Page 144 of A Debt Inherited

Roark’s good eye narrowed.

“Tell me something useful,” Fitzwilliam said, “or I stop asking and let Villiers begin.”

Villiers leant forward, setting his feet. Harris’s hammer came down into his hand. Simms did not move at all.

Roark looked from one man to the next, then back to Fitzwilliam. “They say you tore out a Frenchman’s throat at Badajoz.”

“He did not understand his adversary.”

“With your teeth.”

“As I said.” Fitzwilliam held Roark’s good eye.

Roark nodded. “Upper Gower Street.”

“What number?”

Roark volunteered the door number. “Ask for Mrs Price.”

Fitzwilliam rose. “What is she to you?”

Roark looked up. “Mrs Price is my man Sykes’s cousin.”

Villiers opened the door. Harris and Simms took the room on either side of Fitzwilliam, who tucked his hat beneath his arm.

“Then I shall be civil.”

* * *

Upper Gower Street, later that evening

The houses stood in a sober line, their brick darkened by weather and coal-smoke, their steps scrubbed clean enough to prove effort rather than prosperity. At the number Roark had given, one lamp burned behind a muslin blind. No carriage waited before the door. The brass knocker had been polished, but not lately.

Villiers looked up at the windows. “Respectable.”

“Nearly,” Fitzwilliam said.

Harris had already passed the house once and returned by the opposite pavement. “No man at the back that I saw. There’s a kitchen light, and a woman moving within.”

“Mrs Price?”

“Could be.”

“Then we shall ask.” Fitzwilliam drew his watch. “Villiers, show them your manners.”

Villiers mounted the steps and swung his fist against the panel three times.

The sound carried sharply in the quiet street. A moment passed. Then another. A chain shifted within, and the door opened as far as the fastening allowed.

A woman’s face appeared in the gap, pale beneath a cap hastily tied. Her eyes went first to Villiers’s shoulders, then to Harris behind him.

“We take no callers at this hour.”

“Mrs Price?” Villiers asked.

Her hand tightened upon the door. “Who asks?”

“Colonel Fitzwilliam.”