Jennifer Ashley: The Untamed Mackenzie

Mrs. Waller, Fellows knew, had nothing to do with the murders; she was a victim as much as any of the people her husband had killed. She’d been the one who’d saved the children, not Waller. Fellows went to tell her she was now safe from her husband.

The residents of the area did not like policemen. They hadn’t much liked Waller, the Marylebone Killer, but even so, they’d been closemouthed when Fellows had questioned them. Now the men and women on these streets stopped what they were doing to watch Fellows pass. Fellows knew his face was bruised and bloody, but his walk and his grim look would tell the others who’d won the fight.

Mrs. Waller was upset, confused, grieved, and relieved at the same time. She promised she’d look after the children and keep them well, and Fellows believed her.

The rooms she lived in weren’t a hovel, but they weren’t a palace either. Fellows handed her a few coins before he left. He also stopped and had a word with her landlord, saying he’d be back if the landlord turfed out Mrs. Waller because her husband had been a murdering bastard. She needed help, not blame.

Fellows left, hearing muttered words behind him. But he hadn’t come here to make friends. He’d come to stop a killer and save a family, and that he’d done.

Now he needed a bath, a thick pint of beer, and a good night’s sleep.

But it wasn’t meant to be. First he’d have to report to his superiors then spend the rest of the day and into the night writing up a concise documentation of the investigation and arrest. The reward for his valor would be paperwork.

Fellows walked into his office to cheers. Word had already gotten around how he’d landed the Marylebone Killer, embellished, no doubt, by the constables who’d been on the scene.

“Well done, sir!” Detective Sergeant Pierce sang out as Fellows entered his inner office. “Fought your way through three men, single-handed, did you, sir? And then dragged out our killer by the hair, him begging for mercy?”

“Exactly,” Fellows said, and Pierce laughed.

Fellows collapsed to the chair behind his desk, drew out a clean handkerchief, and dabbed at the wounds on his face.

“Don’t get too comfortable, sir,” Sergeant Pierce said, annoyingly cheerful. “One’s come over the wire from Richmond. Asking for you specifically, Chief.”

Bloody hell, what now? “I’m on leave, Sergeant. Starting immediately. That is, after I spend all night writing a boring report.”

“Sorry, sir.” Pierce didn’t look one bit sorry, the sod. “Detective Chief Super wants you to take this. Police in Richmond telegraphed. A bishop dropped dead at a fancy garden party in the middle of a load of toffs. They think it’s foul play, and they want a detective from the Yard. They want it handled with kid gloves, and they specifically want you.”

Fellows scrubbed his hand through his hair, finding it stiff with blood. “If they want kid gloves, why do they want me ?”

“I suspect ’cause you’re related to a toff—a duke, no less.”

Since the day it had come out that Fellows was in fact the illegitimate son of the Duke of Kilmorgan, he’d gotten hell from his colleagues. They either looked at him with contempt or went so far as to bow to him mockingly in the halls. Laughter was always present.

Fellows decided he could either play superior officer and quell them, or he could look the other way. He’d gained back his respect by making a rude gesture when he bothered to notice the jibes, then completely ignoring them. Fellows also worked hard to show he was damn good at his job, better than most, and did not let his accidental aristocratic blood hamper him.

Sergeant Pierce went on, “I suspect that if we do have to arrest one of the nobs, the Richmond boys would rather it be one of us who does it. They have to go on living there while we can scuttle back to Town.”

“They want us to do the dirty work, in other words.”

Pierce grinned. “On the nose, sir.”

A jaunt to Richmond to clear up a problem among the upper classes was not what Fellows wanted at the moment. He’d meant to finish his report, go home, bathe, sleep, pack, drop in at his mother’s to say hello and good-bye, and then board a train. He had a week’s leave coming. His half brother, Cameron Mackenzie, had suggested Fellows stop in at the races at Newmarket next week. Fellows, though still uncomfortable with his newfound family, didn’t mind the horse races. Any man might enjoy himself at a racecourse. He’d planned to go to the seaside and stare at the water a while, then make his leisurely way to Newmarket for the racing meet next Monday.

But he was a policeman first, and if he had to postpone his trip, then he did. Policemen didn’t get days off.

Fellows rubbed his hair again. His face was already dark with new beard, and then there was the blood all over him. He didn’t feel in any way fit to face a house party of people convinced a man who’d died of overeating and apoplexy had been murdered.

But there was nothing for it. “We go,” Fellows said in a hard voice. “It’s our job.”

Sergeant Pierce lost his grin. “We?”

“I’ll need my dutiful sergeant for this one. Let me go wash my face, and we’ll be off. Fetch your hat.”

Fellows took some grim satisfaction from Sergeant Pierce’s crestfallen look as he headed off to the washroom to make himself presentable.

“He’s dead, all right,” Sergeant Pierce said an hour or so later.

He and Fellows knelt next to the body while a doctor called Sir Richard Cavanaugh stood nearby and gave them his medical opinion in the most condescending way possible.

“Histotoxic hypoxia,” Sir Richard said. “See his blue coloring? Prussic acid, most likely. In the tea, I would think, a fatal dose. Would have been quick. Only a few moments from ingestion to death.”

Fellows disliked arrogant doctors who presumed ahead of the facts, but in this case, the man was probably right. Fellows had seen death by prussic-acid poisoning before. Still, he preferred to hear conclusions from the coroner after a thorough postmortem, not to mention a testing of food and drink the victim had taken, than speculations by a doctor to the elite.

Fellows ordered Pierce to gather up what was left of the broken teacup with the liquid inside, and also the full teacup that stood next to the pot on the table. He had Pierce pour off the tea still in the pot into a vial for more testing. Fellows scraped up cream from a pastry that had been smashed on the ground, and the remains of the plate that had held it, handing all to Pierce.

He left Pierce sealing up the vials with wax and had a look around the tea tent. Unfortunately too many people had trampled in here; the place was a mess. The grass was filled with footprints—ladies’ high heels, gentlemen’s boots, servants’ sturdy shoes—all overlapping one another.

The local police sergeant stood well outside the tent as though washing his hands of the affair. Fellows approached him anyway. The fact that the local police had sent no one higher than a sergeant meant the chief constable wanted to keep well out of the way. He wondered why.

“Your thoughts, Sergeant?” Fellows asked the local man.

The sergeant shrugged, but the man had a keen eye and didn’t look in the least bit stupid. “The doc says poison in the tea, and I don’t disagree. The young lady they think did it is in the house—my constable’s on the lookout up there. She’s an aristo’s daughter, though, so the lady of the house didn’t want the likes of us questioning her. Says we had to wait for you.” The sergeant gave Fellows a dark nod. “Better you than me, if you don’t mind me saying so, guv.”

He meant better Fellows lost his job for arresting a rich man’s spoiled daughter, which was exactly what could happen. Fellows’ Mackenzie connections might be able to save him from a lawsuit by the girl’s father, but his career could be over.