Convicted Innocent(51)

“Warnin’ you,” the heavy grated to them. “Safe passage, or ‘e gets hit.”

The uncle let out a terrified whimper.

Sergeant Todd paused a few paces away, snarled, and then started forward again.

“Lewis!” Horace put out a hand to stop the man.

Where was that bloody magician? To a similar point, where were Sergeant Bartholomew and the others?

“It’s a bluff,” the tall policeman growled, even though he stopped in his tracks.

“How can you be sure?” the detective asked as the thug dragged his prisoner backward toward the tunnel from which the pair had come originally.

“The blood—” a wracking cough interrupted him, “—the blood on his shoe is mine. Kicked me.”

Lewis took a step toward the retreating pair but faltered as another cough nearly bent him double.

Horace grasped the sergeant under the arm to steady him, “Lewis?”

The sergeant straightened, clenched his jaw determinedly, and tried again to take another step, but his legs buckled.

“Easy, son. I’ve got you,” Horace murmured, getting his arms around the tall policeman before the fellow collapsed completely. The detective went to one knee helping the younger man sit down, keeping an eye on the thug and his prisoner all the while.

“Sir,” Lewis mumbled, his head starting to loll. He coughed again. “Don’t let them ‘scape. Duke’s not a victim…mastermind.”

Horace grunted.

“He’s been giving ‘em hand signals. Don’t let…” Lewis murmured again, and then he fainted.

The old man gently laid the younger policeman down and then lurched to his feet. Jogging as quickly as he might after the pair that had just disappeared in the tunnel’s darkness, Horace cursed his own shortsightedness.

Of course he trusted Sergeant Todd’s judgment; though he didn’t quite see how it all fit together yet or how Duke might be his magician, Horace was willing to take Lewis’s pronouncement on faith.

…only there was no sign of either Duke or his captor ahead of him in the tunnel.

Horace slowed, stopped, and swore.

Too slow, old man, he berated himself, but then he heard something that nearly made him smile.

“Hi! You there: stop! Why, Mr. Duke—! No, no! We’ll sort all that out at the station.”

Sergeant Bartholomew’s voice wafted to him from somewhere up ahead, faint and oddly distorted by the confines of the passage, but clear nonetheless.

Finally! The reinforcements he’d sent the long way around had found their way in. Apparently the metal door on the main corridor was the entrance to the arena.

Less than a minute later, the face of a constable he sort of recognized peered back at him around a bend, the lad’s face haloed by lamplight.

“Sir!” The constable then shouted back over his shoulder, presumably to Sergeant Bartholomew: “It’s the inspector!”

“Come with me, quickly.”

Letting the constable run to catch up, Horace spun on his heel and retraced his steps to the arena.

Sergeant Todd was as he’d left him: unconscious, bleeding, and breathing roughly. The old man paused for a moment to make sure the constable who’d followed was taking care of the dear boy, and then stood and stopped.

Slowly he pivoted on his heel, noting that not one of the heavies Lewis had knocked down was stirring yet.

Hopefully they would stay that way until more reinforcements arrived. What could he do, anyway? Hit them again?

In a moment he was kneeling next to Nicholas Harker by Lewis’s best mate. Powell lay twisted on his stomach, and Harker had stripped off his own shirt to press to the bloody wound in the little man’s back.