An Inquiry Into Love and Death (20 page)

I
resisted the kiss for all of a second. But it felt good to be held, to be touched, and his kiss made me feel safe and fiercely alive. I gripped his flexed upper arms and let him press me to the wall, the heat of his body suffusing mine. I parted my lips, and he needed no other invitation. He tilted my chin and kissed me with raw, naked hunger until I couldn’t breathe.

He broke off and cupped my face in his hands. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” I managed, my fingers curling under his lapels.

“Damn it, Jillian. Damn it. You just left before the doctor could come. I told you to stay bloody put. Are you hurt? Are you in pain?”

“Not really—just . . . my throat, a little. My chest hurts. And my hands.”

He grabbed my hands and stared down into the palms, at their crisscrossed scratches, the red welt still running under my thumbnail. He was dressed like an inspector again, his collar crisp and his tie perfectly knotted, but his jaw was clenched and his eyes were wild. I was as liquid as a bowl of cream.

He gripped my wrists and raised his gaze to my face. “What were you doing in there?” he demanded. “Tell me. What the bloody hell were you doing in that place? Full of all those dry, dusty papers? What were you thinking? How the hell did you
knock over an oil lamp
?”

“I didn’t knock it over. I told you. I thought I heard something, so I left the room. Someone went in behind me and knocked it over. The lamp was on the table, but the bookshelf was already on fire. Someone set it, and when I came back into the room, they locked the door.”

“And that is supposed to make me feel better?” he choked. “That someone is trying to
kill
you? I think I’m losing my mind.”

It was insane, it was ridiculous, but I watched his mouth and I wanted him to kiss me again. “You look all right to me.”

He made a sound like a laugh. He let go of me, but he put his palms against the walls over my shoulders, still boxing me in, and leaned hard on them, looking at the floor. I could smell clean wool and starch and warm, faint shaving soap. “I’ve spent the last day beside myself with worry. I made up some ridiculous paper-thin story for Teddy Easterbrook about needing to talk to the vicar just to get back here. As if I give a damn about the vicar, or anything else.”

“You did?” I said.

“Jesus, Jillian! I’ve barely been able to focus. And we were at the vicarage, of all places, and we saw the smoke, and you started screaming—” He looked at me, then leaned in and kissed me, swift and hard. “I didn’t think I’d get that door open,” he said when he finished.

I touched his face, ran my fingers along his cheekbone, touched his lip with my thumb the way he’d done to me. “I broke the lock myself. With a piece of table leg.”

His gaze darkened at the contact, and I began to wonder just how deeply in trouble I was. “Yes, you did, you bloody brave, brilliant girl. I nearly planted Teddy a facer just for looking at you, you know. He’s insufferable, even if he has his uses. I just couldn’t let on.”

“I may accept that. I’ll think about it.”

I thought he might kiss me again, but as I watched, he changed his mind. He seemed to make an effort to pull away from me, his expression settling into a semblance of professional detachment. He dropped his hands from the wall and stood straight, backing away.

“We need to talk,” he said.

I stayed where I was, leaning against the wall, and waited.

“Why were you in the vicarage in the first place?” His voice was calmer now.

“I wanted to see the archives. My uncle had been to see them.”

“And did you find anything?”

My gaze flickered to the table behind him. Sitting next to his hat, which he had tossed there as he came through the door, was the photograph of Elizabeth Price, her sad gaze staring into the distance. Drew hadn’t noticed the photo.

“Walking John wants to be put to rest,” I answered. “His message is, ‘Make me sleep.’ A previous vicar saw the full message in the sand and recorded it along with the footprints.”

Drew seemed to take this in for a moment. I saw the memory of that night in the woods cross his expression, then disappear again. “Interesting. And what else?”

I looked away from the photograph and raised my gaze to his. “Would you like some tea?”

“Thank you, no.”

“I want some,” I said. “My throat hurts.” I stepped forward and pushed past him, brushing alongside the table. I scooped up the photo and put it in the pocket of my skirt without looking down.

“Did you see anyone before the fire started?” Drew asked me.

“No. Aubrey let me into the vicarage; that was all.”

“Did you see Mrs. Thorne?”

I swallowed, realizing for the first time that Aubrey’s wife could have tried to kill me. “I didn’t see her. Was she home?”

“They were both home. They claim to be horribly upset about what happened. Mrs. Thorne wanted to come here and see you, but we talked her out of it. Teddy is interviewing them now while I’m here interviewing you.”

I busied myself preparing a cup of tea I didn’t want and had no intention of drinking. My skin was still burning. Drew’s idea of
interviewing
was an interesting one, but I let it go for now. “It doesn’t make sense that Aubrey would burn his own archives. He spent years collecting the pieces. But it had to be one of them. It must have been.”

“Not necessarily.” He had turned and was watching me. “When you told us the fire had been set deliberately, I checked the building. If you were in the hall, no one could have come through the front door without your seeing them. But there was a back door as well as a side servants’ entrance that came through the scullery. That means if you were facing the front of the building, someone could have come from behind your back.”

I stilled. I had noticed nothing. The person, whoever he was, had been completely silent. He, or she, could just as easily have attacked me directly from behind—a bludgeon, perhaps, or a pair of hands around my throat—and I would have died none the wiser. Why bother with fire?

I gave up and put the kettle down without pouring. My hands were shaking again. “Were any of the doors locked?”

“Yes, but Thorne keeps the key ring in his greenhouse, hanging on the wall. And the greenhouse wasn’t locked. If someone knew where the key was, he could have let himself in.”

“So.” My voice was barely a whisper. I tried to stay calm. “You’re saying that anyone at all could have come in one of those doors and set the fire.” I turned to him. “You’re also saying you actually listened to me when I said it was deliberate.”

He shrugged. “Teddy thought you were hysterical. But it seemed plausible enough to me.”

“Because you suspect everyone of murder,” I supplied.

He came toward me, and my heart thumped in my chest. “It’s convenient sometimes, isn’t it?” He was close to me now, and he reached out, his hand brushing my waist. “Now, perhaps we can make a deal that you’ll tell me everything you found in that archive before it burned.”

“I did tell you everything.”

“I don’t think so.” His hand moved lower. I tried not to shiver. Then I realized he was sliding his fingers into the pocket of my skirt. He deftly withdrew the photograph and held it up. “You’re a terrible liar, Jillian, and an even worse thief. Who is this?”

I felt my cheeks flame. I snatched the photograph from his hand before he could look too closely at it. For some reason I wanted to keep Elizabeth Price to myself, at least until I had a better idea of who she was. “That’s none of your concern.”

“My concern is that you’re keeping things from me.”

Now I was outraged. “I’m keeping things . . . ? I think it’s the other way around. You’ve kept me in the dark about everything, including the true nature of your investigation.”

His gaze shuttered. “Ah. That.”

“Yes, that.”

“I thought you may have learned something. I could see you were angry with me at the vicarage. Who have you been talking to? Or did your infernal intelligence figure everything out on its own?”

“My infernal intelligence failed me utterly, in fact. I talked to Edward, and don’t you dare get him in trouble. He was torn enough as it is.”

Drew sighed, ran a hand through his hair. “Jillian, this is a job. A rather important one this time. In a job, I’m not always free to say what I’d like to.”

“And Toby’s murder?”

“Your uncle’s death is part of it, yes. I’m convinced of it. But I wasn’t lying about that. I can’t make a case for murder. The Yard doesn’t work on hunches or circumstances. There isn’t enough evidence.”

“Drew.” My voice would not quaver. It would not. “Someone has just tried to kill me. I don’t know what I’m up against. There must be something you can tell me. Anything at all.”

He put his hands in his pockets. I watched him wrestle with himself, with the weight of duty and the wish to keep me safe. He looked out the window, thinking. At last he turned back to me with a sigh.

“All right,” he said. “The first thing we need is a map of England.”

•   •   •

Drew shrugged off his jacket and placed it over the back of a kitchen chair. He loosened his tie, as if preparing for something physical. As I watched the line of his shoulders, he reached into his hanging jacket and pulled a piece of paper from the pocket. “Like so,” he said.

He spread the paper on the kitchen table. It was a small printed map, England’s distinctive shape in ink. “There’s Plymouth there—see?—and there’s Cornwall. Here we are, here. The tides are dangerous along this coast, and the coastline itself is a challenge, but if you can land a ship, it’s ideal.”

“Like John Barrow and his smugglers,” I said.

“Yes, exactly. Most smuggling was based on the east coast, where the waters are better and the trip to France is much shorter. That meant that most of the policing was based there as well. No one much bothered with the west coast here, so many of the smugglers brave enough to try it didn’t get caught. What killed the smuggling trade more than a century ago was the lowering of taxes on imports, which didn’t make it a lucrative business anymore.”

I crossed my arms. “Let me guess—that isn’t quite the end of the story.”

“Not quite, no. Wherever you have ships and traffic, you have the potential for illegal trade, and England is all coastline. Smuggling has never exactly gone away. This corridor, along here”—he pointed to the sea along our western coast—“is a major merchant corridor. In fact, it was one of the main targets of German U-boats during the war for that reason. They were trying to strangle our imports by sinking all our merchant ships.”

“And killing all the sailors.”

“It was war, and we were doing exactly the same thing to them. Since it ended, things have gone back to normal, or as near as possible. But since the war, we’ve seen an upsurge of smuggling in this area. It’s only the goods that have changed.”

“And what are the goods?”

He shrugged. “Tobacco isn’t profitable anymore, and neither is tea, but there are other things. Alcohol is still shipped, as are jewels and precious metals. Certain drugs I have no intention of telling you about—those go for a high price.”

“That sounds lovely,” I said. “It also sounds like the dominion of Customs and Excise, not Scotland Yard.”

“Be patient, my girl. I’m not finished. The war was hard for Customs and Excise; they were as understaffed as everyone else, and they were under the thumb of the War Office, which was too busy to administer it properly. They came out of the war and found that while they’d been looking the other way, a new network of smugglers seemed to have set up shop along the coast—a group that seemed not only coordinated, but also well organized.

“They weren’t able to nab anyone, and last year the smugglers committed the idiotic act of killing a customs agent. Now they have murder on their hands, and Scotland Yard was called in. A number of us are working up and down the coast, trying to flush this group from the bushes.”

I shook my head. “How stupid I am. You told me you were here to investigate my uncle’s murder despite what the coroner said, and I believed it. You must have been laughing up your sleeve.”

He regarded me steadily. “If you truly thought that, I’d still be out in the back garden. Besides, I do think that Toby’s murder has something to do with this. And I do disagree with the coroner. None of that was a lie.”

“You make it sound so reasonable. But . . . someone in Rothewell, smuggling jewels and drugs? It’s outlandish. I just don’t see it.”

“Neither did I. Neither did anyone until your admirer, Edward Bruton, wrote us that he’d heard those German sailors. We traced the boat
Cornwall
to an owner near Plymouth, who’d sold it to an Englishman named Jasper Kipps, who claimed to be a lawyer processing the transaction on behalf of a client. But when we checked, no such lawyer exists.”

“Perhaps they were just immigrant laborers. We’re not at war with Germany anymore.”

“Jillian. Edward saw those men, and two days later your uncle was dead.”

I blinked. Tears welled up in my throat and behind my eyes, and I beat them back. How senseless that Toby—kind, shy, eccentric Toby—had been killed over someone’s greedy, grasping scheme. I stared fiercely at the map until I was under control again. “What are you getting at? You think someone is landing illegal cargo in Blood Moon Bay, is that it?”

“That’s exactly what I think—though the buying and selling goes both ways. Until now, we haven’t been able to narrow down exactly where on the coast they’ve been weighing anchor. If they’re smart, and they are, they have several chosen spots. When I heard that no one goes into the woods for fear of the local ghost, I figured we’d found one of those spots.”

“Toby’s notes said that he’d been ghost hunting in the woods at night. Setting up his equipment and doing tests.” It was starting to make sense. “He wandered into Blood Moon Bay in the middle of the night and saw something he shouldn’t have. But he doesn’t describe it in his journal. He only says that it all makes sense.”

“In a way,” Drew said, “your uncle’s death provided an opportunity for us to investigate. It’s perfectly normal for the police to come after a man has died on the cliffs, to be seen around town, to ask questions. I was to gather information and take it back to London without tipping off anyone who might be in league with the smugglers themselves.”