Why Mermaids Sing sscm-3

by C. S. Harris

  “I suppose it’s possible, although I’ve found nothing that would suggest it. I’m thinking perhaps the drug was used to make him more manageable.”

  “It would do that. Particularly if the lad were unused to its effects. But to force it down his throat wouldn’t have been easy if he resisted.”

  “No. But if someone held a gun on him and gave him a choice between the opium and instant death, he would drink it.”

  As bad as the room had smelled yesterday, today it was indescribably worse. Sebastian went to stand in the open doorway and breathe. “According to Mr. Stanton’s friends, the boy was nervous the past few weeks, convinced someone was following him. Whoever killed him must have been watching him. Waiting for the chance to catch him alone. His friends thought he was imagining it. They even laughed at him for being afraid.”

  “Aye, he was afraid, poor lad. He wet himself at some point before he died.”

  “Not at the moment of his death?”

  “No. It was when he was still wearing his shirt.”

  Sebastian turned to gaze at the fair curls and full cheeks of the silent face on Paul Gibson’s granite slab. Dominic Stanton had probably thought himself a downy one, awake on every suit. Whereas in fact, he’d been little more than a child. A scared child. “Jesus.”

  His gaze rose to the enameled basin on a nearby table, where something bloody and vaguely familiar lay. “The object he had stuffed in his mouth, what was it?”

  Gibson followed his stare. “The hoof of a goat. It probably came from a butcher’s stall. Whoever dismembered that goat was far more familiar with a cleaver than the man who hacked up Stanton’s legs. Any idea what it signifies?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “No. According to Lovejoy, Barclay Carmichael had a page from a ship’s log stuffed in his mouth.”

  Gibson nodded. “I spoke to Martin, the surgeon who did the postmortem on young Carmichael.” His lip quivered in disdain. “The man’s a bloody idiot. I asked him if the body showed signs of having been bound and gagged before death, and he said he’d never thought to notice. But you were right: Carmichael’s throat was slit and the body drained of all blood. The flesh was hacked from his arms.”

  “Not the legs?”

  “No. Just the arms.”

  Sebastian walked around the slab. He had to force himself to look, really look, at the mangled boy. “Barclay Carmichael’s body was found at dawn in St. James’s Park,” he said, “hanging upside down from a mulberry tree. Dominic Stanton was found in Old Palace Yard, again at dawn. Both very public places. Both young men were last seen the night before their deaths by friends whom they then left. Sometime between when they were last seen and when their bodies were discovered at dawn, both young men were set upon by at least one assailant, perhaps more. They were taken God only knows where, stripped of their shirts, their throats slit, and the blood drained from their bodies. Then the killer—or killers—hacked the flesh from Carmichael’s arms and from Stanton’s legs and dumped the bodies where they’d be quickly found the next morning.” He glanced up to find Gibson watching him. “Does that sound right?”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Was there nothing to indicate where Stanton might have been killed?”

  “Just these.” Gibson walked over to pluck what looked like pieces of straw from the table and hold them out. “I found one in his hair, the others caught in his shirt and coat.”

  Sebastian took the fragile stems between his fingers and sniffed. “It’s hay.”

  “I asked Martin if Barclay Carmichael had hay in his hair and clothes. He said yes—although he couldn’t imagine why it might be significant.” Reaching for the sheet, Gibson shook it out over the body, his motions unexpectedly gentle as he smoothed the covering over the boy’s mutilated feet. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the silent, shrouded form before him. When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “What kind of person would do something like this? Butcher a human body like a slab of meat?”

  “You do it.”

  Gibson looked up, his lips pressed together so tightly that two white lines bracketed his mouth. “I dissect cadavers for knowledge, to help save lives, and I respect and honor every body that comes to me. Whoever killed those two young men was acting out some twisted hatred, not pursuing any scientific inquiry. He desecrated their bodies in a way that violates every standard of decency, every tenet of civilization as we know it.”

  “Yet we’ve both seen men do such things—and worse. Well-bred young men of birth and fortune.”

  There was a silence as both men’s thoughts drifted back to another time and another place, and a fellow officer who had once delighted in the pain and dismemberment of his enemies.

  “That was war,” said Gibson. “This isn’t war. And besides, he’s not here.”

  “No, this isn’t war. But he is here in London.”

  “Quail?” said Gibson.

  Sebastian nodded. “Captain Peter himself.”

  Captain Peter Quail was not the kind of fellow officer one easily forgot. A tall, lanky barrister’s son from Devon with corn-flower blue eyes, a shank of straight blond hair, and a ready laugh that came loud and often, he had served with Gibson and Sebastian in Portugal. He was every regiment’s dream with a cricket bat and poetry in motion on horseback. And he had taken a fiendishly sadistic delight in butchering informers—or men he suspected of being informers. He used to dump his victims’ mutilated bodies on their families’ doorsteps. As time passed, he developed what he considered his calling card—various parts of his victims’ anatomy sliced off and stuffed into their mouths.

  “I’d heard he lost an arm at Ciudad Rodrigo.”

  “He did. But he was able to use an inheritance from his wife’s people to buy a transfer to the Horse Guards.” Commissions in the Horse Guards were the most expensive in the Army.

  Gibson stared at the silent figure before them. “What possible reason could he have to do this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sebastian. “Maybe he simply developed a taste for it.”

  “I want you to find someone for me,” Sebastian told his tiger, Tom, as he drew Sebastian’s curricle up before the surgery.

  Tom handed over the chestnuts’ reins and scrambled back onto his perch. “Who?”

  “A captain in the Horse Guards named Quail. Peter Quail.”

  Chapter 15

  Kat set the casquet at a rakish angle on her head, then turned this way and that, studying her reflection in the shop’s looking glass. Once she’d dressed in rags, a frightened child alone on the streets of London who’d learned to beg and steal just to stay alive. Now she owned a wardrobe full of clothes, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough to make her forget.

  After the death of her mother and stepfather, Kat had found a brief refuge with her mother’s sister, an ostentatiously religious woman named Emma Stone. Determined to prevent Kat from following her mother’s path to sin and damnation, Aunt Emma had wielded her whip with brutal purpose. But it was the lecherous advances of Mr. Stone that had finally driven Kat to escape into the night. The experience had left her with a bitter contempt for sanctimonious piety and a child’s delight in the joys of soft sheets and fine clothing.

  This particular hat’s brim was of cherry velvet, with a bunch of silk flowers tucked beneath a darker ribbon at the crown, and the entire effect was—

  “Charming,” said a deep male voice behind her.

  Kat spun around to find a tall, dark-haired man regarding her through a quizzing glass. Nattily dressed in buff-colored breeches, an olive coat, and gleaming Hessians, he leaned casually against the frame of the shop’s open doorway. Behind him, she could see the bright sunshine of a fine September afternoon, the street crowded with dowagers and matrons in elegant carriages and town bucks on horseback. Yet she felt—and understood herself to be—utterly alone.

  She knew him, of course. His name was Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith. Once an officer in t
he Hussars, he had for some three or four years served as the personal agent of Charles, Lord Jarvis, cousin to the King and the acknowledged power behind the Regent.

  “Why, thank you.” Lifting the cheery confection from her head, Kat reached for a chip hat with a forest green velvet band and a matching wisp of a veil. “Or do you prefer this one?”

  “Why not take both?”

  Kat smiled. “Why not, indeed?” She turned to the woman behind the counter, a thin slip of a thing who had suddenly gone very quiet. “Wrap them up for me.”

  Dropping his quizzing glass, Epson-Smith pushed away from the doorframe and took a step toward her. “Miss Boleyn will be sending someone to pick them up.” He spoke to the girl behind the counter, but he kept his gaze on Kat.

  Kat met his inflexible stare. “I’d rather take them with me now.”

  “Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. Lord Jarvis would like a word with you. He doesn’t appreciate being kept waiting.”

  In spite of herself, Kat knew a flutter of fear. People had been known to simply disappear when Jarvis expressed an interest in seeing them. Others were later found dead, dumped in outlying fields after frightening things had been done to their tormented bodies. “And if I refuse?”

  Epson-Smith’s eyes were gray and hard. It took all of Kat’s courage and determination to continue to hold his stare. “I don’t think you’re that stupid.”

  Chapter 16

  That afternoon, following a tip from Tom, Sebastian tracked Captain Peter Quail to the horse auction yard of Tattersall’s.

  Even in that crowd, Captain Quail was easy enough to spot: a tall, blond-haired man with the left sleeve of his regimentals hanging conspicuously empty. He was inspecting a carriage horse, a glossy bay with a gracefully arching neck and regally held tail, when Sebastian came up behind him.

  “Showy,” said Sebastian. “But a bit short in the back, wouldn’t you say?”

  Quail turned, the expression on his face closed and watchful. “I wouldn’t have said so, no. But then, you always did have the best horses in the regiment.”

  “I heard you’d purchased a transfer to the Horse Guards. How comforting for your wife to have you once again by her side.”

  Quail’s eyes narrowed. When they’d served together in the Peninsula, Quail had never been without a Portuguese mistress, sometimes keeping two whores at a time. “What’s this about, Devlin? I don’t flatter myself that you’ve sought me out simply for the sake of auld lang syne.”

  Sebastian ran one hand down the bay’s neck. She really was a splendid animal. “I suppose I’m curious. You didn’t by any chance know a young gentleman named Dominic Stanton?”

  “You mean the lord’s son who just got himself butchered?” Quail gave an abrupt huff of laughter. “Not hardly.”

  “Yet you’ve heard what happened to him.”

  “Who in London has not?”

  The bay nosed Sebastian’s pockets, looking for a carrot. “What about Barclay Carmichael? Did you know him?”

  A muscle twitched along the man’s handsome jawline, his nostrils flaring on a quickly indrawn breath. “I know where you’re going with this.”

  “I should rather think you would,” said Sebastian, his attention seemingly all for the horse. “That’s what happens when you acquire a reputation for torture and mutilation. Young men start showing up butchered, and suspicion naturally turns toward you.”

  Quail’s chest swelled, the brass on his regimentals gleaming in the late-afternoon light. “I did what I did in Portugal for King and country.”

  “And loved every minute of it, didn’t you?” Sebastian turned to study the man beside him. “So what happened? Did you acquire a taste for it, and then find you missed it when you had nothing to do besides parade up and down the Mall and provide an ornamental backdrop for the Prince?”

  Quail stared back at him, breathing hard but saying nothing.

  The afternoon sun struck the dust in the air, turning it to gold. The smell of expensive horseflesh and manure drifted on the afternoon breeze. “Where were you Saturday night, anyway?” Sebastian asked.

  “At home. In bed with my wife.” Quail leaned in close, his blue eyes like ice. “Why? Whose bed were you in? My lord.”

  Sebastian smiled. “Not my wife’s.” He started to turn away.

  Quail stopped him, his voice rising. “You’re wrong about this. You hear me, Devlin? You’re wrong. I had nothing to do with either Carmichael or Stanton.”

  “Really?” Sebastian gathered the bay’s lead and slapped it against the captain’s chest. “Then why are you lying?”

  Sebastian stood in the shadows of the auction yard’s Palladian facade and watched as Quail glanced quickly around, then disappeared into one of the subscription rooms.

  “Follow him,” Sebastian told Tom. “I want to know where he goes, whom he sees.”

  Tom pulled his hat low enough to shade his eyes and grinned. “Aye, gov’nor.”

  Chapter 17

  Charles, Lord Jarvis lifted a pinch of snuff to his nostrils and sniffed. He was a big man, tall and fleshy, with large appetites and a power unmatched by any in England.

  Although he could claim a distant kinship to the King, Jarvis owed his position of power not so much to his birth as to the nearly incomparable brilliance of his intellect, his shrewd ability to manipulate men, and a fierce dedication to King and country that no one could question. If it weren’t for Jarvis, the Hanovers would have lost their fragile hold on the throne of England long ago, and both the Regent and the old King knew it. Or at least, the King knew it when he was in his right mind, which was seldom these days.

  Jarvis kept offices in both St. James’s Palace and Carlton House, although it was at Carlton House that he spent most of his time since the proclamation of the Regency some seven months before. His own house, in Berkeley Square, he visited as seldom as possible. The place was overrun with females, a species for which Jarvis had little patience and even less tenderness. His mother was a foul-tempered, grasping harpy, his wife an idiot, while his daughter, Hero…Jarvis felt his chest burn and rose to pour himself a brandy. At the age of twenty-five, Hero was headstrong and stubborn, forever engaged in a nauseating string of good works and unlikely ever to wed.

  Once Jarvis had had a son, a weak-willed namby-pamby named David. But David was dead, which left only Hero. If she’d been born a son, Jarvis would have been fiercely proud of her—except for those radical notions of hers, of course. As it was, she was a sore trial to him.

  He took a sip of his brandy. The woman he’d ordered brought to him today was of a sort he understood well. A whore, she used her beauty and the ecstasy to be found between her legs to entice and ensnare men. It mattered not whether she served the French out of conviction or for greed. She would tell Jarvis what he wanted to know and allow herself to be used, or he would crush her. Her and Devlin both, if need be.

  The discreet knock at his door brought his head around. He watched Kat Boleyn sweep into his chamber with a regal bearing that Princess Caroline and her horsey daughter, Charlotte, would do well to emulate. She held her head high and was pretending not to be afraid, although he knew she was. Only a fool wouldn’t be afraid, and this little actress was no fool.

  She was a beautiful woman, even if she wasn’t his type. Jarvis’s taste ran to delicate, flaxen-haired women, while Kat Boleyn was dark and tall. She fixed him with a fierce blue stare and said, “I understand you wanted to see me.”

  “Admirable,” he said, and saw her eyebrows rise in inquiry and surprise. “But unnecessary. We both know why you’re here. I trust you won’t waste either my time or yours with protestations of innocence.”

  “It’s difficult to protest my innocence when I don’t know what I’m being accused of.” She had her voice flawlessly under control.

  Jarvis took another sip of his brandy. He did not offer her wine; nor did he invite her to sit. “Your association with the French is known. Has been known, actually,
for quite some time now.”

  “Really? If this is a fishing expedition, I’m not biting.” She turned toward the door. “May I go now?”

  He went to lounge in a chair beside the empty hearth, his legs crossed in front of him. “No.”

  She hesitated, then swung slowly to face him again.

  “We have a report, compiled by two of our agents last winter. A copy of it is there on the table.” He nodded to the black notebook that lay on a nearby ebony side table. “Do take a look at it. I’m convinced you’ll find it fascinating reading.”

  She picked up the book with a hand that did not tremble and flipped through the pages. Once or twice she paused, her lips parting on a quickly indrawn breath. When she finished, she set the book aside and looked up at him, her famous blue eyes huge in a pale face.

  “I deny it all.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I didn’t bring you here to discuss the contents of that most interesting little book.”

  “Then why am I here?”

  Jarvis folded his hands together and rested them on his broad chest. “As you are no doubt aware, Monsieur Pierrepont’s activities on behalf of Paris were known to us. We left him alone because it suited our purposes. But his hasty departure last February has disrupted what was a nice, tidy situation. Our agents tell us Napoleon has a new spymaster in London. We want his name. You’re going to give it to us.”

  She started to say something, but he held up his hand, stopping her. “It’s immaterial if you know his name now or not. But if you do not know it, I suggest you learn it. Quickly. You have until Friday.”

  She stared back at him, her head held high, her posture defiant. He knew what she was thinking. He smiled.

  “You’re thinking I’ve given you something of a reprieve. That left to your own devices until Friday, you will simply flee the country for France. That would not be wise. You are being watched. If you make any attempt to flee—or to warn the gentleman whose name I seek—you will be seized.” He pushed up from the chair and walked toward her. “I have men in my employ who enjoy hurting people, and they are very good at what they do. It wouldn’t take them long to extract whatever information you might possess. Only, I’m afraid they wouldn’t stop there. Before they finished with you, you would no longer be pretty. Or whole. You would be begging them to kill you, and they would. Eventually.”