“Free Moriarty!”
Our protesters were back, both sides. One bald man calling for my father’s hanging in the town square and one tiny, curly-haired, red-lipped woman shouting the others down. She was our very own version of Sally Alexander, only instead of throwing paper packets of flour at Miss World candidates, our Sally had been screaming vulgarities at me and my family every day since my father had been incarcerated.
Perhaps she didn’t deserve such a distinguished nickname, but there was something about her I liked. Maybe it was the way she jabbed at the police with her bony elbows to get them off her whenever they tried to take her away for disturbing the public decorum of Baker Street. Or the way she plied them with baked goods and a Thermos of tea the next time she saw them, like she’d known them forever. She was on the side of a monster, but she allowed no one to dampen her efforts to be heard. She would not be silenced. How could I fail to respect that?
“Find the real Regent’s Park killer! Give us back our sergeant! Free Moriarty!”
Her counterpart looked like nobody, and even though his message was the more righteous of the two, something about him was entirely off-putting. He always lifted his nose a bit when he looked at us, like he could smell our father’s genetic code wafting off our skin. He was a bit of a git, really.
“Toss away the key! No tolerance for police corruption!”
Still, he said all the right things.
A heavy hand landed on my shoulder from behind. “Inspector wants to see you.”
The hand was gone before I could see who’d touched me, but when I turned, Sherlock stood pointed nose to bulbous nose with what had to be London’s tallest, widest constable.
With a smile in his voice, but not at his lips, Lock said, “I must insist that you do not touch her. But do lead the way to the inspector. I’m fascinated to hear what he has to say.”
The giant constable’s shoulders rolled back to better puff out his massive chest, but he didn’t retaliate further than that. With his eyes still on Lock, he lifted one sausage-like finger toward me and said, “Not you. Just that one there.”
“Oh, what to do?” Lock lamented, not backing down one inch himself. “She’s a minor, so I’m afraid she must be accompanied by her guardian”—he gestured toward Alice—“who is rather busy at the moment caring for three young boys kept out of their house for reasons no one has shared with us yet.”
The constable huffed and then started toward the house without another word. Sherlock shrugged at me and took my hand, and then we both followed along behind him.
Chapter 3
Detective Inspector Mallory sat at the head of our kitchen table, one long, slim leg draped over the other like he’d been invited for tea. As we approached, he took a gulp from a tiny cup without acknowledging Sherlock and me, then shuffled through the papers within the manila folder splayed open in front of him. Mallory cleared his throat and the two officers who had been snooping through our kitchen drawers and cabinets filed out of the room, leaving us alone with him—the DI who had pulled me out from under my father’s strangling hands.
I should, perhaps, have been grateful for that at least, but I couldn’t seem to rid myself of past images of him and Detective Sergeant Day standing on our stoop and doing nothing to rescue us from the drunken monster inside the house, of their overly cheerful waves as they abandoned me and my brothers to deal with the monster on our own, of the way their eyes couldn’t seem to find the welts and bruises on my brothers’ faces. And if those weren’t enough reasons to despise the man, I could still clearly remember the dismissal in his eyes when I’d sat up in my hospital bed and accused my father of killing all those people in Regent’s Park, including my best friend, Sadie. I remembered each word he spoke, when the inspector looked me straight in my battered face, just hours after he’d stopped my father from killing me, and said, “Being an angry drunk does not make one a killer, Miss Moriarty.”
Mallory kept us standing there in the silence for what felt like minutes, and when he did speak, his voice was quiet and calm. “Miss Moriarty.”
My tone wasn’t as gentle. “Mallory.” I wanted to add a few dozen questions about who the hell he thought he was and why the hell he was in my house, but his continued silence could only mean that he wanted me to explode. I wasn’t about to do anything to fulfill that man’s wants.
Mallory sighed and flipped over a page from one half of the folder to the other. “Do you have the sword that killed those people in the park?”
“That’s what all this is about? You’re looking for my father’s weapon?”