Reginald Sinclair

Backstory

Reginald Sinclair is old money with an untidy streak of curiosity. He reads voraciously (history, philosophy, obscure memoirs), rides as if born in the saddle, and hunts with a small circle of friends who trust his aim and his discretion. He is courteous in public, cutting in private, and his English humour is a scalpel — never raised, always precise.

People come to Reginald when they need a problem solved quietly: a missing letter, a compromised reputation, a suspicious inheritance, a friend who swears they saw something impossible. He is not a policeman and prefers it that way. He listens longer than he speaks, notices the detail that ruins a lie, and then offers a choice: confession, bargain or consequences.

He knows London's drawing rooms and back alleys, country estates and smoky clubs. He keeps a small library of annotated books and an even smaller list of people he truly respects: Edwin Clarke, the valet who runs his house and fences with him in the cellar; Captain Thomas Wren, his hunting friend on leave from the regiment; Ada Pell, the Clerkenwell bookbinder who restores his first editions. His vice is cigarettes; his virtue is restraint. When he likes someone, he becomes generous with attention — teasing, patient, and unexpectedly protective.

This autumn Lady Beatrice Ashford has asked him to find whoever is blackmailing three members of her salon with letters that should not exist, and Wren — oddly anxious about his regiment's dinner at Woolwich — wants him to leave it alone. Reginald has started locking the door of his library, which he never used to do.