Read Online A Fatal Likeness by Lynn Shepherd - Free Book Online

want diggin’ up. Not now.”
    “And certainly not,” says Charles dryly, “if they’ve been doing everything in their power to ensure it remains safely buried.”
    “But even if they ’ave, it don’t prove this ’arriet was murdered. She coulda died in any one of an ’undred ways. Small-pox, typhoid, childbirth—”
    “She was living apart from her husband.”
    There is a silence. Charles glances up and sees Sam looking at his bandaged hand. “Look,” he says, pulling his hand away under the table, ”I know what you’re saying but I just don’t believe it’s as simple as that. And more to the point, neither did Maddox.”
    Sam eyes him carefully. “He’s still not well then.”
    Charles shakes his head. “But you know as well as I do that he would never have written those words if he wasn’t absolutely sure of what he was saying. Even if he didn’t have the proof necessary to make such an accusation in public.”
    Sam nods; even in 1850 Maddox is remembered in the Metropolitan Police, and Sam needs no reminding of either his achievements, or his much-merited reputation.
    The waitress comes towards the table with their two plates under tin lids, and clatters them down. There is a delicious smell of meat and gravy, and the two of them fall on the food like men half starved.
    “I was thinkin’,” says Sam a minute later, his mouth full of pie, “those words of your uncle’s—he obviously weren’t the only person as thought there’d been a murder. Someone ’ad obviously spoken to ’im about it and ’e didn’t believe ’em—or at least not to start wiv.”
    Charles raises an eyebrow. “I had just about managed to get that far, Sam,” he says.
    “No, what I mean is, ’as it occurred to you that that person might be the same one the Shelleys want you to spy on? I reckon this other person’s showed ’em papers of ’is own—papers they ’ad no idea existed, and that’s what’s set the cat among the pigeons all of a sudden. I’m prepared to bet them Shelleys ’ad never even ’eard the name Maddox before that.”
    Charles is staring at him now—staring like a man who has just had a revelation. As indeed he has.
    “That’s brilliant, Sam— brilliant. I’ve been wondering what the sudden urgency is in all this—why the Shelleys didn’t try to track my uncle down years ago if they were so worried about what he might say—but if they’ve only just discovered he was involved that would explain everything. That has to be the answer— has to be. ”
    Sam grins. “Glad to be of use.”
    Charles picks up his fork, then lays it down again. “One more favour, Sam. Can you have another look at the Runners’ files for 1816? Not for Harriet this time, but for my uncle—see if there’s any mention of his name—any suggestion of what he might have been doing back then.”
    Sam wipes his mouth with his sleeve. “Right you are. Now then, what do you say to pudding?”

THREE
    A Wanderer
    B ACK AT B UCKINGHAM S TREET , time scarcely seems to have passed at all. It is as if the house is becalmed in a perpetual present tense: Molly is cooking, Billy is filling the coal scuttles, Abel is sitting at Maddox’ side, and the old man himself is straying still, like a day-appearing dream, through the dim wildernesses of his closed and darkened mind. Charles heads up to the office, where he goes again through the case files for the years before 1816 for any possible clue he might have overlooked. But there’s nothing. Nothing, oddly, apart from another section mysteriously missing from late 1814, but there are no scored-through words there, either before or after the excised pages, and therefore no clue, now, as to what they once contained.
    Charles is putting the book back on the shelf when he registers the sound of the door-bell downstairs, but assumes it’s the butcher’s boy until he looks up to see Billy standing at the office door.
    “Female to see you, Mr Charles.”
    Charles sighs. The