by C. S. Harris
“He could have. But the swordstick and note argue against it. And even if he did, then who was the gentleman in the cart when the boy was digging Benji’s grave?”
“Les Jenkins?”
“I don’t think anyone could have mistaken Les Jenkins for a gentleman.”
For a time, only the crackle of the fire on the hearth filled the silence. Then she said, “What do you think happened to Benji’s little sister, Sybil?”
“She must be dead. They’ll probably find her buried in one of the fields around the farm when they start searching in the morning.” Just saying it out loud caused something painful to pull across his chest. “I don’t want to think about how many graves they’re going to find between Penniwinch Lane and the cottage in Bethnal Green.”
“How long could this have been going on?”
“Who knows? Gilles de Rais got away with it for years. I’ve heard some put the number of his victims as high as five hundred.”
“Good God. How is that possible?”
“Money and power. De Sade knew what he was talking about. Whoever we’re dealing with here is wealthy enough not only to lease those houses, but to hire servants and keep a carriage and horses he uses for nothing except brutalizing the impoverished, wretched children he snatches off the streets of London.”
“The young servant who was digging Benji’s grave,” said Hero. “He’s still out there.”
“Perhaps. Or perhaps we simply haven’t found his body yet. This killer seems to make a habit of periodically changing his houses. And killing his servants.”
• • •
Monday, 20 September
It rained again during the night, a hard rain this time that soaked the ground and left the trees dripping and the air filled with the scent of sodden vegetation and wet earth.
Sebastian arrived in Bethnal Green to find Lovejoy standing on the brick cottage’s back stoop, an umbrella in one hand and his features set in grim lines.
“They’ve found one so far,” said Lovejoy. “And I’m afraid it’s only the beginning.”
Sebastian stared out over the soggy, bedraggled garden and hoped the pleasant young mother and her two babies had taken refuge far away from this horror. “Have you heard anything yet from the crew out at Penniwinch Lane?”
“Only that one of my constables spoke to a woman who says Les Jenkins used to pay her to come out to the farmhouse every few weeks to clean. Interestingly, she says the doors to two of the rooms were always kept locked: the upstairs solar and the old buttery. She was never allowed to enter either one.”
Sebastian frowned. “I can understand the solar. But why the buttery? There was nothing there except an empty wardrobe and a washstand.”
The two men watched as one of the workers at the base of the garden called to a nearby companion.
Lovejoy sighed. “All indications are that Richard Herbert is an assumed name.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“So we’re essentially back where we were before.”
Sebastian squinted up at the dreary skies. “Not entirely. We now know we’re looking for someone with considerable resources at his disposal. Someone who hires servants to help dispose of his victims. Someone who is clever and plans very carefully.”
Lovejoy pursed his lips in a frown. “Which is particularly worrisome, given he knows you’re after him and is openly taunting you.
“Yes,” agreed Sebastian, just as a shout went up from the two men working near the garden’s far wall. “Ah, Christ; they’ve found another one.”
• • •
It was midday by the time Sebastian drove out to the ancient farmstead in Penniwinch Lane. As he drew up his curricle beneath the stand of dripping oaks, he could see a dozen or more volunteers spreading out across the wet, overgrown fields. Paul Gibson stood before the old house with his hands on his hips, watching them.
“No sign of any graves?” asked Sebastian, handing the reins to Giles and landing with a squish on the muddy ground.
“Not yet,” said Gibson. “Thank God.”
“You should have gone to the Bethnal Green house instead. They were just uncovering a third skeleton as I left.”
“Agh. Mother Mary.” Gibson dropped his hands so that they hung limply at his sides. There was a drawn, haggard look to the surgeon’s face that Sebastian suspected mirrored his own. “Please tell me you’re close to figuring out who’s doing this.”
Sebastian shook his head, his gaze on the men walking the distant fields, throwing their circle ever wider. He supposed there was a chance that the searchers might still come upon something, but he doubted it. If Sybil Thatcher were buried here, her raw new grave would surely have been found by now.
So where the hell was she?
“You know what’s one of the most frightening aspects of all this?” said Gibson. “It’s the realization that this monster is somewhere out there right now, a normal-seeming man moving amongst his family and friends, all of whom have no idea—no idea whatsoever—that he is in truth a creature from their worst visions of hell. How is that possible?”
Sebastian watched one of the lines of men come up against a far hedgerow and then turn to walk back. “Some people are very, very good at hiding who they really are.”
• • •
Sometime later, as if drawn by an irresistible compulsion, Sebastian pushed open the front door of the ancient farmhouse and walked inside. He had already searched the place twice—once after finding Les Jenkins’s body, and again the following morning. Lovejoy’s men had likewise gone over each room carefully. They’d found nothing. Yet even as the house repulsed him, it also beckoned to him. He kept thinking there must be something here. Something he’d missed.
In the dull light of the overcast day the house looked somber and unlived in. The drawers from the chests in the hall lay scattered across the floor where they’d been thrown by various searchers; rugs were rolled up, cushions overturned. Crossing the lofty, now chaotic space, Sebastian climbed the stairs to what had once, no doubt, been a pleasant room—before it was turned by the mysterious Richard Herbert into a chamber of horrors.
He had to force himself to enter the room. There he turned in a slow circle, taking in the blood-splattered walls, the dusty old bed, the now empty table. The Bow Street men had taken away the killer’s nasty collection of whips and knives. But Sebastian doubted they would learn anything from them. This killer was too clever to leave anything that could be linked to him in any way.
Outside, the wind gusted up, rattling the panes in the windows. And Sebastian found himself wondering why he had come here again; why he’d forced himself to endure once more the waves of fear and agony and despair that seemed to emanate from this place. What had he imagined the cold, calm light of a new day might show him that he’d missed before? There was nothing.
Returning downstairs, he went next to the old buttery that opened off the entrance passage. Although Sebastian had found the door ajar, the charwoman had insisted that it was always kept locked. Why had she been kept out? Why lock a room that’s empty except for a couple of simple pieces of furniture?
There was no rug on the scarred wooden floor, only the wardrobe he remembered from before and the plain washstand bearing a simple white pitcher and bowl. He went to open the doors to the wardrobe and stared again at the empty shelves. In a room that was never cleaned, the shelves were tellingly free of dust. Which suggested the wardrobe had, until quite recently, held clothes. Clothes that were no longer there.
Sebastian ran his hand thoughtfully across the top shelf. Whoever had tortured and killed Benji would have ended up splattered with blood. But no wealthy gentleman could go home to his valet in such a condition without arousing dangerous suspicions. So that meant either the killer’s valet was as complicit as Les Jenkins and the unknown, grave-digging boy, or the killer had regular
ly come to this room to wash and change his clothes before going home.
Sebastian closed the wardrobe’s doors with a click that seemed to echo in the nearly empty room. It was telling that the killer had taken his blood-splattered clothing away with him when he cleared the house of everything incriminating. A good tailor would be able to recognize his own work and identify its purchaser. The killer had anticipated that the same way he had anticipated so much else.
“Who are you?” Sebastian said aloud to the empty room. Then he shouted it, his voice raw and torn with the reality of this horror he seemed incapable of stopping. “Who are you!”
His voice echoed back to him, mocking and futile.
He was suddenly seized with an intense need to get out of this house. He felt himself rendered unclean simply by standing in a place once occupied by such a monster, by touching objects the killer had touched before him. So great was that welling of revulsion that it drove him out of the house to stand on the cracked, weed-choked front walk with his arms outspread and his face lifted to the softly falling rain.
As if the heavens could somehow cleanse him of the horrors this unknown killer had wrought.
Chapter 46
Hat in hand, Sebastian stood beside Benji Thatcher’s grave in St. James’s churchyard. The rain had eased up again, leaving a dismal, flat white sky against which the blazing leaves of a nearby row of maples and horse chestnuts stood out in brilliant flushes of scarlet and yellow.
He couldn’t have said why he’d felt the need to come here. But as he stared down at that muddy patch of earth, he was aware of a heavy sense of sadness settling over him. He was failing this child and all the others like him in death, just as their society had failed them in life. And because of those failures a vicious killer was still out there waiting to prey on another frightened, homeless child, and then another and another.
He sucked in a deep breath of damp air. And it came to him that his emotional reaction to both the ages of these victims and the horror of their deaths was undermining his ability to reason and analyze. He needed to find a way to assess what he knew with a calm detachment that kept eluding him.
He stared out over the thickly clustered, lichen-covered gray tombstones, his eyes narrowing. What was he missing? Was there some sort of telling pattern?
Something?
He forced himself to run through everything they’d learned. Six years ago a mysterious, wealthy gentleman calling himself Richard Herbert had leased a house in Bethnal Green, hired a servant named Jim Kimball, and spent the next several years murdering the neighborhood’s street children. He then leased a new house, the one in the hills above Pentonville. He killed Kimball, buried the servant beside Bethnal Green’s murdered children, hired Les Jenkins as caretaker, and transferred his nasty hobby to a new location.
Except that this time the killer didn’t bury his young victims in his garden. He buried them several miles away on the grounds of an abandoned shot factory with the help of a young boy who was in all likelihood as poor as his master’s victims. Why the change? The farmhouse on Penniwinch Lane was even more isolated than the Bethnal Green cottage, which meant the killer could easily have buried his victims in its untilled fields. Yet for some reason he had chosen not to.
Why?
Perhaps it had something to do with the reason Jim Kimball had ended up in an unmarked grave with a knife in his back. So why had “Richard Herbert” killed his Bethnal Green caretaker? Because Kimball knew where the bodies were buried and had in some way become a threat?
It was a thought that brought Sebastian back again to the unknown boy who’d left his hat at the bottom of what was to have been Benji Thatcher’s grave. Where was that boy now? Was he dead too, like Les Jenkins?
The darting shadows of swifts drew Sebastian’s gaze to the white sky hanging heavy above. And he knew again the growing fear that this monster was slipping through his fingers; that he had chased the killer away from both his burying ground and his latest torture chamber only to leave him free to set up again someplace else.
How do you identify a killer who has no real connection to his victims? How?
Part of the problem, Sebastian acknowledged, was that he had allowed not only his emotions but also his prejudices to influence his thinking. He kept circling back to Viscount Ashworth, both because of a long-standing dislike of the man and because of his concerns for Stephanie’s future. But Ashworth, like Sir Francis Rowe, had a good, solid alibi—in Ashworth’s case for the nights both Benji and Les Jenkins were killed. And while it was true that Corky Baldoon was convinced he’d seen someone who looked like a younger version of Ashworth’s father riding away from the cottage in Bethnal Green, just how reliable was the old man? It was possible, even likely, that any arrogant young gentleman on a horse would remind Baldoon of the lord who had destroyed his life.
Sebastian liked to say he didn’t believe in coincidences, but the truth was, he’d seen many a strange and wondrous coincidence in his life. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say he was highly suspicious of coincidences when it came to murder. Yet they could and did happen. The only thing he knew for certain was that unless his own sister and niece were lying, he was wasting precious time and energy focusing on someone who simply could not be the killer.
So that left him with—what? A nasty brothel in Pickering Place that in no way he could fathom seemed to fit with what he’d discovered about this killer? A royal cousin who also possessed a solid alibi? A French émigré financed by both Napoléon and Sebastian’s own father-in-law?
An actor with a taste for young whores and le vice anglais?
Could someone like Hector Kneebone afford to lease houses and keep horses and a carriage he used only for killing? Sebastian found it doubtful, but nevertheless possible. And what about de Brienne? Sebastian allowed his thoughts to linger on the French comte. De Brienne had the wealth to indulge his various tastes and interests. And Sebastian had no doubt the émigré was capable of killing—had in all likelihood killed his own uncle and cousins before fleeing France.
The wind kicked up, scattering a shower of scarlet maple leaves across the churchyard, where they lay against the rain-sodden headstones and nestled in the rank grass like splotches of old blood. He’d been aware for some time of a ragged boy hovering near the church wall. Sebastian now realized the boy was Toby the Dancer. Their gazes met and Toby stiffened, his face tight with fear. For a moment Sebastian thought the boy would run. Instead Toby came toward him, not stopping until he stood on the far side of Benji Thatcher’s grave.
“Hullo,” said Sebastian.
Toby stared at him, his eyes wide, his body so tense he was quivering. He said, “I hear they found a bunch more graves out at the shot factory.”
“They did, yes.”
“Was Sybil one of ’em?”
“No.”
The boy sucked in a jerking breath, his gaze shifting to stare off across the churchyard. “I’ve looked everywhere I can think of and I can’t find her. How can that be?”
Sebastian shook his head. “I don’t know.”
It was a lie, of course. Sebastian had no doubt that Sybil remained missing simply because they hadn’t found her grave yet. He saw no reason to burden this poor, orphaned boy with such a painful truth. But Toby slanted a look at him that told Sebastian the boy wasn’t fooled. He knew Sybil was probably dead, and Sebastian had basically confirmed that suspicion.
Sebastian said, “Whoever killed Benji has been taking children from around here for years. He must select them somehow. He probably even watches them for a time before he actually abducts them. You’ve never noticed anyone paying special attention to the street children?”
The boy shook his head, his eyes wide with raw, naked fear. “The shopkeepers all watch us real close. But most ev’rybody else acts like we ain’t there—like they don’t even see us when they pass us on the street. O
nly body knows any of us is Constable Gowan. And I s’pose the vicar.”
“Reverend Filby?”
“Aye.”
Sebastian felt an unpleasant sensation crawl across his skin. “Tell me about the reverend.”
The Dancer looked at him blankly. “Whatcha mean?”
“How long has he been the vicar here?”
“I dunno. Couple years, maybe.”
“Do you know if he keeps a riding horse?”
The question seemed to puzzle the boy, but he nodded.
Sebastian glanced again at that austere, redbrick church. Could a simple vicar afford to lease houses in other parishes and keep carriage horses he used solely in the pursuit of a sick taste for torture and murder? It seemed unlikely. And yet what did Sebastian really know about the Reverend Leigh Filby other than that he had gone out of his way to befriend the area’s street children?
Just then, the tower’s bell began to strike the hour, its deep vibrations swelling out across the wet churchyard. Sebastian said, “You can’t think of anyone else?”
Once again, Toby’s gaze met his. And in that tense, revealing moment, Sebastian caught a glimpse of all the anger and hopeless despair that roiled so deep within this skinny, ragged boy. “There ain’t nobody else.”
Toby Dancing had bright green eyes the color of a grassy meadow on a warm spring day. His features were regular, his mind sharp and quick. In just a few years he would grow to be a young man who, if he’d been born to even the most basic of opportunities, could have looked forward to a bright future. Instead, he was lucky not to have ended up like the dead boy buried at their feet.
And they both knew it.
• • •
Sebastian spent the next half hour searching for the Reverend Leigh Filby.
He found the church of St. James empty except for the bell ringer, who suggested Sebastian try the vicarage. The vicar’s aging housekeeper told Sebastian she thought the reverend was visiting a sick parishioner, only she couldn’t recall which one. But she did provide Sebastian with two interesting pieces of information: Filby’s wife had died some eight years before and he had never remarried. And he enjoyed a comfortable income from what she called a “tidy sum” left to him by a cousin and skillfully invested in the Funds.