Page 5 of To Sketch a Scandal (Lucky Lovers of London #4)

But Barrows was reaching into his desk drawer, paying Matty’s feeble protest no mind. He took out a small blue box with ribbon on it.

Matty took it reluctantly. “Sir, this isn’t—”

“I know I ought to wait the few weeks, until I leave and your promotion is official,” said Barrows. “But I admit, I’m impatient. And it’s all in the bag anyway. So open it now. Let it keep you company through our last case together.”

With hands that suddenly felt stiff and dry, Matty undid the wrapping and opened the box. It was a modest but well-made gold ring set with an inky onyx stone.

“Th-thank you, sir,” said Matty, throat squeezed. He shut the box and held it back out. “Once it’s all official—”

“Make sure it fits,” Barrows scolded, pushing it back.

He opened the box again and slipped on the ring. A perfect fit.

“As I say,” Barrows said. “You’ve done well, these years. I didn’t want to leave without a bit of recognition for that. I know you don’t get much of it around here. But I have appreciated your work immensely.”

“Thank you, sir,” Matty nearly whispered. “Um. It’s… I like it a lot.”

There was an awkward silence. The shorter-term goodbye became inevitable when it stretched too long, brought about by his own unwillingness to fully engage with the other. Barrows stood, tacked the advertisement back on the board, and gave Matty a pat on the back.

“Well, Matthew, we have plenty of long nights ahead of us as it is, and these old bones are ready for a rest,” he said. “Are yours? Those terribly ancient, twenty-five-year-old bones of yours?”

They were, actually, but his mind was not ready to disengage from this dusty little office.

The room he rented was objectively more comfortable, but what was there for him aside from a lonely bed?

A landlady and other tenants he could not talk to about his high-security days?

A cold plate of the supper he’d long-since missed?

He was certainly no expert in the mysterious concept of “home,” but he assumed what he felt in this office was closer to it than what he felt at his boardinghouse.

It was better when Barrows was sitting across from him, admittedly, but even alone, it was something.

“Not yet.” Matty tapped one of the tacked-up notes with the back of a finger. “There’s a little more I’d like to sort through, I think.”

“The character profiles of your suspiciously-surnamed would-be lovers?” Barrows teased.

When Matty didn’t smile back, his own faded rapidly.

He gave another pat on the back, this one firm with the unspoken weight of where Matty’d been found, what he’d been through, what he’d made of himself with the face that might otherwise have been his ruin before the age of twenty.

Statistically. “You’ll have earned that mustache when all is said and done, lad. More than earned it.”

Barrows left, and Matty returned to his desk with his case file and the single photograph of the Buttersnipes and their dog.

As usual, they were not exactly the sort he’d choose to seduce if given the option—it had only happened the other way once, during the investigation of a coffeehouse in Piccadilly Circus that he investigated for supposed sodomitical conspiracies.

As an occasional participant in such conspiracies himself, Matty had opted not to find any proof of wrongdoing when the wrongdoing he found turned out to be the sort that wasn’t hurting anyone, in his estimation.

He’d done the same for David Forester, his harmless employer in the Belleville case.

Having been shown mercy himself by Barrows all those years ago, he had an appetite for letting things slide that was nearly as inconvenient as the other one.

So he’d cleared the place and in the process made a few…

well, not friends, exactly, but chaps with whom he could pass the occasional hour when he’d stayed too long at headquarters but could not stomach the thought of going back to his lonely room.

Which might prove to be the case tonight.

As he tried to reread the suspect notes, hardly a quarter of the words seemed to actually reach his brain.

He leaned his elbows on the desk and ruffled his hands through his hair, chest still tight with anxiety over Barrows’s retirement.

It would be best for both of them, in the end, when Barrows got his pension and the promotion came for Matty.

But in the meantime, he was becoming increasingly wretched about the idea, convinced he’d never cut it without his mentor at the desk across the way.

The sentimentality that had overtaken him at the giving of a fairly modest and standard sort of parting gift was not helping at all.

A little company might put it from his mind for a bit…

He was so wrapped up that at first, he hardly noticed the sound of steps and voices in the hall outside his office.

He’d known he wasn’t the only one here—there was always a good heapful of someones at headquarters—so it was no shock to hear conversation.

Once he consciously noticed the voices, he tried not to hear what was being said.

Years of being surrounded by secrets had made his hearing conveniently selective.

But even through his closed door and his efforts at ignorance, he couldn’t help but hear the words “Barrows’s position” quite clearly.

Barrows’s position? As in, the role that Matty’s name was already in for? Barrows’s position, meaning, Matty’s position, soon enough?

He nearly left them to it, but hardly half a moment later he was on his feet, carefully cracking his door just a little.

Just enough. One could not talk about the fate of Barrows’s position without talking about Matty, and curiosity about what they might say about his qualifications was too great to resist. Maybe they would say the thing Matty needed to hear to believe he could handle the phase of his career less dependent on accidents of beauty.

A peek down the dark hall showed the speakers were in the office of Detective Superintendent Frost—the man who oversaw the entire Special Investigations department.

A little thrill ran through Matty’s belly. An official conversation it was, then. Not mere office gossip.

He did not dare creep closer, but both office doors were open now, and not too far from each other. All Matty had to do was be still. Focus. He knew how to hear what needed to be heard, whether or not he was strictly supposed to hear it…

“So you mean to say,” came a voice Matty recognized as Detective Ashton, a man at Barrows’s level, though with less experience. “That the Shaw kid—”

Alone as he was, Matty let his lips quirk upward just a tad.

“That’s right,” said Frost, nice and loud in the quiet hallway.

“Shocking, really,” said Ashton. “I never would have expected it to go this way.”

The smile faded with ire. What did he mean he didn’t expect it ?

Barrows had brought him on as an “unofficial asset” when he was hardly fifteen years old, a pay-rolled Detective Constable just two years later, and an inspector instead of a statistic at the age of twenty-one.

He’d practically been raised for this position like some were raised in a family trade.

Whether it was a particularly good idea to give the job to Matty was perhaps debatable, but who else would it go to?

“Didn’t you?” Frost chuckled, and it should have been a comfort, but there was something undeniably wrong about the sound.

Matty felt the first tingle of trouble start up low in his belly.

It would be a very good time to go back to his desk.

To shut the door. To hear no more. But his shoes felt glued to the floorboards.

Against his better judgment, he leaned his head on the door frame, shut his eyes, and listened harder than ever: “Well, if you’re shocked, I’m sure Barrows will have that bloody heart attack that he’s overdue for when he finds out.

But be honest, Ashton: how can I possibly give such an important position to Detective Matilda ? ”

The words and Ashton’s responding laugh were so shocking, so baldly cruel and uncalled for, that it took Matty a moment to realize they were still talking about him.

“Don’t get me wrong, he does well enough at…what he does,” Frost went on. “But do you really think I can ask other self-respecting detectives to take orders from the boy bait?”

Matty’s heart thudded and his fingers tingled.

Gossip of all kinds was common at the Met.

This was not the first time Matty had overheard words like this thrown around about him.

Stupid schoolboy stuff was inevitable in such a masculine workplace.

It would spell disaster on the street-policing side of things, but this was the detectives’ unit, and Special Investigations to boot.

They all needed to do what had to be done. Such rumors hardly mattered.

Unless, of course, it was the superintendent spreading them.

“Oh, he does seem to have other skills, though,” Ashton said, friendly, amiable, like they’d disagreed on the merits of a casual cricket player neither had much of a stake in, rather than a respected junior detective who’d brought down multiple trafficking rings by playing “the boy bait” by day and working his damned arse off with the hours that remained.

“Did a bang-up job on that Belleville ring, didn’t he?

And Barrows recommends him very highly.”

“Oh, he’s been useful enough,” Frost said.

“But don’t you think it reflects a little funny on Barrows that he’s so enthusiastic about a detective with less than a decade of official work under his belt?

Don’t you think it might reflect a little funny on me to promote him now, given his role in that last case, bang-up job or not? ”

“What was that, again?”

“Valet and confidant to a man suspected of serious sodomitical conspiracies, Ashton.”