Page 104 of The Duke and Lady Scandal
“Wait,” she said, sliding her hands down his arms.
When he winced, she pulled back, and her eyes shot wide when she spotted the blood.
“It’s nothing,” he told her. “A scratch.”
“Did he shoot you?”
When she started to turn back to the room, Ben wrapped a hand around her wrist to stop her.
“No,” she whispered. “Look.” She pointed high on the far wall, but he saw nothing.
“Tip your head. You’ll see a painted grate.” She turned back to face him. “He spoke to me through it,” she whispered. “He’s back there, beyond that wall.”
Ben led her out and slid the door almost shut behind him.
He gestured to one of his men guarding the three they’d shackled.
“Come with me out back and you’ll take position behind the house to the right of this one. Send Wainwright and anyone he wants to takepost out front,” he told his man quietly. “He’s in that house, and I’m going to flush him out.”
Alexandra moved past Ben.
“Where are you going?”
“He will have heard all of this,” she shout-whispered. “He’ll already have fled.”
“No carriage will have left this square, nor the mews behind, without us hearing,” Constable Eddings told her.
“Then he’s on foot.” She pulled away from him, lifted her skirt, and broke into a run toward the front door.
“There,” she shouted, pointing to a tall man in a long dark coat with a black beard and dark glasses.
Ben lifted his revolver from his pocket and approached the man, who was walking as if he was on an afternoon stroll. “Stop. Police.”
The man jerked to a stop and whirled toward him with a smile. “Good afternoon, Inspector.”
Allie placed a hand on his uninjured arm and whispered, “I don’t think it’s M. It’s not the one who got me into the house.”
“How do you know?” Ben asked her, never taking his eyes from the man.
“Because this is the man I overheard at Hawlston’s and saw in the alley.”
The tall man nodded at her, as if acknowledging her claim, but said nothing.
“I’m still taking him in.” Ben lifted a pair of shackles from his other pocket.
Allie took them and attached them to the man’s outstretched wrists.
M’s confederate was being far too bloody accommodating.
Soon, Ben saw why. A man emerged from one of the other M properties wearing the same disguise. Then another in the same disguise, though far shorter, strode out of a house he didn’t know had any connection to M at all.
Collier, who had apparently made his way to Bedford Square after all, approached one of the men. That one wasn’t nearly as accommodating and put up a boisterous resistance to Collier’s questioning. Another constable apprehended one of M’s other disguised men.
“Always a bloody game.”
“I’ll speak to them all.” Alexandra seemed shockingly unfazed by the madness. “I’ll know his voice.”
“Collect all three of them,” Ben shouted, his voice echoing off the buildings in the squares. “I still need to search that house,” he told her. “Stay with Collier or one of the other men. Never go off alone.”
