Lord John and the Private Matter lj-1 Read online

  “God rot him,” said Francine O’Connell Scanlon. She turned her head and spat neatly on the ground. “ Andher.”

  It was not yet noon, and the taverns were still largely empty. Constable Magruder and his assistants graciously accepted a quantity of drink in the Blue Swan in reward of their help, and then returned to their duties, leaving Grey to shuck his coat and attempt repairs to his wardrobe in a modicum of privacy.

  “It seems you’re a handy fellow with a needle as well as a razor, Tom.” Grey slouched comfortably on a bench in the tavern’s deserted snug, restoring himself with a second pint of stout. “To say nothing of quick with both wits and feet. If you’d not gone for Magruder when you did, I’d likely be laid out in the alley now, cold as yesterday’s turbot.”

  Tom Byrd squinted over the red coat he was mending by the imperfect light from a leaded-glass window. He didn’t look up from his work, but a small glow of gratification appeared to spread itself across his snub features.

  “Well, I could see as how you had the matter well in hand, me lord,” he said tactfully, “but there was a dreadful lot of them Irish, to say nothin’ of the Frenchies.”

  “Frenchies?” Grey put a fist to his mouth to stifle a rising eructation. “What, you thought Miss Stokes’s friends were French? Why?”

  Byrd looked up, surprised.

  “Why, they was speakin’ French to each other—at least a couple of them. Two black-browed coves, curly-haired, what looked as if they was related to that Miss Stokes.”

  Grey was surprised in turn, and furrowed his brow in concentration, trying to recall any remarks that might have been made in French during the recent contretemps, but failing. He had marked out the two swarthy persons described by Tom, who had squared up behind their—sister, cousin? for surely Tom was right; there wasan undeniable resemblance—in menacing fashion, but they had looked more like—

  “Oh,” he said, struck by a thought. “Did it sound perhaps a bit like this?” He recited a brief verse from Homer, doing his best to infuse it with a crude English accent.

  Tom’s face lighted and he nodded vigorously, the end of the thread in his mouth.

  “I did wonder where she’d got Iphigenia,” Grey said, smiling. “Shouldn’t think her father was a scholar of the classics, after all. It’s Greek, Tom,” he clarified, seeing his young valet frown in incomprehension. “Likely Miss Stokes and her brothers—if that’s what they are—have a Greek mother or grandmother, for I’m sure Stokes is home-grown enough.”

  “Oh, Greek,” Tom said uncertainly, obviously unclear on the distinctions between this and any other form of French. “To be sure, me lord.” He delicately removed a bit of thread stuck to his lip, and shook out the folds of the coat. “Here, me lord; I won’t say as it’s good as new, but you can at least be wearing it without the lining peepin’ out.”

  Grey nodded in thanks, and pushed a full mug of beer in Tom’s direction. He shrugged himself carefully into the mended coat, inspecting the torn seam. It was scarcely tailor’s work, but the repair looked stout enough.

  He wondered whether Iphigenia Stokes might repay closer inspection; if she didhave family ties to France, it would suggest both a motive for O’Connell’s treachery—if he had been a traitor—and an avenue by which he might have disposed of the Calais information. But Greek . . . that argued for Stokes P и rehaving been a sailor, perhaps. Likely merchant seaman rather than naval, if he’d brought home a foreign wife.

  Yes, he rather thought the Stokes family would bear looking into. Seafaring ran in families, and while his observations had necessarily been cursory under the circumstances, he thought that one or two of the men in the Stokes party had looked like sailors; one had had a gold ring in his ear, he was sure. And sailors would be well-placed for smuggling information out of Britain, though in that case—

  “Me lord?”

  “Yes, Tom?” He frowned slightly at the interruption to his thoughts, but answered courteously.

  “It’s only I was thinking . . . seeing the dead cove, I mean—”

  “Sergeant O’Connell, you mean?” Grey amended, not liking to hear a late comrade in arms referred to carelessly as “the dead cove,” traitor or not.

  “Yes, me lord.” Tom took a deep swallow of his beer, then looked up, meeting Grey’s eyes directly. “Do you think me brother’s dead, too?”

  That brought him up short. He readjusted the coat on his shoulders, thinking what to say. In fact, he did not think Jack Byrd was dead; he agreed with Harry Quarry that the fellow had probably either joined forces with whoever had killed O’Connell—or had killed the Sergeant himself. Neither speculation was likely to be reassuring to Jack Byrd’s brother, though.

  “No,” he said slowly. “I do not. If he had been killed by the persons who brought about Sergeant O’Connell’s death, I think his body would have been discovered nearby. There could be no particular reason to hide it, do you think?”

  The boy’s rigid shoulders relaxed a little, and he shook his head, taking another gulp of his beer.

  “No, me lord.” He wiped at his mouth with the back of his hand. “Only—if he’s not dead, where do ye think he might be?”

  “I don’t know,” Grey answered honestly. “I am hoping we shall discover that soon.” It occurred to him that if Jack Byrd had not yet left London, his brother might be a help in determining his whereabouts, witting or not.

  “Can you think of places where your brother might go? If he was—frightened, perhaps? Or felt himself to be in danger?”

  Tom Byrd shot him a sharp look, and he realized that the boy was a good deal more intelligent than he had at first assumed.

  “No, me lord. If he needed help—well, there’s six of us boys and Dad, and me father’s two brothers and their boys, too; we takes care of our own. But he’s not been home; I know that much.”

  “Quite a thriving rookery of Byrds, it seems. You’ve spoken to your family, then?” Grey felt gingerly beneath the skirts of his coat; finding his breeches mostly dried, he sat down again opposite Byrd.

  “Yes, me lord. Me sister—there’s only the one of her—come to Mr. Trevelyan’s on Sunday last, a-looking for Jack with a message. That was when Mr. Trevelyan said he’d not heard from Jack since the night before Mr. O’Connell died.”

  The boy shook his head.

  “If it happened Jack ran into summat too much for him, that Dad and us couldn’t handle, he would have gone to Mr. Trevelyan, I think. But he didn’t do that. If something happened, I think it must’ve been sudden, like.”

  A clatter in the passageway announced the return of the barmaid, and prevented Grey answering—which was as well, since he had no useful suggestion to offer.

  “Are you hungry, Tom?” The tray of fresh pasties the woman carried were hot and doubtless savory enough, but Grey’s nose was still numbed with oil of wintergreen, and the memory of O’Connell’s corpse fresh enough in mind to suppress his appetite.

  The same appeared true of Byrd, for he shook his head emphatically.

  “Well, then. Give the lady back her needle—and a bit for her kindness—and we’ll be off.”

  Grey had not kept the coach, and so they walked back toward Bow Street, where they might find transport. Byrd slouched along, a little behind Grey, kicking at pebbles; obviously thoughts of his brother were weighing on his mind.

  “Was your brother accustomed to report back to Mr. Trevelyan regularly?” Grey asked, glancing over his shoulder. “Whilst watching Sergeant O’Connell, I mean?”

  Tom shrugged, looking unhappy.

  “Dunno, me lord. Jack didn’t say what it was he was up to; only that it was a special thing Mr. Joseph wanted him to do, and that was why he wouldn’t be in the house for a bit.”

  “But you know now? What he was doing, and why?”

  An expression of wariness flitted through the boy’s eyes.

  “No, me lord. Mr. Trevelyan only said as I should help you. He didn’t say specially what with.”

&nb
sp; “I see.” Grey wondered how much of the situation to impart. It was the anxious look on Tom Byrd’s face, as much as anything else, that decided him on full disclosure. Full, that is, bar the precise nature of O’Connell’s suspected peculations and Grey’s private conjectures regarding the role of Jack Byrd in the matter.

  “So you don’t think the dead—Sergeant O’Connell, I mean—you don’t think he was just knocked on the head by accident, like, me lord?” Byrd had come out of his mope; the clammy look had left his cheeks, and he was walking briskly now, engrossed in the details of Grey’s account.

  “Well, you see, Tom, I still cannot say so with any certainty. I was hoping that perhaps we should discover some particular mark upon the body that would make it clear that someone had deliberately set out to murder Sergeant O’Connell, and I found nothing of that nature. On the other hand . . .”

  “On the other hand, whoever stamped on his face didn’t like him much,” Tom completed the thought shrewdly. “ Thatwas no accident, me lord.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” Grey agreed dryly. “That was done after death, not in the frenzy of the moment.”

  Tom’s eyes went quite round.

  “However do you know that? Me lord,” he added hastily.

  “You looked closely at the heelprint? Several of the nailheads had broken through the skin, and yet there was no blood extravasated.”

  Tom gave him a look of mingled bewilderment and suspicion, obviously suspecting that Grey had made up the word upon the moment for the express purpose of tormenting him, but merely said, “Oh?”

  “Oh, indeed.” Grey felt some slight chagrin at having inadvertently shown up the deficiencies of Tom’s vocabulary, but didn’t wish to make further issue of the point by apologizing.

  “Dead men don’t bleed, you see—save they have suffered some grievous wound, such as the loss of a limb, and are picked up soon after. Then you will see some dripping, of course, but the blood soon thickens as it chills, and—” Seeing the pallid look reappear on Tom’s face, he coughed, and resumed upon another tack.

  “No doubt you are thinking that the nail marks might have bled, but the blood had been cleansed away?”

  “Oh. Um . . . yes,” Tom said faintly.

  “Possible,” Grey conceded, “but not likely. Wounds to the head bleed inordinately—like a stuck pig, as the saying is.”

  “Whoever says it hasn’t likely seen a stuck pig,” Tom said, rallying stoutly. “I have. Floods of it, there is. Enough to fill a barrel—or two!”

  Grey nodded, noting that it was clearly not the notion of blood per se that was disturbing the lad.

  “Yes, that’s the way of it. I looked very carefully and found no dried blood in the corpse’s hair or on the skin of the face—though the cleansing appeared otherwise to be rather crude. So no, I am fairly sure the mark was made some little time after the Sergeant had ceased to breathe.”

  “Well, it wasn’t Jack what made it!”

  Grey glanced at him, startled. Well, now he knew what was disturbing the boy; beyond simple worry at his brother’s absence, Tom clearly feared that Jack Byrd might be guilty of murder—or at least suspected of it.

  “I did not suggest that he did,” he replied carefully.

  “But I know he didn’t! I can prove it, me lord!” Byrd grasped him by the sleeve, carried away by the passion of his speech.

  “Jack’s shoes have square heels, me lord! Whoever stamped the dead cove had round ones! Wooden ones, too, and Jack’s shoes have leather heels!”

  He paused, almost panting in his excitement, searching Grey’s face with wide eyes, anxious for any sign of agreement.

  “I see,” Grey said slowly. The boy was still gripping his arm. He put his own hand over the boy’s and squeezed lightly. “I am glad to hear it, Tom. Very glad.”

  Byrd searched his face a moment longer, then evidently found what he had been seeking, for he drew a deep breath and let go of Grey’s sleeve with a shaky nod.

  They reached Bow Street a few moments later, and Grey waved an arm to summon a carriage, glad of the excuse to discontinue the conversation. For while he was sure that Tom was telling the truth regarding his brother’s shoes, one fact remained: The disappearance of Jack Byrd was still the main reason for presuming that O’Connell’s death had been no accident.

  Harry Quarry was eating supper at his desk while doing paperwork, but put aside both plate and papers to listen to Grey’s account of Sergeant O’Connell’s dramatic departure.

  “‘How dare you be takin’ liberties with me person, you?’ She really said that?” He wheezed, wiping tears of amusement from the corners of his eyes. “Christ, Johnny, you’ve had a more entertaining day than I have, by a long shot!”

  “You are quite welcome to resume the personal aspects of this investigation at any moment,” Grey assured him, leaning over to pluck a radish from the ravaged remains of Quarry’s meal. He had had no food since breakfast, and was ravenous. “I won’t mind at all.”

  “No, no,” Quarry reassured him. “Wouldn’t dream of deprivin’ you of the opportunity. What d’ye make of Scanlon and the widow, coming to bury O’Connell like that?”

  Grey shrugged, chewing the radish as he brushed flecks of dried mud from the skirts of his coat.

  “He’d just married O’Connell’s widow, mere days after the sergeant was killed. I suppose he meant to deflect suspicion, assuming that people would scarce suspect him of having killed the man if he had the face to show up looking pious and paying for the funeral, complete with priest and trimmings.”

  “Mm.” Quarry nodded, picking up a stalk of buttered asparagus and inserting it whole into his mouth. “Geddaluk t’shus?”

  “Scanlon’s shoes? No, I hadn’t the opportunity, what with those two harpies trying to murder each other. Stubbs did look at his hands, though, when we were round at his shop. If Scanlon did for O’Connell, someone else did the heavy work.”

  “D’you think he did it?”

  “God knows. Are you going to eat that muffin?”

  “Yes,” Quarry said, biting into it. Consuming the muffin in two large bites, he tilted back in his chair, squinting at the plate in hopes of discovering something else edible.

  “So, this new valet of yours says his brother can’t have done it? Well, he would, wouldn’t he?”

  “Perhaps so—but the same argument obtains as for Scanlon; it took more than one person to kill O’Connell. So far as we know, Jack Byrd was quite alone—and I can’t envision a mere footman by himself doing what was done to Tim O’Connell.”

  Failing to find anything more substantial, Quarry broke a gnawed chicken bone in two and sucked out the marrow.

  “So,” he summed up, licking his fingers, “what it comes down to is that O’Connell was killed by two or more men, after which someone stamped on his face, then left him to lie for a bit. Sometime later, someone—whether the same someone who killed him, or someone else—picked him up and dropped him into the Fleet Ditch off Puddle Dock.”

  “That’s it. I asked the constable in charge to look through his reports, to see whether there was any fighting reported anywhere on the night O’Connell died. Beyond that—” Grey rubbed his forehead, fighting weariness. “We should look closely at Iphigenia Stokes and her family, I think.”

  “You don’t suppose she did it, do you? Woman scorned and all that—and she has got the sailor brothers. Sailors all wear wooden heels; leather’s slippery on deck.”

  Grey looked at him, surprised.

  “However do you come to know that, Harry?”

  “Sailed from Edinburgh to France in a new pair of leather-heeled shoes once,” Quarry said, picking up a lettuce leaf and peering hopefully beneath it. “Squalls all the way, and nearly broke me leg six times.”

  Grey plucked the lettuce leaf out of Quarry’s hand and ate it.

  “An excellent point,” he said, swallowing. “And it would account for the apparent personal animosity evident in the crime. But no, I cannot t
hink Miss Stokes had the Sergeant murdered. Scanlon might easily maintain a pose of pious concern for the purpose of disarming suspicion—but not she. She was entirely sincere in her desire to see O’Connell decently buried; I am sure of it.”

  “Mm.” Quarry rubbed thoughtfully at the scar on his cheek. “Perhaps. Might her male relations have discovered that O’Connell had a wife, though, and done him in for honor’s sake? They might not have told her what they’d done, if so.”

  “Hadn’t thought of that,” Grey admitted. He examined the notion, finding it appealing on several grounds. It would explain the physical circumstances of the Sergeant’s death very nicely; not only the battering, done by multiple persons, but the viciousness of the heelprint—and if the killing had been done in or near Miss Stokes’s residence, then there was plainly a need to dispose of the body at a safe distance, which would explain its having been moved after death.

  “It’s not a bad idea at all, Harry. May I have Stubbs, Calvert, and Jowett, then, to help with the inquiries?”

  “Take anyone you like. And you’ll keep looking for Jack Byrd, of course.”

  “Yes.” Grey dipped a forefinger into the small puddle of sauce that was the only thing remaining on the plate, and sucked it clean. “I doubt there’s much to be gained by troubling the Scanlons further, but I wouldn’t mind knowing a bit about his close associates, and where they might have been on Saturday night. Last but not least—what about this hypothetical spymaster?”

  Quarry blew out his cheeks and heaved a deep sigh.

  “I’ve something in train there—tell you later, if anything comes of it. Meanwhile”—he pushed back his chair and rose, brushing crumbs from his waistcoat—“I’ve got a dinner party to go to.”

  “Sure you haven’t spoiled your appetite?” Grey asked, bitingly.

  “Ha-ha,” Quarry said, clapping his wig on his head and bending to peer into the looking glass he kept on the wall near his desk. “Surely you don’t think one gets anything to eatat a dinner party?”

  “That was my impression, yes. I am mistaken?”