Page 39 of The Spy Who Loved Her
Because she’d had a damned fool for a husband, a man who had not appreciated her.
Her breaths were slowing, evening in the cadence of approaching sleep. “Dannyboy came for breakfast again,” she said.
“Did he?” Rafe asked. “I didn’t send him.” Perhaps the boy had misunderstood what he had meant when he’d told him to get it.
“He likes bacon and eggs,” she said. “But I think—I think he likes the company more. I’m of the impression that he isn’t much in the company of other children.” A brief hesitation. “Perhaps you could convince him that he would benefit from a proper education,” she suggested. “Say a few hours each week?”
Probably, he thought, she had begun to think of the boy as one of her own. “He’ll balk,” he warned her. “I’ll send him, but you may find he causes chaos for you.”
“All children cause chaos in their own way,” she said wearily. “I’m accustomed to it.” Another yawn, and he felt her lashes flutter against his arm. “Thank you,” she whispered. “For coming.”
“I’m sorry I was so late,” he said. But he doubted she had heard—she had already fallen asleep.
∞∞∞
Sometime in the night, Rafe woke to the sound of a soft scratch upon the door. The sort of noise intended only for him, he thought—it hadn’t disturbed Emma, who slept soundly still, her cheek pillowed in the cup of her hand.
The fire had long since withered to ash, and in the clinging darkness Rafe slid out of bed and pulled on his trousers, carefully creeping toward where he knew the door to be. His fingertips grazed the cool bronze of the handle, and he easedthe door open.
Only faint drifts of moonlight pierced the hallway from the window at the end of the hall, but it was still enough to reveal Chris standing there, his hands tucked into his pockets as he waited in silence. Probably he’d picked a lock to get inside.
There was only one reason he could think of which would have brought Chris here at this time of night. “They’ve caught someone, your men,” Rafe said, his voice pitched low.
Chris gave a short, sharp nod, and pitched his voice low, even and precisely enunciated. “An hour ago. Just outside, upon the terrace. Did Em hear it?”
The man hadn’t successfully breached the house, then. Good. “No,” he said. And he’d heard nothing either, so the scuffle—if there had been one—had been quick and quiet. “They brought him to you?”
“At once. Got him tied and locked up tight. Came to tell you as soon as they brought him to me.” Chris lifted one hand to scratch at the back of his neck. “It was Jenkins,” he said quietly.
Rafe felt his jaw go slack, a queer dizziness floating through his head, threatening to pitch him off balance. “Jenkins,” he said, and felt his stomach sink with a kind of leaden resignation. “That means—”
Another nod, tighter. Jenkins was a Home Office asset—of a sort. Not practiced enough, nor genial enough, nor even subtle enough to have much value as a spy. But another blunt instrument to be wielded from time to time, as necessary, when subtlety was not a firm requirement. The sort of man who had few scruples, still less intelligence, and more than a little cruelty lurking within him not so very deep down. Hands already dirtied beyond salvaging to keep others clean. Not the sort of man the Home Office would ever claim, but one they used from time to time nonetheless.
The sort of man that Sir Roger used from time to time. Rafe’s superior—and Chris’. And once, Ambrose’s as well.
“We don’tknow,” Chris said, and there was a sort of fragile futility in his voice. “We don’tknowit’s him.” As if by saying the words, he could make them true. As if he were grappling desperately for one tiny thread of hope that might negate the wretched reality of it all.
“No,” Rafe corrected. “We have noproofthat it’s him.” Because there was a damned difference, and it was a crucial one. “Jenkins won’t talk.” Not because he was loyal, but because he took jobs indiscriminately. He was not the sort to ask questions, who had ever wondered whyhe had been asked to do a particular thing. He cared only for the payment he received in kind.
There was every possibility—every likelihood—that he did not even know whohad hired him out. He was accustomed, as it were, to receiving sealed orders from clerks within the Home Office. There would be no telling who had handed them off.
They had blundered into a deadly game of chess against Sir Roger, and they had just swept a piece from the board. Only a pawn, he thought, but the loss would certainly be noted. There was no telling how many more might wait in the shadows. There would be another move, and another, in increasing aggression, as was Sir Roger’s wont.
Unless—
“Had he anything on him?” Rafe asked. “When your men took him?”
“A knife,” Chris said, “and a purse. Twenty quid, or thereabouts.”
Jenkins had been bought cheaply, though to a man of his status, it might have seemed a fortune. “Likely an advance payment,” Rafe said. “Do you think you can get his home address out of him?”
Chris shrugged. “Probably. With the right encouragement.”
A couple of broken fingers, then. Perhaps so much as a ruined kneecap. Rafe found that he did not have pity to spare for the man, who had thought nothing of invading Emma’s home and had brought with him a weapon to do so. “Have your men ransack the place. Make it look like he’s left in a hurry.”
“Like he’s done a runner,” Chris said slowly. “Taken the money and run off with it?”
It was an inelegant solution, but the only one available at present. No doubt Sir Roger would be suspicious, but at least he would have no way to be certain that his man had been intercepted. No way of knowing what, exactly, Rafe and Chris might know of it.
