Free The Black Hand by Will Thomas Page B

he asked in wonder. “Good work, lad. You’ve outdone yourself tonight. I’ve got two of my own. Mrs. Ashleigh will be pleased, though not, I suppose, by the sight of her conservatory glass.”
    “Not my doing, sir,” I said. “It was the Sicilian.”
    “A good thing, too, for both our sakes.”
    Barker helped me back into the relative safety of the house. I was shivering and the front of my shirt was covered in blood. Mrs. Ashleigh came down the grand staircase sans pistols, and hurried over to me, touching my shoulder.
    “Oh, Thomas,” she said gravely.
    “Philippa, do you think you can sew his cheek?” the Guv asked. “I doubt we can get a physician in here before the morning. In fact, I prefer not to send a man out for one, conditions being what they are.”
    “Of course,” she said, hurrying back up the staircase, while Barker sat me down in a chair.
    “I’m all right,” I answered. “A sight better than the blighter in there.”
    “I did not expect them to actually follow us here,” Barker said. “I misjudged them, something I will not do again.”
    “Perhaps they didn’t follow us. Perhaps they followed Juno.”
    “Take my handkerchief,” he said. “Yours is sodden.”
    Beauchamp came in just then, as soaked as I, though he wore a sailor’s cap and pea jacket. He took one look at my cheek and gave a short whistle.
    “They broke in, then,” he stated.
    “Yes, but we’re alive,” the Guv said. “We’ve got three men tied up and one dead. How are your men?”
    “A few injuries. The gang that tried to break in was the Garrison boys, a family of local ne’er-do-wells that hire themselves out for crimes like this. We’re guarding six more.”
    “I imagine they were the diversion. The one Llewelyn killed in the conservatory is a Sicilian by the look of him. He’s got nothing in his pockets.”
    Beauchamp raised an eyebrow in my direction, and I tried to look as if I dispatched assassins every day. Mrs. Ashleigh returned with a bottle of alcohol, needles, and thread while the Guv poured a tumbler full of whiskey and put it in front of me. I almost preferred the needle to the whiskey.
    “Are you sure we shouldn’t wait until morning, when Doctor Bales can come?” Mrs. Ashleigh asked.
    “Best to get it over with,” Barker replied. “Drink up, lad. We haven’t got all night.”
    I tossed the burning liquid down my throat, and then my employer had the nerve to fill the glass again. I hate whiskeyand vowed as I downed the second glass that I would never drink the horrid stuff again. Meanwhile, Mrs. Ashleigh was threading the needle. I gritted my teeth as it pricked the skin.
    The local inspector, or to be more precise, the inspector for the part of East Sussex from Lewes to the Channel, was named Marsden, a man approaching or retreating from sixty, who looked like a prosperous farmer or a country squire. A square of sheepskin was pinned to his tweed jacket with hooks and fishing flies nestled in it. I expected him to clash with Barker, as nearly every inspector I’d ever met before had done, but he seemed to take Barker in stride. A patient inspector, I thought. The country needed more of them.
    “I’ll take charge of the Garrison boys, if you don’t mind, Mr. Barker,” he said. “This is new ground for them. Normally, they deal in nothing more felonious than poaching and smuggling. I suppose they were hired for the work by the dead fellow there. They’d never be brash enough to enter an estate this large on their own. Did you know this person, Mr. Barker?”
    “No, sir, but we have recently been threatened by Sicilian criminals. I assume he was sent by them to oversee the operation.”
    “Did you kill him?” he asked, looking down at the body.
    “I killed him,” I spoke up. I knew Barker would try to take the blame for it. “He attacked me in the conservatory during the height of the gale. He did this to me.”
    Marsden nodded. He pushed around the shards of bloody glass