Chapter 3
Sebastian drew a slow, even breath as he studied the magistrate’s tightly held features. He’d known this man for four years. Over the course of more murder investigations than he liked to think about, the two men had talked for endless hours, sharing some of their deepest thoughts and secrets. Sebastian knew Lovejoy’s wife and daughter had died suddenly; knew that those deaths had altered the path of his life and profoundly impacted his spiritual beliefs. So how could he not have known this?
For a moment, he found himself at a loss for words.
Lovejoy said, “It can’t be a coincidence.”
“No.” Sebastian gazed down at the oddly posed bodies. Their postures reminded him of the stone effigies one often saw atop medieval tombs, and he wondered if the echo was deliberate. “No one was ever arrested for their murders?”
“Oh, yes; someone was arrested—a one-armed ex-soldier named Daniel O’Toole who’d been menacing other people in the area. He was remanded into custody, tried, convicted, and hanged.”
Sebastian glanced over at his friend. “You’re thinking they hanged the wrong man?”
Lovejoy’s small, dark eyes were filled with silent anguish. “What else can one think? The man did die shouting his innocence from the scaffold.”
“Someone could have learned the details of the previous murders and patterned this after them. We’ve seen it before.”
Lovejoy considered this. “I suppose. But . . . why would he?”
It was a question for which Sebastian had no answer.
He hunkered down beside the still, lifeless husk of what was once Laura McInnis. She’d been an attractive woman, probably somewhere in her late thirties, still youthful and slim, with honey-colored hair and delicate features. In death she looked peaceful, serene.
He hoped she was.
“What time did this happen?” he asked. Flies were buzzing around her open mouth and blood-soaked chest, and he batted them away in a spurt of useless rage.
“Half past one or thereabouts, we believe.”
It had taken time for the brothers to summon one of the park’s keepers, more time for the keepers to call in the local magistrate, and more time still for word to be sent to London some eight miles away. By now, Lady McInnis and her daughter had been dead at least four or five hours.
Sebastian picked up one of her ladyship’s limp, still vaguely warm hands and turned it over. The edge of her fine kid glove was stained bright red from where it had rested against the blood-drenched cloth of her bodice. He could see no sign that she had attempted to fight off their attacker. But then, how could a couple of gentlewomen grapple with an armed man?
He shifted to where her daughter lay in a similar pose. Unlike her mother, Emma McInnis’s soft brown eyes were open and staring, and she looked so young and innocent that it tore at his heart. He said, “Christ,” again and pushed to his feet.
He was intensely aware of a woodlark singing sweetly from the top of a nearby oak, of the restless sighing of the breeze through the leafy branches of the adjacent wood and the late-afternoon sun drenching the long summer grass with a deep golden light. Turning, he let his gaze drift over the nearby picnic rug and hamper. The cheese, bread, and chicken that remained from the women’s nuncheon were now dried and crawling with ants.
He said, “Has anyone told Sir Ivo?”
“One of my colleagues has undertaken the task of breaking the news to him, as well as carrying word of the situation to the surviving children’s father. But it’s difficult to say if he’s managed to do so yet.”
Sebastian’s gaze shifted to where the brothers still sat. “What do we know about those two?”
“Their father is a prosperous barrister—has a small estate not far from Richmond. They say they came here today to escape a house filled with relatives for their sister’s wedding.”
“And they neither saw nor heard anything?”
“Nothing beyond the pistol shots,” said Lovejoy, just as the younger brother pushed to his feet, whirled, and was sick again.
Harry Barrows was twenty years old, with lanky brown hair, a thin face, and a long, narrow nose. He sat now with his arms wrapped around his bent knees, his hands locked together so tightly his knuckles were turning white. His face was pale, and a muscle kept twitching beneath his right eye, but Sebastian could tell the young man was gamely fighting to maintain his composure.
“I hear you’re down from Cambridge for the summer,” said Sebastian, settling in the grass beside him.
Harry nodded. “Yes, sir. Magdalene College.”
“I’m an Oxford man, myself.”
A faint smile touched Harry’s face, then was gone. “Sir Henry said you’d be wanting to talk to us, but I don’t know how much we can tell you.”
“Where were you when you heard the first shot?”
Harry nodded toward the top of the nearby hill. “Just over there, sir.”
“How many shots did you hear?”
“Only two, sir.”
“Sir Henry says you think it was a pistol?”
“Yes, sir. No doubt about that. Ben and I’ve been going shooting with our father since we were breeched.”
“Do you remember how much time there was between the first and second shot?”
Harry was silent, as if mentally reconstructing the moment. “Only seconds, sir. I figure it had to have been a double-barreled pistol—there wasn’t enough time in between for anyone to reload. Ben thinks so, too.” He turned his head to look at his brother, who was now lying on his back in the grass with his eyes closed. “Is he going to be all right? He’s been awfully unwell.”
“It will pass. How long was it between the last shot and the time you and your brother arrived here?”
“Not long, sir. Not long at all.”
“Yet you didn’t see anyone running away?”
“No, sir. But then we wouldn’t, would we? I mean, not if whoever did that had headed straight into the wood.”
“And you didn’t hear anything besides the pistol shots?”
“No, sir.”
“No voices? No screams?”
The young man pressed his lips together and shook his head. There was a bleakness to his expression that Sebastian had seen before, the look of someone whose safe, predictable existence has suddenly been touched by evil and horror. The world would never be quite the same for him again.
Harry said, “That girl—the one who’d been picking flowers down by the stream with her little brother. She didn’t scream. She opened her mouth, and I kept waiting and waiting for her to scream. But she never did.” He swallowed. “In a way, it was almost worse than if she had screamed.”
“I suspect she was in shock.”
“I should have tried to stop her from seeing it—the bodies and all that blood, I mean. I didn’t even think of it.”
“Not your fault,” said Sebastian, although he knew it would do no good, that this burden of guilt and regret, once picked up, would niggle at Harry Barrows forever. “Had you seen anyone else in the park before you heard the shots?”
Harry stared at him blankly. “I suppose we must have, but I don’t recall anyone in particular, if that’s what you’re asking. We weren’t really paying attention, if you know what I mean?”
“I understand.”
Harry stared off across the park, the westering sun shining through the branches overhead to dance a pattern of light and shadow across his face. “Who would do something like that? Shoot a woman and girl having themselves a picnic? And then do that weird thing with their bodies? It makes no sense.”
“No,” said Sebastian. “No, it doesn’t.”
Miss Arabella Priestly was seated on a bench beside the sunny, whitewashed stone walls of the keeper’s cottage when Sebastian walked up to her some time later. She had her head bowed, one hand moving rhythmically over the purring gray-and-white kitten in her lap. She looked younger than her fifteen years, small and boyishly slim, with long golden hair, a thin face, and large gray eyes. According to Lovejoy, she was the second child and only daughter of Miles Priestly, Viscount Salinger, Lady McInnis’s brother, and she was holding herself together with a composure Sebastian found both awe-inspiring and worrisome.
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” he said after the keeper’s middle-aged wife had introduced them and then quietly withdrawn.
Arabella drew a ragged breath that shuddered her thin chest. “No, sir; I understand you need to. But I don’t really know anything.”
Sebastian gazed across the nearby duck pond to where her thirteen-year-old little brother, Percy, was chasing frogs. He hated like hell having to ask this young girl to relive the horror of what she’d been through. He said, “Did you hear the shots?”
She nodded. “We didn’t think anything of it, though.”
“You’d gone to pick flowers?”
“Yes, sir.” She hesitated, then added, “Well, I was picking flowers. Percy was looking for tadpoles.”
“How long would you say it was between when you left your aunt and when you heard the shots?”
“I don’t know. Not that long. Maybe ten or fifteen minutes?”
“Did you see anyone?”
“No, sir. No one except the two brothers.”
“Had you seen them before? Before you went to pick flowers, I mean.”
“No, sir.”
“How did your aunt seem before you and your brother left her?”
She stared at him, her eyes wide and still. He had the impression she was tamping down so many emotions right now that she was numb. She said, “What do you mean?”
“Did she seem nervous? Afraid? Worried in any way?”
She thought about it a moment. “I guess she seemed pretty much the way she always did, sir.”
“What about your cousin Emma?”
Arabella twitched one shoulder. “She was just . . . Emma.”
“Can you think of anyone who might have wanted to hurt either your aunt or your cousin?”
“Hurt them? No, sir.” She glanced toward the lane, where Lady McInnis’s carriage stood waiting. “Will we be able to go home soon, sir?”
“Soon,” said Sebastian. It was an hour’s drive back to London, and the light would be fading from the day before long. If neither Sir Ivo nor Viscount Salinger arrived soon, the keeper’s wife had volunteered to accompany the children back to London in Lady McInnis’s carriage, with Lovejoy following behind in a hackney.
Arabella sucked in a deep breath that flared her nostrils, her gaze dropping to the kitten now sleeping in her lap. “What about Aunt Laura and Emma?”
“Sir Henry—the magistrate from Bow Street—is taking care of that.” The bodies were being sent to a surgeon named Paul Gibson for autopsy, but Sebastian saw no reason to burden this young girl with that knowledge.
“What—” Arabella broke off, her throat working as she swallowed, then tried again. “What do you think would’ve happened if Percy and I hadn’t gone off like that? Do you think Aunt Laura and Emma would still be alive? Or would Percy and I be dead, too?”
She was looking up at him with liquid, pleading eyes, and he understood only too well the anguish that was tormenting her, that would probably always torment her. He’d seen it too many times in war—the guilt that bedevils the lucky ones who are inexplicably left alive when those near to them die. He wanted to say, Don’t ask yourself that; don’t even think it. But all he could say was, “I’m not sure we’ll ever know. But I do know that your aunt and cousin would be very thankful that you’re here now, safe. You and Percy.”
She nodded, her face tightening in a way that told him she was fighting back tears. And all he could think was, Where is their damned father?