Silence of Deceit

Silence of Deceit A BOW STREET DUCHESS MYSTERY BOOK THREE CARA DEVLIN Copyright © 2023 by Cara Devlin All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Names and characters are products of the author’s imagination. Paperback ISBN: 979-8987612545 Contents Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20 Penance for the Dead About the Author Also by Cara Devlin Chapter One November 1819 London The offices at number four Bow Street were an entirely different beast once the sun slipped behind the city’s western horizon. During daylight hours, the magistrate’s offices were generally sedate, with patrolmen either clearing out the overnight arrests or readying them for hearings at the magistrate’s court. Come nightfall, however, those patrolmen started dragging in all manner of criminals, from petty thieves and pickpockets to drunken belligerents and unruly cyprians. As a principal officer, Hugh Marsden no longer prowled the streets to catch criminals in the act or answer the hue and cry of wronged citizens. He was accountable for more significant arrests and investigations that took time and patience to solve. Murders were, by and large, simple things to crack as most people did a rather shoddy job of covering up their evil deeds. People were sloppy. They were guileless and unoriginal. In short, they were predictable, which made Hugh’s work relatively straightforward and boring. However, some cases broke the mold and diverged from the ordinary and mundane. Last April, and then again in August, Hugh had come upon two such cases. In the spring, a mutilated opera singer had been found in Seven Dials with a delirious and blood-covered man nearby, the murder weapon at his side. The fact that the man had been a duke of the realm had only further convinced Hugh that whether one lived in the East End slums, or in Mayfair, people were simple creatures. There were exceptions, of course. The duke’s wife, Audrey Sinclair, was certainly one. She’d challenged Hugh’s accusations against the duke, and rejecting the clear-cut case, she went about hunting down the true murderer, going against the grain and in the end, proving Hugh wrong. And then in August, the duchess had beckoned him to the countryside to investigate a woman’s death. The unraveling of that case had been anything but straightforward, and once again, Audrey managed to untangle a host of well-concealed lies while in lockstep with Hugh. In the near two months since that case in Hertfordshire, Hugh had made arrests in several more killings in London, none of them very inventive or complex. And most of his investigating tended to happen during the day, when the Bow Street offices resembled a busy but orderly business firm. Tonight, however, as he entered the offices near midnight, his eyes burning from lack of sleep and his mind slightly hazed from one too many drams of whisky, Hugh remembered the hassle of working at this hour. He pitied the night officers and patrolmen. The main room was a madhouse of shouting and jostling bodies. A pair of drunken women screeched lewd and suggestive comments at the harried booking officer behind the front desk while several patrolmen attempted to keep a group of ragtags from entering fisticuffs. An old woman with blackened gums and hardly any teeth laughed hysterically as she bounced a wailing baby, bundled in fouled linens, upon her knee. And to top it off, in the corner, a stray, mangy dog lifted its leg over a potted plant. Immediately, Hugh regretted his decision to leave his warm, quiet home on Bedford Street at such a ridiculous hour. He had no one to blame but himself. It wasn’t as if he’d been summoned to the station, and earlier that afternoon, he’d resolved an investigation into several stolen shipments of snuff (an assistant to the tobacconist who reported the theft had, unsurprisingly, thought to sell it for his own gain). Hugh had but some papers to sort through and reports to complete for filing. Nothing that could not wait until proper morning. However, Bow Street had been a better alternative to lying awake in bed until dawn, dwelling on what Miss Gloria Hanson had whispered in his ear that evening as they lay side-by-side, sweaty and spent: “Who were you just making love to? It was not me.” He’d stared at his long-standing mistress, baffled, and asked her to explain her meaning. Though now, he wished he had not. The harassed booking officer caught Hugh’s eye. He parted his lips, as if to call to him, and Hugh quickly raised a hand in greeting before darting toward his office. Once inside, he closed the door, shutting out the chaos. He hung his greatcoat and top hat, both damp from a misty autumn rain, and sighed as he collapsed into the creaky chair behind his desk. The room was small and windowless, likely a closet when the building had been a residence during the previous century, before Sir Henry Fielding had founded the Runners. But it was his own space, and for that, Hugh was grateful. He leaned back into the chair and stared at the stacks of waiting files on his blotter. Then, sighed heavily. It seemed all he’d managed to do was change his physical location, for the memory of Gloria’s bold question continued to plague him. “You’ve been different lately,” she’d elaborated with an insouciant shrug of her bare shoulder. “In what manner?” “Distant. Like you are thinking of something else. And yet…” She had searched for the right words before settling upon,