What Angels Fear sscm-1

by C. S. Harris

  Sir Christopher’s smile faded. “No. I didn’t even know what he’d done until the day before he was set to leave England.”

  “A bit of a start, that. Was it not?”

  Sir Christopher fell into a troubled silence, as if considering his next words. Then he said, “About a year after we came down from Oxford, Sebastian fell in love with a woman the Earl considered unsuitable. He threatened to cut Sebastian off without a penny, if he married the chit.”

  “Lord Hendon objected to the lady’s birth?”

  Farrell rubbed his nose. “She was a Cyprian.”

  “Ah,” said Lovejoy. It was difficult to imagine the proud, arrogant young man he’d first met in the library at Brook Street doing anything so improper or foolish as to fall in love with an Incognita. But then, it must have all happened long ago. One wondered how much, if any, of that impetuous, romantic youth could still be found in the cool, hard man Lord Devlin was today.

  “Sebastian swore he’d marry the girl anyway. Only, the lady in question had no interest in marrying a pauper. Once she realized Hendon meant what he’d said, she broke it off.”

  “So Devlin went to war to get himself killed.”

  “I’m not sure it was as dramatic as all that. Let’s just say he was anxious to get away from England for a spell.”

  “Understandable,” said Lovejoy smoothly. “Yet I gather he volunteered for some rather dangerous assignments.”

  “He was in intelligence, if that’s what you mean. He was good at it.”

  Lovejoy made a noncommittal humming sound. “So I’ve heard. Yet I understand he left the service last year under something of a cloud. What was that about, I wonder?”

  Sir Christopher returned Lovejoy’s questioning look with a mulish stare. “I don’t know anything about that,” he said, and on this, it seemed, Sir Christopher would not be drawn.

  Lovejoy shifted his approach. “Did you see Lord Devlin this last Tuesday evening?”

  “Of course.” Sir Christopher’s eyes remained narrowed. The man might be easygoing, Lovejoy thought, but he was no fool. He knew to what end Lovejoy was circling back around. “We were at Watier’s all night—until dawn the next morning, when we drove out to Chalk Heath.”

  Lovejoy gave a tight smile. “Yes. But you see, it’s his lordship’s movements earlier in the evening we’re interested in. According to our information, Lord Devlin didn’t arrive at Watier’s until shortly after nine o’clock, although he left his house some four hours earlier, at approximately five. His lordship claims he spent the intervening four hours simply walking the streets of London. But unfortunately, he says he was alone.”

  Sir Christopher set his jaw and glared back at Lovejoy. “If Devlin says he was out walking, then that’s where he was.”

  The man had too open a face and too natural a disposition toward honesty, Lovejoy thought, to ever be anything other than a terrible liar. The magistrate spent the next ten minutes pressing Sir Christopher for the truth. But in the end, Lovejoy gave it up.

  He’d have better luck, he decided, with the unhappily married Melanie Talbot.

  Chapter 18

  Rachel York had kept rooms on the first floor of a neat little lodging house in Dorset Court, not far from Kat’s own townhouse. But it was midafternoon by the time Kat was able to get rid of Lord Stoneleigh and make her way there. Already, the light was fading from the day. As she climbed the long flight of stairs from the ground floor, a hard sleet began to fall, striking the window at the end of the wide hall like a flurry of small pebbles.

  “You won’t find anyone there, I can tell you that,” said a querulous female voice floating down from the second floor just as Kat raised her hand to knock.

  Crossing the hall, Kat stuck her head over the banister and looked up. “Excuse me?”

  She found a small face, deeply wrinkled by time and surrounded by a halo of white hair, peering down at her from the gloom of the second floor. “She’s dead. Murdered in a church, God rest her soul.”

  “Actually, it was her maid, Mary Grant, I was interested in seeing. I thought I might like to hire her, if she’s in need of a new position.”

  “Huh. She’s long gone, that one. Cleaned the place out first thing this morning, she did.”

  Kat was starting to get a crick in her neck. She shifted around to a more comfortable position. She could see the woman better now, so small she had to stand on tiptoe to rest her arms on the top of the upper banister. Her purple satin gown was of a style one might have seen in the previous century, although it looked new. Just like the ropes of pearls and emeralds and rubies draping her neck and thin wrists looked real—at least in this light, and from this angle. “Cleaned it out?”

  “Took everything,” said the elderly woman, her inflection betraying lingering traces of a Highland accent. “Carried it right off. Easy enough to do, I suppose, seeing as how her mistress already had most everything packed.”

  “Rachel was moving to new lodgings?” It was news to Kat.

  “Huh. Leaving London, more like, if you ask me.”

  “Leaving?”

  “That’s what I thought, although she wasn’t exactly what I’d call forthcoming, that girl. All atwitter this week, she was—up in the trees one minute, scared of her shadow the next. She’d found some way to get her hands on some money, was what I thought.” The old woman expelled her breath in a little hmm. “Lot of good it did her, in the end.”

  “But . . . I thought there was a constable here. How could Mary Grant have taken anything without his knowing?”

  The old woman didn’t seem to find Kat’s interest in details in any way unusual. She gave another of her little hmms. “That one? He left at first light, he did. And good riddance to him, too. Let me tell you, the number of people we’ve had, tramping up and down these stairs! Why, it’s worse than what it was when that girl was alive.”

  “I suppose you’ve had the authorities here. . . .” Kat allowed her voice to trail off encouragingly.

  “Aye, three times. At least, I assume that’s who they were. And then there was that young man who had a key.”

  Kat felt a quickening of interest. A young man with a key? None of Rachel’s men, as far as Kat knew, had been young. And Rachel never gave any of them keys. “One of her . . . cousins, I suppose?”

  The elderly woman laughed, a ribald cackle that echoed eerily down the darkening stairwell. “One of her lovers, you mean. No need to pull your punches with me, young woman. I cut my eyeteeth long ago.”

  Kat smiled up at her. “Come here regularly, did he?”

  The woman sniffed. “Not him. Never seen him before.”

  This time, Kat kept her smile to herself. She had no doubt the old woman kept a very, very close watch on the stairwell’s comings and goings.

  “If you ask me,” said the woman, “he was here looking for something—something he didn’t find.”

  “Really?”

  “Aye. Heard him down there a good five minutes, going from room to room. And I says to myself, he must be searching that place. And then what does he do but come up here and knock at my door, bold as brass, wanting to know if I had any idea where that maid had taken herself off to. As if I would.” The old woman fixed Kat with a speculative look. “You’re an actress, too, I suppose.”

  “Well,” said Kat hastily, “if Mary Grant is indeed gone, then I suppose I’m wasting my time looking for her here. Thank you for your help.”

  Kat was aware of that bright, curious gaze fixed upon her as she walked back down the stairs, her steps slow and deliberate. It wasn’t until she had almost reached the ground floor that she finally heard the click of the old woman’s door closing above.

  Slipping off her half-boots and hugging the wall so that the treads wouldn’t creak, Kat darted back up the steps. The lock on Rachel’s door was a simple mechanism, easy enough to pick when one has had the right training. Kat let herself in and closed the door quietly behind her.

  Rachel had done
well for herself in the three short years she’d trodden the boards. The rooms were well proportioned and richly paneled, the hangings at the windows of draped velvet. But the old woman was right: where once had stood gleaming polished tables and satin settees were now only small piles of rubbish and other litter strewn here and there.

  Her bare toes curling away from the cold floorboards, Kat crept softly through the empty, echoing drawing room and interconnecting dining room. Rachel’s maid had left very little. At the back of the house lay the chamber Rachel had used as her bedroom, its walls covered in a flattering, pink silk. It was to this room that Kat now went. Crossing the bare floor, she carefully drew back the heavy drapes and let the fading light of the dying day into the room. Then, her arms at her chest, hugging herself against the cold, she went to stand before the fireplace.

  The mantel had been cleverly worked, of carved wood painted to resemble marble. Kat studied the fluted pilasters, the scroll-like capitals. She touched first one decorative segment, then the other, pushing, twisting. It has to be here somewhere, she thought, just as a small section of the architrave pulled away from the others.

  Thrusting her hand into the gaping blackness of the secret nook, she drew out a small book, its gilt-edged pages bound in red leather and tied up with a thong. Rachel’s appointment book. Kat checked the compartment again, but it was empty.

  Untying the leather thong, Kat leafed quickly through the book. She would need to tear out some of the pages, she realized, before she gave the book to Sebastian. It would be too dangerous to let him see anything that might somehow link Rachel back to Leo. Kat could only hope enough would be left to provide Sebastian with some clue to the identity of Rachel’s killer.

  The distant sound of the door from the hall opening brought Kat’s head up with a jerk. “Mother Mary,” she whispered beneath her breath and thrust the small book into her reticule.

  A man’s voice came to her, high-pitched and sharp with angry incredulity. “What in the name of God has happened here? I ordered a watch set on this place.”

  Shoving the secret compartment closed, Kat darted through a side door to the back cupboard, off which opened the steep, narrow flight of service steps.

  “We left a man here overnight, sir,” said another voice, a younger man’s voice, at once defensive and conciliatory. “You said nothing about continuing the watch after that.”

  Hopping inelegantly on one foot, Kat slipped on first one boot, then the other, her elbow thumping the stair door back against the wall as she momentarily lost her balance and wavered.

  “What was that?”

  Kat’s head jerked around as the urgent, high-pitched words echoed through the empty rooms.

  “What? I didn’t hear anything.”

  The first voice was moving. “There’s someone here. In the back. Quick.”

  Kat didn’t wait to hear more. Her half-boots clattering on the bare steps, her reticule clutched in her hand, she fled.

  Chapter 19

  The ruse of simple Mr. Simon Taylor from Worcestershire wasn’t going to work with a man such as Leo Pierrepont. Sebastian and Pierrepont didn’t exactly move in the same circles, but the émigré knew Lord Devlin on sight, and a poorly cut coat and a few streaks of gray at the temples would be unlikely to prove an adequate disguise. Pierrepont had a reputation amongst the ton for shrewdness.

  So Sebastian visited a discreet shop on the Strand, where he provided himself with a neat little French Cassaignard flintlock pistol with a cannon muzzle and stepped breech, which fit snugly into the front pocket of his greatcoat. Then, as an early dusk fell over the city and the lamplighters struggled against a steady rain and sharp January wind, he set off for Half Moon Street.

  Leo Pierrepont hurried down his front steps, his coat collar turned up and hat brim pulled low against the wind-driven rain. “Cavendish Square,” he told the hackney driver, shutting the door behind him with a snap.

  “There are more reasons than one might suppose,” said Sebastian, lounging at his ease in the far corner, “for the Beau’s assertion that gentlemen should avoid riding in hackney carriages.”

  The Frenchman’s start of surprise was almost instantly controlled. “I beg your pardon,” he said, his glance darting, betrayingly, to the door. “I didn’t realize the jarvey already had a customer.”

  He had quite a reputation as a swordsman, this Frenchman, his slim body still energetic and agile despite his forty or fifty years. Sebastian slipped his hand from his pocket and calmly aimed the flintlock at the Frenchman’s chest. “I think you understand.”

  Leo Pierrepont stretched out his legs, settled deeper into the seat, and smiled. “Then I fear you overestimate my powers of imagination.”

  “Yet you know who I am.”

  “Of course.” His eyebrows rose in a very Gallic expression of disdain. “Wherever did you find that appalling coat?”

  Sebastian smiled. “The Rag Fair in Rosemary Lane.”

  “It looks like it. An effective disguise, I suppose, in its way. But only so long as the authorities fail to realize they should be seeking their missing viscount amongst the ill-dressed, hmm?”

  “I’m not worried. I suspect you have your own reasons for avoiding the authorities. At least when the topic of conversation is Rachel York.”

  “And if your suspicions are incorrect?”

  “There is that, of course. Still, it’s interesting, don’t you think, that you were the man paying the rent on her rooms?”

  A carriage rattled past, the glow from the torches carried by its linkboys slanting in through the hackney window to highlight the Frenchman’s sharp, hawkish features. “Who told you that?”

  Sebastian lifted one shoulder in a careless shrug. “Information is easy enough to come by . . . when one uses the right means of persuasion.”

  The Frenchman regarded him dispassionately for a moment. “Am I to guess why you’ve chosen to approach me on this matter?”

  “I should think the reason obvious.”

  Pierrepont opened his eyes wide. “Good God. What are you suggesting? That I killed Rachel? What do you imagine to be my motive, 4I wonder? Not lust, surely. Given the details you’ve discovered about our arrangement, it’s obvious I could have had the girl anytime I chose. Why rape her in a church?”

  Sebastian studied the other man’s carefully composed features. Had Rachel been raped? “Yet you seem to have shared her with others,” said Sebastian, keeping his voice deliberately bland. “Was that generosity willing, I wonder? Or not?”

  “What do you think? That I killed Rachel in a fit of jealous passion?” Pierrepont waved one long, delicate hand through the air in a dismissive gesture. “Such a fatiguing emotion, jealousy—apart from being rather primitive and plebian. You see, I am not a possessive man, my lord. The arrangement Rachel and I had suited us both—however strange some might find it.”

  “There are other reasons to kill.”

  A gust of wind caught the carriage and rattled the glass in the window frame as they turned onto New Bond Street. “There are reasons, yes. But to slit a woman’s throat—viciously, repeatedly, until her head is virtually severed from her body? What manner of man does that, hmm?”

  “You tell me.”

  Pierrepont sat silent for a moment, his chin sunk onto his chest, his thoughts seemingly elsewhere. “When I was a young man, I watched my father’s head roll in the Place de la Concorde. Did you know that a decapitated head remains conscious for some twenty seconds after it is separated from its body? Twenty seconds. Think about that. It’s a long time, no? Do you think Rachel knew that? That horror?”

  Sebastian listened to the rattle of the carriage wheels over the cobbles, the jingle of the harness. He hadn’t known that about Rachel’s death, either. He thought about that vibrant, beautiful young woman, thought about her alone and afraid in that church, her life’s blood ebbing away.

  “You don’t ask, but I’ll tell you anyway,” said Pierrepont, his lips drawing back i
n a cold, hard smile. “Tuesday night, I hosted at a dinner party attended by some half-dozen highly respectable people who can swear I was at home the entire evening. So you see, my friend, you need to seek elsewhere for Rachel’s murderer—if you are not, in fact, he.”

  The hackney slowed, swinging wide into Henrietta Place. Sebastian reached for the door handle. He didn’t doubt the Frenchman knew more than he’d been willing to admit, but they were almost to Cavendish Square and Sebastian had no desire to be seen there.

  He was beginning to realize how little he really knew about either Rachel York or her death. He knew she’d been murdered in the Lady Chapel of a small parish church near Westminster Abbey after telling her maid she was going to meet him, and that one of his pistols had been found tangled in her clothes. But he had only Pierrepont’s word for it that she’d been raped, and that her throat had been repeatedly, savagely slashed. He didn’t even know who had found her or at what time, precisely, she had died. These were things he needed to learn, if he were to have any hope of tracking down the real killer.

  And it occurred to him that he knew someone who just might be able to tell him.

  Chapter 20

  By the time he reached the narrow, medieval lane that wound its way around the base of Tower Hill, the wind was blowing in sharp, angry gusts that flapped the wooden signs overhead and sent the rain slashing sideways. In the lee of the deep, crumbling arch of a doorway, his eyes narrowed against the wind-driven rain, Sebastian studied the huddle of old stone buildings opposite. The surgery was dark, but he could see a light burning in the small house beyond it.

  He cast a quick glance up and down the street. The freezing rain had driven most people indoors. There was no one to see him as he crossed the lane and knocked on the house’s weathered front door.

  A dog barked in the distance. Sebastian heard the thump of uneven footsteps coming down the hall. Then there was silence, and Sebastian knew he was being watched. A wise man did not open his door to strangers at night, even when that man was a surgeon.