Sir Henry Lovejoy stood beside the placid waters of the Serpentine in Hyde Park, watching a couple of young constables wade through the shallows of the ornamental lake in what was surely a futile search for the knife that had been used to kill Arabella Priestly’s young abigail, Cassy Jones. The sun was already sinking low in the blue summer sky, for it had taken time for Lovejoy to be brought around to believing it possible that two children—two wealthy, wellborn, privileged children—could be guilty of murder, and more time still for Lord Devlin to convince him that the children were likely to have thrown their bloodstained weapon away someplace they assumed it would never be found, rather than carrying it off with them. Now, with evening rapidly approaching, Lovejoy found himself thinking it was a good thing the Regent’s celebratory fireworks were to be set off in St. James’s Park rather than here.
“My fellow magistrates at Bow Street are going to think I’ve gone mad, agreeing to this,” he said as Devlin came to stand beside him, hands on his hips, his lordship’s attention likewise fixed on the constables wading through the murky waters before them. “That we’re both mad.”
“I hope they’re right.”
Lovejoy glanced over at him. “So do I.”
The two men lapsed back into silence as the minutes ticked past and the constables, stripped down to their shirts and breeches, waded back and forth, back and forth, slowly venturing out deeper and deeper, the water rising until it lapped at their groins. Lovejoy said, “Even if we find the knife and Salinger’s cook identifies it as one missing from her kitchen, it doesn’t prove the children took the knife.”
“No.”
“We couldn’t possibly have them remanded into custody—not on such a flimsy string of happenstances that can each be easily explained away no matter how convincing they might seem when taken all together. The truth is, even if we had irrefutable evidence, no jury would ever convict a nobleman’s thirteen-year-old son and fifteen-year-old daughter of such a heinous string of murders. We hang poor children of that age—and younger—all the time. But most people accept it as a given that the children of the lower classes are predisposed to crime.”
“ ‘Tainted,’ ” said Devlin wryly. He glanced toward the sinking sun. “I suspect the most we can hope for is to somehow convince Salinger that his children need help, although—” He broke off as one of the constables let out a whoop and bent over to virtually disappear into the water.
The man came up huffing air and dripping, a broad grin spreading across his wet face as he triumphantly thrust one arm in the air, his fist gripping the handle of what looked like a large cook’s knife, its blade still rust-free and gleaming in the golden light of the setting sun.