Peril by Post Read online

  THE JOHN PICKETT MYSTERIES:

  PICKPOCKET’S APPRENTICE

  (prequel novella)

  IN MILADY’S CHAMBER

  A DEAD BORE

  FAMILY PLOT

  DINNER MOST DEADLY

  WAITING GAME

  (Christmas novella)

  TOO HOT TO HANDEL

  FOR DEADER OR WORSE

  MYSTERY LOVES COMPANY

  PERIL BY POST

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Peril by Post | Another John Pickett Mystery

  Sheri Cobb South

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  Peril by Post

  Another John Pickett Mystery

  Sheri Cobb South

  PERIL BY POST

  © 2018 by Sheri Cobb South. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Don’t turn that page!

  Not just yet, anyway. First, I have a bonus short story for you. (Consider it a little appetizer before you begin the main course.) “Tales out of School” is 5,000 words, or about 15 typed double-spaced pages. You can download it in EPUB, MOBI, or PDF format here: Tales out of School

  And the best part? It’s absolutely free! It’s my way of saying “Thank you” for sharing in John Pickett’s adventures. There are a lot of books out there, and you chose to invest your time, imagination, and, yes, money, in mine. I’m more honored than I can say.

  1

  In Which John Pickett Takes On a New Case

  THE LONG-CASE CLOCK in the hall struck seven, the descending tones of its Whittington chimes echoing up to the bedrooms on the floor above. Pushing back the covers, John Pickett sat up and swung his legs out of bed, yawning as he raked his fingers through his tousled brown curls. Behind him, a mound of rumpled sheets stirred, and a sleepy feminine voice purred.

  “Mmm, you’re nice to wake up to.”

  He turned to regard his wife of three months in some surprise. “Oh?”

  Julia smiled sleepily at him. “You find that surprising?”

  “I do,” he confessed, then turned away to hide the mischievous smile he could not quite suppress. “I didn’t think you woke up until noon, at the earliest.”

  While she sputtered in mock indignation, Pickett leaned forward to reach for the pair of breeches lying on a chair beside the bed. Herein he made a tactical error, for she seized the opportunity to swat him on his bare backside. Such uxorial impertinence could not be allowed to go unpunished, so he crawled back into the bed, determined to wreak vengeance upon his laughing spouse. As a result, more than half an hour had passed by the time he left the Curzon Street town house and set out for Bow Street at a run.

  “Late, late, late,” he muttered under his breath, around a mouthful of the roll he’d snatched from the breakfast room to eat on the way.

  Alas, in spite of his best efforts, it was five minutes past eight by the time he entered the Bow Street Public Office, and any hopes he might have entertained of being able to slip in unobserved were dashed when Harry Carson, one of the newer members of the horse patrol, called out to him, “Cutting it a bit close, aren’t you, lover boy?”

  How did they know? Pickett wondered, blushing crimson at finding himself the object of a dozen knowing grins. Was it so obvious? Did it show on his face?

  “So pleased you could join us, Mr. Pickett,” said the magistrate, looking considerably less amused than his men.

  “I’m sorry, sir—” Pickett began, but Mr. Colquhoun silenced him with a look. He finished giving instructions to the men and dismissed them to their duties, concluding with, “Not you, Mr. Pickett.” As Pickett squirmed in anticipation of the coming rebuke, his magistrate waited until the group had dispersed. Once he could be certain of not being overheard, he regarded his most junior Runner with a baleful eye. “This makes the third time you’ve been late since your marriage, does it not, Mr. Pickett?”

  Pickett bethought himself of several late nights and certain unscheduled morning activities, and could not deny it. “I am sorry, sir. It—it won’t happen again.” He considered this last statement. “Actually, it will, but I won’t be late again. That is”—he thought of his wife’s warm and welcoming embrace, and smiled in fond remembrance—“I’ll try not to be.”

  Mr. Colquhoun’s Scottish burr recalled him to the present. “You might try for a little less smugness, Mr. Pickett. You haven’t invented anything new, you know.”

  “It’s new to me,” Pickett objected, thus confirming what Mr. Colquhoun had already suspected.

  The magistrate sighed. “You didn’t have much of a wedding trip, did you?” he asked, not without sympathy.

  Pickett could not agree to this. “Two weeks in Somersetshire,” he reminded his magistrate, “with pay.”

  “During which you not only found yourself saddled with a missing-person case and a murder, but you spent the entire time housed beneath your father-in-law’s roof. And don’t tell me the latter didn’t put more of a damper on the honeymoon than the former.”

  Pickett recalled his uncomfortable first meeting with his horrified in-laws, and shuddered. “No, sir, I won’t.”

  “That being the case, would you fancy a trip to the Lake District with the missus? Tell me what you make of this.”

  Mr. Colquhoun reached across the railing that separated the magistrate’s bench from the rest of the room and handed Pickett a folded sheet of paper, a paper directed to Patrick Colquhoun, Esq., 4 Bow Street, London. Pickett opened it and scanned the few lines it contained. The message was brief and to the point: Please send one of your men to the village of Banfell in Cumberland. He can put up at the Hart and Hound.

  Pickett looked up at the magistrate. “It isn’t signed.”

  Mr. Colquhoun nodded. “It’s obvious that marriage has not dulled your razor-sharp wits.”

  Pickett acknowledged this verbal hit with a rather sheepish grin. “No, but it doesn’t give much to go on, does it?”

  “No, it doesn’t. Truth to tell, I’m a bit scunnered at having been obliged to pay a shilling for the dubious privilege of accepting it. And yet whoever wrote it expects me to send a man on an expensive and time-consuming journey, without so much as hinting at what the purpose might be. I don’t know whether to dispatch you to the Lake District, or this thing to the fire.”

  “But what if he couldn’t say more?” Pickett suggested a bit desperately, seeing the proposed honeymoon slipping away before his eyes. “What if he hadn’t the time to dash off more than a quick note for fear someone else would see? Or if he was afraid to be more specific, lest it fall into the wrong hands?”

  “Aye, you might have a point,” the magistrate said thoughtfully, drumming his fingers on the bench. “If I were to send you to Cumberland on so little information, Mr. Pickett, where would you begin?”

  Pickett looked down at the uncommunicative message in his hand, and sighed. “I suppose I would start by taking a room at the Hart and Hound, letting it be known that I’d come from London, and waiting for our anonymous correspondent to identify himself.”

  “Aye, and in the meantime, you and your lady wife would merely be a newly wedded couple on your honeymoon, which shouldn’t tax your acting abilities overmuch. I think it might work. You might even enjoy the change of scenery. It’s
a wild and beautiful country, the Lake District. Reminds me a bit of my native Scotland, the countryside around Loch Lomond.”

  Pickett could see only one thing wrong with this plan. “I’m not sure Julia should be traveling in her condition.”

  “How far along is she?”

  It had been a shock to both Picketts, man and wife, to discover that Julia—who, after six childless years of marriage to her first husband, had believed herself to be barren—had conceived almost immediately after their own marriage was consummated. “About three months—certainly no more than that.”

  “John, in another month—two, at the most—her condition will become obvious, and she’ll be confined to the house until after the birth. If you’ll heed a word of advice from a man who’s been through it seven times with his own wife, let her get out as much as possible while still she may.”

  For women of Pickett’s own class, life went on very much as usual whether they were increasing or not, so he didn’t quite understand the gentry’s practice of hiding pregnant women away out of sight—did they think babies were found under cabbage leaves?—but he had no doubt that his wife, a lady born and bred, would expect to conform to a custom that no doubt seemed perfectly reasonable to her. Then, too, there was the fact that she had wanted to go with him the last time he’d been obliged to travel during the course of an investigation. He had refused to allow it, not realizing she’d had reasons of her own for being disinclined to remain in London alone. What followed had been their first (and only, touch wood) quarrel, and he had no desire to repeat the experience. Besides, once the baby came, he wasn’t sure she would want to leave it with a nurse long enough to accompany him on an investigation. They might not have another chance.

  “All right, you’ve convinced me,” he said at last.

  “Good man! As it happens, I have an old friend who lives in the area, a fellow by the name of Robert Hetherington. If you’ll wait a bit, I’ll write you a letter of introduction. Who knows but what it might prove useful to you, having a local contact in the area.”

  For some moments afterward, there was no sound but the scratching of the quill as the magistrate penned his letter. At last he returned the quill to its standish, shook pounce over his missive to dry the ink, then folded and sealed it.

  “In the ordinary way of things, I would instruct you to take the stage, but given that you’ll be traveling with a lady—and a breeding lady at that, who will no doubt need to stop at every necessary between here and Penrith—I’ll stand the nonsense for a post-chaise.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Pickett in some surprise, unaccustomed to traveling in such luxury at Bow Street’s expense.

  “No servants, though,” the magistrate added. “I have to hold the cost down where I can. Think your wife can manage?”

  “I know she can,” Pickett assured him with no small note of pride in his wife’s unexpected versatility. In fact, he’d been surprised at how well his gently bred bride had adapted to life in his own Drury Lane flat during the two weeks they’d lived there, although he had no intention of asking her to make such a sacrifice on a more permanent basis.

  “Excellent! It will take you the better part of a se’ennight to reach Cumberland,” Mr. Colquhoun continued, scrawling his acquaintance’s name on the outside of the letter and handing it across the railing. “Add another for the return trip, and I shall expect to see you again in, say, three weeks. If you should require more time—time for your investigation, that is, not for your honeymoon—you may write to inform me of it. For that matter, if you should care to apprise me as to what you find there, I will be happy to accept any letters you might send.”

  “Thank you, sir.” Pickett knew this was no small concession, as receipt of the letter would come from the budget of the Bow Street Public Office, if not from Mr. Colquhoun’s own pocket. Nor would such a correspondence come cheap: a single letter delivered by the Royal Mail from so remote a location would cost the recipient no less than a shilling—four percent of Pickett’s own weekly wages. “I promise not to abuse the privilege. If you receive a letter from me, you may be sure I have significant news to report.”

  “I doubt you’ll have much time for writing in any case, Mr. Pickett,” the magistrate said, then added, with a twinkle in his eye, “after all, you’ll be on your honeymoon.”

  PICKETT RETURNED TO Curzon Street a short time later to find Julia in the dining room, cutting up lengths of white linen spread over the table.

  “Back so soon?” she asked, looking up from her task with every appearance of pleasure. “Nothing wrong, I hope?”

  “No, but—sweetheart, I’m sure you must have a very good reason, but why are you cutting up the tablecloth?”

  “It’s not a tablecloth, silly,” she said, pausing in her task long enough to greet him with a kiss. “I’m making clouts for the baby.”

  “Clouts?” Pickett’s bemused gaze took in the mounds of large white rectangles stacked on several chairs, as well as the length which Julia was in the process of converting into still more, and he formed a very fair estimation of the use to which these “clouts” would be put. “How many clouts does the average baby need?”

  “My dear John, surely you don’t mean to suggest that our child will be ‘average’!”

  “Let’s just say there are some things I would just as soon it not excel at,” Pickett said, wrinkling his nose at the prospect. “But you don’t have to make them yourself, you know. I’m sure we can afford to buy them.” It was still a bit of a sore point to him, that he could not provide her with the many little luxuries to which she was accustomed; he supposed it always would be, no matter how many times she assured him that it did not matter. Still, he could not imagine this expense would be beyond his ability to pay.

  “Oh, but I want to! I’ll have to have something to do during those last few months. I thought I would cut them up now, while I can still lean across the table without difficulty, and then later, when I must keep to the house, I can roll the edges and hem them to prevent fraying. But you were about to tell me why you’re home so early,” she reminded him.

  “I need to pack.”

  “Oh?” Her scissors sliced through the folds of cloth without so much as a pause. “You’re going away?”

  He might have been disappointed, even hurt, by her seeming indifference, had he not noticed her determination not to look him in the face. He braced one hand on the table and leaned forward, making it all but impossible for her to avoid his gaze. “We’re going away,” he corrected her. “How would you like to go to the Lake District with me?”

  The scissors clattered to the table, the baby and its clouts temporarily forgotten. “Oh John, do you mean it?”

  “I do.” Once again he felt a twinge of guilt that marriage to him had effectively banished her from the society of her own class. Mr. Colquhoun was right: he needed to get her out of the house as much as possible for the next month or two. And after that, if hiding her condition away from the world helped her reclaim some part of her lost status—to say nothing of allowing her to escape the public eye until the gossip surrounding their unequal marriage could be forgotten—well, who could blame her? “Mr. Colquhoun thinks we can put on a convincing pose as a newlywed couple—I can’t imagine how he got that idea—while I do a bit of investigating on the sly.”

  “What sort of case is it?” she asked. “When do we set out?”

  “First thing tomorrow morning, if you can be ready that soon. As to what sort of case, well, it’s a curious thing.” He took the letter from his pocket and handed it to her.

  “Curious, indeed.” She scanned the brief note just as he had done only a short time earlier, then turned it over, searching in vain for any sign of a frank that would have allowed the letter to be delivered free of charge. “And wasteful as well, to expect your magistrate to pay a shilling for no more than this.”

  “Yes, Mr. Colquhoun said he was a bit ‘scunnered’ about that, which I assume means he was displ
eased.”

  “I can’t say I blame him.” One of the few things—the very few things—she missed about her first marriage was the loss of Lord Fieldhurst’s franking privileges. She supposed her husband’s cousin George, the new viscount, would frank her letters if she asked—he could hardly do otherwise without looking like the nip-farthing he was—but she refused to give him the satisfaction of believing, quite correctly, that her second husband was incapable of providing the luxuries to which she was accustomed. Instead, newly conscious of the expenses of keeping house (and the need to balance these against the peace of mind of a husband whose income was much less than her own), she reserved her correspondence for when she had real news to impart—or, as she had become increasingly aware, a rather large favor to ask. “In fact, I’m surprised Mr. Colquhoun agreed to send you at all, on so little information.”

  “Oh, he was sorely tempted to consign the letter to the fire, but I persuaded him otherwise.”

  “You did? How? And perhaps more to the point, why? Unless, of course, you saw an opportunity for the two of us to steal away to a secluded and picturesque locale for a few weeks, in which case you’re even cleverer than I thought.”

  “No, I’m afraid not, much as it pains me to disillusion you,” he confessed. “It just seemed a bit, I don’t know, desperate, I suppose. As if whoever wrote this—what there is of it—didn’t dare say more for fear of its falling into the wrong hands.”

  “It all sounds very cryptic and mysterious.”

  “And may yet prove to be nothing but a chase after mare’s nests—in which case Mr. Colquhoun won’t be best pleased with me for persuading him to fund this little jaunt.”

  “I thought the person who sent for you would be the person to pay your expenses.”

  “Yes, but the letter is unsigned,” he pointed out. “If I can’t identify the sender, Bow Street will be left to foot the bill—which is bound to be substantial, what with the hire of a post-chaise to Cumberland and back. But Mr. Colquhoun reckoned that I would not want my wife traveling on the common stage. And he was right,” he added, taking her in his arms and kissing her again.