She could disarm just about anyone with her winsome charms.
Until she opened her mouth.
Then their desire melted into anything from dismay to disgust.
As Mercy’s father often said, she’d make a perfect wife, if only someone could relieve her of her wits and her willfulness.
Or at least her tongue.
Her charms, as it happened, were only skin-deep.
Ah well, c’est la vie.
Fingers the size of breakfast sausages curled around her gloved hands as the newcomer bowed over her knuckles. “I’m Detective Inspector Martin Trout, at your service, Miss...”
Trout. A more apropos surname was never given.
“You know who did this?” Mercy plucked her hand away, blithely stepping around his subtle press for an introduction. “You know who murdered Mathilde?”
“That’s a relief. I was beginning to think it was her.” Constable Jenkins gestured toward Mercy, his brass buttons catching on the afternoon light streaming in through the windows from the back gardens.
One such window, Mercy noted, was open.
In February?
When even the fire blazing in the hearth wasn’t enough to ward off the moist chill in the room.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Jenkins,” Detective Inspector Trout said, sidling closer to Mercy. “Our division is very familiar with this household. Mrs. Archambeau was unquestionably killed by her ham-fisted husband, Gregoire.”
Mercy deflated instantly. So much for the police being any help. “No, Detective Inspector, that is where you are wrong. It had to have been someone else.”
“Wrong?” The man echoed the word as if he’d never heard it before as shadows passed over his ruddy features.
Mercy nodded. “Mathilde and I had someone follow Gregoire onto a ferry to France where he was to conduct business for a week at least. You see, while he was away, she was going to leave him, due to the aforementioned mistreatment of her.” At this, Mercy’s brows drew together as she speared the man with her most imperious glare. “Which begs the question, Detective Inspector Trout, if you were aware that Mr. Archambeau was a cruel man, why didn’t you arrest him or at least take measures to keep poor Mathilde safe?”
Ah, there it was. The dulling of his desire.
All semblance of approbation drained from Trout’s murky eyes, replaced by instant antipathy. “Mathilde Archambeau is a notorious drunkard and recently made a cuckold of her husband on a number of occasions,” he informed her stiffly.
“Yes,” Mercy clipped, “Mathilde admitted to me that she drank, among other things, to dull the anxiety and misery of living with such a man as Mr. Archambeau...” Stalling, she also recalled the rapturous expression on the woman’s features when she’d confided that she’d taken a lover recently. One who’d coaxed such pleasure from her body, she’d become addicted to that, as well.
If only Mercy hadn’t been too embarrassed—and too stimulated—to ask the man’s name.
For, surely, he was a suspect.
“Certainly, Mathilde’s indiscretions didn’t warrant violence against her. Indeed, she didn’t deserve this terrible fate,” she said.
“I don’t know about that.” Trout gave a tight, one-shouldered shrug and twisted his lips into something acerbic and ugly as he glanced down at the departed. “Were I to catch my missus with anyone, I don’t imagine the outcome would be much different. She’d be lucky to escape with a sound hiding, and he’d be certain to end up in the Thames.”
This, from a man who’d undressed her with his eyes, only moments before.
Mercy decided to take a different approach.
It was that or lose her temper.
“Look over here.” She hurried to the window and swiped at the ledge, the silk of her white glove coming away dirty with mud from the garden. “I entered the Archambeau household through the front door, as would Gregoire, if he’d come home early. Someone very obviously climbed in this window recently. Someone strong and limber, to have scaled up to the third-floor terrace in last night’s rain. Strong enough to say... snap a woman’s neck with his bare hands.” She moved the drapes out of the way, uncovering one large footprint in the arabesque carpet. “I deduce that if you find the man who wears a military Brogan boot with such a definitive heel, you’ll find Mathilde’s murderer.”
She couldn’t say that she expected an ovation or anything, but the grim consternation on both the lawmen’s faces threatened to steal some of the wind from her sails. “Confirm Gregoire’s absence from the country if you must—no one would fault you for being thorough—but also it’s your duty to examine and investigate any other evidence, and this is certainly compelling.” She looked at Trout pointedly. “Do you happen to know the name of her lover? Maybe he—”
Trout moved with astonishing speed for a man of his girth and was in front of her in an instant. Those large sausage fingers of his spanned her wrist in a bruising grip and yanked her away from the window. “Time for you to leave.”
“Unhand me, sir!” Mercy demanded.
He dragged her toward the door, speaking through clenched teeth. “Regardless of her supposed wealth, Mathilde Archambeau was a degenerate who associated with students, theater folk, socialists, and suffragists. Her husband is little better. I do not know to which group you belong, but I’ll tell you this... you’ll be hard-pressed to find a detective who will spend extra precious time and energy on behalf of a drunken immigrant slag. Her death means there is one less nasty woman in my borough—”
Mercy’s hand connected with the detective’s cheek before she realized she’d meant to slap him. Her palm stung, even beneath her glove, and she’d barely time to close her fingers around it before her blow was answered with a backhand to the jaw.
The force was such that her neck gave an audible crack when it wrenched to the side. She would rather have died than allow a cry to escape, but the pain was so acute, so startling, she couldn’t hold in the whimper.
Jenkins stepped toward them. The frown of concern twisting his mustache blurred as hot, unwanted tears muddled Mercy’s vision.
“Inspector, is such brutality necessary—”
“Shut up, Jenkins, and get me the shackles. I’m arresting this harpy for accosting an officer of—”
The sound of splintering wood froze all in the room into a momentary tableau of shock as the door on the far wall shattered beneath an overwhelming force.
Mercy’s pulse slammed in her veins as recognition seized her with a queer and instantaneous paralysis.
The last—well, the only—time she’d seen the newcomer, his gait had been lazy and arrogant. His movements loose-limbed and careless, as if he’d conquer the world when he bothered to get around to it.
He had made it abundantly clear to her in the past that he did nothing lest it pleased him.
And what he took pleasure in at this moment, was violence.
All semblance of charm and leisure had been replaced by a body coiled with the tension of steel cables and grey eyes glinting with all the lethality of gunmetal.
He was across the room in a blink, lunging like a viper.
He struck. Struck again.
Blood flew and bone crunched.
Suddenly, Trout was no longer grasping her but crumpled in a moaning puddle at her feet.