The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(68)

“Because you had just been beating Lucien Moriarty half to death,” Mr. Morgan-Vilk said, with the same jolly smile he had on before. I inched away from him. Maybe I didn’t want him to meet my father. “How did you manage that?” he asked me. “Brilliant work, really.”

“Ah. Rugby?”

“I should have played rugby,” he said. “Pity. Yes, anyway, Mr. Moriarty. I am very interested in Mr. Moriarty.”

Holmes frowned. “I’ve looked at the records. You know, when I first spoke to your son—”

“When was that?”

“Monday,” Holmes said. “In his stairwell.” She said it so smoothly it took me a second to realize.

“You were there—”

“Later,” she said, and gave me a look I couldn’t quite interpret. “When I first spoke with him, I got the impression that perhaps Lucien had quit your campaign to deal with the matter of his brother August losing his job as my tutor.”

“‘Losing his job.’ What a euphemism. Can’t forget the trunkload of cocaine, or you framing him,” Milo said.

“I’m so happy to entertain you. Yes, me and my wretched mistakes, it’s all very dramatic.” Holmes’s tone was acid. “But I looked them up, and the dates don’t track. Your election was the summer before all that happened. So why did Lucien quit, just before your scandal broke? When he would quite literally have been needed to ‘fix’ your problem?”

The two of them locked eyes. Morgan-Vilk rested his hands on his belly. “After Moriarty quit, and I lost my seat in Parliament so dramatically, I had some time on my hands. As you can imagine, I had developed a bit of a . . . fixation with Lucien.”

“And?”

“He consults for a number of clients, you know. Spins things for them in the news. He hasn’t worked for Downing Street in years, it’s all been in the private sector. You spend your days telling lies for a living—it’s toxic. It can kill your sense of right and wrong, and if you didn’t have one to begin with . . . do you want to know why he left my campaign?”

“Why?” I asked.

“He was having an affair with my wife,” Morgan-Vilk said. There wasn’t a scrap of emotion in his voice. “And I had no idea. It had been going on for more than a decade. Lucien was . . . what, mid-twenties when he started working for me? Young, handsome. He has that ne’er-do-well charm, or did, anyway. That Moriarty name. There’s an odd glamour to it. I suppose my wife was drawn to it.

“He left my campaign because my daughter, Anna, was thirteen years old, and the moment she hit puberty she began to look just like him.”

Anna.

Anna Morgan-Vilk.

Anna with the missing thousand dollars.

“No,” I breathed. “You have got to be—”

“Was there a paternity test done?” Holmes demanded.

“Of course,” Morgan-Vilk said. “Lucien wore his hair longer, in those days. Anna did it herself—plucked a few hairs off his coat and sent them in through a mail service. She showed him the results the week before the election.”

“And he rabbited,” I said.

“Yes,” Morgan-Vilk said. That smile again, like Santa Claus. “Yes, he rabbited. I quite like that term. And when the news broke the next week about me and my mistress—well. My daughter despised me. She despised her mother. And she began worshipping the ‘father’ she’d just discovered she had. She tried to live with him, you know, and he promptly sent her off to school.”

“Our school. She’s working for him now,” I said. “Set me up pretty neatly earlier this week.”

“Oh, I thought he might do something like that. Nasty business.” Morgan-Vilk’s smile faded slightly. “I hate that my girl is mixed up in all of that. You two—well. Like I said, the story about Charlotte and August and Lucien is the sort of nightmare fuel I’ve been running on, thinking about Anna. That man has it in for you, and he’s using my daughter to do it.”

“I’m sorry,” Milo said, and to my surprise it sounded genuine. Maybe it was because the bottle was almost empty. He stood, unsteadily, to open the document box on the table. “I came here originally to discuss certain actions Mr. Morgan-Vilk could perform to improve his public perception, both here and abroad.”

Even drunk and disheveled, Milo Holmes had a certain sort of dignity that made you loath to talk back to him. But I couldn’t let this one slide. “Right. You being here had nothing to do with taking down Lucien. With helping your sister.”

She locked eyes with him. He shook his head almost imperceptibly.

“Come, now. Moriarty has his fingers in other pies. Yours isn’t the only one.” Morgan-Vilk indicated the files in the document box. “Let me put it bluntly. He’s a brand-name criminal, and I’m in need of the recognition that would come from bringing him to justice. So I’d like to be the one to haul him in, if you don’t mind. I’m working out the extradition details already.”

“Mind?” I laughed, bitterly. “I don’t know about Holmes, but yes, please, for Christ’s sake, drag him home in irons. That fucker just married my mother.”

“Did he?” Milo murmured, the way you would ask about the weather.