Chapter 17 - The Manor at Blackwood
Dawn broke over London in shades of charcoal and bruised purple. The Gulfstream touched down on an isolated private airstrip in Essex, where two black Jaguar sedans with heavily tinted windows were waiting on the tarmac.
Captain Joseph, his head wrapped in a thick gauze dressing beneath a flat wool cap, stepped out of the first car to open the jet's stairs. His face was gray, but his jaw was set like granite.
"I told you to stay in the hospital in Manhattan, old friend," Vincent said as he stepped onto the wet tarmac, the damp British air filling his lungs with the smell of coal smoke and wet earth.
"Respectfully, Don Vincent," Joseph growled, patting the heavy Colt beneath his coat, "I'd rather die on English soil putting a bullet through Sterling’s teeth than rot in an American bed wondering if my little girl was cold."
They drove in silence through the waking streets of London, heading south toward the Surrey hills, where the ancient Turner estate—Blackwood Manor—stood abandoned behind iron gates overgrown with black ivy.
Vincent needed a staging ground. He needed weapons that couldn't be traced by the Metropolitan Police, and he needed the original ledger Marcus had buried beneath the stone floor of the manor's carriage house forty years ago.
As the heavy iron gates groaned open, Vincent stepped out onto the gravel drive.
To a normal man, Blackwood Manor was a derelict ruin—broken slate roofs, boarded-up mullioned windows, and the suffocating silence of an English winter.
But to Vincent, the house was screaming.
He stood by the car, closing his eyes, letting his auditory field expand across the seventy-acre grounds.
The wind rustling through the dead yew trees.
The distant rumble of the M25 motorway five miles to the north.
And then... something closer.
Within the manor. On the third floor, behind the broken pediment of the east wing.
A sound.
*Squeak. Thud. Squeak. Thud.*
A rocking chair moving against bare floorboards.
"Joseph. Clara. Get back in the car," Vincent commanded, not turning around.
"Vincent, what is it?" Emily asked, leaning out the car window, her face pale.
"We aren't alone," Vincent replied.
Drawing his silenced automatic from his shoulder holster, Vincent moved across the overgrown lawn like a wraith. He breached the rotting side door without making a sound, slipping through the shadows of the servant's hall.
The air inside smelled of dry rot, damp wallpaper, and expensive French tobacco.
Fresh tobacco.
Vincent ascended the grand spiral staircase, stepping only on the extreme outer edges of the treads where the wood was reinforced by iron brackets. His hearing tracked the rocking chair on the third floor. Along with the chair, there was another sound: a low, baritone voice humming a Victorian sea shanty.
*Blow the man down.*
Vincent reached the third-floor landing. The door to the old master nursery was slightly ajar.
He kicked the door open, leveling his weapon into the room.
Sitting in a high-backed mahogany rocking chair by the broken window, an old man in a tailored tweed suit was slowly smoking a thin brown cheroot. Beside him on a small wooden table was a silver tea service and an open brass birdcage containing a stuffed nightingale.
The old man turned his head. His eyes were milky with cataracts, but his ears twitched at the sound of Vincent’s boots.
"Thirty-seven years late for tea, Vincent," the old man said, his voice gravelly and ancient. "Your father always said you were a punctual boy. I suppose having ears has made you sloppy."
Vincent lowered his gun slightly, his heart giving a rare, violent jolt.
May you like
"Uncle Arthur," Vincent said.
Arthur Turner—Marcus’s younger brother, who had supposedly been executed by the Italian mob in Naples in 1982.
