Airs and Graces by Roz Southey Page A

again! I swung round, raising my fist – and looked into the furious face of Fowler, Heron’s manservant.
    ‘Damn you to hell, Patterson,’ he said, gripping my arm like steel. ‘You’re avoiding me!’
    ‘ Avoiding you?’ I remembered him hovering in the hallway at Heron’s house that morning; he’d had no reason to be there. Unless  . . . ‘You want to talk to me?’
    He was in a savage mood. Fowler has never used the deferential servant’s tone with me, but this was worse than usual. His lean sardonic face was white. ‘Damn it, you can’t even catch a slip of a girl!’
    His grip on my arm was bruising; I said, as calmly as I could, ‘I have been trying to find Alice Gregson, I promise you that. What’s your interest in the matter?’
    His face worked as he struggled to control his anger. Fowler was once a ruffian in the back streets of London and there’s a part of him, under the surface civilization, that remains a ruffian. ‘Ned,’ he said thickly.
    ‘Ned?’
    ‘Edward Hills.’ He looked impatient at my obtuseness. ‘The apprentice! Slaughtered by that bitch while he lay asleep on his bed. The boy who’d only spoken to her twice and then only to say yes, madam, no, madam . The boy who never said a word against her and certainly never made any advances to her!’
    I knew what that meant. Fowler leant forward and hissed in my face. ‘She killed him, Patterson. She slaughtered an innocent boy and I want her. And if you’ve any sense, you’ll not ask what I intend to do to her.’
    I glanced up and down Westgate. The street was quieter than normal but there were still people within earshot. ‘We need to find somewhere private to discuss this.’
    I pulled my arm out of his grip; he let me go, his lean face twisting in derision. ‘That’s right, Patterson. Hide me in a corner somewhere, hide Ned .’
    ‘You know I don’t care about that .’
    ‘He was just a boy,’ he said bitterly, changing tack because he knew what I said was true. ‘An apprentice. You know what apprentices are like – you know what roughs and toughs they are. Nothing like Samuel Gregson, a respected citizen with his business and his money, or his wife, with her hair and her clothes and nothing in her head. Good upstanding citizens, both! Mustn’t let anyone get away with hurting them . But who cares about an apprentice?’
    I hauled him into the nearest tavern, on the other side of the street. It wasn’t the smartest of places but a huge fire was roaring in the grate and the straw on the floor was reasonably clean. I pushed Fowler on to a bench in a quiet corner and signalled for beer. He was losing some of the first flush of anger; he put his head back against the wall and swore at a spirit who came across to chat. I said, ‘Just found out his wife has been entertaining the neighbour,’ and the spirit chortled and withdrew.
    Fowler’s thin mouth twisted in derision. ‘Not likely that will happen, is it?’
    I’ve been acquainted with Fowler about a year now, and known his secret almost from the first. No woman is likely to find herself marrying him; his tastes run in entirely another direction. It’s not information he gives out freely, given it could get him hanged. I’ve never considered it any of my business, any more than my marriage is any of his.
    But the boy’s death was my business. I said in a deliberately mild tone, ‘Have you known him long?’
    He shrugged. His voice was still sharp, his accent aggressively London, but he was calmer now. ‘Six months maybe. Damn it, Patterson, he was seventeen years old – did his tasks well, never answered his master back. Trustworthy, honest and lighthearted. He talked of having his own shop. And all that taken away by a girl who never gave him the time of day! Why? Damn it, why ?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘There was money involved but not enough to warrant killing four people.’
    ‘Money? In the house?’
    I nodded.
    ‘That was something