Monday, 24 July
Early the next morning, the rising sun was only beginning to cast long, cool shadows down the streets of the slowly awakening city when Sebastian drove east, to the Tower Hill surgery of the anatomist Paul Gibson.
This was an old part of London, its narrow cobbled lanes dominated by the massive looming presence of the grim eleventh-century Norman fortress on the banks of the river. Gibson’s surgery and the small, low-roofed stone house beside it both dated back to medieval times.
Leaving the chestnuts in Tom’s care, Sebastian cut through the narrow passage that ran along the side of the ancient house to a warped wooden gate set in the high wall that enclosed the old yard. Once, this had been little more than a weed-choked wasteland. But for several years now Alexi Sauvage—the Frenchwoman who shared Gibson’s house and bed but not his name—had been turning the space into a garden. At the base of the garden stood the high-windowed stone outbuilding that Gibson used for both his postmortems and the surreptitious dissections he performed on cadavers filched by gangs of body snatchers from the city’s overflowing churchyards on dark, moonless nights.
“You’re early,” said Gibson, looking up from doing something Sebastian didn’t want to think about to the body of a woman lying on the high stone slab that stood in the center of the room. Sebastian glanced at her once, then looked away.
It was Laura McInnis.
“Too early?” said Sebastian, pausing outside the dank building’s low doorway.
“Not really. I couldn’t sleep, so I figured I might as well get started.” Gibson set aside his scalpel and reached for a rag to wipe his hands. Irish by birth, he was in his mid-thirties, although he looked older. The lingering pains from the loss of part of his leg to a French cannonball—and the ever-increasing doses of opium he used to control those pains—had left his frame gaunt, threaded his once-dark hair with silver, and dug deep grooves on either side of his nose and mouth.
But this morning he looked even worse than usual, his face haggard with fatigue, his eyes bloodshot and deep in shadow. It had been weeks since he’d promised to let Alexi—who’d trained as a physician in Italy—try to do something about his leg’s phantom pains. But so far he’d kept finding one excuse after another to put her off, and Sebastian was beginning to wonder if it was ever going to happen.
“When was the last time you slept?” said Sebastian. “You look like hell.”
Gibson’s eyes crinkled with his smile. “Why, thank you.”
The friendship between the anatomist and the heir to an earldom dated back more than a decade, to the days when Sebastian had been a cavalry captain and Gibson his regimental surgeon. For years the two men had laughed and drunk, fought and bled and faced death together, forging the kinds of bonds that are rarely broken. Seeing his old friend slowly kill himself like this, one grain of opium at a time, was tearing Sebastian apart.
“I might not be finished,” said Gibson, tossing the rag aside, “but the truth is, I doubt I’m going to find anything that will help you. The mother did have some blood smears on both her arms, here”—he touched one of the dead woman’s pale, delicate wrists—“and there, on her stockings at the ankles. I noticed them when she was still in the wagon that brought her. Do you know how the constables lifted her into it out at Richmond?”
“Yes, I watched them. One slid his hands beneath her shoulders while the other grabbed her legs—but he had her skirts wrapped tight around her, so even if he had blood on his hands, he couldn’t have smeared it on her stockings.”
Gibson nodded. “So it was probably left by the killer. I suspect he posed the girl first and got her blood on his hands, then inadvertently smeared it on the mother’s body when he grabbed her arms and legs to drag her over into position by her daughter.”
“Jesus,” whispered Sebastian. The mental image of the killer calmly positioning his victim’s bodies somehow made the act seem even more revolting.
“What do you know about the husband?” said Gibson.
“Sir Ivo? Why do you ask?”
“Mainly because of this.” Gibson pointed to a large, yellowing bruise on Lady McInnis’s left side. “And these—” He touched first one shoulder, then the other, where Sebastian could see dark purple bruises in a distinct pattern that could only have been left by a man’s heavy hands, the fingers digging in deep. “Whoever did that grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, hard, maybe three or four days ago. The bruise on her ribs is older, probably a week old or more at this point, and made by a fist. That time he punched her.”
“The bloody son of a bitch,” whispered Sebastian. “McInnis’s servants told Tom that Sir Ivo is ‘handy with his fives,’ but I assumed they meant the bastard had a habit of striking his servants. It never occurred to me that he might also beat his wife.”
“Men who start out beating their wives frequently end up killing them. Far more often than most people like to admit.”
Sebastian stared at the dead woman’s calm, pale profile. I could be wrong, but I wouldn’t say she and Sir Ivo were what you might call “close,” Hero had said. Did she know about this aspect of Laura McInnis’s marriage? Somehow, he doubted it.
Aloud, he said, “I can see Sir Ivo maybe killing his wife. But his own daughter? Why would he do that?”
“Perhaps the girl was hit by mistake. He takes aim at his wife, except then, just as he’s pulling the trigger, the girl throws herself forward, trying to protect her mother.”
“And then, having accidently killed his own daughter, he turns and shoots his wife next?” Sebastian thought about it a moment. “That might make sense if he’d then run into the woods. But why pose the bodies like that? And if he were going to kill his wife, why do it someplace public like the park, with his daughter as a witness?”
Gibson gave a faint shake of his head. “That I can’t begin to answer. Have you spoken to him yet?”
“Briefly, yesterday evening out at Richmond. I’ll admit his reaction to the deaths of his wife and daughter struck me as odd. But that doesn’t mean he’s the killer.”
“Huh. My money’s still on him,” said Gibson. “But then, I have a significant prejudice against men who hit women.”
“You have to be a special kind of bastard, there’s no doubt about that.” Turning, Sebastian let his gaze rove over Alexi’s garden, awash with color now in the waning days of July. In the strengthening morning light, the dew on the bright green leaves of the roses and honeysuckle, hollyhocks and daisies, glistened like diamonds. “The thing is, fourteen years ago, another woman and her daughter were shot in Richmond Park, and their bodies posed in the same way.”
“Good God. So it’s happened before?”
“At least once that I know of.”
Gibson blew out a long, slow breath. “So maybe not the husband . . . unless there’s some connection between the two families?”
Sebastian shook his head. “The earlier victims were Julia and Madeline Lovejoy—Sir Henry’s wife and daughter.”
Gibson’s eyes widened. “I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Hero thinks the killer could be someone deliberately echoing the first killings to torment Sir Henry.”
“Now, there’s a chilling thought. Magistrates must rack up an ungodly number of enemies. How long has Lovejoy been a magistrate?”
“Ever since his family was killed—fourteen years.”
“In other words, your pool of suspects might as well be infinite.”
Sebastian met his friend’s worried gaze. “Exactly.”