Knockout: A Hell’s Belles Novel

Three mornings later, Thomas Peck’s day was boding extremely well. He had slept deeply, uninterrupted by either late night or early morning summonses from Scotland Yard, and woken to a bright January morning, blue skied and unseasonably warm. He’d fetched water, had a quick soak and a quicker shave, and dressed in a navy coat and trousers, his world in perfect order. Precisely as he liked it.

Yes, all was right with the world. No explosions, which meant no lushly curved ladies smelling of pears and cream in their wreckage, which meant no disorder. Everything as it should be, he thought, stroking one hand over his freshly oiled beard as he pulled his hat and greatcoat from the peg just inside the door and left his rooms, making his way downstairs. An auspicious beginning.

At which point, everything went sideways.

First, his landlady bid him good morning. Authentically—without any hint of her usual surly censure, and without even a whiff of the long list of grievances she kept so close at hand relating to his tenancy, and that of everyone else in the rooming house.

Instead, she’d offered him breakfast. And not day-old toast and the end of the marmalade, neither. No, Mrs. Edwards had cooked. Eggs. Bacon and blood pudding. Bread that was, if his nose was not deceiving him, freshly baked. With butter.

She’d set a salt cellar next to his plate.

A plate that was, when he touched it, warm.

It was the warm plate that summoned the whisper of cold dread, which became even more icy when Mrs. Edwards did not return to the kitchens, muttering about how the terrible tenant in room three (a German barber who seemed a perfectly decent fellow) had woken her in the dead of night when he’d come in from Lord knew where.

No, instead, the very tall, very slim, very taciturn white woman had lingered. And Thomas Peck, known for being one of the most skilled detectives in the Metropolitan Police Force—so skilled he had been made detective inspector in its newly formed Detective Branch two years earlier—had no choice but to notice . . . Oh no. Was the woman blushing?

The freshly baked bread scent went acrid.

Mrs. Edwards’s brows rose, expectantly, and Thomas had the unsettling sense that he was in a play, the lines to which he had never learned. “Erm,” he said, clearing his throat. “Thank you?”

His landlady smiled a wide, brilliant smile—one he’d never seen before. One that made her seem younger, more handsome, and . . . Was it possible she seemed friendly? “Oh, Inspector Peck, it was my absolute pleasure,” she gushed, and he froze, recognizing the tone in her voice.

Something had happened.

Before he could decide how to respond, she continued. “I confess, I had no idea I had such a hero in the house.”

Thomas frowned. What on earth?

“I am afraid I do not—”

“Carrying a lady from a collapsing building! To think!”

The memory of Imogen Loveless—Lady Imogen Loveless, he reminded himself—in his arms three mornings earlier, dark eyes on his, dust in her silky curls, came unbidden. There’d been a witness.

Of course there had been. There was nothing involving that woman that wouldn’t summon attention. She was pure chaos. His frown turned to a scowl. “How did you—”

“The News even has a sketch!”

“A what?”

“Shall I fetch it? So you can see?”

Dear God, no. Peck stood, eager to leave this conversation. This room.

Before he could say no to his landlady, whom he found he liked far better when she was consumed with grouchiness, she was off, into the kitchens. Excellent. A perfect opening for escape. Before she returned with the sketch.

Peck left the breakfast room at a clip—he’d never again be tricked by warm food—barreling past the barber from room three, who tipped his hat with a “Good day, Detective Inspector! Off to keep us all safe, I see!”

Little did the man know that in that moment, Thomas Peck was thinking only of escape.

Dammit.

There had been a witness to the collapse . . . to his carrying Imogen—Lady Imogen, he corrected himself once more—from O’Dwyer and Leafe’s . . . and they’d gone to the News.

Who? It could have been anyone.

And, more importantly, why? These days, did there need to be a reason?

But, perhaps even more importantly, was there any earthly way he could avoid anyone who had seen it?

That, at least, had an answer: Absolutely not.

But he was one of Scotland Yard’s best regarded men, the head of the Detective Branch, in line for a promotion to superintendent of his own police division, and big as a house. So at least he could bank on some segment of his colleagues being terrified enough to keep their mouths shut.

Head down, he headed to work, slightly surprised when the two sergeants at the front desk of Whitehall—the building that housed the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police—ignored him altogether, deep in discussion about something else. As he climbed the steps to the row of glass-paned offices that housed Whitehall’s senior inspectors, no one seemed to notice his arrival. And by the time he’d made it to the end of the wood-paneled corridor—to his own office in the rear corner of the building, where the Detective Branch was situated, it appeared possible that no one in all of Scotland Yard had seen the News.

Or perhaps Mrs. Edwards had been mistaken. Doubtful, that.

“Ah. You’re here.”

Peck paused in unlocking the door to his office, looking over his shoulder to find John Phillips, a senior Whitehall inspector, coming round the corner, thick file in hand. A tall, dark-skinned Black man with a wardrobe full of perfectly tailored suits, Phillips had been at Scotland Yard a mere two weeks fewer than Thomas had, having joined the Metropolitan Police eleven years earlier after a stint in Her Majesty’s Navy. For his part, Thomas had joined the police fresh-faced and green, nearly as green as the force itself—only three months after Parliament had voted for a new, publicly funded police unit to replace the private Bow Street Runners, which had grown rampant with corruption.

Phillips and Thomas had become fast friends, when they’d discovered their mutual love of boxing and ale. After that, they’d chased each other up the rungs of Whitehall, honing each other’s powers of deduction as they unofficially competed for the most cases solved in a given month—a tradition that only ended when Peck was assigned a post as an inaugural detective inspector of Scotland Yard, two years earlier. Phillips could have easily joined the Detective Branch, but instead elected to continue his rise through the rungs of the formal Metropolitan Police, overseeing the uniformed members of the Whitehall precinct—five dozen sergeants and constables. While their work now differed, the men remained colleagues and friends.

“I am here,” Thomas replied, entering his office and shucking his coat and hat. “And I’ve work to do.”

“No doubt,” Phillips said, following him into the room and dropping into a chair as Thomas rounded the desk. “Your explosions won’t solve themselves, will they?”

“They will not, in fact.” Thomas lifted a stack of files from the desk—seven explosions. Four on one day late last October, no witnesses. No deaths. Just clean explosions taking out some of the cruelest workhouses in the city, on the same morning Imogen Loveless delivered him a file thick as his thumb, indicting their owner in more than one murder.

And now, three more. Different from the October bombings because of their cruelty—November’s killed eight at a bakery in Bethnal Green. December’s razed a print shop in Whitechapel, sending two to their death and another dozen to surgeons across the East End. And now, the most recent, a seamstress in Spitalfields—in the middle of the night, thankfully, luckily, when the building was empty.

No witnesses. Explosions just as tidy, with little, if any, evidence pointing to a culprit. And just as connected to Lady Imogen—but in a different way. Thomas couldn’t prove it, but he was fairly certain she had orchestrated the first round of bombings, ensuring no victims but the wealthy, powerful, titled monster who owned the workhouses. But the recent ones . . . it was almost as though she knew more than he did.

A vision flashed. Lady Imogen in his arms as he stood outside the building, smiling up at him as though everything had gone just as she’d intended. Lush curves, bright laugh, and somehow, always at the center of the chaos.

He’d be fascinated by her if she wasn’t so infuriating.

Eager to think of anything but Imogen Loveless, he looked to his friend. “Do you not have an office of your own?”

Phillips ignored the dry question. “Adams is asking for you.”

Superintendent Wallace Adams oversaw the Detective Branch along with the rest of the Whitehall police division, but rarely came to this corner of the building, allowing Peck nearly complete control over the Detective Branch, a decision that could not be faulted for Thomas’s legendary unflappable nature and keen investigative skill. Adams had been Thomas’s superior officer for years before the branch had been formed, and he was happy to turn up to praise the team for a crime well solved, or to deliver a few claps on the back, but he rarely, if ever, summoned his detective inspector.

“What’s he want?” Thomas asked.

“Dunno,” Phillips said. “Maybe it has something to do with your newfound celebrity?”

Peck froze at the words, full of dry humor, his gaze immediately meeting his friend’s. “Dammit.”

Phillips grinned. “A proper hero if I do say so myself.”

Thomas cursed under his breath. “I don’t understand how anyone knew I was there. I was alone.”

“Alone, with the lady.”

Alone with the lady.

Thomas did not reply, and Phillips filled the silence. “From what I read, she was lucky you were there. She ought to send you a thank-you note.”

“No, thank you,” Thomas said, making a show of sorting through the files on his desk. “Knowing her, it would arrive delivered by a wild bear, and explode upon reading.”

Phillips’s black brows rose in amusement. “Really? Sounds like a worthy adventure.”

At first glance, she didn’t seem like mayhem. She seemed pretty as a damn picture, with her enormous brown eyes and her full pink lips and her rosy cheeks, all set in a perfect round face atop a lush body that made a man wonder before he remembered she was a lady and ladies weren’t for wondering.

And just then—just when he was telling himself not to wonder—that was when she’d knock him over the head with her chaos.

She wielded distraction like a weapon.

In that moment, Thomas would have done anything to distract from the conversation and, more specifically, from the woman herself. He looked down at his desk, hoping for a robbery, perhaps. Some light counterfeiting. He’d settle for a missing hound.

What he got was far worse.

He went hot with . . . something. It wasn’t embarrassment. Thomas Peck did not get embarrassed. But truly, he’d take an exploding missive over this. Because there, in all its glory, was the morning’s News, a front-page headline reading:

Spitalfields Gets a Peek of Peck!

London’s Favorite Detective Proves

Fascinatingly Fearless in Building Collapse!

And as if that weren’t atrocious enough, beneath it was a caricature that made Thomas seriously consider going door to door throughout the city to collect every damn issue of the rag, stopping only when they were all deposited into the Thames.

Set against a sketch of the hollowed-out carcass of the building that had once housed O’Dwyer and Leafe’s Dressmakers, an illustrated Peck stepped from the rubble into the street, looking like a giant, with broad shoulders and long legs. In his arms, a woman, plump and dark-haired, her legs kicked up in the air, skirts scandalously askew.

Imogen Loveless. Though, thankfully, she remained unidentified. If she’d been named . . . Well. While he didn’t care for the way she turned up constantly in the midst of his working day, he didn’t wish her ruined. Indeed, he wished she’d go back to the world into which she’d been born. Where she belonged.

Where he decidedly did not belong.

They’d gotten it wrong, of course. Oh, they had the curls right—a riotous cloud—and the lush drape of her in his arms. He could still feel the warm weight of her, soft and curving, even though he absolutely should not remember any of that. But she was unconscious in the picture, dark eyes and full pink lips closed instead of as they’d been—open, with a delighted gleam in one, and a cacophony of chatter in the other.

In one corner of the frame, a gaggle of women of all ages and ilk—old and young, bejeweled and in rags, one holding a squalling infant, another with a basket of posies—stood wide-eyed and sighing, hearts floating up from their clump.

“Fucking hell,” he said quietly. He’d never live it down.

“Really, Tom,” Phillips said, and Thomas did not have to look to know his friend was smiling a wide and irritating grin. “You’d think you’d embrace such meteoric fame.”

“Fame is for artists and dandies,” Thomas said. “I’ve actual work to do. As do you, for that matter.”

Phillips—one of the hardest working men at Whitehall—did not rise to the bait, instead ignoring it altogether. “One question,” he began, and Thomas clenched the paper in one hand. “Could you explain the physics of your clothing coming off your body as the building came down around you?”

Thomas’s gaze returned to the giant in the caricature—no doubt supposed to be him—half naked, his shirt and coat shredded to bits as he stormed from the building.

Phillips tilted his head and considered the cartoon as well. “Or perhaps we are to think it was the lady who could not stop herself from . . . before the rafters came down around you . . .”

“Bugger off.”

His friend grinned. “Nah. I think I’ll stay.” He whistled long and low. “But I shan’t stop thinking about whether or not the lady in question had such a nice ankle.”

Nicer. “And how do you think your wife would respond to that?”

“I hope by showing me how well her own ankles compare. But your lady would be hard-pressed to match my Susie.” No man in the wide world loved a woman like John Phillips loved his wife. It was enough to give anyone in the vicinity a toothache.

“She’s not my lady,” Thomas grumbled. He simply happened to have the ill fortune to run into Lady Imogen with alarming frequency.

“Of course not. You’re simply an everyday hero, rescuing a damsel in distress.”

Thomas scoffed. “There was nothing distressed about that particular damsel.”

“Rescuing hapless women, then.”

The scoff became a little huff of laughter. “If she heard you call her hapless, I’m not sure she wouldn’t challenge you to a duel.”

“Pistols or swords?”

“Blasting powder, more likely.”

“Really.” The word was drawn out, as though Phillips were considering his options.

Thomas didn’t like that. And he liked the fact that he didn’t like that even less. Clearing his throat, he stood up from the desk. “You know, I think I’d prefer a conversation with Adams over this one, after all.”

Philips waved a hand in the direction of the superintendent’s offices. “Go on then.” He leaned forward and snatched the paper off the desk. “I’ll be here. Reading.”

“Again, you’ve an office of your own.”

“Yours has better light.” Phillips brandished the paper. “And better material.”

Thomas rolled his eyes and left the office, in search of more important business, his long strides claiming ground as he pushed thoughts of newspapers and aristocratic women and one lushly beautiful one in particular out of the way. He was a serious man with a serious job and a serious future. And he did not have time for whatever one madcap hour with Lady Imogen Loveless threatened to bring into his life.

Certainly not here, at his place of business.

Satisfied with the resolution, Peck made for the long corridor that led to the rear corner of Whitehall, where the superintendent’s office overlooked the mews behind the building.

And that’s when she appeared.

For a moment, he thought he’d imagined her. After all, there was no reason for Lady Imogen to be inside Scotland Yard at all, let alone down a long, dark passage full of storage closets and unused interrogation rooms.

But there she was, exiting the uniform room, as though everything were perfectly normal.

As though Thomas himself had summoned her.

And perhaps he had.

She was wearing green this time, a bright, happy emerald with luxurious skirts and the wide ballooned sleeves and her ever-present obsidian brooch. The dress was so bold that it seemed impossible that she was skulking about down the dark corridor. Surely someone attempting to stay out of sight would have chosen a less . . . flamboyant color.

“What in hell?” he said, immediately changing course and heading for her.

And damned if the woman didn’t flash him her boldest, brightest smile and say, “Hello, Detective Inspector! What brings you here?”