4

In Which John Pickett Examines a Body

and Julia Makes a Sacrifice

ALL TRACES OF SLEEP vanished. Without raising his head from his makeshift pillow, Pickett turned in the direction she was staring. Some hundred yards ahead, the dark silhouette of a man bent and picked up what appeared at this distance to be a long stick, then stood upright, braced it against his shoulder, and—

“Get down!” Pickett grabbed Julia by the wrist and yanked her down. She fell across his chest with sufficient force to knock the breath from his body, and in the same instant a shower of splinters exploded from the tree behind them.

“John—was that—did he—?”

“Yes—no, stay down,” Pickett said, still gasping for breath. The man had not waited to see if his ball had found its mark, but hurried up the path toward the waterfall, presumably in the direction whence he and his companion had come.

“He—he pushed the other man off the cliff,” Julia said, trembling with delayed reaction. “There were two of them, and I was trying to decide whether to include them in my drawing, and suddenly he was standing on the edge and the other one was—gone. It happened so fast—it was almost as if there had never been another man at all, as if I’d imagined the whole thing.”

“That shot wasn’t imaginary,” Pickett said, glancing up at the trunk of the tree, whose bark showed a pale, jagged scar that hadn’t been there before.

“So what do we do now?” Julia asked.

“I suppose I’d better find a way down to the river,” Pickett said. No one stood on the path near the waterfall now, so he eased himself out from underneath her and cautiously stood up. Confirming that they were alone—at least for the nonce—he took her hand and pulled her to her feet, then picked up his coat and shook it out. One sleeve was still wet and smelled rather strongly of wine, but he shrugged it on nevertheless. “First, though, I’d better get that ball out of the tree to hold as evidence. I don’t want him—whoever he is—to come back and tamper with the scene.”

Julia cast a nervous glance up the path. “Do you think he will? Come back, I mean?”

“I don’t know, but I’m taking no chances.” Using the tip of the corkscrew, he prized the spent ball out of the tree trunk—an operation that seemed to take an unconscionably long time, exposed as they were to any murderer who might choose to return to the scene of the crime.

“I don’t understand,” she said unsteadily. “If he had a gun, why did he push the other man off the cliff? Why didn’t he just shoot him?”

Pickett looked up from his task long enough to chide her gently. “Think, Julia. If a body is found with a ball in its chest obviously fired from point-blank range, it’s a clear case of murder. But I expect when we find the body at the foot of the cliff, there will be no injuries that couldn’t be the result of an accidental fall—and those, I’ll wager, are frequent enough in these parts that no one would think to question it.”

“And yet he shot at me,” she pointed out with some asperity.

“Only after he realized he’d been seen.”

She raised a shaking hand to her forehead. “Of course. I should have known—I’m afraid I’m not thinking very clearly.”

“And who can wonder at it? I am a bit puzzled by the gun, though. It isn’t yet hunting season, is it?”

She shook her head. “Hunting doesn’t begin until the twelfth of August, so two months yet.”

“Could they have been poachers, then? Or perhaps the man with the gun was poaching, and when the other fellow objected, he was killed for his pains?”

Julia cast her mind back. “It would seem to make sense, and yet—and yet they looked so—so companionable, the two of them! There was no trace of animosity in their bearing, and certainly no sign of a quarrel—at least none that I could tell from a distance.”

At last the tree trunk surrendered its captive. Pickett dropped the slightly misshapen ball of lead into the inside pocket of his coat and stepped back to inspect his handiwork. His operation had done nothing to improve the scar of pale splintered wood marring the bark of the tree, but there was no help for it; he would just have to trust no one would notice or, if they noticed, would not wonder at it. For now, though, there was a body somewhere at the bottom of the cliff that required his attention.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to come with me, sweetheart,” he told Julia apologetically. “I don’t dare leave you alone here; for all we know, he might be lurking around the bend, waiting for a chance to come back and make sure any witnesses have been eliminated.”

She shuddered at the prospect. “Believe me, I have no desire to be left behind!”

“Yes, but it may be rough going,” Pickett cautioned. “It’s a long way down, and the path is bound to be steep.”

“You forget that I am country-bred,” Julia said, pale but resolute. “I’ll keep up, I promise.”

She proved to be as good as her word. The only path down the face of the cliff was every bit as rough and steep as Pickett had feared, being more suited to the walkers and trout fishermen who no doubt constituted the majority of its traffic than it was to an aristocratic lady in a delicate condition. Julia’s West Country childhood stood her in good stead, however, and with Pickett to help her over the worst patches or hold back the gorse that snatched at her skirts, they both made it safely to the foot of the cliff, where the water rushed past on its way to the lake farther downriver.

“It is beautiful, isn’t it,” Julia remarked, when they paused for a moment’s rest. “What sort of person looks at such scenery and sees only a means to commit murder?”

“Perhaps when we find the body we’ll have a better idea of that,” Pickett said. As if concurring with this suggestion, a trout suddenly leaped from the water, a flash of spotted brown scales that vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Recalling that his magistrate was an enthusiastic angler, he remarked, “Mr. Colquhoun will wish he were here.”

Julia grimaced, her thoughts clearly dwelling on the act of violence she had witnessed. “I would be happy to yield my place to him.”

“I thank you, sweetheart, but no! Much as I respect him, I have no desire to go on a honeymoon with Mr. Colquhoun.”

She gave a shaky laugh, and Pickett took her hand and drew it through his arm, glad to have distracted her, if only for a moment.

Alas, greater difficulties lay ahead. The path had taken them some way downriver from their picnic spot, and the place where Julia had seen the two men was farther still, which meant they would have to follow the river upstream for some distance before reaching the body. But the bank was very narrow, so narrow that in places the water lapped against the side of the cliff itself.

“Stay here,” Pickett said, stripping off his boots. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“John, you will be careful, won’t you?”

“I promise.” He stepped barefooted into the water and gasped. “Brrr! That’s cold!”

“I’ll warm you up when we get back to the inn,” she said, and although she smiled bravely, there was little of the flirtatiousness that would ordinarily have accompanied such a promise.

“I’ll hold you to that,” Pickett replied, and began making his way against the current.

He had no idea how long he waded—fifteen minutes? Twenty?—but at last he came upon a rounded shape of brown and gray, half in the water and half on the narrow riverbank. Pickett might have mistaken it for a boulder, had it not been for the skirts of the old-fashioned frock coat that swayed in the current—and the broad shoulders that rose and fell in quick, shallow breaths. Somehow, miraculously, the man was still alive. For how long, however, was anyone’s guess. Heedless of the splashing he made, Pickett increased his pace and soon stepped up on the bank beside the man. From this vantage point, he could see a leg stuck out at an unnatural angle.

“It’s all right,” Pickett said soothingly, realizing even as he said the words just how absurd they were. It was anything but “all right”; even if it were possible to get a stretcher down to the man, the chances of his surviving the trek back up to the top of the cliff without either succumbing to his injuries or being tipped out by his bearers was somewhere between slim and none. Still, Pickett knew better than to point out this probable outcome to a dying man.

“It’s all right,” he said again. “You’re not alone.”

“What—who’s there?” The voice was the merest wisp of sound, but the man seemed to be fully conscious.

“John Pickett. I’m visiting from London. I’d like to move your head a bit farther from the water, if I may. Will it hurt you if I turn you over?”

“Don’t—don’t think so. I can’t—can’t feel my legs.”

This was a very bad sign, Pickett knew, but one glance at the twisted limbs told him it might actually be for the best. The man would very likely die in any case; at least he would be spared the agony of pain that must otherwise have been excruciating. The fellow no doubt outweighed Pickett by a good five stone, but he eased the man onto his back as gently as he could, being careful to keep his head clear of the water. When he saw the bruised face, he suffered a shock.

“Mr. Hawkins?” he said. “Ned Hawkins?”

The innkeeper acknowledged him with the briefest flicker of his eyelids. “John Pickett of Bow Street.”

“Yes, sir.” Was he just repeating the information Pickett had given as he and Julia had signed the inn’s register, or did he mean something else entirely? One look at Ned Hawkins’s ashen face told Pickett he had not long to find out. “Was it you who sent for me?” he asked urgently.

“Let her—” He broke off and took a rattling breath.

“Did you send to Bow Street for a Runner?” Pickett reiterated.

“Let her—” The words trailed off to a whisper.

“Let who what?” asked Pickett, his voice rising on a note of desperation.

“No—in my—in my pocket—let her—let her—” The voice faded away, and the pale blue eyes grew unfocused. Ned Hawkins was gone.

Let her, he’d said. Let her. But who was she, and what must she be allowed to do? Whoever and whatever, it had been important enough to Ned Hawkins that he’d spent his last breaths trying to communicate it. Her, then, must refer to Mrs. Hawkins, but that would presume she was doing, or intended to do, something which Pickett had the power to prohibit. Or perhaps he meant his daughter, and was giving his blessing to Lizzie and her poet—although what influence he imagined Pickett might exercise in such a case left the latter mystified. Hawkins had also referred to his pocket, however, and in a way that suggested this might shed some light on the puzzle.

It seemed somehow wrong to rifle a dead man’s pockets while the body was still warm, but the dead man in question had given him permission, in a way. Besides, once the death was reported, he was unlikely to have another chance. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, thought Pickett, and reached inside the man’s coat. His nimble pickpocket’s fingers located the breast pocket and slipped inside. Paper crackled beneath his fingertips, and he withdrew a folded sheet sealed with red wax into which was pressed a crest bearing the image of a curiously shaped harp. He turned it over and found that it bore the name (slightly smudged) of one James Sullivan, along with an address in Dublin.

Not “let her,” then, but “letter.” It still didn’t explain much. Was Hawkins asking him to make sure that the letter was delivered, or urging him to intercept it? He glanced down at the dead man, but there was no answer in the glazed eyes. A quick search of the other pockets yielded nothing but a few copper coins and one silver shilling, none of which interested Pickett in the slightest. Meanwhile, Julia was waiting for him, and Pickett wasn’t at all certain that, if he were to linger too long, she wouldn’t come in search of him. Resisting the urge to close those staring eyes—it would not do to let anyone know that someone else had seen, let alone tampered with, the body—he tucked the letter into his own inside breast pocket, and stepped back into the cold water. Turning back toward the dead man, he made a cup of his hands and scooped water up onto the bank to eradicate any footprints he might have left behind. Finally, satisfied that he’d left no trace of his visit behind—no trace, that is, except for the absence of the letter—he waded back down the river to find Julia.

“Well?” she asked urgently. “Did you find him?”

“Yes,” he said tersely. “It was Ned Hawkins, our host.”

“Oh,” she said faintly. “Was he—was he dead?”

He shook his head. “Not at first. He is now.”

“Oh,” she said again. “I can’t help thinking it would have been better if he had died immediately. One hates to think of him lying there suffering, knowing it unlikely that anyone will come along to help—” She broke off, shuddering.

“It wasn’t like that at all,” Pickett said quickly, not wanting her to dwell on imaginary horrors. “I believe he must have sustained some spinal injury. He said he could not feel his legs, and so he did not suffer as much pain as he otherwise would have done. As for his being alone, I was with him at the end. Not that I could do much, but he seemed to have a dying wish, which I will try my best to fulfill.”

“A dying wish? What was that?”

He sighed. “I only wish I knew.” As he pulled his stockings on over wet feet, he recounted the innkeeper’s cryptic utterings about a letter, including his own misunderstanding of the word and the sealed correspondence now residing in his own pocket. He almost wished he’d allowed her to accompany him in spite of her condition; she might have noticed something or recognized some significance to the words that he had missed.

“I wonder what it says. It must be important, for him to speak of it with his last breath.” Something in Pickett’s face must have given him away, for she spoke accusingly. “John! You don’t intend to read someone else’s mail!”

“I have to,” he pointed out. “How else am I to know what he wanted done with it?”

“I see,” she said thoughtfully, regarding him with narrowed eyes. “You think it was Mr. Hawkins who sent to Bow Street.”

“I think it very likely. He couldn’t see me at first—he was lying with his back to me—but it wasn’t until after I identified myself that he began talking about the letter. In any case, I intend to try and find out. In the meantime, we’d better get back up to our interrupted picnic.”

“Hadn’t we ought to notify the coroner first? Or at least go back to the inn and tell Mrs. Hawkins?”

“We can’t,” he said with a sigh. “I know it sounds cruel to leave him there, but I can’t call undue attention to myself, not until I discover who sent for me and why. I’m working in the dark here, Julia. Someone here knows who I am and why they’ve summoned me, but I don’t know who they are, or what I’m supposed to be doing for them. Whatever it is, it was apparently sensitive enough—or dangerous enough—that it couldn’t be put down in writing. Nor, for that matter, would Hawkins run the risk of putting his name to it—if it was Hawkins who wrote the letter, which is by no means certain. It’s an uncomfortable position, to say the least.”

“But Hawkins is dead now,” she pointed out. “Whatever is going on, and whoever is behind it, they can’t hurt him anymore.”

“No, but they can hurt me,” he said bluntly. “Worse yet, they can hurt me the most by hurting you. That’s why I can’t let anyone know I’ve been down to the river and seen the body.”

“And so poor Mrs. Hawkins will be left to wait and worry, and wonder why her husband hasn’t come back home.”

“I’m afraid so. It seems harsh, I know, but by keeping mum now, I might be able to discover who did this and why. Could you describe him at all—the man who pushed Hawkins, I mean? I’m afraid I didn’t get a very good look—it was all over by the time I woke up, and the fellow was already making his escape.”

“No—I didn’t even recognize Hawkins, and I’d been watching the pair of them for some time, trying to decide whether or not to include them in my drawing. But I was seeing them only in silhouette, you know, for the sun was behind them.”

“You couldn’t say whether he was short or tall, thin or fat?”

“I should say Mr. Hawkins and his attacker were much of a size, but that is only an impression. It stands to reason, doesn’t it, that a frail man could not have pushed Mr. Hawkins hard enough to send him over the edge? After all, he is—was—somewhat stout himself.”

Pickett made no reply beyond a noncommittal noise, and Julia, focused on putting one foot in front of the other as they climbed the steep path, failed to notice anything unusual in this. Eventually they reached the gentler slope at the top of the path, and returned to the inn. Still, Julia thought nothing of his uncharacteristic silence beyond assuming that he must be pondering the unexpectedly tragic twist their outing had taken. Upon entering the public room, Julia was relieved when they entered the room to find no sign of Mrs. Hawkins behind the counter; resigned as she was to yield to her husband’s wishes in the matter of informing the widow, she was glad she didn’t have to look the woman in the face while withholding the information.

Upstairs, she removed her bonnet and spencer while Pickett, still apparently chilled from his wade in the river, kindled a fire in the grate. Once the flame had taken hold, he stood up, dusted off his hands, and turned to face her, and suddenly the direction of his thoughts became clear.

“Julia,” he said with the air of one coming to an unpleasant but necessary decision, “I think you had best go back to London.”

“Go back without you?” she asked, dismayed. “But why?”

He stared at her in stunned disbelief. “Sweetheart, a man has been murdered.”

“I’ve helped you on murder cases before,” she pointed out reasonably.

“Yes, but on those occasions, you weren’t a witness to the murder. This time you saw it happen, and the murderer obviously saw you, else he wouldn’t have shot at you.”

“But it doesn’t necessarily follow that he knows who I am. After all, I couldn’t identify him; how do we know he could identify me?”

“You couldn’t recognize him because the sun was behind him; it wasn’t behind you.”

Julia could not dispute this home truth, but neither was she ready to give in. “We’re supposed to be on our honeymoon,” she reminded him. “How are you going to explain your staying behind while I return to London?”

She had the satisfaction of seeing him pace the floor for a few minutes while he pondered the question. Alas, her satisfaction was short-lived.

“We’ll have to quarrel,” he said at last. “Tonight, in the public room downstairs, where there will be plenty of witnesses. That way you can leave on the mail coach first thing tomorrow.”

“But I don’t want to quarrel with you,” she said bleakly. “Not even just for show.”

He stopped pacing and took her in his arms. “I don’t want to quarrel with you, either,” he said, knowing she was thinking, as he was, about their one and only quarrel, which had not been “just for show” at all, and which had resulted in the longest—and very nearly the last—thirty-six hours of his life. “But I don’t want you to be shot, either. God, Julia, if anything were to happen to you—” He broke off, bending his head to bury his face in the curve of her neck.

“And does it never occur to you that I feel the same way about you?” she asked, stroking his hair. “That I should be utterly miserable, sitting all alone in the Curzon Street house not knowing if you were at that very moment on a London-bound coach coming back home to me, or lying dead in a ditch somewhere?”

“All right,” he said resolutely as they drew apart. “You can stay, on one condition.”

“Anything!” she declared fervently.

“You’re not going to like it,” he cautioned her.

“Try me.”

He took a deep breath. “Turn around.”

She turned her back to him, and he went to work on the laces at the back of her gown.

“John, this is hardly the time—”

“I’m going to burn it.”

“You’re going to what?” If anyone had asked him, Pickett would have sworn it would be impossible for anyone to exude offended dignity while clad in nothing but their undergarments. He would have been wrong. Julia, standing in only her shift and stays with her gown lying in a puddle of fabric at her feet, fairly quivered with outrage. Her bare shoulders appeared creamy in the afternoon sunlight, inviting his touch, but a finely tuned instinct for self-preservation warned Pickett that he would make advances at his peril.

“I have to, sweetheart,” he said in a conciliatory tone that moved her not at all. “He’s seen you in it—whoever he is—and if he sees you wearing it again, he’ll know beyond any doubt who was the only witness to his crime. I won’t risk it.”

“I don’t see you offering to burn your clothes!”

“No, for I was lying down, so if he saw me at all, he couldn’t have got a very good look at me. And even if he had, well, I’d taken off my coat, and one man’s shirt looks very much like another’s, especially from a distance.”

“I won’t wear this dress again until we return to London,” she promised. “I’ll hide it in the bottom of my portmanteau.”

“And if someone searches the room? What then?”

“But—but I like this dress!”

“You won’t even be able to wear it in a couple of months,” he pointed out with unassailable logic.

“All the more reason for wearing it now, while I have the chance! John, it’s new,” she said coaxingly. “It only just came from the dressmaker.”

“I know, sweetheart, and I’m sorry. When we get back to London, you can have another one made.”

“What’s the use?” she asked bitterly. “By the time it was ready, I wouldn’t be able to wear it—as you so generously reminded me.”

“All right, then,” he said, grasping at straws, “how about this? Whatever reward I get for this case is yours, to do with as you please, no matter the amount.”

She regarded him speculatively. It wasn’t a matter of money; her widow’s jointure from her first husband was sufficient for her to replace the gown, and purchase one or two others as well. But she knew it galled him, the fact that he could not support her as her first husband had done; in truth, that had been the crux of their first, bitter quarrel. If he was willing to surrender what independence he had, without even knowing the sum that independence might amount to, then he was more worried for her safety than she’d realized. That being the case, she could not spurn such a gesture. Nor, for that matter, could she let him know that she realized the offer was worth far more than money. “You promise?” she asked, pretending to think only of pounds, shillings, and pence.

“I promise.”

She said not a word, but looked down at the pool of cloth at her feet and slowly, deliberately, stepped out of it. Pickett grabbed it and bundled up both it and its matching spencer before she could change her mind. The fabric blackened and disintegrated as soon as the flames touched it.

“What about your bonnet?” He glanced about the room and found it lying on the foot of the bed. “Did you take it off at any point while I was asleep?”

“No.”

He snatched it up by its plaited straw crown. “Thank God for that, anyway.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Only that no one seeing you with the sun in your hair would ever forget it,” he said, and added her bonnet to the blaze.

He’d spoken the words with no trace of flattery, and, ironically, they moved her as no amount of effusive praise would have done. “John Pickett!” she chided him. “Keep saying things like that, and soon you’ll have me begging you to burn my clothes!”

Her voice held a mixture of annoyance and affection, and he had hopes of being forgiven—not at this moment, perhaps, but eventually. Emboldened, he cupped his hands over her bare shoulders. “I am sorry,” he said.

“I know you are,” she retorted, but kissed him nonetheless.