Page 63 of Cruel Shame

He chuckled. “The governors were delighted, but His Grace baulked at my legal team getting to the truth.”

My brows furrowed. “Shouldn’t the police have seized that information for their inquiries?”

Mr. Burgh pulled back his lips in a grimace. “When I reported Elizabeth on Saturday morning, they said they would bring an officer round to take a statement. Everything got shoved to the side with the shooting.”

I clapped a hand to my forehead. “That scheming old cow.”

He snorted. “Lady Liddell was too busy causing chaos to protect Elizabeth, that she hadn’t thought to order a wipe of all footage from around the academy. The legal team are sorting through hours of activity that will prove that nothing untoward happened between Miss Liddell and me. It will also prove her involvement in the cocaine dealing and corroborate the statements of Miss Highmore and the two scholarship students who sold her curry.”

I whistled through my teeth. “What will happen to them?”

“They’re still her accomplices, but some of the punishment and blame may fall to where it belongs.”

I placed a hand on his forearm. “Why do you look so miserable?”

“It’s never easy to realize someone I considered a friend and mentor could sit back and allow his family to pick my family and me apart like vultures.”

I leaned against Mr. Burgh’s side and wrapped an arm around his middle. “Sorry you had to go through so much betrayal.”

“That’s not the end of it.”

I drew back and stared into his profile. “What else happened?”

“The archbishop and the governors reinstated me at the academy, and ordered Lady Liddell and Elizabeth to retract their statements.”

“Would that get you out of trouble?”

“The police never pressed charges,” he muttered. “After everything they’ve put us through, we’re back how we started.”

“But you’re now out of pocket and Elizabeth’s bullshit will hang over you like a stink.”

“Crude but accurate,” he muttered.

A silence stretched between us, filled by the crack and pop of the fire. What was the bloody point of putting an old man through all this anguish, only to backtrack the moment he tried to fight back?

Mr. Burgh took a long sip of his drink. “There was one condition.”

“What was that?” I whispered.

“I must call off the lawyers and drop all charges of libel against the Liddells.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

I scowled into the flames and clenched my teeth. Angry, prickly heat flared across my cheeks, and my blood screamed for vengeance. Even when the archbishop seemed the most reasonable of his wretched family, he offered back everything they took from Mr. Burgh in exchange for a coverup?

Every fiber of my being thrummed with the desire to tell Mr. Burgh to reject the archbishop’s offer and crush the Liddells instead, but lawyers were expensive. Some of them could cost over a thousand pounds per hour. Billy Hancock always griped that they were bigger thieves than bank robbers, who at least targeted institutions with insurance.

One time after winning a case, the senior partner of his firm took Billy out for a champagne dinner up in the west end of London, complete with an evening in an exclusive gentlemen’s club, where a bunch of them smoked fat cigars and drank vintage brandy. In the following month’s invoice, everything the lawyer spent that evening was not only itemized with his and his colleagues’ hourly rate but inflated with twenty percent value-added tax.

I turned to Mr. Burgh and sighed. Teachers didn’t spew cash like cocaine barons. Not even headmasters at private boarding schools who got to save their money from the free food and accommodation. No wonder he was staring at the flames, looking like he was about to jump off the high tower of bankruptcy. The Liddells could fight his lawyers, sending them around in circles, until Mr. Burgh lost his last penny on legal fees.

Before I could ask what he would do next, the phone rang.

With a sigh, Mr. Burgh rose from the sofa and shifted to the armchair closest to the landline. “Yes?”

A deep, loud voice spoke back, but I couldn’t make out the words. Mr. Burgh frowned. “Yes, it is.”

For the next few minutes, whoever was at the other end of the line laughed and bellowed down the phone. Mr. Burgh’s mouth hung open, and he stared at me as though I was an apparition of granddaughters past. I clasped my hands and sat straighter in my seat. The caller couldn’t be talking about me.