Chapter Text
She writes to meet Gladys Russell pretending to be a advocate of children in need. They keep the meeting short and sweet, present evidence and propose deals. She keeps the meeting just woman, Pinkerton would be furious if he got wind of this but Allan has always had a distinct lack of imagination when it comes to this—he’s been radical about twice in his life, once when he hired Kate Warne and the second time when he told her that if she got him a case he could make famous all over the world then she would get what she wanted—only not in New York.
McKenna doesn’t particularly care about the New York bit. Private Detectives can go anywhere and despite what Allan thinks Washington D.C and New York are not the epicentre of crime in America. Don’t get McKenna wrong she knows they are bad but…
Gladys Russell surprises her. She takes the evidence that the Duke of Buckingham has murdered six prostitutes and two maids in a fit of some kind of sadistic machoism sexual bondage thing (McKenna doesn’t know the exact word for it but even Allan—looking a tad green around the gills—mutters that this might be a case for the ladies) and then she leans back in her chair and—
“Yes I suppose that tracks”
McKenna doesn’t choke on her tea because it is unladylike and despite what she is now she was raised a lady. She does on the other hand inhale it rather sharply and burns her tongue.
“So” Gladys Russell says brightly. “I assume you have a plan to get me out of marry him right?”
McKenna does choke then. She thinks she might be excused.
It takes a lot of back and forth to get this deal in place. Gladys Russell is not the airhead that both New York society and her mother would have the world believe. She has a head on her shoulders, a wicked sense of humour and a great sense of personal power. For a woman who has been bullied and pushed down and degraded and demeaned for half her life, forced to conform in the way that so many of them are she certainly seems to know what she is doing.
“What kind of evidence do you need?”
“Bloody coat, something, a weapon of some kind. Something that…something that will link him to the last murder. And then—”
“You will arrest the Duke of Buckingham on American soil?”
“Yes…well…Pinkerton will.”
“British will never let you bring it to trial”
“Probably not. But it’s not just about a trial. You know that”
“Oh you mean socially ruin him?”
“Yes”
Gladys Russell takes a sip of coffee and—
“Yes I can do that” she says. “He’s hosting a dinner…I can slip into his bedroom at the hotel. See what I can find…I would need a rather large handbag—” she’s thinking hard things that McKenna has not even considered and—
“Why do they call you McKenna?”
“My name is Kate”
“Yes but—”
Something about her question fires her into honesty.
“Kate was the name of my boss. Kate Warne she was—”
“Pinkerton’s first female hire yes I know”
“And she died recently and—well I’ve been McKenna ever since”
Gladys Russell nods as if she finds that statement perfectly acceptable and then—
“What do you get for this? Pinkerton offering you a pay rise?”
She doesn’t want to answer the question but the girl has a way of getting intel out of her that she doesn’t want to share. The idea of her being an agent is almost laughable but still…
It is laughable…right?
“He’s giving me a command position, wherever I want it, small team, four woman, my own choices of cases”
“In New York?”
“No”
“Then where, I can’t imagine they will like you that much in the South”
“Chicago maybe. We have an office in Chicago. Hattie’s our Lady Superintendent but she would move to New York to work with Allan and I would take over the role. I would work with male detectives within the agency, I know them all. It’s mostly female related crime scenes that they’ve got…but it’s good work”
Gladys Russell nods stares at then she looks away thinking hard. McKenna waits patiently taking in the tea and guessing how much it costs and betting its an arm and a leg and then—
“What do I get for helping you?”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously”
“The thanks of a grateful nation. The satisfaction of knowing that you saved God only knows how many girls lives…including your own and—”
“Yeah not good enough”
“I beg your pardon?”
“When your mother is Bertha Russell the thanks of a grateful nation will not cut it, she wants this to happen and I can quite easily see her doing whatever it takes to make this marriage happen, if you want me to go routing around the Duke of Buckinghams underwear draws knowing he can kill me at any given time your going to give me something else”
“What?”
Gladys Russell puts down her teacup.
“An escape”
For a second there is a pause and then—
“And how would I do that?”
Gladys Russell smiles.
And somehow McKenna knows that she has lost the argument.
It shouldn’t work. It’s utter insanity and yet it works.
Hattie doesn’t know Gladys Russell is her CI. Gladys Russell is a big thing in the society pages and Hattie reads them as does Liz and both of them would hate this. Hell Liz doesn’t even think what she did in the war amounts to private detective work she thinks that she just did her duty. Allan keeps inviting her to lunch and she keeps going and on and on and on it spins. Anyhow neither one of them would sign off on this. McKenna gets it cleared. Allan gave her hiring powers and besides…the girl has skills. She’s posh and that helps even in Chicago.
She cannot go by her surname, her identity is going to have to be scrubbed but Gladys Russell keeps her end of the deal. By the end of the month just as that portrait is about to be announced she gives McKenna and Allan all the evidence that they need, rope, a weapon—a crowbar with hair still in it and more importantly a detailed book detailing what he has done to each and everyone of his victims. The stupidity and the arrogance of man never ceases to amaze her, that he would write down all his plans in a book and leave it lying around thinking himself invincible.
Gladys Russell asks her only for one thing.
To be there when they arrest him.
Technically it’s the Secret Service that does it but McKenna slips into the engagement party to do it. It happens just after the portrait drops and the look on George Russell’s face as he sees them bang through the front door is almost kinda funny. Secret Service will give the blame for it, Allan might be a company man but he runs a company and he is not going to lose one of his biggest clients but as the charges are read out she feels a bone deep sense of satisfaction.
“You were right”
She flinches and turns to see Gladys Russell stood there. Her choker is hanging off her neck pearls on the floor—if one of the Secret Service Agents slips and breaks his back they will never hear the end of it—McKenna thinks, but the girl is beaming too much for such a serious occasion.
“Oh?”
“This is a good feeling”
“Aha”
The second the word sexual deviant is muttered Bertha Russell goes down like a log into her son’s arms. Gladys snorts.
“Have you ever seen someone who needs to be on the stage more” she mutters. McKenna opens her mouth and then closes it again. In truth she thinks that Mrs Russell is more than likely shocked at how close her daughter came to marrying such a man than how big the scandal is but she might be wrong. She is not the best expert on mothers after all, her own relationship is…well…complicated at best.
“Do you have what I want?”
“Yes” she says crossing her arms over her chest and watching the shit show unfold. “Bank account set up in a false name, house in a false name, you won’t be rich”
“I don’t need to be rich”
“But you will be comfortable. And you can start on Monday, but I am not smuggling you out of New York, I will meet you at the office on Monday don’t travel with eight suitcases, you’re going to have to leave a lot of this behind. And you cant come back, you’re going from being an everybody to a nobody.”
Gladys Russell’s eyes are on her mother again lying prone on the floor. Her father is speaking in conversation with the Secret Service Agents hands fluttering and mouth moving at a hundred miles an hour, the brother is sat on the stairs clutching some pretty blonde’s hand. The Duke of Buckingham has been hauled off spitting and shouting language that she hasn’t heard before—and she has worked with Saunders’s boys before and they don’t take prisoners—already she can see what Derek’s thoughts on this are going to be.
“Whose the blonde?”
“Oh that’s Marian”
“She gonna stick with your brother after this?”
Gladys scrunched up her face.
“Yes I think so. If Marian was going to run she would have done it by now. She’s not the panicking kind”
McKenna nods and—
“I expect you at work on Monday. You can leave your stuff in my office—”
“If your screwing me over I will say you kidnapped me”
Kate McKenna laughs. Several people throw her scandalised looks. George Russell looks at her and deliberately she reaches and tugs his daughters dress off her shoulder. Gladys Russell stares at the strap and then shrugs.
“Of that I have no doubt” she lights a cigarette and makes for the door.
“Fucking awful portrait” she shouts as she leaves.
Allan will get her for that little bit of spite she is sure but she can’t help it.
She throws her smoke into the bushes.
She does doubt that the girl is going to show up. Doubts it when she moves into her new office. Doubts it when she smirks at Derek Saunders when he scowls at her. Derek’s second in command beams at her and she smiles. Andrew ‘Drew’ Dawson’s usually good people and they’ve been low key flirting for years.
She doubts the girl is going to show up as Saturday turns into Sunday and the newspapers don’t shut up about Buckingham. Someone (and she reckons she knows who) had copies of the book and leaked it to the press and the New York Times is having a field day, even the Chicago Tribune, the Boston Globe, all of these newspapers are having kittens over this, the entire thing makes for very entertaining reading, New York society is in free fall. They all fawned over this man, all made sure they were next to him in photographs and reports and now everyone from Bertha Russell to Caroline Astor to this Winterton woman and this Fish person are running from him as best they can.
“Ugh” Dawson says on Monday morning. “Derek have you read this? Apparently some ex whore says he put a breadstick inside of her and said that she tasted good?”
Derek puts down his report. Kate really wishes they didn’t share a corridor. She is making tea and she doesn’t know what on Earth she is waiting for. The girl has only half an hour more to show up and she doesn’t know why she is feeling disappointed. Gladys Russell is like all other rich girls really isn’t she? She was never going to come and give up her life and actually work for a living. She’ll be onto the next mark as soon as she can be. It’s honestly fucking pathetic. A vicious cycle society want them to stay in, a box of married and childbirth and death, father, husband, son.
She sighs and then stretches out cracking her neck to the side and wincing as her corset dug into her side.
“I mean that has got to be the most unhygienic thing I have ever heard in my life—”
“Was the book full of things like this?” she asks conversationally. She didn’t actually read the damn thing properly. Just the parts that she needed to prove murder.
“Apparently”
Somewhere below them a door opens and shuts and there is the sound of a conversation. The Pinkerton Desk is ran by a woman called Hart who is arguably the most terrifying woman whose ever lived and McKenna has worked with both Hattie and Kate and there is a reason why those two are the reason Pinkerton decided to hire woman.
Saunders looks her over and—
“What did you do?”
“What?”
“No offence Kate you’ve got a look on your face that indicates that you have been badly let down by something and your hardly the most pleasant of female detectives—” he says the word with a drawl. Saunders is a company man but he doesn’t believe in female detectives outside of the war. Its good humoured ribbing, he doesn’t like woman in danger but she ignores him, she has a better office and he’s bitter.
“I made a girl an offer to join us and—”
“She turned you down” Saunders says, somewhere down below them there is another door opening.
“I didn’t think she would” McKenna says truthfully. Saunders rolls his eyes just as Dawson still reading the filthy erotic that is the Duke of Buckingham's private life goes.
“Oh gross, he apparently liked to piss all over the bodies of the woman he garro—”
“Ladies present” Derek Saunders snaps and Kate shoots him a look because she has never been a lady to Saunders and sure as shit she isn’t going to start now when she sees what he is looking at. Or who he is looking at.
And standing there, her hair loose down her back clutching two bags in a very plain gown and beaming with a sense of satisfaction is Gladys Russell.
Or…Winters as she now goes by. Call her simple but if you bury someone who used to be famous then you are going to need a very ordinary name.
“Got here” she jumps up and down looking pleased with herself. “And on time, only about ten minutes to go” she beams. “I did it” she says into the silent room. “I left, they don’t know where I am—I took your job offer”
Kate blinks.
Derek leans back in his chair looking between the two of them. Dawson blinks.
“Jesus McKenna” Derek says eyes wide. “What in the name of all that is good and holy did you do?”