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“Why are you here tonight, Mr. Callister?” Gideon asked.

The older man pressed a hand to his forehead. “I felt responsible. Not that I am, but the boy is falling apart.” He gestured toward Pennington. “He confided to me what he’d done.”

“And you concealed it,” Gideon said.

“Yes,” he whispered. “I struggled with what I ought to do.”

Electra walked across the room and tugged the bell pull. Gideon nodded at her as if he understood her intention.

When Mr. Burton appeared in the doorway moments later. “You rang for me, Mr. Pennington.”

“Have someone fetch a constable and a police wagon,” Gideon told the butler.

“Promise me you will free Demeter,” Lance Pennington repeated.

“Once I have your signed confession, Mr. Pennington,” Gideon told him.

The tension in the man’s body seemed to ease at that.

Electra approached Miss Faraday. “Will you be all right?” she whispered to the girl, whose tears had dried but left her eyes red-rimmed.

“Yes,” she said softly. “I will marry and leave this house for good.”

Electra laid a hand on the girl’s arm.

It struck her that marriage seemed a secure future to her, whilst it had been one Demeter Devlin had taken extreme measures to avoid.

“And you,” Gideon said as he came to stand beside Electra. “Are you all right?”

“Of course. We have the truth now, don’t we?” Electra arched a brow, wondering if he would take umbrage with the we in her declaration.

Instead, he held her gaze and said, “Yes, we do.”

Epilogue

One week later

The Café Royal was finer than any place Gideon had ever dined in his life. The sort of establishment he could have never imagined stepping into, let alone one day escorting Electra to for a dinner to celebrate his birthday. Yet, he’d heard of the restaurant’s renown, and perhaps some part of him wished to impress her, to surprise her, despite how well they knew each other.

Every surface was gilded, and mirrors threw back glints of gold and movement from every angle while gaslight blazed from crystal fixtures overhead. The upscale supper room overwhelmed the senses, though not unpleasantly. Savory scents of French cuisine stoked his appetite—though, even here, his attention would not settle. Habit pulled his eye to the way one guest watched another a fraction too long.

Though now that they were seated across from each other, he gave Electra his singular attention. He couldn’t help but notice how the warm glow of the gaslights brightened her blue-green eyes.

She had that look tonight—impatient curiosity. He knew it well.

The Pennington case had kept him late at the station for days. And they had not had an opportunity to speak since the night Lance Pennington confessed. No deductive skill was necessary to hazard a guess she was curious about what had occurred since that night.

“The case is strong,” he told her. “Between Lance Pennington’s signed confession, Callister’s statement, and the depositions of other witnesses, the magistrate will commit the case for trial.”

The proceedings had taken place that afternoon, and the results would no doubt be in the evening papers. Reporters had already been intent on the scandal of the playwright who murdered his Queen’s Counsel barrister brother, and the member of Parliament who was tangled up in it all.

“Good.” Electra nodded.

None of that news could have come as a surprise. Still, it was a relief to Gideon. Though they’d both heard Lance Pennington’s confession, he would not be the first killer to retract an oral confession when faced with a pen and document attesting to what he’d done.

However, Pennington had held fast, still pronouncing his guilt, even after learning that Mrs. Devlin had been in no real danger of arrest.

“And Gordon Callister?” she asked.