. “There is nothing to be saved after that. So I did not save it. I banked it.”

“The money?”

“All of it. It left England before the shooting started. For America. He thinks it’s gone to France.” He said it without any pleasure at all.

“You stole from him.”

“I did not steal. I earned that money. It wasn’t his. It was mine.” He pounded his chest. “And he went and tossed it all away. For a woman.”

“You wanted her dead as well,” I said.

He met my eyes then for the first time. “I offered that twice. After Trinity Lane, and then after the river. I offered, but I was refused. He told me I mistook thoroughness for feeling.” A pause. “I did not mistake anything. He has spent an entire enterprise on a woman who wants nothing to do with him, and today he spent the last of it. If he had let me see to her three months ago, there would be no cell in Holloway with an earl in it, and no papers in Graves’s hands. And I would be a rich man in a country of my choosing instead of standing in your study wondering if you will end my life.”

“I will if you don’t tell me right now where he has taken her. I will not ask again.”

“Wapping. A bonded warehouse off the High Street with a private stair to the water. It is in no register you have looked at, because it stands in a name I never signed.” He said it flatly. “You have had men on the Hammersmith ground for several days. You are not going to find her there. That is where the trade is. This is where he goes.”

Finch's best men had spent days in a hedge on the Middlesex shore, watching a wall where the man we sought would never be found.

“And?”

“And there is a steam launch at the stair with her fires banked since noon. He ordered it at eleven o’clock this morning, before the Bond Street business, which should tell you what he meant to do all along.” He paused. “Once your woman is on the tideway you will not get her back. Not this month, not this year, not ever.”

“Take me there. To Wapping.”

Boots in the hall then, heavy and uneven.

Finch came into my study holding his left arm across his body. The sleeve was gone from elbow to cuff and what remained of it was black-red. Somebody had tied a neckcloth above the wound and knotted it hard.

“You’ve been shot.”

"Nothing like stating the obvious, Your Grace." His mouth twitched. "A mere scratch. Only a through-and-through, above the elbow. Missed the bone." He opened and closed his fingers to prove it and went white doing it. Then he saw who was standing at my window, and everything in his face changed at once. “Who is this?”

“Mercer, Mr. Finch. You have been looking for me.”

“The gentleman who dined with Marsh at the Argosy. Five dinners in a private room and never a face to hang on you.” Finch’s voice was pleasant, which in Finch was not a good sign.

“Enough of this,” I said. “Harcourt has taken Rosalynd to Wapping. Mercer will take me there. You are staying here.”

“The hell I am. I’m coming with you. You need me.” He shifted his arm and set his jaw against the pain. “You are going to the Wapping shore in the last two hours of the tide, and you don’t know a stair from a set of dock steps. You can’t ask a boatman for a thing without knowing what to call it. I, on the other hand, have thirty years of that river.” He looked at me steadily. “I was on that pavement on Bond Street, Your Grace. Someone owes me and I mean to have that debt paid.”