One Hour in Freedom by Jude Knight

Author:Jude Knight [Knight, Jude]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781991199669
Publisher: Jude Knight
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Max had been the one to let Lion know that Dan needed him. Apparently, word of the arrest of Dan’s team was all the buzz on the docks.

After a quick consultation with Lion and Fogg, Dan sent his watermen off to see what people were saying. “Grumble all you like. Say you think I did it and only got off because an earl intervened. Or that I was arrested because someone else had it in for me. Whatever will get people talking. But be careful. Keep together. Don’t let anyone know the magistrate thinks we’re innocent. I don’t want any of you knifed in the back.”

They agreed a place and time for their next meeting. Dan told them how to get an urgent message to him through Lion’s man Blythe, and then off they went.

Lion, Dan, and Fogg adjourned to a coffee shop, which was relatively quiet after the rush of people calling in on their way to work and before the influx when those who kept later hours woke and started their day.

Fogg had news and a theory. The Wakefield case file on the war between the crime lord known as the Beast and the ducal houses of Haverford and Winshire said it had ended in the death of the crime lord and the deportation of his sister, who later died in the Caribbean.

Dan knew that much. Indeed, the man whose trial he had attended in Coventry was the lover of that sister, out for revenge against the Duke and Duchess of Haverford, whom he blamed for her death.

The notes identified the Beast as Stanley Wharton, born to an impoverished gentry family. They detailed several earlier cases where he had committed crimes that affected people who knew who he really was. Fogg explained, “In 1814 and 1815, he called himself The Beast, but for several years before that, he was known as the Duke of Devil’s Kitchen. And before that, as a young man, he was caught selling flesh and also treasonous secrets. That was before he changed his name. He fled overseas in 1807, but Wakefield believes he was back in England by 1812.”

Fogg thought it interesting that, in Wharton’s investment into crime in the first decade of the century, he used a little coterie of former school friends as go-betweens. Wharton had dropped out of Society, but the friends continued to attend fashionable events and feed information to Wharton. “It may be worth investigating, my lord, Mr Moriarty, whether any of those who were at school with him are still active in Society. His only known living relatives are certainly not criminals. They are two little girls, and their father was one of those who put Wharton out of business. It seems possible Wharton bequeathed his enterprises to a friend.”

“It is a thought,” Lion conceded. “I have a few friends still from school, though my closest friends are people I served with in the dragoons.”

Fogg nodded. “Yes, my lord. We find friends in our circle. But crime bosses do not have circles.

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