by C. S. Harris
“Presumably for her safety during all those endless months on the ship. That, and because Hayes was familiar with the rough area around the Red Lion where he hoped to be able to hide here in London. How ironic that by dressing her as a boy to keep her safe, he almost got her killed because Seaforth thought she might be the rightful heir to the earldom.”
Hero was silent for a moment. “I can’t believe Lady Bradbury turned her brother down. Because his child is half-Chinese? My God.”
“That, and a by-blow—or so her ladyship assumes.”
“What a despicable woman.”
They watched the cat start to stalk toward the lizard. But the lizard took fright and ran away, so Mr. Darcy sat down and began cleaning himself as if that had been his plan all along.
Devlin said, “One of my favorite parts of her tale is her indignation at the fact that Nicholas approached her as she was leaving Sunday services. He’s begging her to take care of his orphaned daughter—practically on the steps of her church—and all she can think about is that someone might see them.”
Hero tipped back her head, her gaze on the clouds above. The sky had taken on a darker color, and the trees were alive with a chorus of birds coming in to roost ahead of the approaching rain. “It’s why he decided to contact Calhoun, isn’t it? Because his sister had just turned him down and he was desperate to find someone who would be there for his little girl when he died.”
Devlin nodded. “I suspect it’s also why he approached Lady Forbes and arranged to meet her in Pennington’s Tea Gardens.”
Hero watched Simon push up from the flagstones and toddle over to place his hands on his father’s knees. She said, “I’d always assumed that if we found the person he’d gone to meet that night, we’d know who killed him. So I suppose the question now becomes, Who besides Lady Forbes knew he was going to be in the gardens? Sir Lindsey?”
Devlin reached to lift the little boy up onto his lap. He was silent for a moment, then said, “Given that Lady Forbes was at Hatchards with her abigail, it’s possible her woman overheard them making the assignation and told Sir Lindsey. It’s also possible that Titus Poole simply followed Nicholas to the gardens that night and killed him, although the sickle in the back has an amateurish, unplanned feeling to it that argues against that. So I’m beginning to think it more likely that Poole overheard the conversation and reported it to whoever was employing him, and that person went to the gardens to confront Hayes.”
“Katherine Forbes said Sir Lindsey was gone by the time she meant to call a hackney for the gardens. She assumed he went straight to the dinner, but what if he didn’t? What if he went to the gardens and met Hayes in the clearing? If he didn’t get any blood on his clothes, Sir Lindsey could conceivably have killed Hayes and then gone on to Carlton House.”
“I’d say so, yes. I think I need to pay another visit to Mr. Titus Poole.”
Chapter 52
T he rain started just before Sebastian turned his horses into Newgate Street. There was a clap of thunder, a hush, then a sudden downpour that roared in their ears. The temperature felt as if it had plummeted twenty degrees.
“Never thought I’d be glad t’ see the rain,” said Tom, grinning as the water ran off his hat and nose.
Sebastian drew up near the arched entrance to the Bell’s yard. “There’s no doubt the city can use a good cleaning.” He handed the reins to the boy and hopped down. “In more ways than one.”
It was raining harder now, the clouds bunching up thick and dark overhead, the wind gusting enough to try to grab the door to the taproom when Sebastian pushed it open and walked into an atmosphere redolent with the smell of wet wool and beer. The room was crowded, for the rain had driven a score or more of men inside, their coats and hats sodden, the men laughing as they wiped shining, wet faces and called for ale or wine. A comely girl of about sixteen was behind the bar, her hair as fair as that of the towheaded child Sebastian had once seen playing with a ball in the inn’s yard.
“Is Titus Poole around?” he asked, pushing his way through the crowd to the bar.
The girl glanced up from filling a clutch of tankards. She did not smile, and something about the way she stiffened told Sebastian she was not overly fond of her stepfather. “He was here a bit ago. I think he said something about going out to the stables.”
“Thank you,” said Sebastian. But she was already turning away.
The Bell’s stables were ranged along the far side of a yard running deep with water, with more falling every second from the angry sky. Sebastian suspected Tom was regretting his enthusiastic welcoming of the rain.
He found the stable doors standing open wide. Inside, a lantern had been lit against the gloom, casting a pool of golden light in which the inn’s master stood in conversation with an ostler. The roar of the rain masked Sebastian’s footsteps so that he’d reached the doorway before Poole turned away from the ostler and saw him. For an instant, the disgraced Runner checked. Then he came on, his bull-like head thrust forward with the arrogant belligerence of a man who’s spent his life using his size to intimidate his fellows.
“What ye doin’ back here?” he growled, drawing up some five feet away, his big hands dangling at his sides alternately opening and closing into fists.
Sebastian had paused just inside the doorway, the rain dripping from his hat and running in a cascade of rivulets from the caped shoulders of his driving coat. “I thought you might like to know that I’ve come to the conclusion you probably didn’t kill Nicholas Hayes.”
Poole’s eyes narrowed, as if to better hide any betraying emotions that might lurk there. “Oh, ye have, have ye? And ye thought this might be of interest to me why?”
Sebastian let his gaze drift around the warm, golden-lit stables, taking in the row of stalls filled with horses now munching on oats, the pitchforks and other tools arrayed along a nearby wall, the ostler watching silently from the shadows. The lad was young, probably no more than eighteen, with the same pale blond hair as the girl in the taproom. Sebastian wondered if he shared his sister’s opinion of their stepfather.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Sebastian. “I still think you were hired to at least follow him. But one assumes that if you were hired to kill him, you were meant to do so quietly, whereas Hayes’s death was . . . not quiet. A sickle in the back suggests a killer who’s not in the habit of carrying his own weapon, and somehow I suspect that description doesn’t apply to you.”
Poole’s gaze flicked for one telltale instant to the listening youth. “I don’t know what yer talking about.”
“Shall I spell it out more clearly? You admitted you were following Hayes—for days. That suggests you were in a position to overhear when Hayes arranged to meet a friend in Pennington’s Tea Gardens. You could have gone there yourself and killed him, but you didn’t. For some reason, you told your employer about the assignation, and your employer killed him, which means you’re protecting a murderer.” Sebastian paused. “And in case you’ve forgotten, the authorities tend to frown on such activities.”
The threat was not subtle. Sebastian watched the fury leap into the man’s eyes—fury driven by fear and accompanied by the quick calculation that the easiest way to shut Sebastian up was to kill him.
Now.
With an angry roar, Poole seized one of the pitchforks from the nearby array of tools, leveled it at Sebastian’s chest, and charged.
Titus Poole was big and strong, but in the manner of so many big, strong men, he was not overly light and agile on his feet. Sebastian avoided the pitchfork’s ugly iron tines by the simple expedient of sidestepping at the last moment.
Poole’s charge carried him through the open doors and out into the storm. Drawing up, he swung around, the rain coursing over his balding head, his cheeks darkened by a tide of anger augmented by a suspicion of just how ridiculous he looked. “Ye bloody bastard,” he howled, and char
ged again.
Sebastian glanced toward the towheaded ostler, but the boy stayed where he was, the features of his young face tight and watchful and indicative of someone who was not at all inclined to interfere. “Don’t be a fool,” Sebastian told Poole, pivoting away from the new assault. “A taproom full of men heard me walk in here and ask for you. You stick me with a pitchfork and you’ll hang. Just tell me the name of the man who hired you.”
Poole tightened his hold on his weapon. “Oh, I’ll stick ye, all right. I’m gonna spit ye like a rabbit ready for roasting. I’m gonna gut ye like a fish on its way to market.”
Leaping away from the next wild thrust, Sebastian grabbed a hay rake and brought it up before him. He was worried that if he pulled his knife, the confrontation would only end with Poole dead, and Sebastian really, really needed the man to talk. “Just stop.”
Poole looked at Sebastian and laughed, for the tines of the pitchfork were forged of iron, while the hay rake was a simple implement of wood. “Ye think that’s gonna stop me? It’s only in here ’cause it’s got a crack in the handle that wants fixing.” Shifting his hold on the pitchfork, Poole swung it like a cricket bat so that the heavy iron head crashed against the end of the wooden rake and shattered it.
Sebastian was left holding a four-foot handle that ended in nothing.
“Aw,” sneered Poole, his dark little eyes alive with contempt and lethal purposefulness. “What ye gonna do now, my pretty little lordling?”
With a laugh, he closed in for what he thought would be the kill.
He was still laughing when Sebastian ducked for the fourth and last time, then spun around to drive the jagged broken shaft into the big man’s heart.
* * *
“You’re fortunate the man’s ostler wasn’t too fond of his employer,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy, the rain pounding loudly on the stable’s roof as he bent to peer down at the bloody corpse at their feet.
“Stepfather,” said Sebastian.
“Ah.”
The disgraced Bow Street Runner lay flat on his back, legs splayed, arms flung wide in the straw. His eyes were open and staring, his mouth sagging as if in faint surprise. The broken end of the hay rake was still buried in his chest.
“I was trying not to kill him,” said Sebastian, his shoulders propped against a nearby support beam, his arms crossed, the mist blowing in through the open doors wet against his face. “I wanted to talk to him.”
“Yes. It’s a pity,” agreed Lovejoy, straightening with one hand at the small of his back. “No one is going to be getting any answers out of him now.” He glanced over at Sebastian. “You’ve still no idea who hired him to follow Hayes?”
“No. There are four obvious possibilities—namely Forbes, Brownbeck, LaRivière, and Seaforth.”
Lovejoy looked over at him in surprise. “You suspect Seaforth, even though he’s dead?”
“For all we know, Poole got nervous and killed him. The problem is, while I have some suspicions, I’ve nothing specific that ties any of the four to Poole. They all knew Hayes was in England, and each had good reason to believe he was here to kill them. But that doesn’t mean one of them decided to kill him first.”
Lovejoy gave a sad shake of his head. “And you say that all the while, Hayes was here simply trying to find someone to take care of his child after his death. What a tragedy it all is. You’ve seen no sign of this little girl?”
“Not since Lady Devlin stopped Seaforth’s men from grabbing her in Clerkenwell.”
Lovejoy shook his head again. “At least we know she was still alive as of yesterday.”
“Yes,” said Sebastian.
But he knew from the pain in Lovejoy’s eyes that the magistrate found no more comfort in the thought than did Sebastian himself.
Later, after the men from the deadhouse had carried away Titus Poole’s body and the officials from Bow Street left, Sebastian sat with the newly widowed Mrs. Poole beside the Bell’s big, old-fashioned kitchen fireplace.
She was a plump woman probably somewhere in her forties, with a massive bosom and a plain, sad face. The extraordinarily fair hair she had passed on to her children was now mingled with white. She huddled close to the fire, for with the rain had come a cold that felt biting after so many unseasonably hot days. She was shivering with reaction, her shoulders rounded as she held a handkerchief to her eyes with one hand.
Sebastian said, “You need to tell me who hired your husband to follow Nicholas Hayes.” He’d almost said to kill Nicholas Hayes, but he reasoned he’d be more likely to get an answer out of her if he didn’t force her to admit she’d known her husband was in the habit of killing people for money.
She gave a faint shudder and sucked in an audible breath, but otherwise she remained silent.
Sebastian said, “Poole is dead. He just tried to kill me in front of your own son. Telling me whom he was working for won’t stain his memory any blacker than he’s already done himself.”
She brought her hand down to twist the handkerchief between her fingers in her lap. Her face was pale and distorted with shock, but he was surprised to see that her eyes were dry. “I don’t know,” she whispered, keeping her head bowed. “Truly I don’t. He didn’t tell me those sorts of things.”
“Do you know when he was hired?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “He came home maybe two weeks ago, flush with money and bragging about how he had a new job. But he didn’t say who for.”
“Do you know if he’d worked for this particular man in the past?” Sir Lindsey Forbes had admitted to knowing Poole.
“No. He didn’t say.”
“How much did you know about the work he did?”
She shifted her gaze to the fire, the orange glow from the flames touching her ashen face with hellish color. “He’d talk to me sometimes about how clever he was, working deals with both thieves and their victims. There wasn’t nothing he liked better than talking about himself, unless maybe it was hearing other people talk about how grand he was. Sometimes I’d hear him bragging in the taproom about how he’d threatened someone and they’d knuckled under, or how he’d cheated some flat.”
“Did you know he killed people?”
She was silent for a moment, her heavy breasts lifting with her strained breathing. “When he was courting me, he was ever so nice. I’d never known anyone so gentlemanlike. I thought I was the luckiest woman alive, that he’d chosen me. But we hadn’t been married a week when he hit me—slapped me on the side of my face with the palm of his big, hard hand. Knocked me clear across the room, he did. Said he was sorry afterward, of course—although he also said it was my own fault for talking back to him.” She brought up the handkerchief to press against her lips. “Sometimes he’d hit me for just looking at him wrong. Hit Jonathan and Mary too—even little Rose. So you see, I ain’t sorry he’s dead. And if I knew who’d hired him, I’d tell you.”
It was an old story, of a man pretending to be something he wasn’t to lure a woman into marriage or into his bed. But Sebastian’s sympathy for this woman was tempered by the fact that she’d surely known the sordid history of Poole’s activities as a Runner. She might have been a widow with three children, but she was also the owner of a tidy inn; she hadn’t married Poole out of any pressing financial need, but because his attentions had flattered her. She hadn’t been bothered by the fact he’d once sent innocent, impoverished men, women, and children to their deaths. She simply hadn’t expected him to hurt her.
Aloud, Sebastian said, “Can you remember anything—anything at all—that he might have said about the man who hired him?”
She was silent for a moment as if with the effort of thought. “Well, I know he was a nob, because that’s what Titus called him—‘that stupid nob.’ Titus was right proud of himself because after Hayes was found dead over in Somer’s Town, Titus went to the nob what’d hired h
im and claimed to have killed Hayes himself. That nob, he wasn’t exactly happy—you see, Titus was supposed to kill the fellow quiet-like and then dump the body someplace it’d never be found. That way no one would ever know the fellow had even been here.”
She paused, obviously feeling compelled to explain how she’d come to know so much. “Titus didn’t usually tell me about his work in any detail. But he was bragging about this, you see. Said that nob weren’t happy with the way everyone was talking about Hayes being murdered—said it made folks remember all that’d happened in the past. So he only gave Titus half of what he was to pay him if the job was done right. Normally Titus would’ve been more than a bit miffed about something like that, but he thought it was a great joke because he hadn’t really killed the fellow himself. He didn’t know who’d actually done it, only that he’d been smart enough to get himself paid for it.”
Chapter 53
L ate that night, a new wave of storms swept in from the North Sea, bringing with it an even fiercer wind and great pulses of lightning that split the sky.
Sebastian lay awake, watching the quick electric flashes light up the room and listening to the rumble of the thunder and the patter of raindrops hitting the window glass. He kept going over what he knew about the day Nicholas Hayes died and trying to tease out how what they’d learned from Kate Forbes and Mrs. Poole should alter their perception of the critical hours surrounding the murder. Then he became aware of a subtle change in the room’s energy and looked over to find Hero lying awake beside him, watching him. “Maybe if you got some sleep,” she said, “it would all make more sense.”
He gave a smothered laugh and drew her close. “You’re always saying that.”
“Because it’s true . . . even if it is impossible.”
She fell silent, her head on his chest, one hand resting on his stomach, and he knew that she too was running through the day’s revelations and what they meant. She said, “It’s somehow the height of irony that whoever hired Poole to murder Nicholas Hayes now thinks that Poole actually did kill him, when he didn’t. Someone else did.”