Page 67 of The Business of Blood

“I’m good at what I do.”

I nudged him with my elbow in mock exasperation. “Youneveranswer my questions.”

That dimple again, deep as I’d ever seen it. “I always answer your questions, just not with the responses you desire.”

“Well, it’s infuriating all the same,” I huffed.

“My profession…” He paused for a hesitant moment, choosing his words carefully. “My life is like most men’s, I expect. Sometimes I do what I want to do. The rest of the time, I do what I have to.”

I doubted most men were trained as he was. To suspect and distrust every extraordinary thing. “What are you doing right now? What you want, or what you have to?”

Now,therewas a question he didn’t answer.

I tucked my arm into his for the sole purpose of increasing his discomfort. “I know you don’t want to hear this, Inspector. But we’re more alike than you think.”

“How so? Because we’re both consumed by the pursuit of retributive justice?”

“Actually, yes.” I’d not at all expected him to be so completely correct.

The cross into inner Chelsea is abrupt. The gentry becomes more threadbare. The manners and diction learned from a university rather than a governess. Street vendors plied their wares to doctors, solicitors, writers, and students as they disembarked from cabs and trains to retire to their comfortable, if a bit more modest, addresses.

On the corner of King’s Road and Radnor Walk, a woman approached us with bundles of fresh flowers. She was drenched with rain, shivering, and pathetically thin.

“Buy a Posey for your missus?”

She’d startled me a bit, and I took longer to reply than I would have had I been walking alone.

“I’ve a bunch ‘ere of lilies of the valley. ‘Twould match ‘er fine dress.” The desperate woman shook dripping flowers at us.

“How much?” Croft asked.

“A ha’penny.”

“I’ll give you a shilling to get out of the storm.” He dropped the coin into her hand, but only took one flower.

Her eyes rounded to positively owlish proportions. “What a lovely man you ‘ave,” she praised me. “Never seen a more ‘andsome couple in me life. May the Lord bless you with long lives an’ many children.”

Here is where Croft met the end of his patience. “Find somewhere dry,” he ordered with a strange sort of terse gentility. If I didn’t know better, I’d have thought him shy.

She curtsied as though the Queen, herself, had given her a command, and scurried back to her cart.

“Mrs. Croft.” The inspector smirked, offering me the flower.

Stymied and more than a bit wobbly, I took it, in spite of myself. We continued in pensive silence. “You didn’t correct her,” I admonished as we turned onto Tite Street.

“Neither did you.”

Damn his propensity for relevant arguments.

“Aberline mentioned you were not married,” I said. “Do you have a sweetheart?”

All conviviality disappeared from his features as though it had never been. “I did have, once.”

“No longer?”

“It became readily apparent that she didn’t have the constitution to tolerate a vocation such as mine. You understand.” He reached in his jacket for his cigarettes, then seemed to change his mind.

“That I do,” I commiserated. “The long hours. The late nights. The dangerous nature of the work.” The blood on your hands, and the blood in your nightmares.