Shadowseer: London by Morgan Rice

Author:Morgan Rice [Rice, Morgan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan Rice
Published: 2021-03-22T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The house was a tall town house, quite close to the museum, and spread over four stories. A series of names and numbers outside suggested that it was divided up into flats. Kaia saw Pinsley frowning at that slightly.

“What is it?” she asked. Kaia wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting from Tabitha Greene’s home. From the area, she sort of understood that it would be grander than anything she’d known growing up, but still, a part of her couldn’t square that with the idea of a woman stuck in Bedlam.

“These are living arrangements I would expect more from a young bachelor,” the inspector said. “Living in a flat at the heart of a fashionable part of the city, rather than with her family. It implies something about that relationship, I think. It is an assertion of independence from them, at the very least. But one that was supported, at least in part, or she would not have the means to do this.”

“How do we do this?” Kaia asked, looking up at the forbidding dark green of the front door, with a brass knocker shaped like a lion’s head. Shouldn’t someone who could afford to live here be able to afford better than the asylum she’d ended up in?

“Directly,” Pinsley said, striding up to the door and rapping the knocker against its plate.

“What if there’s no one in?” Kaia started to ask, but even as she did it, an older woman in a dark dress and white apron opened the door. She had white hair curling under her bonnet, and slightly crabbed fingers clutched a broom. Kaia guessed that she was a housekeeper.

“Oh, you startled me,” the woman said. “Do forgive me. I’m afraid, if you’re here to see any of the residents no one is at home right now.”

“This is where Tabitha Greene lived?” Inspector Pinsley asked, in a businesslike tone that seemed to leave no room for polite chattering on the doorstep.

“If you’re looking for Miss Greene, I’m sorry, but she is currently away in Harrogate, taking the waters at the spa,” the housekeeper said, in a faint Scottish accent.

“A pleasant fiction,” Pinsley said. “Who coached you to say that rather than the truth?”

“Sir, I-”

“Until the early hours of yesterday morning, when she was killed by an unknown assailant, Miss Greene was being held in Bedlam.”

The housekeeper took a staggering step back. “Killed? What kind of a thing is that to say? Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Kaia saw Pinsley take out his warrant card, holding it up for her to see. The moment he did it, the housekeeper seemed to collapse in on herself, slumping down to the ground with only her broom to hold her up.

Kaia went to her instinctively, helping her back to her feet. The housekeeper was crying now, tears pouring down her face.

“She’s really dead?” the housekeeper said. “She’s… no, she can’t be.”

“She is,” Pinsley said. “And now I need to find the person who did it. To do that, I need to see where she lived.

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