The Girl and the Clockwork Conspiracy: Clockwork Enterprises Book Two Read online

  THE GIRL AND THE CLOCKWORK CONSPIRACY

  NIKKI McCORMACK

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  AUTHOR BIO

  COPYRIGHT

  In loving memory of my dad, Max.

  Thank you for always telling me you believed in me.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The street was quiet. Too quiet for London at night. The steady dripping of water from a recent rain the only sound. A special kind of unnatural silence lurked in the darkest corners, the kind that promised to line an undertaker’s pockets with coin. Detective Emeraude had been around enough to know that silence all too well. It made her skin crawl, triggering the urge to turn back. It was her job to keep going, taking heed of that instinctive warning only in an increase of caution.

  “Why’re we here, Em?”

  She scowled over her shoulder at the stocky man in the bowler cap and put a finger to her lips for silence. Amos stared back at her, small cynical eyes black beads in the darkness. He didn’t take the hint.

  “We’re gettin’ paid for this, right? This is somehow going to help us figure out where Mr. Bricker’s wife’s been spending her evenings?”

  To hell with Mr. Bricker and his roaming wife. She gave Amos another warning look.

  “Do you even care about the case we are gettin’ paid for?” he demanded with a little too much insight.

  She looked up at Rueben, seeking support for her cause. The tall Texan offered nothing back. His lazy southern drawl gained physical manifestation in the careless hunch of his shoulders and the bored wandering of his gaze. He didn’t agree with her preoccupation either, but he wasn’t the type to trouble himself with arguments. Even after three years working together, she still wasn’t sure what type he was.

  “I have to know why Commissioner Henderson was paying a covert nocturnal visit to Mr. Folesworth.” She peered into the dark, watching the shadow-cloaked gentleman striding along, casting furtive glances over his shoulder. That looked suspicious enough, but he had also avoided brighter, busier—and consequently safer—streets since leaving Lucian Folesworth’s flat at the top of the Airship Tower. She couldn’t see the two men being old chums given the way Lucian’s political and financial support of the Literati contributed to the dissolution of the City of London Police and the ousting of the Metropolitan Police Service from many of the London outskirts. The Bobbies no longer had enough funding or political influence in London to fight off the expanding jurisdiction of the Literati’s new police force.

  “Why we still got our noses in Mr. Folesworth’s business? We did the job his brother was paying us for.”

  This time she ignored Amos. Something about the Folesworth case didn’t add up in her head. The mystery of who murdered Lucian’s wife and child had wrapped up neatly. Too neatly, perhaps. The killer, Lucian’s late business partner Joel Jacard, sat in jail awaiting trial and the supposedly wrongly accused Pirates had returned to their normal lives, cleared of guilt.

  That last part peeved her. Damned Pirates danced around the law, claiming to fight for the rights of the common man and getting innocent people hurt or killed more often than not in the process. Maybe Captain Garret and his bunch weren’t guilty of that crime, but they were certain to bring someone to harm in the name of their misguided subversions if they hadn’t already. Still, she didn’t think it was the Pirates and street rats getting off scot-free at the end of the case that left her with a bad taste in her mouth. It felt like they were missing something, some deeper subterfuge below the surface, and her instincts were rarely far off.

  Except with Maeko.

  Em ground her teeth and brushed the thought aside. She crept ahead, sticking to the darkest shadows and trying to keep up with the quick pace set by the MPS commissioner without making enough noise to draw attention. Where was he going now? And why all the secrecy? He’d looked smug coming out of the Airship Tower. What did that mean? What was Lucian Folesworth up to?

  The commissioner turned down another dark street, disappearing around the side of a building. Three shots rang out in the night, each one setting off a blast of adrenalin in her. Em sprinted for the corner, drawing the gun out of her shoulder holster. Amos and Rueben kept close behind. The second she passed the edge of the building, another shot fired and she dove for the ground, landing beside the still body of the commissioner. Whoever the shooter was, they weren’t looking to leave any witnesses.

  “Get back!” she shouted.

  Amos and Reuben obeyed, shrinking back behind the corner of the building. She stayed down alongside the commissioner, the cold damp of the wet street soaking through her clothes. The commissioner’s blank eyes stared up into a dark, soot black sky. A bullet hole in his forehead seeped red. The shooter didn’t fire again. Either they didn’t have a good angle or they had decided to make a run for it. She didn’t hear footsteps to indicate the latter, but the gunshots would draw more attention soon. Whoever had done the deed couldn’t be happy about sticking around.

  Two more gunshots split the night. The first hit the corner of the building Amos and Rueben hid behind, sending out a spray of mortar. The second hit a puddle behind her, splashing muddy water on the back of her head and neck. The side of her neck started to sting.

  Warning shots. That likely meant they were about to make a run for it. She tensed, holding her breath to listen.

  There! Up the street, she heard the sound of someone running and surged to her feet to give chase. Rueben was already out and sprinting. She glanced back and gestured at the commissioner. Amos hurried to the body to stand watch.

  Tall as he was, Rueben had a slow southern drawl to his run too. By the time they turned onto the cross street the killer had darted down, she was sprinting alongside him, cool night air spreading icy fingers along her damp side. She spotted a figure running almost a block ahead of them. Average height, lean build, average dress. Easily one of hundreds of men in the city. The type she’d have a hard time tracking down if she didn’t get more to work with.

  More shots rang out, bullets firing down from the top of a nearby building. Rueben grunted. They both veered to the near side and ducked behind a pile of bricks next to a building under repair. The killer wasn’t alone. She peeked out to see their quarry turn down the next street, but she didn’t dare give chase now. The rooftop shooter had too good an angle, and he might not be the only one up there.

  Rueben crouched down, his right hand clasped tight around his left bicep.

  “You hit?”

  “Seems so.”

  She almost grinned at the pained drawl. Did nothing ever get him worked up? “How bad?”

  He shrugged, his long face drawn in a tight grimace.

  Em leaned out as far as she dared and peered up at the roof. A figure stood above, staring into the dark street. Her pistol didn’t have
enough range to make that distance, but whatever he was firing clearly did. He wore a long jacket full of holes she could see dark grey sky through when he moved and a western style hat with a warped brim. One forearm was thick and bulky, wrapped in a cast perhaps. When he moved, he did so with a significant limp, leaning his whole body to lift his left leg. A hip injury of some kind?

  Her smile wasn’t kind. Here was someone she could hunt down.

  Raised voices reached them from the street they’d just left. The shooter on the rooftop retreated from sight, moving with considerable speed in spite of the limp. Time to get Reuben’s arm tended and explain things to the local Lit patrol before they arrested Amos. Em holstered her gun and touched the stinging side of her neck. Her fingers came away sticky with blood. She shuddered. That shot had come a little too close and now her suspects were getting away. She had one distinctive suspect though and a few leads, including a former street rat who might have inside information regarding one part of this mystery.

  Em ran a hand through her hair, realizing after she did so that she had most certainly smeared blood in it. She frowned.

  It was going to be a long night.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Maeko lay petting Macak who curled against her side, his head on her shoulder. His purr could wake the dead and he snored too. It kept her up sometimes. It didn’t matter though. She wouldn’t give him up for anything in the world. His furry warmth made the big comfortable bed less intimidating and helped her ignore the selection of dolls staring at her from the dresser. They made her skin crawl. Not because their blank eyes were creepy, though they were, but because she feared damaging them anytime she got near the dresser.

  Lucian had his late daughter’s clothing removed from the room and stored a few days after he brought Maeko into the house. Why he hadn’t removed the toys as well was beyond her. She was too old for most of them, though the little jeweled clockwork elephant that had been on the vanity fascinated her. Lucian said he made it himself and she longed to wind it up, but it felt like an intrusion upon the deceased girl’s memory to do so. To fight temptation, she’d tucked it away in a drawer where it wouldn’t come to harm. If they had fit, the dreadful dolls would be there too.

  The door swept open and a young woman dressed in a fine, if rather simple, tan dress stormed in, brown tresses neatly bundled up on the back of her head under a bonnet. “Still in bed, Miss? Mr. Folesworth is in a sour mood this morning. He won’t be pleased with your indolence.”

  Maeko groaned, not because of the accusation of slothfulness, the thought of her new guardian being in a poor temper, or even the nasty tone reminding her how the housemaid felt about serving someone of her objectionable origins. No, the sound of suffering was inspired by the ominous rustling of the dress Constance laid on the bed before walking over to sweep open the curtains, letting in the dingy light of a gray morning sky.

  “Why can’t I wear proper clothes once in a while?”

  Constance pursed her lips and walked around to pick up the blue dress. “We’ve been over this a hundred times, Miss. This is proper clothing for a young lady.”

  “That explains the ongoing confusion then. A lady I’m not.”

  Constance lowered her voice to a hiss. “Ungrateful scamp. Don’t you think I know that? Would you spit on Mr. Folesworth’s generosity?”

  Maeko disregarded the frosty outburst and kissed Macak on the head where the white and black fur intersected in a peak above his eyes, earning a disgusted scowl from Constance. She slid out of bed then and the cat meowed protest, curling one foreleg over his face.

  The housemaid turned away with a gasp. “You know you’re supposed to wear night clothes to bed.”

  Bother. If she had her usual threadbare togs and a blanket full of holes, she would be been fine. “I try, but they’re too hot with those covers. I don’t see how anyone sleeps buried under all that soft squishy warm stuff.”

  “Most don’t sleep with a nasty old cat for starters.”

  Maeko tossed a smile over her shoulder at Macak. “Their loss.”

  Constance huffed and resumed tidying the layers of the dress.

  Maeko wiped away the night sweat with a damp cloth using the dreadful perfumed water in the basin on the vanity then dug out the ‘proper’ undergarments. She caught Constance staring at the healing scar on her shoulder, a disgusted grimace frozen on her face, and turned away. The puncture from Joel’s sedative dart had itched like mad for a while, but the scar there was barely noticeable now. The knife wound in her shoulder from her encounter with the murderer she called Hatchet-face had also healed well enough, though the remaining scar wasn’t pretty.

  The puncture wound from the large sliver that lodged in her forearm when the Literati officer threw her into the crates also formed an angry scar, a constant reminder of Chaff who had pulled the chunk of wood out rather indelicately. He never was one to drag feet about things that needed doing. She might have been annoyed with his rough handling, but he had looked so worried and had even said her name right when he saw her there on the floor of the warehouse. How could she be upset with him?

  A smile curved her lips. She hadn’t seen him since that night over a month ago, him or Ash, and perhaps the latter was for the best, but she missed them both. Now that her wounds were healed enough not to require so much attention, she itched to get out of the flat and pay some visits.

  Constance helped her dress and arranged her short hair as best she could under a small hat with trimmings of blue ribbon. Maeko glanced at the full-length mirror in the corner. No one was going to mistake her for a boy in this silly getup. Why did all dresses have to have frills and lace? They had lace at the cuffs and lace on the bodice and sometimes more lace on the skirts amidst frills and pleats. Worse yet, the ridiculous bustles in the back added to the already burdensome weight of all that fabric. Then there were the corsets. Men who feared their women running away must have designed the hateful things. One couldn’t breathe well enough in the fool contraptions to run anywhere and they had rather the opposite effect of the wrappings she’d used on the streets to hide her breasts. She yearned for the tattered boys’ clothes she used to wear.

  Constance completed the miserable ensemble by helping her into a pair of short-heeled lacey cream boots. Another accessory clearly intended to keep women from wandering astray.

  What I wouldn’t give for a nice sludgy puddle to give them a bit of character.

  Maeko walked from the room with small careful steps, fearful of stepping on the hem of the skirt or rolling an ankle in the insufferable heels. The whir and click of gears in Macak’s clockwork leg followed her down the hall.

  Lucian sat on the settee in the front room, elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. She hadn’t seen a genuine smile on his face since the day she met him, before she told him of the murder of his wife and daughter. Sleeping in his daughter’s old room didn’t make her feel any better about that, but he insisted on providing her a better life in exchange for saving his. How could a street rat say no to an offer like that from the owner of the biggest company in London?

  She moved close and skimmed the newspaper sitting on the table in front of him. The headline read: Commissioner Henderson Found Dead of Multiple Gunshot Wounds.

  Mr. Henderson, the man who had visited last night. He was—had been—Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Service that was driven out of London proper a few years prior by the Literati and replaced with their own police force. Lucian had sent her to bed when he arrived. She’d even obeyed, several hours later after finding a dark corner from which to listen in for a while to discover the purpose of his visit. If anyone else knew the reasons for that visit, then it was highly likely that the man’s murder was connected. No wonder Lucian was in a sour mood.

  She chewed on her lip. Should she say something or would it be better to give him time alone?

  “Mr. Folesworth.” Constance entered the room, giving Maeko a sharp look as if her standing there had been im
proper somehow.

  Lucian lifted his head. Dark hair stuck out in disarray around his narrow face, misery casting deeper shadows under his eyes now than it had the night before, if that were possible. He glanced up at Maeko. His moustache wanted trimming.

  She managed a tiny pseudo-curtsy in the hope of starting the day on his good side. “Can I help with something, Mr. Folesworth?”

  “Lucian, Maeko. You may call me Lucian in private.” He gave her a sad smile, an expression more depressing than his typical tight-lipped frown. “I was going to take you to town and get more proper attire for you today, but I’m afraid I have other affairs I must attend to.”

  Go to town and get out of this sorrow-filled flat? Yes, please. “I could go alone. I know my way around the city.”

  He shook his head. “I’m sure you know the city better than I do, but a decent young lady does not go about without a chaperone and I’d wager a fair sum that you don’t know how to shop for proper dresses.”

  Bloody proper everything! She took a deep breath and glanced at the housemaid. Going out in bothersome company was better than not going out at all. “Constance does.”

  Constance held her hands up and took a step back. “Oh no, Sir. I’ve got to clean the silver and help Margaret prepare for supper tonight and…and I just don’t have time, Sir.”

  Prepare for supper? That sounded ominous. Were they having company?

  Lucian smoothed his moustache and stared down at the paper then he shook his head. “You’d like to get out of the flat I imagine, Maeko.”

  When he looked at her, Maeko gave him that pleading look that so often earned her what she wanted. His sad smile brightened a fraction.

  “Maybe next week we can arrange a visit with your mother. For today, I think Miss Schutz can handle things here. Miss Foster will go with you to help you select some dresses.” Constance stared hard at her shoes and Maeko could see muscles in her jaw jump as she ground her teeth. Lucian didn’t notice or perhaps he simply didn’t care how the maid felt about it. “I’ll have my coach take you two over to my wife’s tailor on Regent Street.”