Chapter 4
Sir Ivo McInnis arrived just as they were preparing to load the children into their dead aunt’s landau.
He swept up before the simple thatched keeper’s cottage in a black barouche drawn by a team of black horses driven by a liveried coachman. “Uncle Ivo!” called Arabella, darting forward to throw herself against the Baronet’s chest as soon as he descended his carriage’s steps.
A big, thickset man in his late forties with a full face, small pale eyes, and thick dark hair, he had a reputation as a sporting man—a bruising rider to hounds, a member of the Four-in-Hand Club, a regular at such places as Jackson’s Boxing Saloon and Angelo’s Fencing Academy. His estates were in the northwest of England, in Cumberland, although he also kept a hunting lodge near Melton Mowbray in Leicestershire and spent much of his time there or in London. He might be only a baronet, but his family was ancient, wealthy, and powerful. Even as he clasped his niece to his broad chest, his gaze went beyond her to where Sebastian and Lovejoy stood in conversation beside Lovejoy’s gig.
“You’re Sir Henry?” said McInnis, setting his niece aside and walking toward them.
Lovejoy stepped forward. “I am, yes, sir. My sincere condolences on the—”
“Where are they?”
Lovejoy paused. “Lady McInnis and your daughter, you mean?”
“Yes, yes,” said McInnis impatiently.
“On their way to London.”
“To Grosvenor Square?”
“No, sir.” Lovejoy threw a cautioning glance in the direction of the children. Percy had crept up to his sister’s side, and the two were now holding hands, watching and obviously listening intently. The magistrate lowered his voice. “To the surgery of Paul Gibson, in Tower Hill. For a postmortem.”
“What the devil?” the Baronet’s voice boomed. “I’ve authorized no such thing.”
“I’m afraid it is necessary, sir.”
“Why? I’m told they were shot. Why the blazes do you need a postmortem?”
Lovejoy glanced again toward the children, who were silently staring at them, their faces lacking any emotion in a way Sebastian found profoundly troubling. “It may tell us something, sir. Something that could help us catch the killer.”
McInnis’s jaw hardened, his eyes narrowing as he shifted his attention to Sebastian. “You’re Devlin, aren’t you?”
Sebastian knew the man, but only vaguely. “I am, yes.”
“What the blazes are you doing here?”
It was Lovejoy who answered. “I have asked Lord Devlin for his assistance.”
McInnis stared at Sebastian, his nostrils flaring. “I’ve heard you do this sort of thing. Queer start, for a peer’s son.”
“True,” said Sebastian, and left it at that.
McInnis’s frown deepened. And it struck Sebastian that the man appeared far more annoyed than grief-stricken.
Sebastian said, “How many people knew that Lady McInnis was planning an expedition to Richmond Park today?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“You never had any intention of joining the picnic yourself?”
“Me? Hardly. Why do you ask?”
“Simply trying to understand what happened here and why. Did Lady McInnis have any enemies?”
“Not to my knowledge. But then, I’m not particularly familiar with my wife’s circle.” He glanced again at Lovejoy. “When will the bodies be released from this blasted surgeon you’ve sent them to?”
“Hopefully by tomorrow evening, sir. The inquest will in all likelihood be scheduled for Tuesday morning.”
“Bloody impudence,” McInnis muttered only half to himself as he started to turn away.
“Will you be taking your niece and nephew back to London with you, Sir Ivo?” said Lovejoy, raising his voice.
McInnis paused. It was obvious he hadn’t given the children a second thought. “I suppose I could.” He glanced at his wife’s landau. “Where was Lady McInnis’s coachman while all this was happening?”
“At the Blue Boar in Richmond,” said Lovejoy. “Resting and feeding the horses. Lady McInnis had asked him to return at four.”
“Huh,” McInnis grunted, and walked away toward the children.
“How well do you know Sir Ivo?” Lovejoy asked Sebastian quietly as they watched the Baronet confer with his wife’s coachman, then shepherd his niece and nephew toward his own waiting barouche.
“Not all that well.”
“Does he strike you as . . . grieving?”
“No,” said Sebastian. “But then, I’m told some men find it difficult to express any emotion other than anger.”
“Perhaps that’s it.”
But Sebastian didn’t need to see the pained, puzzled expression in the magistrate’s eyes to know that Lovejoy was remembering his own reaction to the deaths of his wife and daughter fourteen years before. It would have been a hideous, soul-destroying time in Lovejoy’s life, and for him to be forced to revisit it now, in this way, was beyond brutal. Sebastian watched the magistrate take off his glasses and clean them with his handkerchief, his movements painfully slow and deliberate.
And he found himself aching for the somber, rigidly controlled, and profoundly shaken man beside him.
“Why would anybody want t’ shoot a gentlewoman and ’er daughter when they was just ’avin’ themselves a picnic?”
The question came from Sebastian’s young tiger as they bowled through the park toward London, the boy perched on his seat at the curricle’s rear. Tom had been with Sebastian ever since the dark days when Sebastian had been on the run from the law and Tom a scruffy pickpocket with a strange affinity for horses and the courage to risk his own life to save a man he barely knew. The boy was still small and sharp faced, his hair a nondescript brown, his features usefully forgettable. He’d always taken an interest in Sebastian’s investigations, and it had recently become his ambition to someday serve as a Bow Street Runner.
Sebastian said, “It certainly wasn’t done in the heat of passion. Whoever shot that woman and her daughter deliberately came here to the park today carrying a double-barreled pistol.”
“I ’adn’t thought about that.” The boy was silent for a moment, then added, “I talked to Lady McInnis’s coachman and footman, like ye asked.”
Sebastian glanced back at his tiger. “And?”
“The coachman didn’t ’ave much t’ say, but it still weren’t hard to tell that both ’e and the footman liked their mistress a whole heap better’n they like the Baronet.”
“Oh? Did they say anything about how Sir Ivo and his wife got along?”
Tom nodded. “Not weery well, accordin’ to Jem—Jem’s the footman, ye know. From what ’e said, it sounds like Sir Ivo ’as the devil’s own temper.”
“That I can believe.”
“ ’Andy wit ’is fives, too, says Jem.”
“Oh? Likes to knock the servants around, does he?”
“Aye.”
“And does Jem have any idea who might’ve been interested in murdering his mistress?”
“Nobody other than Sir Ivo ’isself.”
“He said that?”
“Yup.”
“Interesting. Did either Jem or the coachman happen to notice anyone in the area when they dropped off Lady McInnis and the children?”
“Nobody ’cept some old codger walkin’ ’is dog.”
“And what time was that?”
“Jist after eleven, Jem reckons.”
“Did they have anything else to say?”
“Well, Jem in particular don’t think much o’ young Master Percy. Says the lad’s a real handful. Never know what ’e’s gonna do next.”
Sebastian guided his horses through the park’s gate. “It can be a difficult age, thirteen. I suspect what happened today will sober the lad considerably.”
Tom was silent, his face expressionless as he stared out over the fields of ripe wheat flashing past, lit now by the rich light of approaching evening. “Why would somebody do that? Lay them out like they was statues on some old tombs in a church?”
“That I can’t begin to explain.”
“Seems to me, whoever done it ain’t right in the ’ead.”
The same thought had occurred to Sebastian, and he found it a disquieting possibility. What if there was no logical, discernible link between Lady McInnis or her daughter and whoever had shot them dead? What if the link was the park itself?
The park, and the mother-daughter relationship that helped tie this killing to that of Julia and Madeline Lovejoy fourteen years before.