Chapter 4

Four

THE AGENCY, TOWER OF LONDON

Angus Brodie rolled his head against the stiffness in the back of his neck from too many hours going back through everything that was known, and a great deal more that wasn't known.

It was very near midday, and he had been at it for verra near twenty-four hours with the latest information Sir Avery had received from Luxembourg.

The information was regarding a man named Soropkin who was supposedly responsible for several incidents on the continent, the sort of individual who lived in the shadows, until he was ready to strike.

Soropkin was Lithuanian by birth but called no place home. He was the sort of person with no loyalty to any place or anyone. He moved in the shadows in whatever city he happened to be in, constantly moving about, never in one place longer than it took to plan the next attack against those in power. Sir Avery's people on the continent had been working with their sources regarding an obscure bit of information they had received months earlier in that shadowy world most people didn't know existed. Where a life was worth less than the mud on the bottom of a man's boot, and anything and anyone could be purchased or disposed of.

"Do ye trust the information?" Brodie had asked Sir Avery at the time.

"I trust our sources and the amount of money they receive for the information they provide."

"What about others who might pay more for that information?" Brodie had asked, having experience in such matters.

"That is where you come in. You know people on the street. You need to find those at the lowest levels who would have knowledge of this."

That was over two months ago, before he left for Edinburgh. It was an obscure piece of information that might have meant something. Or nothing.

He had passed what he had learned on to Sir Avery before he left London, unaware of its importance at the time and with little concern over it— a rumor among dozens of others heard on the street. There were other matters that pulled him back to Edinburgh, that had been waiting for verra near thirty years.

That was then, this was now.

There was a new urgency as the latest information the Agency had received from Luxembourg and decoded was verra near two weeks old with a warning about something that had been described as dangerous with far-reaching consequences.

Only another rumor like so many others the Agency followed up on?

However, Sir Avery wanted him to check with his sources on the street. More than that he wouldn't say. It was an aspect of the work the Agency did that he found to be off-putting.

Sir Avery provided just enough information to send him off in a particular direction with little more to go on— that "little more" could be dangerous.

It was like being in a street fight with one hand tied behind his back, and something he didn't care for. It was Mr. Sinclair who had provided more information in a hastily whispered comment.

It seemed the "event" that was rumored was a possible assassination attempt that Soropkin was involved in. But against who?

It wasn't the first time. A previous inquiry case had exposed a threat against the Prince of Wales. And then, there had been the attempts in the past against the Queen.

That information, Brodie had been able to learn from bits and pieces of information in the past, came from a network of those the Agency— and therefore the Crown, paid to keep them informed about increasing unrest in Europe.

It came by way of coded messages in telegrams as well as bits of information in obscure telephone calls that Alex revealed the Agency was able to listen to through new equipment that had been invented. And then there were messages intercepted, like this last one, often at great cost.

"What about the man, who originally provided the information some time ago?" he had then asked Alex.

"Nothing has been heard from him since that first message, even with the amount of money he was promised. He's a greedy sort and has always had something to send us. But there's been nothing more."

Sir Avery hadn't shared that with him, something that might mean nothing at all.

On the other hand, it might mean that there was someone who was willing to pay more, that the information first received was just a rumor, or that the man's communication with London had been exposed, and he was dead.

He had thanked Alex for the additional information then set out to learn what he could about Soropkin, in anything that might be overheard on the streets— long hours that often went far into the night. He had said nothing about it to Mikaela.

He worked those sorts of hours and more with the Met, and in private inquiries on behalf of clients. He was accustomed to it. One did the work until the work was done. And this new urgency was like searching for needles in haystacks as someone would have reminded him.

That particular someone would have been the first person to understand, to give her thoughts on the matter and then plunge into the middle of it.

Mikaela— intelligent, stubborn, fearless… with a habit for ending up in the middle of things, dangerous things that made him want to shake some sense into her, then hold onto her to make certain she was safe.

She was safe now, or as safe as she could possibly be all things considered, off on her own inquiry case.

He could well imagine her with her notebook and pen. That direct way she had of obtaining information. The case— a husband, a physician, who had been keeping late hours and being most secretive, the wife certain there must be another woman involved.

Then again, he thought, knowing Mikaela's past experience with her own father, it might be dangerous for the poor man when she finally learned his whereabouts and the reason for it.

"Contact the priest again," Sir Avery was telling him now.

The priest was one of his sources.

"Call me if he's heard anything more, then go home and get some sleep."

He had placed a call to Father Sebastian and asked to meet with him before he left the Tower.

Now, as he made his way from that ancient fortress he thought of Sir Avery's parting comment— "go home and get some sleep."

Home. At present that might be the office on the Strand or Mikaela's townhouse in Mayfair.

It didn't matter. He'd spent his life on the streets and slept in places that were best forgotten before joining the London Police. Afterward there had been a small flat, then the office on the Strand best suited his needs.

It didn't matter, he thought again, as long as she was there, with her notes, and questions, and suggestions. Even when she put herself into situations where she had no business. She would have argued that with him.

He found a driver and gave him the location in Whitechapel.

The German Catholic Mission Church had served the immigrant community that had grown over the past several years, ministering to the poor, providing a haven of faith for those who had little else.

Brodie had met Father Sebastian in the course of a previous investigation some years before, when the priest was asked to provide last rites over a young girl who had been brutally used and then left to die on the streets.

The priest had arrived in the East End over twenty years earlier, with little more than a Bible and his faith. In that time he had established a school for orphan children and helped families as best he could.

"God does not ask whether Catholic, Methodist, or Jew," Father Sebastian once told him. "He accepts all, and I can do no less."

After that first encounter, Brodie had made contributions to the church in his mother's name. She had been baptized in the faith and believed in a merciful and protective God, even with her dying breath.

His own beliefs were more circumspect, influenced by the streets as a boy after her death and then in London. With what he saw on the streets, he thought that God might very well not exist at all.

"It is not the big miracles , " Father Sebastian had reminded him in one of their conversations. "But the small everyday miracles— a life saved, a wrong that is set right, food and clothes for those who have none."

Brodie didn't believe that the clothes he delivered from a woman who ran the seconds shop in Holborn from time to time for children at the school were a miracle. It was simply something that he could do.

Then there was what had waited in Edinburgh, finding his mother's murderer, and the fire for revenge that had burned in him since he was a lad.

Father Sebastian had cautioned him about taking revenge on that last visit before Brodie left. It was not wrong to seek justice he explained, but revenge for the sake of revenge was a sin.

In the end he didn't know whether it was justice or revenge he'd found in Edinburgh. Afterward, he had spoken of it with Mikaela at Old Lodge in the north of Scotland before returning to London.

"And your choice would have been to simply let the man go about destroying other lives to protect himself and his career after murdering your mother when she refused him? And the others who knew what happened that night?

" What about Kip ?" she had then asked of the boy from a previous inquiry case who had verra nearly died, and yet they had found the persons responsible and he supposed there was some justice in that, the possibility that other children— at least a few of them, wouldn't suffer or be used as the lad had been.

"And what about Templeton?" she asked of her friend. "Would you have simply let her be tried for a murder she did not commit ?"

"Well there was the damned lizard," he had admitted. "Dangerous beast. It would have served her right."

"Ziggy is an iguana," she had corrected him. "And he was not at all dangerous. He's an herbivore— he eats only plants."

He wasn't certain he believed that given his encounters with the creature. But he believed in the woman who had dropped into his life like a storm and took away his doubts about his reasons for going to Edinburgh.

Father Sebastian had sent word a week ago when it seemed that everything had gone quiet.

"It was told to me in confession ," the priest had said when he met with him afterward.

"I have prayed over it. As you well know, my friend, that which is told in confession is inviolate and I am bound to keep secret. However, this seemed most serious and I cannot condone the taking of innocent lives."

It was then Father Sebastian told him what it was that he had heard in confession— a conversation overheard by a man on the voyage to London that troubled him deeply, and the choice the priest was forced to make to break his vow of silence regarding confession.

The man who had come to him, a tailor by the name of Anatole, was traveling from Budapest with his wife and young son.

With anarchist groups terrorizing the city, it had become too dangerous for them to remain in the country where they were born.

His wife's brother had immigrated to London the year before and encouraged them in letters to leave.

Once the decision was made, they traveled from Budapest to Paris, then to LeHavre where they found passage to London.

It was on that trip from LeHavre that Anatole overheard a conversation between two men.

The tailor had stumbled upon them on a walk about the deck one night and had then hidden himself because of the words he'd overheard.

The two men spoke of an event that had been set in motion, with information one man was to take to others once they arrived in London. Then a packet with something inside was exchanged.

Payment for seeing that the information was delivered, perhaps?

The tailor did not know, but the men's manner, a phrase he picked up on even in his broken English— "They will pay in blood" — had convinced him that it was something dangerous.

In addition, there was a note, to be delivered once the one man arrived in London.

Was there anything else the tailor mentioned? Anything that might tell them what the event was?

The priest nodded. "That it would not be suspected with the coming holiday celebrations. But he saw something in addition to that message. It was a tattoo on the wrist of one of the men— that looked like a black hand."

There had also been a name, Soropkin .

"I know this name as well," Father Sebastian had continued, "from the old country. The man is an assassin. If what the tailor overheard is true, I fear something will happen here and very soon."

From what Brodie had learned at the Agency, Soropkin had once been the leader of an anarchist group responsible for assassinations in France and Spain. And the tattoo the tailor had seen was the mark of the anarchist movement found on posters in several cities.

There had been warnings circulated by the Metropolitan Police several years earlier to be vigilant regarding individuals who might have arrived in London in the aftermath of those assassinations.

The first inquiry case with Mikaela in the disappearance of her sister, had exposed individuals with anarchist ties.

Brodie had thanked the priest and promised to keep the fact that the information came through confession a secret when he had first asked Alex Sinclair if there had been any recent information about a new threat or plot.

"Nothing," Alex had replied at the time. "It's been very quiet."

Perhaps too quiet, Brodie thought and put out word to his friend, Munro, who often came in contact with merchants and workmen at the warehouses along the riverfront as manager of Lady Montgomery's estates.

He'd also put out word with Mr. Conner who he'd worked with before he retired. Mr. Conner knew people at the docks from his time with the MET and often lifted a pint with them. Both were men he could trust to keep the information to themselves.

"Anything that might indicate any activity someone doesna want the authorities to know about, unusual shipments that aren't on a manifest, names that might have surfaced again that might be familiar from previous cases."

"Is there a particular person we're lookin' for ? " Munro asked.

He gave them the name the tailor had overheard— Soropkin.

Conner had cursed. "I'm not fond of the upper classes and the hold they keep on the working man, as you well know , " he commented.

" However, I had hoped that Soropkin was no longer among the living. " Conner shook his head then continued.

"Too many good men have ended up dead because of him. And to my way of thinkin' the change that he wants to bring about will cost too many lives of innocent people ," he spat out.

"It makes one wonder if that one was any better than those of the upper classes? In it for himself and only wears a different boot?

"Now you tell me that he may still be alive, and here in London?"

Brodie understood only too well, as did Munro. They both came from the streets. They had seen the poverty and crime every day. They had lived it, and there was the long and painful history of Scotland at the mercy of English authority.

A different boot, Conner called it.

"What about Miss Mikaela?" Munro had asked. "She might be able to learn something from those she knows. The man at the canal docks? He's the sort who knows a great deal about what comes into the country."

Captain Turner was a man who had served thirty years on merchant ships and was then forced to retire after a shipboard accident took his leg. He ran the canal boats that brought goods in from the country and took on passengers as well.

Captain Tom, as she referred to him from a past acquaintance, also operated a bit of smuggling according to what Brodie had learned about the man.

"No!" his answer was firm. At the look both men gave him he had added, "She's not to be involved in this. She has another inquiry she is working at present."

Munro nodded. "I wish ye luck with that."

He knew Munro was right. He was going to need more than luck when it came to keeping her out of this.

Considering what the Agency had learned along with that conversation overheard by the tailor, it was safe to assume there was something planned that might have serious repercussions. Sir Avery had also shared that there had been more recent rumors from other sources that something might be planned against the Crown.

Was it the Black Hand? There was reason to suspect that it was a possibility.

Mikaela had spoken of the organization; it was the first he heard it was mentioned. There had been a deadly confrontation in Budapest between the anarchists and authorities on one of her travels a handful of years earlier.

That information had been useful at the time.

There was more to it now, of course, he was willing to admit. For him everything had changed with that simple ceremony in Edinburgh, a piece of paper with their names, a "contract" she had commented at the time with her usual penchant for being sarcastic. But for him, it was more than that.

Then weeks after those first rumors, and a piece of information passed to him by Mr. Dooley, a man he worked with in his years with the Met. The information came by way of a report filed by the officers on the watch the night before.

They'd been called when a body was found in Holborn. A man by the name of Anatole had been stabbed to death. He had been found in the back room of a tailor's shop by the owner.

Robbery? An assault that ended badly? Common enough in parts of London. Except for the man's name, a name that was familiar from the information Father Sebastian had given him.

Coincidence? Another man named Anatole? However, a man by that name who was also a tailor?

He didn't believe in coincidences. Experience had taught him there was no such thing.

He hadn't had a chance to speak with the man from the confessional yet, and thought then of Father Sebastian.

If the attack wasn't about robbery, then what was it? Was it possible that someone else knew of the man's confession to Father Sebastian?

The church was quiet this hour of the evening in the middle of the week. Those who attended to confess their sins long since gone with only a handful of worshippers who knelt among the pews, perhaps those on their way home from work, or those who had no other place to go.

There was a stand near the altar with rows of candles that had been lit below a sculptured scene.

A frieze , Mikaela had explained at another church in Edinburgh during an inquiry case. They depicted various scenes from the Bible, according to what she told him. His time in such places, admittedly, had been limited.

"I suppose people find comfort in such thing s," she had remarked at the time. "Places filled with artwork, frescoes and priceless objects while lives are ruined, and children starve ."

That had surprised him. It came, he supposed, from her own past and her travels to those faraway places that gave her that point of view. That and her bloody independence that had a way of getting her into trouble from time to time.

Although she would have argued that "trouble" as he saw it, was merely doing something because she could. And that brought him back around to the small ceremony, merely signing a piece of paper in Edinburgh.

She deserved more, he thought at the time. A church ceremony, even with his somewhat questionable past, a fine gown to wear, and something more than the plain ring he had placed on her hand.

In her usual way, she had assured him that she didna need a church or a priest or vicar for something that was between two people.

And the license? A formality on paper to satisfy the local magistrate.

She didna need a piece of paper, she told him, only that he not get himself kilt any time soon.

He had laughed and asked the same of her— an odd way, he'd thought at the time, to begin this new part of their partnership.

He made his way now through the nave to the door at the back of the altar that led to the anteroom where Father Sebastian met privately with parishioners or prepared for his next service.

He entered the short hallway, then continued down the hall to the small office at the end. The door was slightly ajar. He knocked in case the priest was with someone, then pushed open the door when there was no answer.

Father Sebastian was there, sprawled on the floor.

Light from the hallway glistened upon the dark stain that spread beneath him. One hand reached out across the slate stones on the floor.

An attempt to protect himself? Or possibly a last act of absolution for the murderer as the priest lay dying?

The attack had apparently come as Father Sebastian returned to the office from afternoon prayers or perhaps meeting with one of his parishioners.

Was it the same person who killed the tailor? Or could it have been one of those Brodie had seen in the church.

For money?

The church was poor. He doubted there was anything in the offering plate.

For food or shelter?

Father Sebastian would have shared his last crust of bread and provided a place for anyone in need.

Brodie cursed as he knelt beside the priest and felt for a pulse even though he already knew what he would find.

His eyes narrowed. With only the light from the single electric in the hallway, a bloodied image appeared almost black on the slate stone beside the priest's outstretched arm.

It was the image of a hand in the priest's own blood that appeared almost black in the meager light.

A coincidence? Nothing more than the priest's outstretched hand covered in blood as he lay dying?

Or was it a message?

The priest had entrusted him with information learned through confession out of concern for the tailor. Both were now dead.

Brodie returned to the nave. Had the people there perhaps heard or seen something? Was the murderer possibly there among them?

An elderly man looked up briefly then returned to his prayers. An old woman sat silently, beads clutched in her hands. Another woman, obviously unwell by the pallor of her face attempted to quiet the child beside her.

From years of experience none of them looked as though they were capable of murdering the priest.

Had they perhaps seen something?

He approached the older man. He used the excuse of looking for a friend he was supposed to meet there. The man shook his head.

He had been there for the good part of an hour. There had been no one else, other than those Brodie saw.

Whoever had been there was now gone.

And it was apparent that the rumors they'd been following were rumors no more.