Page 64 of An Artful Dodge
“So what string did she pull to convince you?”
She lowered her chin and looked up at me as if I was being willfully obtuse. “Come now, Kit. What would do it?”
“She threatenedus,” I said slowly, thinking not only of Josie’s arrest, mere days after Maggie appeared at Elephant and Castle, but of the brown-suited man who had nearly caught Mary and me. “There was a man at Pickford’s, the day before Josie was arrested.”
She blinked. “What?”
“I didn’t tell you because nothing happened,” I said hurriedly. “I didn’t want you to think Mary should’ve seen him and keep her from working.”
“Oh.” Amelia pressed a hand over her face with a groan. “God, I wish I’d known. I thought Maggie was bluffing about having you all tagged. That takes time to arrange—finding people you can trust to alert the shops. I didn’t think she could organize it in a matter of days.”
“You didn’t know she’d been here months,” I reminded her. “Or even longer. February was just the first timeIsaw her. And didn’t you say that Silas Pike had been her lover? All she had to do was connect with him, and her network would start coming back to her.”
Regret deepened the lines around her mouth. “If I’d known about you and Mary, I’d have believed it sooner.”
“I know,” I said. “I should have told you.”
The silence was broken only by the fizz of coals in the stove.
“She threatened to burn you all, until I gave in,” she said. “I told her I’d halt every bloody dodge if she kept on, and that she was being stupid—that she was cutting off her nose to spite her face. Training thieves takes time.” She raised a shoulder and dropped it. “I told her I could hold out for months, given what the ring has saved and set aside.” She paused. “That sent her into a rage.”
“Because she wanted to pull this dodge at the jeweler’s,” I said. “She didn’t want to wait months.”
“Aye. So she pulled out her ace.”
“What?”
Her eyes met mine. “Adam.”
It took me a moment.
Adam was her brother, a mostly harmless ne’er-do-well drifter and drunk. Amelia paid his rent and hired a woman to keep house for him.
“Your brother?” I asked. “She knew him?”
Amelia’s tongue darted out, licked her lips, and vanished as her mouth tightened. “When he was nineteen, he killed someone and was never caught. It wasn’t outright murder—he was fighting back to protect himself—but still. Maggie knew.”
“How?”
“Another Castle man was there when it happened. He was eventually sent to Australia himself. He found Maggie there and told her what he saw. She could tell the Yard.” Her expression was resigned. “She has a witness.”
“Who did Adam kill? Is it someone who matters, after all this time?”
“It was a Yard man who’d been arresting him,” she said. “They’ll care.”
“Oh,” I breathed. Yes, they would, even all these years later.
“He’d hang for it,” she concluded. “If she tells them—and if they can find him.”
I shook my head. “I can’t believe this.”
Her smile was thin. “No honor among thieves.”
“But thereis,” I replied. “None of us would do this to each other.” The bleak look on her face made something in my chest twist. “Where is Adam now?”
She glanced at one of the two closed doors.
My hands tightened on the chair arms. “He’s here?”
