A Christmas Odyssey Read Free Page B

self-indulgence to be aware of its labyrinthine depths and dangers. What onearth had possessed him to begin this? He should have told Henry Rathbone that the whole thing was impossible. For that matter, Rathbone should have told Lucien’s father that in the first place. Squeaky was really losing his grip. Respectability was an idiot’s calling.
    “Right!” he said tartly. “I’ll go back and tell Hester I can’t do it.”
    “You didn’t tell her anything about it in the first place,” Crow pointed out, but there was no smile in his eyes.
    “And how do I tell Mr. Rathbone that I can’t do it?” Squeaky said sarcastically. “Without her knowing, eh? She’s clever, that one. She can read a lie like it was writ on your face. She’ll know, whatever I say.”
    Crow thrust his hands into his pockets. His hands always seemed to be bare, whatever the weather. Squeaky looked at him. “Why don’t you get someone to pay you with a pair o’ gloves?” he said pointedly.
    Crow ignored the remark. “Are you saying obliquely that you will tell Hester I refused to help?”
    “Obliquely? Obliquely? You mean sideways?” Squeaky said crossly. “Why can’t you say it straightout? And no, I’m not saying it sideways, I’m telling you plain that she’ll know, ’cause if she were in my place, you’d be the person she’d ask. Which comes to my point. You want me to tell her you won’t help, or you want to tell her yourself?”
    Crow shook his head. “You haven’t lost your touch, Squeaky. You’re a hard man.”
    “Thank you,” Squeaky said with unexpected appreciation.
    Crow glared at him. “It wasn’t a compliment! What do we know about this Lucien Wentworth, apart from the fact that his father is wealthy and seems to have let him have a lot more money than is good for him?”
    Squeaky shrugged and started to walk again, talking half over his shoulder as Crow caught up with him. He repeated what Henry Rathbone had told him about Lucien’s weakness for physical pleasure, his need to feel a sense of power, to feel admired, to feel—as it might appear to his deluded and immature mind—loved.
    Behind them a string of barges went downriver with the ebbing tide, their riding lights bright sparks in the wind and darkness. To the south a foghorn sounded mournfully.
    Crow’s expression grew grimmer as he tramped beside Squeaky. Finally they turned inland and slightly up the slope, leaving the sounds of the water behind them. The thickening gloom of the winter night lay ahead. Lamps shone one after another along the narrow street, angular beacons toward the busier High Street.
    “It’s going to be a long night,” Crow said as they reached the crossroad. They waited for the traffic to clear, and then hurried over, their boots splashing in the gutter and then crunching on the cobbles already slicked with ice. “And we may not find anything.”
    Squeaky wanted to tell him to stop complaining, but he knew that Crow was right, so he said nothing for several minutes.
    “Let’s have a drink first,” he suggested finally. He thought of offering to pay for both of them, but that was a bad habit to start.

I t was, as Crow had said, a very long night. They began with extremely discreet inquiries in the Haymarket. The area was notorious for the prostitutes who patrolled its pavements so openlythat no decent woman went there, even if accompanied by her husband. However well-dressed she was, she would be likely to be taken for a lady of the night. In this area such women might be indistinguishable from ladies of society, especially those whose taste was a little daring.
    “I don’t know what we’ll learn here,” Crow said, watching a couple of young women quite openly sidle up to a group of theatergoers.
    “Do you know which theaters are fashionable right now for tastes a bit sharper than usual?” Squeaky asked challengingly.
    “My patients don’t come up this way,” Crow admitted. “East End music halls are more