Lord John and the Private Matter lj-1 Page 17

  If he or Quarry could extract anything resembling a confession from his suspects, they might be offered official clemency in the form of a commuted sentence—if the stolen records were restored. He was sure that between them, Harry Quarry and the mysterious Mr. Bowles could arrange for a sentence of transportation rather than hanging, and he hoped it would fall out so.

  He was very much afraid, though, that the stolen requisitions were presently in France, having been taken there by Jack Byrd. And in that case . . .

  In spite of the convoluted nature of his thoughts, he had not abandoned his alertness, and the sound of running footsteps on the roadway behind him made him turn sharply, both hands on his weapons.

  His pursuer was not one of the pickpockets, though, but rather his valet, Tom Byrd.

  “Me lord,” the boy gasped, coming to a halt beside him. He bent over, hands on his knees, panting like a dog to recover breath. “I was lookin’ for—saw you—and ran—what—you been—a-doing to your suit?”

  “Never mind that,” Grey said shortly. “Has something happened?”

  Byrd nodded, gulping air. His face was still bright red and streaming sweat, but he could at least form words.

  “Constable Magruder. He sent—says come as quick as may be. He’s found a woman. A dead woman—in a green velvet dress.”

  Stray bodies would normally be taken to the nearest coroner—but mindful of the possible importance of his discovery and the need for discretion, Constable Magruder had helpfully had the body brought first to the regiment’s quarters near Cadogan Square, where it had been placed in the hay shed—to the horror of Corporal Hicks, who was in charge of the horses. Harry Quarry, summoned from his tea to deal with this new circumstance, told Grey as much upon his arrival in the courtyard.

  “What happened to your suit?” Quarry asked, casting an interested eye over the assorted stains. He rubbed a finger beneath his nose. “Phew.”

  “Never mind that,” Grey said tersely. “Do you know the woman?”

  “Don’t think her own mother would know her,” Quarry said, turning to lead the way into the stables. “Pretty sure I’ve seen the dress, at Maggie’s place. Certainly isn’t Maggie, though—no tits at all.”

  A sudden fear turned Grey’s bowels to water. Christ, could it be Nessie?

  “When you say her mother wouldn’t know her—had she . . . been in the water long?”

  Quarry cast him a puzzled look.

  “She wasn’t in the water at all. Had her face beaten in.”

  He felt bile rise at the back of his throat. Had the little whore gone nosing about, in hopes of helping him further, and been murdered for her interference? If she had died on his account, and in such a way . . . Uncorking the bottle of wine, he took a deep swallow, and another, then handed it to Quarry.

  “Good idea. She’s niffy as a Frenchman’s arse; been dead a day or two.” Harry tilted up the bottle and drank, looking somewhat happier afterward. “Nice stuff, that.”

  Grey saw Tom Byrd cast a look of longing at the bottle, but Quarry kept firm hold of it as he led the way through the brick-paved stables.

  Magruder was waiting for them outside the shed, with one of his constables.

  “My lord.” Magruder inclined his head, looking curiously at Grey. “What happened to—”

  “Where did you find her?” Grey interrupted.

  “In Saint James’s Park,” the constable replied. “In the bushes by the path.”

  “Where?” Grey said incredulously. Saint James’s was the preserve of merchants and aristocrats, where the young, the rich, and the fashionable strolled to see and be seen. Magruder shrugged, slightly defensive.

  “People out for an early walk found her—or rather, their dog did.” He stepped back, ushering the soldiers ahead of him through the door to the tack room. “There was considerable blood.”

  Grey’s first thought upon seeing the body was that the constable was a master of understatement. His second was a sense of profound relief; the body was in fact fairly flat-chested, but was much too tall to be Nessie. The hair was darker than the Scottish whore’s, too—nearly black—and while it was thick and wavy, it was nothing like Nessie’s wild curly mane.

  The face was essentially gone; obliterated in a frenzy of blows from something like the back of a spade or a fireplace poker. Suppressing his distaste—Quarry had been right about the smell—Grey circled slowly about the table on which the corpse had been laid.

  “Think it’s the same?” Quarry asked, watching him. “The dress, I mean. You’ve an eye for such things.”

  “I am fairly sure that it is. The lace . . .” He nodded at the wide trim on the gown, which matched the edging of the kerchief. The kerchief itself straggled loose across the table, torn and soaked in blood, but still pinned precariously to the gown. “It’s Valenciennes. I noticed it particularly at the brothel, because it’s very like that on my cousin’s wedding gown—there are swathes of it all over my mother’s house. Expensive stuff, though.”

  “Not common, then.” Quarry fingered the tattered rag of the kerchief.

  “Not at all.”

  Quarry nodded, turning to Magruder.

  “I think we shall be wanting a word with a madam named Maggie—house in Meacham Street, you know it? Rather a pity, that,” he added, turning back to Grey with a sigh. “Did like that blonde with the big tits.”

  Grey nodded, only half-hearing. The gown itself was so crusted with blood and dirt that the color was almost indistinguishable; only the draggled folds of the skirt still showed emerald green. The smell was very strong in the confined quarters—Quarry had been right, she did reek like a . . .

  He bent closer, hands on the table, sniffing deeply. Civet. He’d swear he smelt civet—and something else as well. The corpse was wearing perfume, though the scent was nearly obscured by the earthier reeks of blood and ordure.

  She wears a very expensive scent. Civet, vetiver, and orange, if I am not mistaken.He could hear Richard Caswell’s voice in his head, dry as grave flowers. She has dark hair. Nearly black. Your cousin is fair, I believe?”

  Excitement and dread tightened his belly as he leaned over the dead woman. It had to be; this was Trevelyan’s mysterious lover. But what had happened to her? Had her husband—if she had one—discovered the affair and taken his revenge? Or had Trevelyan . . .

  He sniffed again, eager for confirmation.

  Where did women wear perfume? Behind the ears—no, not a chance; the corpse had only one ear and the other was in no condition . . . Between the breasts, perhaps; he’d seen his mother tuck a scented cloth down into the top of her stays before a party.

  He ducked his head to inhale more deeply, and saw the small, blackened hole in the center of the bodice, inconspicuous amidst the general carnage.

  “I will be damned,” he said, looking up at the phalanx of bemused faces hovering over him. “She’s been shot.”

  “Do you want to know summat else, me lord?” The whisper came at his elbow. Tom Byrd, by now somewhat inured to nasty sights, had edged his way close, and was looking at the corpse’s smashed face in fascination.

  “What’s that, Tom?”

  The boy’s finger floated tentatively across the table, pointing at what Grey had taken for a smudge of dirt behind the jaw.

  “She’s got whiskers.”

  The corpse was, in fact, that of a man. Striking as that was, though, it was not the main point of remark, once the rags of the green gown had been removed to verify the fact.

  “I’ve never seen anything like that in me life,” Harry Quarry said, eyeing the dead man with a combination of disgust and fascination. “You, Magruder?”

  “Well, on a woman, now and then,” the constable said, pursing his lips fastidiously. “Some of the whores do it regular, I understand. Bit of a curiosity, like.”

  “Oh, whores, yes, of course.” Quarry flapped a hand, indicating that such usage was not only familiar to him, but positively commonplace. “But this is
a man, dammit! You’ve never seen such a thing, have you, Grey?”

  Grey had, in fact, seen such a thing, and more than once, though it was not an affectation that appealed to him personally. It would scarcely do to say so, though, and he shook his head, widening his eyes in a semblance of shocked incomprehension at the perversity of mankind.

  “Mr. Byrd,” he said, making space for Tom to approach closer. “You are our chief expert on the art of shaving; what can you tell us about this?”

  Nostrils pinched against the reek of the corpse, Tom the barber’s son motioned for the lantern to be brought closer, and leaned down, squinting in professional fashion along the planes of the body.

  “Well,” he said judiciously, “he does it—did it, I mean—regular. More like, someone did it for him—a nice, professional bit of work. See, there’s no cuts, nor yet no scraping—and that’s an awkward bit, round there.” He pointed, frowning. “Hard to manage by yourself, I should think.”

  Quarry made a noise that might have been a laugh, but converted it hastily into a wheezing cough.

  Byrd, ignoring this, stretched out a hand and ran it very delicately up the corpse’s leg.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, in tones of satisfaction. “Feel that, me lord? You can feel the stubble, sharp-ended, like, when you goes against the grain. It gets like that when a man shaves regular. If he shaves no more than once or twice a month, he’s like to get bumps—the hair curls up under the skin as it grows, see? But no bumps here.”

  There were not. The corpse’s skin was smooth, devoid of hairs on arms, legs, chest, buttocks and privates. Other than smears of dried blood and caked ordure, and the small black hole of the bullet wound in his chest, only the deep purple-brown of the nipples and the riper tones of the rather well-endowed expanse between the man’s legs interrupted the pale olive perfection of his flesh. Grey thought the gentleman would likely have been quite popular, in certain circles.

  “He has stubble. So the shaving took place before death?” Grey asked.

  “Oh, yes, me lord. Like I said—he does it regular.”

  Quarry scratched his head.

  “I will be damned. D’ye think he’s a he-whore, then? A sodomite of some type?”

  Grey would have taken a substantial wager to that effect, were it not for one observation. The man was slight, but well-built and muscular, like Grey himself. However, the muscles of chest and arms had begun to sag from lack of use, and there was a definite roll of fat around the middle. Adding to these observations the fact that the man’s neck was deeply seamed and, despite an impeccable manicure, the backs of his hands thickly veined and knobbed, Grey was reasonably sure that the body was that of a man in his late thirties or early forties. Male prostitutes seldom lasted far beyond twenty.

  “Nah, too old,” Magruder objected, fortunately saving Grey from the necessity of finding some way of saying the same thing, without disclosing how he knew it. “This cove would be one as hires such, not one himself.”

  Quarry shook his head in disapproval.

  “Should never have suspected Maggie of dealing in that sort of thing,” he said, as much in regret as condemnation. “You sure about the dress, then, Grey?”

  “Reasonably. It is not impossible that a dressmaker should make more than one gown, of course—but whoever made this one made the one that Magda was wearing.”

  “Magda?” Quarry blinked at him.

  Grey cleared his throat, a hideous realization coming suddenly over him. Quarry hadn’t known.

  “The . . . ah . . . Scottish woman I met there informed me that the madam was called Magda, and is in fact a, um, a German of some type.”

  Quarry’s face looked pinched in the lantern light.

  “Of some type,” he repeated bleakly. It made considerable difference whichtype, and Quarry was well aware of it. Prussia and Hanover—of course—had allied themselves with England, while the duchy of Saxony had chosen up sides with France and Russia, in support of its neighbor Austria. For an English colonel to be patronizing a brothel owned by a German of unknown background and allegiance, and now with an evident involvement in criminal matters, was a dicey proposition, and one that Quarry must devoutly hope would never come to official notice. Or the notice of the unblinking Mr. Bowles.

  It wouldn’t do Grey’s reputation any good, either. He realized now that he ought to have mentioned the situation to Quarry at the time, rather than assuming that he must know of Magda’s background already. But he had allowed himself to be distracted by alcoholic excess, and by Nessie’s disclosure about Trevelyan—and now he could but hope there wasn’t the devil to pay for it.

  Harry Quarry drew a deep breath and blew it out again, squaring his shoulders. One of Harry’s many good points was that he never wasted time in recrimination, and—unlike Bernard Sydell—never blamed subordinates, even when they deserved it.

  “Well, then,” he said, and turned to Magruder. “I think we must have Mrs. Magda taken into custody and questioned without delay. We shall need to search her premises, as well, I should think—will you require a warrant?”

  “Yes, sir. Given the circumstances”—Magruder nodded delicately at the dead man—“I shouldn’t think the magistrate would be reluctant.”

  Quarry nodded, straightening the coat on his shoulders.

  “Aye. I’ll come myself and speak to him now.” He drummed his fingers restlessly on the table, making the corpse’s slack hand tremble with the vibration. “Grey—I think we shall have the Scanlons taken up, too, as you advised. You’ll question them; go round to the gaol tomorrow, once Magruder has had a chance to lay them by the heels. As for . . . the Cornish gentleman . . . use your best judgment there, will you?”

  Grey managed a nod, cursing himself for his idiocy, and then Quarry and Magruder were gone, leaving the faceless corpse naked and staring in the flickering light.

  “You in trouble, me lord?” Tom Byrd was frowning worriedly at him from the shadows, having evidently divined some hint of the undercurrents in the preceding conversation.

  “I hope not.” He stood looking down at the dead man. Who the devil was he? Grey had been convinced that the body was that of Trevelyan’s lover—and it might still be, he reminded himself. True, Caswell had insisted that it was a woman whom Trevelyan entertained at Lavender House, but Caswell might have been mistaken in his own powers of olfactory discernment—or lying, for reasons unknown.

  Use his best judgment, Harry said. His best judgment was that Trevelyan was in this up to his neck—but there was no direct evidence.

  There was certainly no evidence to connect the Scanlons with this business, and precious little to connect them with O’Connell’s murder—but Harry’s motive in ordering an arrest there was apparent; if inquiries were eventually made into the conduct of the investigation, it would be prudent to make it look as though affairs were being pursued aggressively. The muddier the waters, the less likely anyone might be to take up the matter of Magda’s inconvenient nationality.

  “Major?” He turned, to see Corporal Hicks frowning at him from the doorway. “You aren’t going to leave that thing here, are you?”

  “Oh. No, Corporal. You may remove it to the coroner’s. Fetch some men.”

  “Right, sir.” Hicks disappeared with alacrity, but Grey hesitated. Was there any further information that the body itself could offer?

  “You think it was the same cove what did for that Sergeant O’Connell what did for this ’un, me lord?” Tom Byrd had come to stand alongside him.

  “I have no particular reason to think so,” Grey said, a little startled at this supposition. “Why?”

  “Well, the, uh, face.” Tom gestured, a little awkwardly, at the remains, and swallowed audibly. One eyeball had been dislodged so far from its parent socket as to dangle out onto the crushed cheek, staring accusingly off into the shadows of the hay shed. “Seems like whoever did this didn’t care for him much—same as whoever stamped on the Sergeant.”

  Grey considered
that, pursing his lips. Reluctantly, he shook his head.

  “I don’t think so, Tom. I think that whoever did this”—he gestured at the corpse—“did it in order to disguise the gentleman’s identity, not out of personal dislike. It’s heavy work, to crush a skull like that, and this was a very thorough job. One would have to be in an absolute frenzy of hatred—and if that was the case, why shoot him first?”

  “Did they? Shoot him first, I mean, me lord. ’Coz what you said about dead men don’t bleed—this one surely did, so he can’t have been dead when they . . . erm.” He glanced at the smashed face, and then away. “But he couldn’t live long like that—so why shoot him, then?”

  Grey stared at Tom. The boy was pale, but bright-eyed, intent on his argument.

  “You have a very logical sort of mind, Tom,” he said. “Why, indeed?” He stood for a moment looking down at the corpse, trying to reconcile the disparate bits of information at hand. What Tom said made obvious sense—and yet he was convinced that whoever had killed this man had not beaten in his face from anger. Just as he was convinced that whoever had stamped on Tim O’Connell’s face had acted from precisely that emotion.

  Tom Byrd stood patiently by, keeping quiet as Grey circled the table, viewing the corpse from all angles. Nothing seemed to make sense of the puzzle, though, and when Hicks’s men came in, he allowed them to bundle up the body into a canvas.

  “D’you want us to take this, as well, sir?” One of the men picked up the sodden hem of the green dress, gingerly, between two fingers.

  “Not even the mort-man’d want that,” the other objected, wrinkling his nose at the reek.

  “You couldn’t sell it to a ragpicker, even was you to wash it.”

  “No,” Grey said, “leave it, for now.”

  “You don’t mean to leave it in here, do you, sir?” Hicks stood by, arms folded, glowering at the sodden pile of velvet.

  “No, I suppose not,” Grey said, with a sigh. “Don’t want to put the horses off their feed, do we?”

  It was full dark as they left the stables, but with a gibbous moon rising. No coach would take them as passengers with their malodorous burden, even with it wrapped in tarred canvas, and so they were obliged to walk to Jermyn Street.