Read Chapter 31: The Police Contact

The café was called Bellini’s, a narrow sliver of a place wedged between a butcher’s and a betting shop on a Lambeth side street. Arthur had chosen it for the frosted glass, the steam on the windows, and the fact that the back exit opened onto an alley he could run through if the meeting went sour. He’d been sitting for twenty minutes with a cup of tea that had gone cold and scummy, watching the door.

When Inspector Lestrange walked in, he almost didn’t recognise her. She wore a plain beige raincoat and carried a handbag like any other woman her age, mid-forties, sharp-featured, with hair pinned tight beneath a headscarf. Only her eyes gave her away, moving across the room in quick, assessing sweeps before she settled on him and crossed to the booth.

She didn’t sit. She stood over the table, hands in her pockets.

“Mr Phelps,” she said. A statement, not a question.

“Inspector. Thanks for coming.”

“I came because Victor Ware’s name came up on my desk six years ago and no one else would touch it. You said you had information about him. That’s the only reason I’m here.” She sat, finally, but kept her back straight, her weight forward. “So talk.”

Arthur kept his hands flat on the table, visible. He’d rehearsed this. A partial truth, wrapped tight enough that the lies didn’t show at the edges.

“I was taken,” he said. “Two weeks ago. Men bundled me off the street outside my own house and held me in a lockup near the docks. They wanted a signalman. Someone who knew the timetables, the rail patterns, the gaps between mail trains.”

Lestrange’s face didn’t move. “Who were these men?”

“Foley. A man called Foley. Worked for a bloke they called the Baron.” Arthur watched her. No flicker. “I was a hostage, not a volunteer. They told me if I didn’t co-operate, they’d kill my sister’s family. I believed them.”

“And then?”

“And then the job went wrong. There was a shooting at the Baron’s estate. Foley’s dead. The Baron’s dead.” Arthur’s hands were steady. His voice was steady. He’d spent the last two days mastering the telling of it. “I got out. I’ve been keeping my head down since.”

Lestrange was quiet for a long moment. The café’s espresso machine hissed like something angry. She took a packet of cigarettes from her pocket, then put it back without lighting one.

“You’re telling me you were a hostage in the biggest robbery attempt this city’s seen since the Great Train — and you just walked away?”

“I ran. There’s a difference.”

“And you think I believe a signalman, a man with a gambling problem and debts that reached half of South London, was simply *taken*? That he didn’t cut a deal for himself somewhere along the way?”

Arthur held her gaze. “You can check my record at the railway. Twenty-two years. Not a single infraction until this year. Ask my supervisors. I’m not a criminal. I’m a man who was put in an impossible spot.”

Lestrange leaned forward. “You’re also a man sitting in front of me with information about a dead man I’ve been chasing for the better part of a decade — and you want something in return.”

“I want to clear my name,” Arthur said. “I’m not a fool. I know my face was seen at that estate. I know someone’s going to come calling with questions. I’m giving you what I know because you’re the only officer in this city who went after Victor Ware when no one else would.”

Lestrange’s expression shifted, a hair’s breadth, a crack in the granite. “The Baron — that was Victor Ware’s network?”

Arthur nodded. “The boss of bosses. The man Ware answered to.”

For the first time, something alive moved behind Lestrange’s eyes. Hunger. She pulled the cigarettes out again, tapped one against the packet, and put it back once more.

“If what you’re telling me is true, you’re holding the keys to something I’ve been trying to unlock for years. But I need more than your word. I need evidence. Names. Paperwork. Something that ties Victor to the operation and to the dead men at the estate.”

“I can get you evidence. There’s a ledger. It has everything — payments, protection money, who was on the Baron’s payroll. I know where it is.”

“Then get it. Bring it to me, and I’ll see what I can do about your situation.”

Arthur hesitated. He let the pause hang, made it look like fear, like calculation of his own safety. Then he said, “You mentioned Victor Ware. The title you applied for was about hunting him. Did you ever wonder why he got away? Why the raids always came up empty, why witnesses went silent?”

Lestrange’s jaw tightened. “What are you asking?”

“I’m asking if you trust everyone in your own building.”

The silence stretched. A car backfired in the street outside. Lestrange’s eyes narrowed, and for a second Arthur saw the cop beneath the raincoat, the one who’d made enemies by asking the wrong questions.

“What are you saying, Mr Phelps?”

“I’m saying the Baron had friends. A network that doesn’t stop at the criminal classes. I’m saying that when I do bring you that ledger, I want to put it in your hands — not in a station evidence room, not through official channels. You and me, directly. Because if I hand it over to the wrong person, I’m dead before the week’s out.”

Lestrange studied him. He could see her weighing it, the possibility that he was playing her, the possibility that he was telling the truth about something more rotten than she’d imagined.

“If there’s corruption in my command, I need to know who.”

“When I bring the ledger,” Arthur said. “You’ll see. The names are all in there. And I guarantee you’ll recognise at least one of them.”

He let that sit. Her eyes flickered — a tell, a microsecond of concern.

“Where do I reach you?”

“You don’t. I reach you.” Arthur slid out of the booth. “Give me two days. I’ll contact you at the station, ask for the afternoon shift desk. If I don’t call, assume I’m dead or gone.”

He was halfway to the door when she called out.

“Mr Phelps.”

He turned.

“You said you were taken. That the Baron’s men forced you into this.” Her voice was flat, but her gaze was sharp as a blade. “But I’ve met men who were held against their will. Most of them don’t walk away with the kind of calm you’ve got. Most of them don’t know exactly how to negotiate with a police officer.”

Arthur said nothing.

“Whatever you really are,” Lestrange said, “whoever you really are — you’ve got two days.”

He left the café.

Outside, the cold air hit him. He walked quickly, threading through shoppers and barrow boys, not looking back. The ledger was in a damp warehouse in Wapping, hidden in a locker behind a stack of rusting pipe. The money was there too — enough to turn anyone, enough to destroy anyone.

But Lestrange was right about one thing. He was too calm.

And for the first time since the manor, that scared him.

He checked his watch. Two days. He turned toward the river and the boarding house, and Eddie, who was still waiting for answers that Arthur wasn’t sure he had.