“Drake! Open up!” Red’s voice called out.

Margot released Drake’s hands, and he strode to the door, jerked it wide, even as the one to Dot’s room cracked open too. “What is it?”

Holmes’s chest was heaving, as if he too had run all the way here—or as close as he could get to running with his foot, anyway. He looked past Drake, to Margot. “I saw police swarming all over a building of flats on my way here and stopped in to see what the hubbub was about. It was Williams’s building.”

She looked to Drake, then back to Red. “What has he done now?”

“Williams?” Red shook his head. “Williams apparently hasn’t done anything for more than a month. They found his body in the basement. The bloke who’s been living there, the one I followed . . . apparently he isn’t Williams at all.”

“Walsh, then.” Drake charged toward the stairs, his face a stony mask. “And he’ll be on the run.”

28

Drake stood in the center of Williams’s unfamiliar flat, knowing well he was only here because Hall had once again pulled strings. Margot stood beside him, her fingers gripping his. To give strength or receive it? He wasn’t sure anymore.

Dot was at home, with Red and their upstairs neighbor to chaperone. And to fuss over them. Camden had been standing sentinel at the door when they’d left. Hall hadn’t sent him, but Cam apparently had heard him barking out an order for an armed guard and had volunteered for the job.

Heaven help anyone who tried to cross him.

“I don’t understand.” Margot’s eyes stayed fixed on the portrait that hung, framed, on the wall. The real Williams, it seemed, smiling as he posed for the camera, shaking the hand of an important-looking Japanese official. Not the man either he or Margot had seen before. “Why would he have assumed Williams’s identity?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps he thought his Niall Walsh cover had been compromised.” Drake’s glance skidded around the room, not sure where to rest. The police had already been all through it, looking for any hints as to who had murdered the poor man. Muddy boot prints marred the floor, papers had been left out on the table, drawers upended.

“Who is this man?” Margot had looked away from the portrait at last. But her gaze settled on the grey overcoat hanging neatly in the corner. Apparently he’d had to flee from the bobbies too quickly to grab it.

But it was the one he’d been wearing outside Dot’s flat. The one, according to Margot, he’d been wearing earlier that evening when he’d attacked them.