The Tin Face Parade (Harrison Catcliffe series Book 1) by Joly Braime

Author:Joly Braime [Braime, Joly]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Corri Barba Books
Published: 2023-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

sixteen

Potter possessed many excellent characteristics (however few of these he might routinely have displayed), and yet humility and sensitivity were not among them. At least not when he considered himself to have been proved correct. Discovering himself vindicated in the matter of Matthew Grayling’s link to Halsingham House, his pomposity bordered on the insufferable.

‘Mark my words, we’re onto it now!’ he cackled, jabbing his pipe stem at me from his customary perch in my most comfortable armchair. His mood was so buoyant that he had not only removed his coat and hat, but he had even ventured to roll up his soot-speckled sleeves, revealing a smudgy, bluish tattoo of a curved sword that he had almost certainly applied himself.

‘Are we, Mr Potter?’ asked Agnes, from a straight-backed seat by the fire. She had said very little since Potter had arrived, confining herself to sipping thoughtfully at her tea and measuring my peculiar friend over the rim of her teacup with undisguised intrigue. Their acquaintance was a quarter of an hour old, and the meeting of worlds was a glorious thing to behold. He now grinned across at her, in a gruesome manner which no doubt he considered winning. She returned his smile politely, then asked tentatively, ‘What… exactly, I mean… are we on to?’

Potter shot me a withering look, as if her perceived slowness were my fault rather than her own.

‘If Matthew was working at the big house then you can be sure there’s a secret that goes with it. I guarantee it.’

‘And I don’t doubt you. But how will this help us find Henrietta?’ enquired Agnes.

‘It won’t, but it might help us get to the bottom of some other questions, which in their turn might put us on the right track to finding her. Where there’s one mystery, there’s another, see?’ he explained with exaggerated patience. ‘If Matthew was there then it means someone in that old pile was getting something made by Giovanni’s workshop, but none of them are talking about it. It might not necessarily have been a face – Matthew was a bloke Giovanni could rely on, and he sometimes went places as his agent, taking casts and measurements or doing fittings. Was it one of the family, I wonder? The boy?’

‘Wait a moment.’ I held my finger up. ‘I don’t think it could have been. Remember the Halsinghams had just gone away when your friend Grayling took lunch in the servants’ hall.’

‘Ah, but if the cook met him in the middle of March then it would have been his last visit,’ countered Potter. ‘The family were at home for all his earlier trips. He might just have been dropping off the finished work.’

‘You’re grasping, Jabez.’

‘Oh, we’re all grasping,’ he said irritably. ‘You’re grasping, the police are grasping. I tell you what no-one’s grasping at – the collar of that runaway murderess. “The Bloody Baroness” they’re calling her down the Bear.’

‘She didn’t kill him deliberately,’ said Agnes stiffly. At Potter’s throwaway remark, curiosity had turned sharply to animosity, and her sudden dislike was palpable.

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