to
sleep, and now he was having a drink to help him get started in the morning.
Not
a good sign. Not a good sign at all. To hell with it, he thought, and tossed
back the Scotch. It felt like fire going down. He held up the empty glass and
looked at it with a wry grimace.
"Be careful, Michael," he said to himself. "You like this evil stuff too
damned
much, you keep this up and it'll be your undoing." He put down the glass and
filled it up again. He raised it. "Well, sod it, here's to my undoing."
The second one went down more smoothly than the first. He walked over to the
window and raised the shade. The sky was getting gray over the city. The
phone
rang.
He flinched, and his hand involuntarily squeezed so hard that the glass
shattered in his grasp. "Damn," he said, opening one of the bureau drawers
and
fumbling for a fresh handkerchief while the telephone kept ringing. He
wrapped
the handkerchief around his bleeding hand and picked up the phone.
"Yes, yes, what is it?"
"Sorry to wake you, Chief Inspector, but I'm afraid we've got another one."
He closed his eyes. "Oh, bloody hell," he said.
"Yes, sir. It certainly is that."
At twenty, Andrew Lloyd Blood was overweight, weak-chinned, and rather pasty,
but he made close to ten times the money that his older brother Michael made
as
Chief Inspector. He was in training for the family business, which meant that
he
was learning to become a shark, and he was an astonishingly quick study. He
was
not quite ready for the subtle world of investment banking yet, because those
polished predators took carefully selective bites and sheared the flesh off
very
neatly, whereas Andrew had a tendency to chomp at everything in sight as if in
a
blood-crazed feeding frenzy. So, appropriately, he had become a stockbroker.
Occasionally he even made some money for his clients. However, that was not
his
chief concern. Andrew was chiefly concerned with making enough money to
support
his hobby, which was self-gratification. Consequently he was eagerly looking
forward to the evening's entertainment, and especially to meeting the
mysterious
Lord Carfax.
It seemed that everyone who was anyone was talking about him, but no one
really
seemed to know just who he was. It was impossible to trace the fellow's
lineage,
which was a pity, Andrew thought. There was no help from anything like