Fred Abberline arrived at Police headquarters a little later than was customary, but this odd English policeman was given a wide berth, much like the tea with milk he drank. The lower ranking officers found his eccentricities amusing, and whilst they might pull faces at the thought of taking orders from him, never quite sure if it would be a death knell to their own careers, they knew this was no commissioner’s lackey. If anything he took the heat off them, a fact acknowledged by the small cup of gunpowder-black coffee that was pushed his way as he sat slightly crumpled as ever at his desk.

“It will help, Inspector... peut-être!” a small giggle rippled through the room and Abberline just grinned.

“Kill or cure? Is that what you are telling me?” His face grimaced as the bitter taste swirled in his mouth, the saving grace being the heavy sugar syrup at the bottom of the cup which he allowed to coat his lips. “Merci…peut-être. Now, I believe that the Commissioner is expecting some results. It seems I am destined to disappoint him,” with a wry smile he gathered the rather unsatisfactorily slim bundle of papers on his desk and set off down the hall. The gendarmes listened to the rising sound of exasperation as it drifted through the wooden doors.

“Inspector Abberline! I had hoped for your completed report this morning. Surely this is an open and shut case?” The reply was lost in soft tones and measured responses but nonetheless appeared to raise the Commissioner’s blood pressure “What do you mean ‘It is more complicated than that’? The Comte de Richelieu is my personal friend, we dined only yesterday together....Yes it was a very pleasant meal amoungst friends! What has that to do with it?!...No I will not tell you who else was there!!...He has been the victim of theft! Inspector, I have no need of your more unusual methods and neither it seems did the English police…Please don’t tell me you expect to proceed on the basis of a hallucination?! Sacre Bleu!…Madame Pascale, stop typing and fetch my tonic immédiatement.”

The door of the Commissioner’s office closed behind him, and Abberline shrugged at the gendarmes sitting with their pens poised and slightly amused smiles. “I have a feeling that didn’t go so well, call it intuition…” and with a wink Abberline slipped back out into Paris.

Stepping into the weak afternoon sun Lily picked up her heels and fairly marched to Rue Belhomme to find the apartment of the artist Michel Demains. If she was going to get the women of the Moulin Rouge to listen to Inspector Fred Abberline, she was going to need Gabrielle’s help, not to mention that she was scared stiff herself and Gabrielle would be sure to have a hug and a glass of wine for her. So it was with conviction that Lily approached the building and pulled the bell cord. A distant tinkle someplace in the building was all the response she got for some time, and Lily pulled the cape further around her shoulders, the autumn Paris afternoon seeping into her bones.

A daunting list of residents past and present were scrawled on scraps of paper and displayed in a menu at the side of the door. Some no doubt once proudly inscribed “Monsieur Lautrec, appartement 4,” and Lily imagined shadows of smiling figures, boxes of books, new easels and fresh paints hurriedly dragged up the stairs to blank canvasses of rooms. The names now though, like everything else, suffered in the rain and the grime of these streets. Lily pulled the bell cord again, her eyes casting upward just as an almighty clatter of feet on wood stairs broke the silence behind the door.

It was some climb up those stairs, but she was rewarded with a smile as wide as the Seine. Gabrielle was sitting amoungst a tumble of stockings and empty glasses and beginnings of paintings that had all been abandoned in favour of more direct artistic endeavours. “What is the matter, Lily? It hours until we have to dance again.”

Lily rolled her eyes, “I need your help with a police inspector.”

Gabrielle raised her eyebrow, “Lily Dubois, surely you can manage a man on your own, but a gendarme...are you ill?” Gabrielle’s good humour however fell at the frown Lily gave, her face suddenly serious as she listened to the tale Lily had tossed and turned over in her mind all night—of theft and fires and eggs and how he made her feel like she was about to drown.

Michel poured the wine as the afternoon progressed into dusk, and at last Lily wiped her face, “So I need help with a police inspector. You know what the girls are like, well what I am like, we’d rather trust our own than them bluecoats, but he needs help, Gabrielle, to get evidence against these men.”

By the time Lily and Gabrielle returned to the boarding house, there was quite a hubbub coming from upstairs, nothing stayed secret for long here. The landlady shouted from the kitchen, “There is someone here for you, Lily!” She knew it was him, and turning about she tucked her curls behind her ears and adjusted the thin lace at her breast. Stage nerves were never this bad.

“Abberline…” Jesus, she had forgotten how good he looked when she found him sitting at the check-covered table. His shirt, waistcoat, and jacket were all buttoned up, but his face was rebelling against formality, at the very least his mouth should declared an enemy of  all that was “decent.”

“Lily,” he winced just a bit as he spoke, “I came to talk to your friends.” If he was about to say something else she cut him off.

“I know. Do you want to come up to my room?” She let that hang there a little, “They are all here.”

Inspector Abberline was holding onto the banister as he climbed the steep stairs behind her. This was ridiculous, he had the whole thing planned in his head—the reasons why they needed to help him and his guarantee of their safety—but now it was all gone and he could only see her hips sway and a flash of her leg on the step above. Lily Dubois was a dangerous woman and there was no doubt. At the top of the stairs an open door revealed a packed room full of the unruliest girls in all Paris, and Abberline allowed himself a small smile, this job perhaps had its perks.

His thoughts however were interrupted by a voice at the back. “Lily, what the hell are you doing bringing a copper in here for?” “I’ll not be saying a word while he’s here.” “She’s lost her marbles, she has!” Their muttering and not-so-quiet dissent circled all round the room before Gabrielle spoke louder than the rest, “Why don’t you let her explain then?”

And he found that actually he didn’t need to remember anything after all because there she was, standing on the bed with her hands and her face doing as much of the explaining as her words. Lily told the women what had happened to Aimee and who was to blame, a flush in her cheeks that was all passion for the moment of a different kind, and then her eyes turned to him. “This is Inspector Abberline. Now you girls know me, I am not one for coppers neither…” Abberline nodded his head, she had made that perfectly clear, “but I am telling you he is a good man, and with all the will in the world, there’s nothing we can do to stop the Comte de Richelieu by ourselves.”

“I say we give him a chance and see what he can do,” Gabrielle proposed from the other side of the room, “and if that doesn’t work, well we can get Lily to go round and sort the comte out.” This idea seemed to lighten the atmosphere some, although in truth, Abberline didn’t look quite so keen on that option.

The room was quiet just as he stepped up to the bed. “Ladies…”

“Oh, ‘ladies’ are we now? Not whores or scum? That’s what you lot usually call us…afterwards anyhow.”

Fred Abberline closed his eyes for a second, “A fair point. I can’t vouch for the morals nor breeding of any of you, but neither are those words I would have occasion to use. I need evidence, and I need your help to get it. You can easily circulate the hall and listen to the comte and his guests. You can perhaps befriend the staff in his mansion. Your friend Aimee was set up, of that I have no doubt. What I need is the proof.”

There were a few remaining mutters but agreement was reached by some at least. Abberline’s fingers searched to find the top button of his shirt, it was unusually hot in this room, or it may have been that Lily had just stepped off the bed and was right next to him. “Well, that went better than my meeting with the Commissioner this morning.”

Lily smiled, “You should go before you are lynched…or worse…ravaged by this lot. You can buy me a drink, before the show starts.” She might just have said “take me to the moon,” all thoughts centered right then on getting her out of this heat to somewhere he could breathe. Lily chattered all down the stairs, the heels of her boots clicking on the wood, but she could feel the air behind her moving and it carried a scent of tobacco, men’s wardrobes, musk, and something sweeter still, she couldn’t identify it, not yet.

The streets were dark now, gas lamps few and far between in this part of the city, and Lily squinted down the street both ways working out the distance to the nearest public house. She had not much time before she would be due at the Moulin Rouge, and whatever else happened, she did not want to lose her job, not now that she would need extra money for Aimee. Gabrielle might find a little extra too, but, oh, this was going to be difficult.

In short Lily’s mind was whirling around, still going over what was said in the meeting but mainly trying not to think about him walking next to her, because whatever else was happening it was simpler than falling for him. But she was. Lily wasn’t a woman unused to the touch of men, but her skin was tingling at the merest brush of his jacket on her arm. She caught herself stealing glances at him and turning corners so she could. Mon Dieu, that mouth was going to be the death of her. Strands of his hair were falling down over his face, and she could have watched his fingers push it back a thousand times.

Catching her look, Fred Abberline smiled and bent near to her face. “Lily, not to cast doubt on your knowledge of the area at all, but where are we going?”

For the first time in minutes she looked up, and for an instant had no idea where she was apart from only inches away from him. Fred Abberline took her arm, gave a slight pull, and said, “Well, wherever it is, I think we are here,” just as she felt her back hit the bricks of the wall and his mouth just over hers. One quick look at each other’s face and she barely had time to catch a breath before his kisses rampaged over her lips, deep and hard and no quarter from either of them, her hands tearing into his jacket and his shirt to find any inch of skin she could. She whimpered into his mouth as he pressed his tongue into her, his cock hard against her belly, and then Lily found his back, smooth and lean and all muscle, and she pulled him in, her legs holding her firm to meet all the strength he had.

His mouth pulled away from hers and she could have screamed in protest but for the reward she got, his hands on the cloth over her breasts. For the first time she could hear him over the sound of her own blood, his breath heavy and caught between gasps and suckles all down her neck and onto that soft skin that disappeared down. He had thought all day about that skin that disappeared down, what her breasts would look like, what her skin would taste like in his mouth. And here he was, harder than he could remember and with Lily, her eyes closed and pressing back against him so that their hip bones fitted together like some erotic jigsaw; he just shuddered at the promise of more.

She was slipping her hand out of his shirt and he manoeuvred them back with a smile, “They are fine where they are, at least for now. Will you forgive me…it wasn’t my intention…I would have bought you a drink…”

Lily hadn’t quite stopped panting, but she fought to get her mind back. “So you didn’t want to…or you didn’t intend to?”

Fred Abberline cast his eyes down what he could now see was probably one of the dankest and darkest alley ways in Paris, certainly not what he had envisaged when he’d thought of kissing her those 2,000 times already. His eyes returned to her mouth, “Neither. I both wanted to and intended to, I just thought you might not…”

“Inspector, vous pensez beaucoup.”

His smile was a mighty thing, especially when she could feel it with her lips. His head tipped to find all of her mouth and his hands barely touched her face, and Lily ran her nails down his back to feel him shiver. When she could next speak she said the words both of them knew were coming, “I need to go to work...and so do you.”

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