Reckless Rules (Brambridge Novel 4) (33 page)

“Boss, I think you should take a look at what we found,” a deep voice said from behind him. It was that of Jimmy Carandel, Pablo Moreno’s second in command.

“Can’t you tell I’m in the middle of something?” Pablo’s reply was testy “It’s a family matter.”

“I think you’ll want to take a look at this man. He looks like a high end nob. Found him coming through the front door on his hands and knees. Don’t know many people that do that sort of thing so I clunked him one on the head. There’s something familiar about him, though.”

A white moon shaped face loomed out of the darkness and into the brighter candle light. Bill blinked. Pablo Moreno stared at him.

“Hmm. Different clothes, a lighter complexion but yes the same man. I said you were different, didn’t I,
strongman
? I shouldn’t have believed your act. If my son hadn’t been messing around then I would have been able to concentrate on you more fully. As it was, you haven’t been too clever, have you? I can see that Jimmy has taken care of you quite nicely.”

Bill glanced down at his chest. In the candlelight, a multitude of chains gleamed around his chest, binding his hands behind his back. He tried to take a deep breath but he couldn’t; the chains dug in too tight.

“I got the old hauling chains out of the carriage, boss. The ones we used for that elephant last year. Thought they might come in handy if there was any snow. Didn’t know I would be catching me a strongman.” Jimmy sneered again through the good side of his face, the effect all the more frightening as the other half of his face remained immobile.

“Very good, Mr. Carandel. Now then, I think our strongman should come into the next room. Whilst this is a family affair, I think our Lady Colchester has been a little naughty with our strongman here. It would do them both good to see each other before I deal with them both. Let nobody say I’m not a kind man.”

“Of course not, boss.” Bill felt himself kicked in the shins. “Get up, you sack of manure. Follow Mr. Moreno here, there’s a good boy.”

Bill stumbled through into a hallway and followed some steps down into a basement room. It was sparsely furnished, and had only three occupants.

“Return back to the front hall, Jimmy. We don’t want anyone else trying more heroics,” Pablo said, pushing Bill’s unresisting form into a chair with one hand. The other held a large pistol.

“Bill!” Victoria gasped. Her face was white, and yet her blue eyes glinted. She sat with her back straight and her feet in front of her. She slumped slightly as she took in the chains around his chest.

Pablo laughed. “You thought he was going to rescue you, didn’t you, my dear Victoria? Instead it was I who pulled you from the crowd, no thanks to my useless son here.”

Pablo kicked at a figure that lay on the ground. The body writhed and was still. Bill bent forward to look more closely. Pedro lay prone at his father’s feet. Whether more out of fear or necessity, Bill could not tell.

The man that had been standing quietly in the corner took a step forward. “We had a deal, Moreno. A deal that your son here threatened to ruin.” His eyes looked only half-open in the candlelight. As Bill looked closer, it became clear that the man was clearly of Asian origin.

It was the first time that Bill had seen Pablo nervous. The heavyset man tapped his fingers against a chair back. “Yes quite,” he muttered. “A deal.”

“And your obsession with your sister-in-law has made our other deal, how should we say, a little precarious in the recent weeks.”

“I need her.” Pablo protested. “She’ll give me the entry into society that I need—just think of all the items I could obtain for you if I have access to all the balls and gatherings of the ton.”

“I don’t understand,” said the man smoothly. “If you expose her as your sister-in-law you will ruin her.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean to do that. Just get her running scared a little to do what I wanted her to do.”

“I would never have done it, Pablo,” Victoria said bitingly. Her voice was cut off as the Asian looking man took out a handkerchief and wound it round her mouth.

“That is the way you deal with women where I come from,” he said scathingly. “No need to sell them off like cattle. They do what we tell them.”

“Yes, that was my son’s idea and I am not very happy with it.” Pablo kicked again at Pedro on the floor. “I should have known he wouldn’t reform his ways. I couldn’t believe it when my friend, Mr. Cryne, told me about some of his activities and that his own son was involved too. And then
Victoria
here confirmed it. I should have cut Pedro off and never allowed him back again.”

“You do realize that by allowing your son to cater to such a club, that he has brought unwanted, high attention to your activities?”

Pablo frowned. “That is a potential problem.”

“It is not a potential problem,” the Asian man thundered. “It has been a problem. Why do you think Edward Fiske, your so called accountant agreed to become your friend so readily?”

“He’s just a businessman,” Pablo said dismissively. “He’s only known me as Mr. Durnish, nothing more.”

“You are a fool, Pablo. He knows exactly who you are. Can’t you tell he has been working for the Crown? What is more you silly fool, you introduced me to him. Now he can recognize me.”

Bill jerked his head up. So that was what Edward Fiske had agreed to with Lord Granwich. Celine had let that one slip when he was comforting her. He couldn’t stop the gasp that came from his mouth. As he did so, he felt the chains around him move. Gods preserve him, he hadn’t been thinking clearly. His concern for Victoria had overridden his common sense. He was tied in chains. One of the acts that he had practiced but discarded was freeing himself from tightly-wound chains. In fact, the tighter the better; it allowed him to flex his muscles more.       

Of course, he had to admit the only reason he had dropped the act was because he had only managed to break the chains once.

CHAPTER 33

Victoria gazed at Bill over the top of her gag. Now, even her voice had been taken away from her, the only method of bargaining that she knew. But she didn’t know any secrets about Pablo Moreno to blackmail him with. He was the one that knew secrets about her that even she didn’t know.

Pedro lay sprawled at her feet, his hands outstretched towards her toes, and his face turned away from her towards his father’s shoes. Victoria couldn’t resist the urge to bring down her booted foot beneath her dress onto his knuckle and
grind
. Pedro gave out a yelp and a scream as Victoria continued.

The men stopped talking and gazed down at Pedro as he continued to scream. They looked suspiciously at Victoria. She cocked her head on one side and raised her eyebrows, shrugging her shoulders.

Whilst their attention was on her, she couldn’t help notice Bill take a deep breath. She was intensely aware of him. They all were. He was such a massive man. He sat bound like a tiger, and yet his danger was palpable. A lock of his overlong hair had fallen across his face. He quirked one side of his mouth up at her.

Constrained as they both were, her tummy turned to liquid. This was nothing to do with
treatment
now. She could recognize it for what it was.

Pablo and the Asian man had started talking again; it was more like arguing. Words such as “diamond and amethyst necklace, Indian dagger, and safe” reached her ears in a jumbled up fashion. She frowned. Lord Colthaven had approached her investigation agency looking for a diamond and amethyst necklace, and an Indian dagger that had been stolen from his house.

Victoria turned her head sharply as a metallic sound ground away at the edges of her hearing. She shook her head as it was sustained, and fell away again. She glanced at Bill and frowned. He took a deep breath inward and the metallic noise started again. His face became redder and redder. Victoria could see his muscles flexing. Good God, he was trying to break the chains with his chest. She glanced back to the arguing men. They hadn’t noticed. And they wouldn’t notice if she had anything to do with it. Bill was their only hope of getting out of the pauper farm alive.

She brought her foot down on Pedro’s hand again. He moaned and squealed.

“Oh do shut your boy up, Pablo,” the Asian man said irritably. “If it wasn’t for him I wouldn’t have had to have stepped out of the shadows. Stealing girls and selling them. Such an amateur’s activity. The average bawd on the street does that.”

Pablo looked sadly at his son. “I am aware that he has a certain disregard for me. I should have known that something was not quite right when he compromised our operation in Manchester. We entered a house looking for some deeds that had been hidden there. He knew that he was meant to just kill anyone he came across, but instead there was this young girl...” Pablo choked slightly. “In the end he did kill her, but not before he…”

“I’m not sure I want to know.”

“I sent him away, but met up with him again a few months ago. He said he was a reformed character. I was… happy. That he had more skills that he could give me, having worked for a man called Bertrand Lisle. He is certainly a very good impersonator.”

Victoria almost choked on her gag.

“I want some recompense for all the trouble,” the Asian man continued. “He was offering for sale a list of names that he attached great importance to. Even though he didn’t know what he was offering. I think I will take those.”

“You are very welcome to have them if you can find them,” Pablo said doubtfully. “What is the significance of the list?”

“You too don’t know? That is why you are the house breaker and I deal with the goods,” the Asian man said pityingly. “Suffice it to say, the list has a great power. Once it is widely known that it is out there, all the governments of western Europe will be fighting over it. As it is, with tensions between our countries deteriorating, this list will bring me much cachet with my advisers. Your Pedro has been most indiscreet. Now then, we were talking about that missing necklace and the dagger that I wanted.”

Victoria winced as the sound of grinding metal grew more audible behind her. She tried to shout through her gag.

“Shut up,” Pablo said sharply.

“I think we should hear what she has to say,” the Asian man said quietly. He pulled the gag loosely off her mouth.

Victoria ran her tongue around her dry mouth. “I’ve got a diamond necklace,” she said quietly.

“Everyone of your ilk has a diamond necklace,” the Asian man said contemptuously. “This one is fabulous, covered in—”

“—amethysts?” Victoria widened her eyes. “What a coincidence. It just so happens that I also have in my possession an Indian dagger. The elephants on its handle are marvelous.”

The Asian man’s face grew black as thunder, his lips pulled to the side he swung to face Pablo. “I thought you said that someone stole those from you, along with the rest of the order?”

“Oh, they weren’t stolen from him,” Victoria said with a smile, to Pablo’s horror. “He gave them to me.”

The Asian man’s body stilled. He stared at Pablo. Then, with no warning, he pulled a large curved knife from his waist band and
swiped
.

Victoria gazed in shock, and Pablo gave out a scream that dwarfed his son’s. “My hand,” he said stutteringly. “Where is my hand?”      

Victoria took a deep breath and choked as the Asian man brusquely pulled the gag back over her mouth. Pablo’s hand lay on the floor twitching, still gripping the pistol. Blood dripped in rhythmic spurts from his wrist onto the floor. He screamed again. “W...W...Why?”

The man grinned darkly. “You have become redundant. You have made several terrible lapses in judgement, firstly revealing yourself to your sister-in-law, stealing from me and lastly allowing your son to compromise our operations.”

“But Mr. Khaffar, we have a longstanding relationship, ever since Spain…”

“You must know, Mr. Moreno, that in our culture there is no mercy. I have already done a deal with your son. In fact, Pedro, why don’t you stand up now?”

Pedro slowly climbed to his feet, nursing his hand and glaring venomously at his father and at Victoria.

Victoria could only watch in horrid fascination.

“Pedro, my son, what have you done?” Pablo said shakily. His body was beginning to convulse from the blood loss. Victoria glanced at Bill, who was still flexing his muscles and trying to break his chains, although watching everything around him.

“What have I done, Father?” Pedro strutted to the stricken man. “I’ve done what had to be done. You were becoming a liability with your obsession with Lady Colchester. You always wanted what you couldn’t have. Mother said as much.”

“I don’t understand what your mother has to do with this. I, I took you away from her.”

“Yes. You did,” Pedro said bitterly. “You took me away from that bitch of a woman and taught me to be an acrobat.”

“We’ve had a good life—”

“That woman was one of the richest women in the country. The life I could have had with her would have been immeasurable compared to what we had. Running for our lives through Spain. Associating with freaks… I would have tamed my own mother. And I would have got all of her money.”

“No one knows where all the money went after she died.” Pablo gasped and grabbed at his arm.

“Oh I do,” Pedro said bitterly. “She wrote to me. God knows how the letter found me.” Pedro raised his voice an octave. “Dear Son. There’s no money for you. Lord Colchester has it all. Mother.”

“I hate to break up this little family feud.” Mr. Khaffar wiped his knife against his breeches, smearing them with a deep red stain. “But time is getting on. I believe you said that you would give me the list if I dealt with your father?”

“But he’s not dead!” Pedro said unhappily.

Mr. Khaffar looked at the acrobat pityingly. “He only has one hand. Soon he will faint from lack of blood. He will be found outside the cellar, a deal gone wrong. With his reputation he will be taken away and hanged. I can leave some things on him to prove that. He will die before they manage to hang him.”