Marry The Man Today Part 5

"To bed with you, Pembridge. Good night." Ross watched the elderly man, worried to see that he seemed to have grown shorter in the last year, slower. He'd have to bring it up to Jared and Drew.

But not tonight. He wanted to take a moment to study the Lord Mayor's report to see if there was anything he could add to the Wallace case. Although how his own specialt y - g athering and a.n.a.lyzing data from naval fleets around the worl d - c ould help a local kidnapping investigation, he couldn't imagine. But he'd promised to try.

His shoulder aching and stiff, Ross left the members' area of the club and was just starting downstairs into the elaborate catacombs of the highly secret Factory when he heard footsteps behind him.

"Hold up there, Ross!"

"Drew! What the devil are you doing here? What happened to attending the theatre with your wife and that pack of Swedish royalty?"

"We did. But we came home to a note from the Lord Mayor, pleading with me to help you quietly investigate Lady Wallace's disappearance." Drew went ahead of Ross into the evidence lab and turned up the gaslight at the door sconce.

"Callis is determined to keep this out of the press for as long as he can," Ross said. "Seems to think the London season will be ruined by this spate of crimes against the aristocracy."

"The very reason Caro insisted I join the search. Because of the two women who vanished earlier this year."

"Did she know them? Or Lady Wallace?"

"No. But, you know Caro. A woman who understands the importance of keeping secrets. I came because it was the only way to keep her from joining the investigation herself."

"Then let's get to it." Ross handed Drew the thin Wallace report then dropped the pasteboard box onto the table. "Does it say who first noticed the lady missing?"

Drew leafed quickly through the file then snorted. "Her footman, Whiggens. According to this, he's elderly. Nearly blind, hard of hearing. Apparently he thought it was unusual for his lady to spend nearly an hour in the millinery shop, so he went inside to check on her."

"Didn't find her, then sent for a policeman, right?"

"Exactly. The officer on the corner came running, but the trail had already gone cold. In less than an hour."

"And this is all they found at the scene." Ross reached into the box and pulled out a gaudy blue bonnet, a large kid glove, and a folded, crumpled man's handkerchief.

"Virtually identical to the evidence they found at the f i rst two abductions." Drew lifted the bonnet by one of its ribbons and set it on a table stand. "Though surely not this same style of hat."

"We won't know that until Scotland Yard sends over the rest of the evidence." Ross took a magnifying gla.s.s from one of the forensic cabinets and peered through it at the bonnet. "So, they found this in Regent Street."

Drew checked the file. "In the alley behind the shop; lodged between two barrels, but in fairly plain sight."

"And Lady Wallace had been wearing this very hat when she entered the shop?"

"According to the footman and three of the sales clerks." Drew was already busy creating a case file from the few pages of the report, the familiar, metal-cornered box that would contain the particulars of the crime as the Factory investigated the details.

"What color is Lady Wallace's hair?" Ross pulled a glittering strand off the line of st.i.tching that attached the wide blue ribbon to the blue velvet brim of the hat.

Drew gave another quick scan of Callis's report. "Dark brown, almost black."

"Interesting." He held the strand up to the sharper light of the gas flame. "Because this belongs to a redhead."

He plucked two more from the rusching at the nape, and was struck by the softness of the scent.

A wisp of the familiar.

"An imposter?" Drew had asked the very question Ross had been considering.

"Except that all the witnesses identified Lady Wallace in the carriage as well as in the shop." Ross dropped onto a ta l l stool, sniffed at the handkerchief and grimaced. "Definitely chloroform. Found in the dressing room."

"And this glove found at the end of the alley. Also tinged with the slight smell of chloroform."

"Which could mean that Lady Wallace was chloroformed in the dressing room, taken outside into the alley, then put into a vehicle."

"We need to see for ourselves, Ross. Otherwise I might be forced to believe that Lady Wallace truly did disappear without a trace."

Leaving only the most bone-chilling possibilities.

"That's what disturbs me the most," Ross said. "Because people don't usually disappear completely, for no reason. Without a threat of blackmail or a ransom demand. This makes three, Drew. What the h.e.l.l's going on?"

"A professional criminal?"

"Clever enough to best Scotland Yard at least twice in the last four months. No wonder the Lord Mayor wasn't going to leave it to the Yard this time. Though I don't mind saying I'm completely stumped."

Not a common feeling here in the Factory. It sprawled for three blocks in all directions beneath the elegant rooms of the Huntsman and other, more ordinary buildings. Its catacombs f i lled with workshops and laboratories, libraries of information, communication systems, every possible invention and some impossible. Every government agency at their beck and call.

Yet sometimes even they were left completely at sea.

"And the Austrians, Ross? How did that go?"

Ross snorted and lifted the blue bonnet off the stand. "Playing games with the Great Powers, Drew. Dangerous games. With dangerous toys."

And yet suddenly Ross felt he was looking at the most dangerous weapon of all.

Richly scented and marked with strands of strawberry gold hair.

All of which made his brain ache.

And the ache only worsened after he left Drew in the lobby and reached the small, shared sitting area in front of his suite where he found Lord Tuckerton fast asleep in a high-backed chair, a newspaper draped across his knees.

"Lord Tuckerton?"

Ross touched the old man's bony shoulder and he woke with a snorting start. "Yes, yes, what?"

"Sorry to startle you, Lord Tuckerton, but you seemed to have fallen asleep."

"Ah, good, Blakestone. Just the man I wanted to see." The old man struggled to rise, but Ross bent onto a knee to save him the effort.

"What can I do for you, Tuckerton?"

The old man lifted his watery gray eyes to Ross. "You can help find my la.s.s."

"Your la.s.s?"

"My grandniece, Lady Wallace. She's missing." The whole of his body sagged against the back of the chair.

b.l.o.o.d.y h.e.l.l. "Lady Wallace is your grandniece?"

"My brother's granddaughter."

"I didn't realize." Poor old Tuckerton. Never married. Rarely left the Huntsman for anything more than Sunday services at St. Paul's or the opening of Parliament.

"How did you find this out?"

"That husband of hers, Wallace. He came by here asking if I'd seen her today. But I hadn't, had I? Not since Monday last when she picked me up and we went for a drive in the country."

"When did Wallace come by?"

"Just after lunch." After the abduction. "Can you find her for me, Blakestone?"

"I promise to do my best, Lord Tuckerton. But let's keep this between the two of us."

"Oh, thank you, lad. Thank you."

"But in the meantime, let's get you back to your chamber." Feeling like a heel for having nothing at all to tell him that would buoy the grieving old man's spirits, Ross stood and slipped his hand under the old man's elbow. "Things will look much better in the morning."

Chapter 5.

What mighty ills have not been done - by woman!Who lost Mark Anthony the world?- A woman!Who was the cause of a long ten years' war,And laid at last old Troy in ashes?- W oman!Thomas Otway, The Orphan, 1680"You look every inch the elderly spinster, Lady Ellis!" Elizabeth grinned as she straightened the woman's dowdy black fichu. "Eighty-five, if you're a day. "

"I feel a hundred." Lady Ellis sent a skittish glance toward the bustling mid-morning traffic clattering along Threadneedle Street. " And so... exposed."

"You've nothing to worry about, my lady." Though Elizabeth remembered being just as frightened the first time. Certain that everyone had guessed at her secret plans. That the police were on their way, ready to clap her in irons.

But now it seemed that the more often she braved the hazardous undertaking, the easier the job became. And the more she shamelessly craved the challenge.

"Is my wig on straight, then?" The woman grimaced and tugged on the black ribbon tied below her chin. "It feels loose."

"It's fine. Besides, no one will suspect a thing, because no one is paying the least attention to us. A pair of helpless, elderly ladies."

"You do look positively ancient, Miss Elizabeth."

"Then we're both well armed!" Elizabeth pushed her spectacles up her nose, then tapped the tip of her cane on the cobble. "Are you ready?"

"If you think we are..."

"I'm quite sure of it." And quite proud. "I've pulled off this stunt dozens of times, without a single hitch."

And she was about to do it again!

They were standing in front of the Bank of England, garbed in their frumpish battle armor, prepared to mount a full frontal a.s.sault on the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.

An indignity that never failed to raise her hackles.

Leave it to men to give an impregnable male inst.i.tution like the Bank of England a feeble, feminine nickname. While at the same time denying married women the right to open accounts of their own without their husbands' permission.

Their permission! As though women hadn't the sense to manage money on their own!

"Now remember, Lady Ellis," Elizabeth said, tamping back that tic of anger as she hooked the woman's arm and adjusted her aged hunch, "you are Miss Althea Moore."

"Althea Moore. I like the name." The woman started up the wide stairs beside Elizabeth, tottering like an expert toward the bank lobby.

"You've never been married. And you live alone in Pickering Place."

"Never married. Pickering Place. Pickering Place." Lady Ellis sounded perfectly doddering with all that muttering.

"You have inherited the rents on a green grocer and a small boardinghouse, and will be adding to your account regularly."

"Green grocer and a boardinghouse. A regular account." Lady Ellis was gripping Elizabeth's arm in a vise of fear. "I hope I can remember all that."

Elizabeth patted her hand. "Just follow my lead, no matter what, and everything will go swimmingly."

"But what if it doesn't?" Lady Ellis paused as they reached the wide porch and peered at Elizabeth through her wiry spectacles. "What if they catch us?"

"They won't." They can't. She couldn't let them. Because the penalty for conspiracy and defrauding a bank was too many years in a dank, dark prison to endure.

But this time there'd be no meddlesome earl to interfere with her fate.

The footman nodded a bow as he opened the great, gla.s.s door for them, and Elizabeth led the trembling woman into the cool air of the vast, vaulted, marble lobby of milling people and bank officials.

The enormously ta l l windows streamed sunlight across the floor and up the front edge of the rich, oak half-walls of the elevated teller's counter, which spanned the back wall of the room. The faces of the bank clerks peered down on the lobby from between the short wooden struts, putting the customers at a distinct disadvantage.

"So this is the Bank of England!" Lady Ellis had stopped in the center of the marble floor, staring in open-mouthed awe at the pompous, overly masculine atmosphere. "Imagine, Elizabeth, I'm nearly fifty years old, and in all that time I've had no cause to come here!"

"Because your husband has taken care of everything."

"Including the substantial inheritance left to me by my father, which I'm not allowed to touch because I'm a woman." Lady Ellis harru in phed, her eyes now snapping, her mouth set in an irritated frown. "After all, I couldn't possibly be intelligent enough to manage my own personal finances. Though not two months ago my husband insisted that our fifteen-year-old son open his own account. And I wouldn't trust that boy to know a horse from a hairbrush."

"Exactly, my lady." A sobering, hard-fought admission for most women.

Lady Ellis gave a defiant grunt, then tugged Elizabeth toward the wall of teller cages. "Come then, my dear. I'm ready for a little independence."

Brav a , Lady Ellis. Elizabeth leaned on the crook of her cane, and then hobbled up to a waiting clerk.

She had to crane her head to see up over the counter and through the short bars to the needle-nosed clerk in a crisp white collar and a staid gray neckcloth.

"May I help you, madam?" the man asked with a long, doubting drawl that made her want to give him a good whack on his balding head with her cane.

"Let's hope you can, sonny," Elizabeth shot back with a goodly amount of disdain, patting the stoop-shouldered Lady Ellis on the arm as though they were fusty old comrades. "My friend here has come to your bank to open an account. "