boy, actually, Melanie saw in the moonlight spilling through the hall windows, a gangly youth with a pockmarked face and a thatch of sandy hair. Charles gripped the boy by both arms. “Deal honestly with us and you have nothing to fear. Lie and I warn you none of us has much patience left.” He pushed the boy against the stair rail. The balusters shook. “Why did the gentleman want you to come here?”
“To deliver a letter, he said.” The boy’s eyes were enormous, his face drained of color. “Same place as before.”
“Where?” Charles’s grip on the boy’s arms tightened.
Fear glistened on the boy’s face. “I don’t give them to anyone. I leave them.”
Charles pulled the homespun of the boy’s shirt taut. “Where do you leave them?”
“At Covent Garden Market, between the railings of St. Paul’s, at the south corner.”
Charles closed his eyes for a moment. Melanie let out a gasping sigh and thought she heard Raoul do the same.
“When did you leave the last one?” Charles asked.
“This morning, round seven. Sometimes he has me go twice a day, but today it was just once. I don’t know anything about it,” the boy insisted in a quavering voice. “I met him when I came here to fish. My brothers and I’ve always fished here. There’s never anyone about, ’cept in the summer. But he said I was poaching, only he wouldn’t turn me in if I delivered the messages for him.”
Raoul looked at Melanie. “Did you break the code?”
“Yes.”
“So we have a way to communicate with them.”
“My thoughts exactly.” Charles looked back at the boy. “You’re coming to Bow Street with us. We may have a message for you to deliver after all.”
Even on the far side of three in the morning, the candles guttering and the smell of gin stale in the air, the Brown Bear Tavern bustled with activity. Melanie noted that her appearance in the common room drew less attention than it had in the afternoon. Perhaps the customers considered that any woman abroad at this hour couldn’t possibly be a lady.
Four men of the Bow Street Patrol were clustered round a table. Yes, they said, in answer to a question from Charles, Roth was there, upstairs, writing up notes. They found him in the room where they had talked before, bent over a table in his shirtsleeves, a pencil in his hand.
He looked up at their entrance. “What’s happened?”
Charles closed the door and advanced into the room, pulling Melanie with him. He had his arm round her shoulders, as he had for the whole of the drive back from Chiswick. The ring, retrieved from Carevalo’s body, was once again strung on his watch chain, though it seemed strangely irrelevant now. Their hope of finding Colin lay with the sandy-haired youth whom Raoul and Edgar were holding by either arm. “Ted here has been taking messages from Carevalo to the men holding Colin,” Charles said.
Roth’s gaze took in the splotches of dried blood on Melanie’s gown. “Where’s Carevalo?”
“Dead.”
Roth’s only reaction was a brief flicker in his eyes. “Did he die in giving you the information?”
“No, we found it afterwards.”
Roth pulled out a chair for Melanie. “Then I’ll assume his death was unavoidable, as I trust you would not kill the man who knew where your son was kept.”
“Quite,” Charles said. “You’ve spoken to Addison?”
“He gave an admirable account of your discovery of Mrs. Constable, especially as he doesn’t seem to have been present for most of the key scenes.” Roth grimaced. “Constable recovered consciousness convinced a couple answering to your description killed his wife. I think we’ve finally managed to persuade him otherwise. I have men searching for this Victor Velasquez, but we haven’t found him yet. Don’t tell me it turns out Carevalo killed her?”
“No.” Charles recounted what had happened, glossing over Carevalo’s attack on Melanie as drunken madness.
Roth stared at the coded message, held down by two empty tankards on a splintery table. He raised his gaze to Ted, who was sitting quiet and wide-eyed on the cot with the blue blanket. Then he looked at Charles and Melanie. “You could write a message in this code?”
Melanie nodded. “We’ll have Ted plant the message in Covent Garden. We have to make sure it’s there well before seven. We’ll cover the area and follow whoever picks up the message back to where they’re holding Colin.”
Roth nodded. “Seemingly straightforward. But I’ve known the most straightforward plans to go awry.”
“Precisely. So in the letter we’ll tell them to bring Colin to a rendezvous point tomorrow night. If it comes to that, we’ll be there to take him from them.”
Roth considered. “My compliments, Mrs. Fraser. That’s not without risk, but it’s about as good a plan as we could devise.” He pulled his coat off a chair back. “You get to work on the message. I’ll assemble men to keep watch in Covent Garden.”
An involuntary noise of protest escaped her lips.
“You can’t do it yourselves,” he said. “You might be recognized.”
“If you’re going to suggest we remain behind—”
He gave her a full, genuine smile. “Mrs. Fraser, I’ve got to know you a bit in the last forty-eight hours. I wouldn’t dream of it. You can wait in a coffeehouse on the edge of the market, as I will myself.” He moved to the door. “I’ll muster the troops. And then, Mr. Fraser, I’d be obliged if you’d give me any other information you have about the death of Elinor Constable.”
Covent Garden Market was a blaze of color. Morning sun limned the scene with russet and gold, burnishing booths and carts, sieves of vegetables and bunches of flowers, kerchiefs and aprons and hampers. An ideal place for a man to lose himself, but Roth had promised that his men knew how to track a quarry in a crowd.
Charles shifted his position in the chair across from her. “It’s early yet. If they only check the railings once or twice a day, they may wait until later.” He picked up his coffee and stared into the dregs.
“Darling?” She scanned his drawn face. “Is something…?”
“Wrong?” A bleak smile pulled at his mouth. “Just about everything, wouldn’t you say?”
“Granted.” She reached across the rough wood of the table, then stilled her hand, because such a gesture seemed to push beyond the boundaries that still lay between them. “But you look as though you’re brooding on something besides what’s in front of us.”
He shook his head and set down the cup. “No. There’s nothing else.” He laid his hand over her own. “At least nothing else that’s worth brooding on.”
A man in a dark green coat and shirt points that obscured half his face slipped between a donkey barrow and a bird-catcher’s stand, making for the railings. Every muscle in her body went still. The man moved on. Then she noticed the woman half-hidden behind him. A woman in a drab-colored gown with a shopping basket laden with cabbages and broccoli on her arm and a faded straw bonnet covering her apricot-colored hair. Another matron doing her marketing. And yet—
Melanie clenched her husband’s hand. “Charles.”
“What?” His voice went sharp.
“I think Jack Evans’s partner may be a woman.”
The donkey reared up in its traces. Its owner grabbed the reins to calm it. The surge in the crowd round the barrow obscured the railings. When the press cleared, the woman was gone. It was impossible to tell about the
