Death in the Dark Walk Read Online Free Page B

certain it was her?’
    â€˜Positive. I saw her face before your friend covered it up.’
    â€˜I wonder if they know this at Bow Street.’
    â€˜They’re sure to find out soon enough.’
    â€˜But where has she been recently?’ said Samuel, almost to himself.
    Lord Bramcote frowned. ‘That’s the damnable odd part. Nobody knows. I think a fancy fellow must have set her up, couldn’t bear to share her, what?’
    â€˜George, please!’ remonstrated one of the Misses Carter.
    â€˜Sony, Sal. ’Zounds, but it’s a wicked world, ain’t it?’
    â€˜So wicked I fear we may be robbed tonight,’ she answered, shivering.
    â€˜If a highwayman comes I’ll blow his head off,’ Milord stated cheerfully, and produced a loaded pistol from an inner pocket.
    Sam sat mute, thinking that this evening, which had started with so much promise, was turning into one of the most nightmarish of his entire life. In fact he was never more glad of anything than when the coach reached the outskirts of London, clattered over Westminster Bridge, opened to the public four years earlier, and set him down at the top of The Hay Market. Hurrying down Coventry Street, from which place he could glimpse the brothel in Leicester Fields where the dead girl had worked, Samuel ran the rest of the way to Nassau Street, startling the Night Watch as he panted up to the front door of number two.
    When the street had been created in the 1730s, a uniform group of elegant residences had been erected, each four storeys high and three windows wide, their interiors furnished in handsome style. As Samuel Swann was shown into the hall by the night porter, he remembered with fondness the house next door where he had lived as a boy, nostalgically wishing he were still there. His father had long since moved away to the unspoilt rural retreat of Islington, while Samuel lodged with his former Master in West Cheap, as yet not settled in a home of his own. Yet looking round him now as the porter went to waken Sir Gabriel Kent’s valet to see if John’s father might himself, in his turn, be awakened, Samuel experienced a great surge of longing, a yearning for boyhood, for the past. And when Sir Gabriel appeared at the top of the stairs, clad in a night rail and turban, the younger man hurried forward to greet him just as he had when he was a child.
    â€˜How very glad I am to see you, Sir,’ he exclaimed and, without thinking, raised Sir Gabriel’s hand to his lips.
    The man who was to all intents and purposes John Rawlings’s father, for he had raised the child since it had been three years old, smiled and nodded, and Samuel stepped back to look at him properly.
    At seventy years of age, Sir Gabriel stood a magnificent figure. Always dressed in black and white – black and silver for balls and other festive occasions – during daylight hours he made it his custom to wear a full-bottomed wig with long curls which flowed down over his shoulders. His eyes were extraordinary, sometimes fierce as an eagle’s, at others gentle as a deer’s, and an unforgettable shade of amber-flecked gold. But beyond his unique way of dressing and arresting features lay a powerful charm that drew even the smallest child to Gabriel’s side. He possessed the kind of magic that won many friends and, therefore, also attracted certain enemies.
    â€˜My dear Samuel,’ he said now, ‘what brings you at this late hour? Has aught befallen John?’
    â€˜In a way, yes. Oh he’s perfectly safe,’ the young man added hastily as he saw a frown cross the planes and hollows of Sir Gabriel’s face. ‘But there’s been an extraordinary event.’
    â€˜Shall we discuss it in the salon? Come, you look fraught,’ and without waiting for a reply, John’s father strode, straight and tall and not in the least bowed down by the weight of years, into a room that led off to