High Vaultage

by Chris Sugden, Jen Sugden

Genres: Gaslamp; Humorous Fantasy; Steampunk

Synopsis

1887. London, but not as you know it.

The Industrial Revolution went further than anyone could have imagined, and the sprawling, chaotic metropolis of Even Greater London spreads across the southern half of England. The immense Tower casts electricity through the sky, powering the mind-boggling mechanisms of the city. The engineer-army of Isambard Kingdom Brunel swarms across the capital, building, demolishing, and rebuilding whatever they see fit. Queen Victoria is recovering nicely from her eleventh assassination, ruling with the dignity that comes from striking terror into anyone who sees the unholy union of human and machine that one has become. And at the heart of all this sits the country's first Private Investigation Agency.

Archibald Fleet (formerly of Scotland Yard, currently administratively deceased) and Clara Entwhistle (formerly of Harrogate, currently intermittent crime journalist) hoped things would pick up quickly for their new enterprise. No-one is taking them seriously, but their break will come soon. Definitely. Probably.

Meanwhile, police are baffled by a series of impossible bank robberies. With no trace left of the thieves, and nothing to connect each break-in to the next, their resources are absorbed by the case. Which means that when a woman witnesses a kidnapping, Fleet-Entwhistle Private Investigations is the only place she can turn for help. They're more than happy to oblige!

But why would this man be a target for kidnappers? As Clara and Fleet dig into the mystery, things go deeper than they could ever have anticipated . . .

From the creators of the acclaimed podcast Victoriocity comes a hilarious novel set in the greatest, most chaotic city in history. Twisty, inventive, and joyously funny, High Vaultage is perfect for fans of Ben Aaronovitch, Tom Holt, Douglas Adams, and Terry Pratchett.

Release date: March 14, 2024

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

Dusk was falling over Even Greater London, and the night wind stirred under the purple pools of crackling sky where lightning skipped like stones.

Somewhere nearby, it whirled up and around the Tower, watching it cast its boundless energy into the heavens and outwards across the capital.

But here, by the Thames Glacier, the wind swept low, chilling its belly on the ice and launching up the snowbanks, pummelling the rickety houses that had the bad luck to be close by.

Inside, sensible folk kept their curtains shut and their bodies close to a toasty fireplace or radiator lamp. They curled up with a nice book or, far more often, an utterly gruesome book. Or they listened to a mandatory radio address on whatever topic of the day had piqued the Royal Interest of Queen Victoria. Or, at least, of the increasingly mechanical monarch that still insisted it was Queen Victoria. And it was best, and indeed legally quite important, not to argue about such things.

Kathleen Price, however, was doing none of these activities. Her lights were off, her best coat and mittens were on, and she was pressing herself against her draughty window, bracing it against the gale, watching the man waiting on the empty Blackfriars Bridge for the love who never came.

He was standing where he always stood: the fourth lamppost along on the up-floe side. He was dressed as he always dressed: the same smart suit, the same shoes buffed until they shone like lamps themselves. And he wore the same firm expression, the same upper-lip rigidity, the same barely concealed abject desperation.

Every night he came, and every night Kathleen watched, fascinated by his obsession and failure.

‘He’s there again, Tommie,’ she said. ‘Think she’ll come this time?’

Tommie did not reply. Tommie could not reply. Kathleen had run a spear through some of his favourite and most critical systems when they both had spied a gold sovereign before them, not too deep down in the glacier. And then she had left his eight-foot-tall metal body to sink into the snowbanks, but not before taking the head to mount on her wall next to all the others.

Their own fault, Kathleen thought. Tommie Tons shouldn’t dig for shinies in the ice. That’s human work.

She turned to her nearest automaton trophy head and checked the clock she had installed in its astonished, terrified mouth.

Ten past eight.

She knew the man would wait until nine before giving up and leaving. She would only watch for a bit most nights, just in case. Even though it had been weeks like this, in her romantic heart she always felt that tonight might be the night.

The man pulled up his collar against the flecks of ice the merciless wind was launching from the glacier towards him. He shivered, but remained fixed to the spot.

I wonder what he did …

She recalled the message she had seen in the classifieds:

Alexandrina, do not forsake me! I will wait for you on Blackfriars Bridge every evening at eight.

Kathleen took one last look up and down the bridge, empty but for the poor man and the whirlwind of ice, and humphed.

You’re pretty forsaken, mister.

She closed the curtains and walked to her table to get on with polishing the trinkets she had unearthed from the glacier banks earlier that day.

She stopped.

Or is it ‘forsook’?

Before she could decide, she heard a sound through the howling wind. A distant rumble and clattering.

She walked back and opened the curtains to see a two-horse carriage speeding along the bridge. The man turned slowly towards it, as if reluctant to let his hopes be raised.

Kathleen’s pulse quickened.

Could it be her at last? Why tonight, of all terrible nights?

She watched as the carriage raced towards the man, the horses puffing clouds of breath into the cold air like the old steam engines she remembered from the days before the Tower.

The man waited, straightening his tie and tidying his hair. Soon enough, the carriage neared him, and slowed down to stop.

‘It’s her!’ Kathleen cried. She tried to peer through the carriage windows to see this fabled Alexandrina, but it was too far off, and the inside was unlit.

The driver jumped down from his perch. Curiously, he did not head back to open the carriage door, but instead walked to the man and said something.

Confirming who he is, perhaps.

The man nodded and replied. The driver nodded back. Then, suddenly, he lunged at the man.

Kathleen shrieked and dropped below the window frame, terrified that she might have been heard.

‘Get help!’ she whispered at her Tommie heads, before remembering they could no longer do anything at all.

She dashed onto the landing and down the staircase, grabbed her trusty ice-spear from the umbrella stand and turned the door latch. The wind burst inside, flinging her onto her back and compressing her lungs into an involuntary ‘Gnng!’, as ice blew through the space as though it were a shaken snowglobe.

She gritted her teeth, pushed herself up, said some understandable-but-unrepeatable things at the wind, and charged out of the door, leaving her home to the elements.

She darted across the narrow road, onto the bridge and towards the carriage. The man’s legs were kicking as he was dragged into the vehicle, and she could see now the windows were blacked out. There was the sound of shouted protests muffled by cloth, and the driver hurried out and climbed up onto his perch.

‘Stop!’ she cried, knowing he would not.

The driver flicked the reins and the carriage turned around and began to hurry back the way it had come, far too quickly to be caught.

Nothing else for it, thought Kathleen, lifting her ice-spear. With luck she would hit the driver, or at least a wheel. Hopefully not impale the man inside. That would take some explaining.

She sprinted, came to a sudden halt, and launched her weapon into the sky so that it arced towards the escaping carriage. Her aim was true, and her strength just enough. But the wind was having none of it, and whipped the spear around and around the frozen vortex and down over the side of the bridge, where it crunched into something digging away in the ice on a night shift, something metal and innocent.

Kathleen listened to the familiar sound of the impaled automaton first apologising for failing to finish its work, and then collapsing.

For once, it brought her no joy.

Hmm, she thought. Wasn’t even trying that time.

She looked out, far along the bridge, and watched, helpless, as the carriage raced on and vanished into the endless city and the cold, darkening, electric night.

Inspector Archibald Fleet arrived at the bus mooring on the main road near his home at exactly the same time as the No. 61: it, eight minutes behind its posted schedule as always, and he, exactly on time for its delayed departure, as he was well acquainted with the actual schedule and how it related to the works of timetable fiction they displayed at the stops.

The voltaic omnibus glided to its best approximation of a halt, bobbing and listing slightly as it floated six inches above its copper tracks. Fleet hopped on through the open door at the back and found the rearmost seat, which gave him a view of the rest of the cabin, including – crucially – all of the newspapers on board.

‘This is the Number Sixty-one to Clay Lane,’ shouted the driver as the omnibus silently resumed its journey. ‘Calling at Willenbrook High Street, Old Road, Ratherbile’s, New Road, Swinford Bridge, The Thrikes, Friar’s Turn, Friar’s Leap, Friar’s End …’

The driver continued to list the three hundred or so stops he would be calling at between here and Clay Lane, but, like everyone else, Fleet had already stopped listening.

Fleet didn’t usually catch the bus to work. Detectives, if they fail to spend considerable amounts of time walking the streets, up close to the sights, sounds and smells of the city, tend to lose their appetite and fall ill, the way sailors come to find that they cannot sleep without the rocking of the waves, and grimly resent the land for being so still. Fleet was, technically, no longer a detective, thanks to an administrative problem he didn’t like to talk about. But regardless, he was a detective in his blood, and only taking the bus to work today to gather critical information.

Eleven other passengers were on board, distributed evenly through the cabin in the London fashion, which is to say: avoiding physical contact, avoiding eye contact, and, at all costs, avoiding emotional contact – although, to be honest, there was very little danger of the last one if proper precautions were taken about the first two.

On the strips of wall above the windows, squat advertisements blared their wares. Boarding houses. Greengrocers. Apothecaries that wouldn’t be beaten on the price of laudanum. Tickets to events at parks and other public spaces across the capital in celebration of Victoria’s golden jubilee. ‘Fifty years our Queen – 50 per cent off a hot towel shave,’ offered a Soho barber, presumably to the passengers rather than the monarch.

Fleet spotted a discarded newspaper on the seat in front of him: today’s Morning Chronicler. The visible part of the headline read ‘EVES STRIKE A’. At a speed born of reflex he uncoiled his wiry frame over the seat-back and grabbed the paper. An old woman reading The Graphic on the seat opposite noticed nothing, but the ageing Dandie Dinmont on her lap was severely startled and spent the remainder of the journey eyeing Fleet suspiciously as a possible threat to its entire universe.

A few months ago, Fleet would never have imagined that he would be reduced to gathering information on the latest criminal cases from abandoned newspapers on omnibuses. But that was a few months ago, and things had been much simpler back then. Fleet’s position at Scotland Yard had provided him with access to intelligence on matters felonious that was now beyond his grasp, and so, just like any ordinary member of the public, he was forced to rely on the press.

Still leaning over the seat in front, Fleet unfolded the paper to read its full headline: ‘BANK THIEVES STRIKE AGAIN’. A quick flick through the pages revealed eight sides of coverage. This came as no surprise to him. It had been this way after every bank so far, and for good reason, as the city had never seen such an audacious series of crimes. Nor any quite so exquisitely done, with the culprits leaving no trace of how they got into – or indeed out of – the impenetrable – and indeed inescapable – vaults. Yet, despite the extensive press coverage, police activity and public interest, no suspects had been found, which, given the lack of clues, Fleet could understand. But neither had there been a call from his former Detective Chief Inspector to draft him in to help figure it all out – which, to be honest, Fleet could also understand, never exactly having been in his good books, nor known him even to have any good books for someone to be in.

Fleet buried himself in the articles as the vehicle drifted through the streets like a low, metal cloud. Ahead, twenty minutes as the bus floats, a brick, steel and glass tower speared a mile upwards into the sky.

This was London in 1887. Even Greater London, to use its proper title, which nobody ever did. An uninterrupted urban plane encompassing the entire lower half of England, and, for complex reasons, only the upper third of the Isle of Wight.

It was a ravenous, sense-numbingly vast expanse of city: an ocean of homes, shops, offices and public houses, all stitched together with roads and criss-crossed by an untidy lattice of rail tracks, stretching off to what you had to assume would be the horizon if you could see past all the buildings in the way.

And at the centre of all of this growth, this commerce, this constant change and urban vitality, was the Tower. For over a quarter of a century it had been the symbol of London’s industrial mastery, beaming electricity outwards through the sky, across hundreds of miles of unbroken city, and allowing its citizens to let their imaginations run free and to charge forth into the future far more quickly than might really be sensible.

To live in Even Greater London was to be in a state of perpetual bewilderment, a bee in a tornado of innovation and progress happening at a speed and scale beyond human, or indeed bee, comprehension. It was best just to keep your head down and not really think about it all that much.

In the south-east of the city, Clara Entwhistle was doing just that, arriving for an early-morning appointment in a grand tearoom unforgivably named the Greenwich Observatea.

The Observatea had once been the site of the most powerful telescope in the city, and traded on this history without shame. The immense, domed ceiling had been painted in the deep blue-black of the heavens and decorated with the constellations of the night sky. A functioning orrery was rooted in the centre of the room, its metal arms of varying lengths slowly rotating above the patrons, carrying on their orbits all the planets of the solar system, with each planet spinning around itself however many moons it was believed to have. And there were functioning telescopes, elegantly but quite impregnably bolted onto every table, through which, if you were lucky enough, you might be able to witness the rather thrilling Transit of the Chef de Cuisine Across the Little Round Windows in the Door to the Kitchen.

It was a ghastly place. You paid for the pizazz; the tea was average.

Clara – having recently moved to London from Yorkshire – had never been in an astronomy-themed tearoom before, and found it quite interesting and exciting. Keen not to miss any of the details, she took her time traversing the room, delighting in the decor – not least an intriguing cluster of stars painted on the far side of the dome that she was certain she had never seen before, because they were the shape of an iced bun, and she would have remembered something like an iced bun in the heavens.

Eventually, Clara made it to the back of the tearoom, ducking carefully under Saturn as she came near to it, and approached a table where a sixteen-year-old girl was enjoying her tea along with one or two of the Observatea’s famed caramel Tycho Brahzilnuts. The girl was wearing an extremely fashionable dress of brilliant wine-red satin and floral silk brocade, topped off with a large feather-trimmed hat. Clara, ten years the girl’s senior, was by contrast in a plain grey-blue poplin day dress – and drew some raised eyebrows from the more couture-minded lady patrons of the tearoom with her unadorned and decidedly out-of-fashion straw bonnet, underneath which her dark hair was neatly tied up.

At the sound of Clara’s approach, the broad brim of the girl’s hat lifted to reveal a hopeful face.

‘Miss Entwhistle, so glad you could join me. Please, sit.’

‘I hope I find you well, Lady Arabella?’ asked Clara, as she lowered herself into a chair.

‘Tolerably well, Miss Entwhistle, thank you. Although I trust the news you bring will leave me feeling a little more than well.’

‘Of course. Your suspicions regarding your governess.’

‘Miss Louisa Smith, yes.’

‘No,’ Clara said gravely, keeping in check her own excitement regarding the information she was about to reveal.

Arabella rustled forward in her seat. ‘No?’

‘It seems your family has been duped, Lady Arabella.’

‘No!’

Arabella contorted her face in horrified delight. She held her teacup close, protecting it from this exquisitely shocking news.

‘She is very likely not named Smith,’ Clara continued, ‘and she is almost certainly not a governess. At least, not one with any record of having existed prior to her reply to your father’s advertisement in The Times.’

Arabella sat in silence for a few moments, cradling her teacup pensively. Clara sensed she was being weighed up, but could only guess at the details of Arabella’s doubts.

The difficulty was that Clara had been efficient. Could it be possible, Arabella wondered, that a stranger had been able to discover her wretched governess’s secret in a mere matter of days? How far could she really trust this peculiar Miss Entwhistle, whose services she’d engaged through a servant, who’d seen an advertisement in a newspaper? Arabella knew that one always had to be on guard against fraudsters, hoodwinkers and flimflammers, that she must take note of inconsistencies and contradictions. Indeed, she thought, the very service itself was an incongruity with the world: a sort of spy for everyone? A personal policeman? She could see that Clara was a gentlewoman, that much was clear: the way she held herself, the care in her movements – besides which, she enunciated too well not to have been taught. But her clothes, that bonnet. Her eyes, wide with excitement at such a humdrum old place. And serving as a secret snoop for a girl ten years her junior? She must have fallen on very hard times indeed, in which case, Arabella reasoned, she might say anything to gain favour from someone still in good standing.

Clara waited for Arabella to conclude that further scrutiny was required. Better to wait for the question than anticipate it: she would value the answer more. After a moment, Clara noticed a young couple at table three – near the centre of the room and directly under the perihelion of Mercury – who were staring nauseatingly into each other’s eyes as they fed one another forkfuls of the tearoom’s most chocolatey dessert, the Galileo Ganachilei. A rather severe older woman – their chaperone, no doubt – grimaced at the sight from her table nearby.

‘But her character reference, Miss Entwhistle?’ Arabella said finally. ‘The Luptons of St Neots?’

‘A forgery, I’m afraid,’ Clara replied, snapping her eyes back to her client. ‘The address was for a lodging house, and the proprietor confessed she had been paid to write a glowing recommendation – paid by a woman matching precisely the description of your governess.’

‘She just admitted it?’ asked Arabella, with the most suspicious eyebrows she could apparently muster.

‘Some of the proprietor’s correspondence was in view, and the handwriting was a clear match with the false reference. She confessed when presented with that fact.’

‘The charlatan!’ cried Arabella, appalled, but also – Clara noted happily – convinced. The young woman’s outrage suddenly vanished, replaced by the triumphant grin of someone whose long-held suspicions had been proved correct. ‘You’ve found her out, Miss Entwhistle. Very well done!’

Her hat feathers danced in approval.

Clara beamed. ‘All in a day’s work.’

Arabella’s face contorted more rapidly than should be possible from delight to hopelessness.

‘But Father will not believe me! He has been taken in. It was all for naught.’

She flicked a porcelain bowl of sugar lumps to punish it for something.

‘Fortunately,’ said Clara, ‘I was able to retrieve some other discarded written material from the proprietor. Your father can compare.’

She handed Arabella an envelope, which she had helpfully, and in her finest calligraphy, labelled ‘Proof’.

Arabella’s face instantly reverted to its previous state of pure joy.

‘Well done, Miss Entwhistle. Well done. You have my thanks.’

‘It was nothing.’

‘Of course, I knew all along,’ Arabella continued. ‘Competent at arithmetic, but her Latin and French were atrocious. I fear I know less than when she began tutoring me! And her accent. She sounded as though she was from Manchester! These things rub off on young people, you know. But now Father will have no choice but to dismiss her, and I will be granted a real governess. A less provincial one, I hope!’

‘Fingers crossed,’ said Clara with a grimace, before noticing the chaperone – entranced by the majestic conjunction of Mars and Neptune on the far side of the room – being lightly concussed by a passing moon of Jupiter.

A waiter dashed off discreetly for medical aid as the young lovers exchanged a knowing glance, quickly threw some money onto the table, and made their exit.

The bus glided to a halt. Fleet’s peripheral vision was good enough to tell him where he was, and he folded his newspaper and got up. He noticed the dog and its owner had alighted some time earlier, leaving her paper – The Graphic – on the seat. Further along, someone had abandoned a copy of yesterday’s Evening News. Fleet hurried down the bus to the front exit, accumulating papers as he went, narrowly besting a vicar in a race to The Herald and receiving a scowl of benevolent concern as a reward. He jumped through the open doors onto the street, the papers bundled under his arms whacking the doorframe as he went.

Fleet walked through a small square that was bounded on three sides by past-their-best stone buildings of shopfronts and offices, their eaves overlapping and colliding over ginnels that led to back alleyways that were also quite successful places of business, only for thievier, stabbier types.

A mass of people were criss-crossing the square: clerks in dark suits heading to work; shopkeepers in overalls carrying crates of produce; tradesmen with toolboxes and the occasional ladder; the crossing sweeper furiously brushing dust across the path of well-dressed folk in the hope of a few pennies to get him to stop.

Crammed in among the other buildings was London’s thirty-fourth most disreputable pub, the Grouse and Chisel, out of which some people having a bad time of it were staggering, and into which people having an even worse time of it were heading. A police wagon was parked up outside, as always, because the police had learned that when it came to the Chisel, it was just easier to have a unit on hand.

An enormous picture painted on the side of the wagon caught Fleet’s eye. Queen Victoria. Or, at least, what passed nowadays for Queen Victoria. Even the most devoted monarchists agreed she had seen better days. Not the days that had featured any of her eleven-and-counting assassinations – those had been very bad days. But they had been followed by the very good days when she had returned, just a tad more made of machinery than before, to the sound of exultant crowds. Not to mention the great relief of her Royal Medical Engineers who, frankly, were astonished that their efforts to revive her kept working, but felt safe in the knowledge that if they ever truly bungled it one day – if they ever failed to devise suitable mechanical replacements for her shot, stabbed, exploded or just good-old-poisoned organs – then their employer would be much too dead to reprimand them.

Truly, Victoria represented the limitless and somewhat frightening technological possibilities of the age, the extremely limited possibilities of who was allowed to benefit, and the ever-popular appeal of trying very hard not to think about things like that and just get on with your day.

And there were very few people as practised at not thinking about things like that and getting on with their day as Fleet, who merely shuddered at the image of the monarch and returned his attention to the front page of his Courier as he weaved his way across the square.

‘Paper, guvnor?’ a young voice asked.

Fleet looked up. The boy was standing next to a pile of newspapers, and didn’t seem to have registered that Fleet was well on his way to amassing an equal-sized stack.

‘Which one?’ asked Fleet.

‘What?’

‘Which paper are you selling?’

The boy looked puzzled. ‘Today’s.’

Fleet looked closer at the folded broadsheet the boy was waving above his head. He knew journalists roamed in packs when it came to high-profile cases – encircling any poor witness with notebooks and portable recording cylinders – so usually the papers had only the same information. There was always a chance, though, that one had happened upon an additional detail and managed to keep it from their rivals, so every paper was worth gathering.

‘Oh, you’ve got the Herald.’

‘Yeah, the ’Erald all right. International ’appenings, national goings-on and whatnot.’

‘I’ve already got today’s Herald.’

‘Then how ’bout a tip?’ asked the boy. ‘I’ve some shocking inside info on the four-fifteen at the electro-velodrome.’

‘It’s happening at half past twelve?’

‘No, no, it’s one of the mechanics in the stables.’ The boy leaned towards Fleet conspiratorially. ‘Got a new gear system, ’asn’t ’e? But who stands to benefit? Might be Twilight Sands. Might be Gibbous Moon. Might be Winter Complicity. Penny, I’ll tell ya.’

‘Tell you what,’ replied Fleet. ‘I’ll give you a penny if you keep an eye out and let me know about any crimes going on around here.’

The boy’s eyebrows shot up with excitement, pulling him briefly off the pavement. ‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘Penny per?’

‘Let’s try one and see how that goes.’

The boy considered this. ‘Am I allowed to commit the crimes?’

‘What? No, of course not.’

‘Bit of thieving, maybe I cut loose a carriage horse here and there?’

‘No!’ exclaimed Fleet. He had never known street lads to be particularly respectful to authority, but now he didn’t have any, it was clear they had previously been on their best behaviour.

‘All right, just pickpocketing then. Stick with what you know – that’s what the man who knifed my dad always said.’ The boy winked at Fleet to confirm the plan.

‘No! No crime!’

‘Seems like that’d be the best way for me to ’elp with what you’re after.’

‘It’s clearly not in the spirit of the idea,’ said Fleet.

‘It’s your fault for establishing perverse incentives, guvnor. Can’t fault water for trickling.’

Fleet pointed a disapproving finger at the boy. ‘You ought to be careful who you say that kind of thing to. I might be the police.’

A steely voice came from behind Fleet.

‘Impersonating a police officer is a criminal offence, sir.’

‘I didn’t say I was police, only that I might be,’ retorted Fleet as he spun round, immediately regretting this decision as he came face to face with a stocky man dressed almost identically to himself – the same simple shirt and necktie, loose-fitting trousers, brown flat-bottomed waistcoat and equally brown woollen overcoat – who was grinning with delight like he had just won a prize in a contest he didn’t know he had entered.

‘Archibald Fleet, it is you! As I live and breathe. And as you …’ The man prodded Fleet in the chest. ‘Whatever it is you do now on that front.’

Fleet stepped backwards and began fastening his coat. He had never cared much for Inspector Collier’s weaponised joviality, nor the fact that despite both of them having the same dozen years’ experience, Collier had a way of making him feel like he was a new recruit.

‘Hello, Collier.’

‘And you, boy!’ Collier barked past Fleet. ‘Show this man some damned respect. Acts of heroism, line of duty and all that, you know.’

The paperboy shrugged and turned towards other passers-by who seemed more likely to buy from him.

Collier rolled his eyes and reverted to grinning at Fleet.

‘Marvellous to see you, Insp— Well, I suppose it’s just plain old “Mr Fleet” now, isn’t it? Although better than “dearly departed”, I’m sure. Remarkable, what you’ve been through. Lucky for you Her Maj was in a generous mood vis-à-vis her … help.’

Fleet shuddered. ‘Keeping well, Collier?’ he asked, indifferently.

‘Me? Oh yes. Busy busy. The bank case is a beast, I’m sure you can imagine.’ Collier glanced down at Fleet’s bundle of newspapers. ‘Or perhaps you don’t need to imagine! What are you up to these days?’

Fleet tucked the papers under one arm.

‘I’m still detecting. Private cases.’

‘Oh, yes!’ said Collier, nodding enthusiastically. ‘I heard you had spun up a little police station of your own. Interesting idea. Good for you.’

‘Good for a number of people, really.’

‘I don’t doubt it! It’s a public service, if you think about it. Keeping all that sort of personal business away frees up the Yard to focus on real cases.’

‘They are real cases, Collier.’

‘Oh, Collier! Both feet inside the mouth, once again! Up to the ankles!’ Collier jabbed his fist halfway into his mouth and popped his eyes wide open in mock panic, before laughing. ‘I do apologise. What did I mean?’

‘Hard to say.’

‘I suppose I meant …’ Collier paused, smiling benevolently at Fleet. ‘Actual crimes.’

A waiter with a trolley orbited the tearoom, attempting to entice the morning customers with a variety of overpriced sweets.

‘She meant to rob us, Miss Entwhistle. I am sure of it.’ Arabella’s youthful face hardened into a scowl.

‘It is possible,’ said Clara, as a nearby diner selected a rather sad-looking tart the waiter explained was filled with something called Copernicustard. ‘Some criminals do jump from identity to identity as suits their needs.’

‘How appalling. But, Miss Entwhistle, you were as good as your word. I should discharge my end of the bargain.’

A delicate hand pushed forward an envelope that Clara assumed, but was too polite to check, contained monetary payment. She placed it carefully into her satchel.

‘I must say, Lady Arabella, your instinct that there was something amiss with your new governess – it showed remarkable intuition. Perhaps you’ll become a private investigator yourself one day.’

A laugh chirruped from Arabella’s lips. ‘Miss Entwhistle, how very droll you are.’

‘Why not