Private Investigation (4 page)

He turned back, beaming. “And what do you make of that, Lilly?”

“Uh…” She hadn’t expected to be asked to contribute to his deductive process. “Well, I suppose it makes sense for a medium to solicit clients from among the recently bereaved…”

“Ha ha, yes! And Dr Cain’s House of Spiritual Solace has such a good reputation of late. Curious, really, when you think of the cheap tricks you described to me—the fishing wire and luminous paint you saw on your previous visits. Dim light and thrown voices and light projected onto gauze. Why, I wonder, are his powers as a medium suddenly so respected?”

Lilly cocked her head to one side, considering. “And that’s why you want me to convince Mrs Langley to take me to one of his séances. To see what is different.”

John, who had been making tea again, pressed a cup of the steaming brew into her hands and gave her a conspiratorial smile. “We already know you’re a good observer. A keen student of human behaviour. Creeping around and peeping through keyholes…”

She blushed and gave him a wry look. Then she returned her attention to Lucien. “But I’m not a trained observer. I’m not a detective. Why don’t you go yourself?”

He shook his head. “I’m too well known.”

She frowned. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I had never heard of you before I replied to your advertisement.”

John took a seat next to Lucien on the settee, and Lilly noticed that their thighs brushed together. She tore her eyes away with difficulty, suddenly aware of how warm it felt in the room. Definitely a result of all the explosions and whatnot, she decided. Definitely. John smiled at her, and she knew he had followed her gaze, but for some reason she did not feel at all embarrassed. John had, somehow, put her at her ease from the first.

He said, “Then you have never been the victim of a baffling crime. Among those who have been blackmailed, those whose loved ones have gone missing or been murdered, Lucien’s name and face are well known.”

“And those are the people who seek out the services of a medium,” she finished for him. A flash of approval crossing Lucien’s pale, angular face told her that he approved of her small insight. “Then, gentlemen,” she said decisively, getting to her feet and smoothing down her skirts, “I suggest we go to visit my landlady, and see if we can effect a reintroduction into Dr Cain’s twilight world.”

Chapter Five

Mrs Langley received Lucien and John with initial puzzlement, which changed to a sort of fluttering obsequiousness when she found out Lucien’s profession and purpose. She twittered about dear Dr Doyle, which Lucien tolerated with grace considering his views on his fictional detective. She fussed with cushions and antimacassars, and offered tea and a selection of biscuits that Lilly knew she kept only for the most favoured of visitors.

Lilly herself had returned to her lodgings half an hour before their arrival, but had crept down the stairs to listen at the door once she had heard Lucien and John being admitted and the parlour door closing behind them. It seemed to be becoming a habit, spying on people, although she didn’t anticipate this meeting would be
quite
as exciting as what she’d witnessed that morning.

She grinned to herself as Lucien explained that they were considering employing one Miss Elizabeth James, and sought a reference as to her person and character. John, ever engaging and full of charm, added that they had not hesitated in seeking the opinion of a woman of such good reputation and sound judgement as Mrs Langley.

She did not dare put her eye to the keyhole considering what had happened the last time she’d tried that trick, but she could just imagine Mrs Langley’s face—her expression hovering somewhere between her instinctive annoyance with a young lady who imposed on her by having the temerity to pay her for board and lodging, and a snobbish desire to be associated with a real, live private detective. A detective like the one created by her dear Dr Doyle.

Whatever romantic passions beat in her thin, black-clad bosom won out, and she said, “Oh, yes, dear Elizabeth. Such a clever girl.” Lucien was not to know that, in Mrs Langley’s world, ‘clever’ was not a compliment—although she thought he might suspect as much.

“So you feel she would be a suitable appointment to the position, Mrs Langley?” Lilly did not know how John managed to flatter with a simple question, but he did.

“I would say… Well, yes. She is frugal, hard-working…”

Lilly bit back a snort of laughter. There was little choice but to be frugal and hard-working when the only meal provided was cold toast and sub-standard preserves and there was an extra charge for hot water. She made do with a cat-lick most days, and couldn’t remember when she’d last had a long soak in a bath that wasn’t either tepid or interrupted by Mrs Langley rapping impatiently on the door.

“Certainly she speaks very highly of you.” John’s voice again.

They had agreed, with Lilly’s emphatic encouragement, that it would be better if John did the majority of the talking. Although she had known him so briefly, Lilly already knew that Lucien was likely to be…unpredictable. He was brilliant, but a grasp of the social niceties was not a notable element of that brilliance.

“Oh!” Mrs Langley sounded surprised, but pleasantly so, which made Lilly feel a little warmer towards her. And perhaps a touch guilty for the deception. “Really? I…”

“Indeed. She mentioned your kindness in introducing her to various societies and meetings when she knew no one in the area. Although she did say she regretted having been a little more forward in her views than she should have been, uninformed as they were at the time.” John’s voice dropped into a low, intimate tone, and she could picture him leaning forward to murmur, “Between us, Mrs Langley, I suspect Miss James sees you as…well, in the light of an older sister, perhaps.”

That, given that Mrs Langley was more than old enough to be Lilly’s mother, was the purest flattery, but the landlady lapped it up like a kitten. “Well of course,” she replied. “She is so young. Perhaps it was hasty to…”

Lucien had clearly lost patience with this game of etiquette and flattery, because he suddenly said, in a voice that seemed jarringly brisk in contrast to John’s soothing, mellifluous tones, “Good! Then we’re agreed. On your recommendation we will take Miss James on.”

“On my recommendation? Oh dear, I…”

“And we will feel much happier in the knowledge that she has some support and guidance in her personal life.”

Lilly almost bit through her tongue. She hadn’t expected them to hand her over to Mrs Langley’s interfering fussing like a sacrificial offering for the sake of the case. But since she wasn’t supposed to be listening, she could hardly protest.

“Thank you, Mrs Langley. It was a sincere pleasure to meet a woman of such…”

Lilly stopped listening and scampered away up the stairs. It was clear the meeting was drawing to a close, and being caught eavesdropping twice in one day would be too much.

It was some twenty minutes later when Lilly heard a knock on her door. Mrs Langley did not wait for her to reply before she came in, but since she had never, ever knocked before, Lilly took this as a sign of approval.

“Hello, dear!” she trilled.

Lilly gave a tremulous smile and said, in a shaky voice, “Hello, Mrs Langley.” She only hoped that her landlady put it down to nerves or disappointed hero worship, not the fact that she was trying desperately to stifle her laughter.

Mrs Langley was carrying a tray with a teapot, a milk jug, two cups, and an assortment of those expensive biscuits she kept for ‘company’.

Lilly jumped to her feet. “Let me take that from you, Mrs Langley. Please, do sit down…”

And so it was arranged that, on the following Thursday evening, Lilly would accompany Mrs Langley to Dr Cain’s House of Spiritual Solace. She felt a little unkind for deceiving the woman in this way, but…after all, she
had
given her lime marmalade.

Chapter Six

Lilly knew she probably shouldn’t go back to Jermayne Street that evening. It probably wasn’t appropriate, for a start, for a young lady to be visiting two gentlemen after dusk in the rooms they shared. And where they…

She let that thought trail off. Well, it wasn’t appropriate. But Lilly, in the privacy of her own rooms of course, and under her breath, found some relief in swearing in a way that certainly wasn’t appropriate. And she read books that she wasn’t supposed to—she liked to be informed—and she held opinions she probably wasn’t supposed to either.

So she caught the Locomotive Autobus over to Jermayne Street. She preferred, usually, to walk, rather than suffering the steam-powered people-carrier belching its way across the city. But on this occasion, she wanted to get there quickly.

The Locomotive Autobus looked like a train without a funnel, low and sleek. It ran like a millipede along the tracks that meandered throughout the capital, a darting line of movement against the massive gantries and pulleys that towered against the smoggy skyline. The lamp mounted on its front illuminated the frequent, sulphurous pea-soupers in a sickly yellow and the plumes of steam that hissed occasionally from vents and seams in its carapace only added to the opacity of the air.

From outside, it looked like a wonder of steam technology—elegant and smooth in its action. Seated inside, Lilly jogged uncomfortably on her seat and concentrated on not allowing her teeth to be rattled right out of her head.

At Jermayne Street, she hesitated to use her key…but then, why had they given her a key if they didn’t mean her to use it? Certainly she didn’t close the door quietly behind her in the hopes they wouldn’t hear her. And certainly she didn’t creep up the stairs hoping she might see Lucien’s pale, naked skin again, or John’s ruddy, curved cock.

She crept closer to the door of 43a, half-crouching to listen, and almost fell down the stairs with shock when Lucien suddenly jerked the door open and said, “Hello, Lilly. Do come in.”

She was seated on the settee next to John, and Lucien was kneeling at her feet. She didn’t know quite how it had happened, but there it was.

John soothed her. “This is going to be very important to the case, Lilly.”

“I don’t altogether understand how.” Lilly shifted in her seat, a little uncomfortable. She was acutely aware that Lucien was close enough that he could have laid his head in her lap had he wished to. She could feel that treacherous wetness beginning to seep from her core, and she wondered vaguely if he could smell her arousal. The thought set up a low buzz of excitement between her thighs and she swallowed hard, trying to concentrate on thoughts of the case. John, too, was sitting close by her side—she could feel the warmth of his body and felt a strong, strange urge to lean in to him.

“I don’t really want to tell you,” Lucien volunteered. “You have a good brain, and you’re an observant girl. I’d like your observations and thoughts on the séance, uninfluenced by anything I might have told you.”

“But I’ve been to a séance at the House of Spiritual Solace before,” Lily protested. “And I’ve given you my thoughts. Dr Cain’s a charlatan. He’s using the same trickery as dozens of other so-called mediums before him, with the additional of a little technological jiggery-pokery.”

Lucien smiled, a rather smug, catlike expression that infuriated Lilly. She was certain he knew what she was going to observe at Dr Cain’s séance, and was a little irritated that he was nevertheless going to make her go through the motions.

“Technological jiggery-pokery,” the detective mused. “It will be interesting to know what new innovations he has come up with in the field of reuniting the grieving with their lost loved ones.”

Lilly frowned. “I think you already know,” she said crossly. “I think—”

Then she gasped as he ran his hand up from her ankle to her knee, underneath her skirts. “Lucien. What…?” She groped for the words to finish her sentence, but all she could think about was the cool pressure of his fingers contrasting so delightfully with the heat at the back of her knee.

He was gazing at her with a look of dreamy, besotted intensity that made her pulse lurch and a treacherous tingle start in the slick folds between her thighs.

It wasn’t the act of a gentleman—far from it—but somehow she couldn’t bring herself to protest. She turned to John, her lips parted, her breath rapid and shallow, and found that he was watching her with heavy-lidded lust.

“It seemed to us that when you walked in on us, you weren’t shocked,” he said.

Lucien insinuated his fingers beneath the top of her stocking and softly stroked the back of her thigh, creating a sensation somewhere between a tickle and a thrill. Lilly squirmed.

“I was certainly very surprised,” she said breathlessly, her breasts rising and falling beneath her bodice as her breath came in shuddering, laboured pants.

“Yes,” said John. “But you didn’t scream, or faint, or go scuttling back to Mrs Langley.”

“No,” Lucien continued.

He had moved his hand up to her inner thigh, and was alternately stroking and pinching the soft, tender skin. Lilly gave a convulsive shudder and unconsciously parted her legs, giving a little squeak and biting her lip as his fingers travelled beneath the lace edging of her drawers.

She tried very hard to sit still as he said, “No, you didn’t run away—you watched.”

John leaned closer to her ear and murmured, “Did you like what you saw, Lilly?” His breath was warm and tickled against her skin.

Lilly swallowed, trying to ignore the delicious, sinful things Lucien was doing to her lower body. His fingers were creeping closer and closer to her cunt, and she knew she should stop him. She knew she should push him away, should get to her feet…should probably administer a sharp slap to the face before storming from the room and never coming back. But somehow, her limbs felt like lead, and she couldn’t move…she didn’t want to move.

“I…yes,” she admitted. “I liked it.”

“You touched yourself,” Lucien said. And he manoeuvred his fingers underneath the cotton of her drawers and drew one long digit between the lips of her cunt, pressing a touch harder when he reached the nub of nerve endings at the apex of her slit.