Who Slays the Wicked

by C. S. Harris

  Sebastian said, “You’re Lawrence McCay’s wife?”

  “Daughter.” Her gaze strayed for one telling instant toward a corridor that opened onto a rear woodyard and sawpit—now standing idle—and a curtained alcove that probably led to a private office. She looked away again quickly, but he had heard it too: the soft approach of a man’s footsteps, followed by the faint breathing of whoever was standing there listening.

  Sebastian said, “The sign reads ‘McCay and Sons’; you’ve brothers?”

  “Not anymore. They’re both dead.”

  “So it’s just you and your father?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  Rather than answer, Sebastian said, “Tell me about your dealings with Ashworth.”

  She shook her head, her gaze hard on his face. “What is your interest in all this?”

  He came to rest his hands on the edge of the chest that lay between them and leaned into it, his gaze holding hers. “Anthony Ledger was my niece’s husband, but I am under no illusions as to what manner of man he was. He was a vile, dangerous hedonist who harmed more people in his life than we will ever know. Like you, I am glad he’s dead. But his father is a wealthy, powerful nobleman, which means that someone will be arrested for Ashworth’s death, whether truly guilty or not. If you have nothing to hide, you would be wise to cooperate with me.”

  He could see the pulse beating wildly in her slim white neck; her eyes were huge. “Why should we trust you?”

  “Let me put it this way: Your father’s name has already been mentioned, and he is likely to come under scrutiny from Bow Street whether you cooperate with me or not. But believe me when I tell you I mean you no harm and that if I am able to help you, I will.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He shoved away from the chest. “If you should change your mind, my address is on the card.”

  He was reaching for the door when a middle-aged man he took to be Lawrence McCay hurried into the showroom and said, “Wait.”

  Like his daughter, McCay was built short and solid. His once dark hair had faded mostly to gray, and the years had scored deep smile lines beside his eyes and mouth. Lines that now seemed out of place in a gravely troubled face.

  “Mr. McCay?” said Sebastian, turning.

  The man nodded. The fear in his eyes was impossible to miss, but his jaw was clenched. “I didn’t kill the bastard. I won’t deny I wanted to, but I didn’t do it.”

  Sebastian said, “But you did threaten to make him pay—‘one way or another’?”

  “I did.”

  The girl came from behind the chest in a rush. “Papa—”

  He put out a hand, stopping her. “There’s no sense in me trying to deny it, Julie. There’s more’n enough heard me say it. But I didn’t mean I would kill him. I just wanted him to pay what he owed me, and, failing that, I figured I’d do my best to make damned sure everyone knows what he does. How he hurts people—little people, like us.”

  “I know what he was like,” said Sebastian.

  McCay’s daughter made a harsh, scoffing sound in her throat. “Do you? Ashworth came close to ruining us. He did it as deliberately and casually as a normal person might step on a bug. Men like him, they think their wealth and lineage give them the right to do whatever they please to anyone weaker or poorer than they are. And you know why they think that way? Because it’s true—they always get away with it. Always. No one stops them. No one dares to stop them. And there’s no real way for those they harm to fight back.”

  “Someone obviously stopped him,” said Sebastian.

  “Good,” said McCay. “I’m glad someone finally had the courage to do it. But it wasn’t me.”

  Sebastian studied the older man’s closed, hard face. “Where were you last night?”

  “Here. We live upstairs.”

  “You didn’t go out?”

  “No.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  McCay glanced toward his daughter, then shook his head. “How can a man prove he was in his own bed, asleep? My wife’s been dead these thirteen years.”

  “When did you last see Ashworth?”

  McCay rubbed his forehead with a splayed thumb and forefinger. “Must’ve been Tuesday or Wednesday; I’m not sure which.”

  “You went by his house on Curzon Street?”

  The merchant nodded. “I was delivering an invoice. At first, I used to just send them, but the last few months, I’ve taken to delivering them myself.”

  “Why?”

  McCay twitched one shoulder. “Hoping he’d see me. Hoping maybe I’d see him, so I could tell him what I thought of him.”

  “Perhaps even follow him to White’s, shouting at him the whole way?”

  Another twitch of the shoulder. “Look—there’s only one way somebody like me can make a man like him pay, and that’s by hurting his reputation. Shouting what he’s done to the world.”

  “There are other ways,” Sebastian said quietly.

  “Maybe. But I’m not a violent man. You can ask anyone; they’ll tell you. I might lose my temper and shout, but I’ve never been one for brawling.”

  Sebastian had no trouble believing that. The problem was, Ashworth hadn’t been killed in a brawl. Whoever murdered him was either a woman frightened by one of the bastard’s erotic “games” or someone who executed him in a cold and calculated revenge.

  “He’s telling the truth,” said McCay’s daughter. “My father may be stubborn, but he’s never hurt anyone. There must be scores of shopkeepers and tradesmen who’ve been ruined by Ashworth.”

  Sebastian studied her set, angry face. “Can you name others?”

  McCay said, “Anyone that bastard did business with, he cheated if he could. It was like a game with him—a matter of pride, a way to show that he was the one with the power, while the rest of us . . .” His face spasmed. “The rest of us were like nothin’ to him. He liked to toy with people. Walk all over them. Make them hurt and then crush them. He was an ugly human being and I’m glad he’s dead, but I didn’t kill him. Not because it would have been morally wrong, because it wouldn’t have been. I’m just too much of a coward. But I’m grateful to whoever finally had the courage to wipe him from the face of the earth, and I pray to God that bastard burns in hell for all eternity.”

  Sebastian let his gaze drift around the nearly empty showroom. “What furniture did you sell him, anyway?”

  Father and daughter exchanged glances. Neither spoke.

  But Sebastian knew. “One of the pieces was the bed, wasn’t it?”

  Julie McCay simply stared back at him. But her father sucked in a deep, shaky breath and nodded.

  Chapter 9

  “Troublesome,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy as he and Sebastian walked along the terrace of Somerset House. “I find it odd that none of the servants said anything to my constables about a furniture maker shouting threats to the Viscount in the streets.”

  “Not as odd as one might think,” said Sebastian, pausing to stare out over the sun-sparkled Thames. There was a chill in the air as the sun sank toward the west, painting the sky with splashes of pink and purple reflected gloriously in the multicolored water. “Given the way Ashworth treated shopkeepers and merchants, I suspect it was a relatively common event. It probably didn’t occur to them to mention it.”

  Sir Henry’s lips flattened in disgust. “Is Ashworth’s valet still missing?”

  “Last I heard, yes.”

  “Perhaps he is our killer after all.”

  “According to the butler, he faints at the sight of blood.”

  Lovejoy glanced over at him. “You think that eliminates him as a suspect?”

  “Maybe not. I won’t deny I’d like to know more about him.”

  “I’ll set one of the lads to seeing what he can learn about the fellow,” said Lovejoy as th
ey turned away from the river. “Have you spoken to Paul Gibson?”

  “No. Why? Has he finished Ashworth’s postmortem already?”

  “He has. Seems the Viscount wasn’t attacked with an ax after all. He was stabbed, probably with something like a butcher knife.”

  “A knife? How many times would you need to stab a man to make that kind of a mess of his chest?”

  Lovejoy lifted his face to the growing wind, his eyes dark and troubled. “Apparently too many to count.”

  * * *

  Sebastian’s friendship with the Irish-born surgeon, Paul Gibson, dated back to a time when both men wore the King’s colors and fought the King’s wars from Italy and the Peninsula to the West Indies. Even after a French cannonball took off the lower part of his left leg, Gibson had stayed with the regiment. But the rigors of the campaign—combined with the phantom pains from his missing limb and the opium he used to control them—eventually proved to be too much. And so he’d come here, to London, to teach at the hospitals of St. Bartholomew’s and St. Thomas’s, and to set up a small surgery on Tower Hill in the shadow of the city’s ancient Norman castle.

  By the time Sebastian reached Tower Hill, the daylight was fading fast. This was one of the oldest sections of London, its low stone or timber houses dating back to the days of the Tudors and beyond. In times gone past, it had been the site of execution for nobles fallen out of favor with the king and rebels caught on the battlefield. For some, death had come quickly with the hiss of a falling ax. But most had been forced to endure agonizing, hours-long tortures so hideous that Sebastian fancied he could sometimes still catch the echoes of their screams reverberating through the ancient alleyways and lanes.

  For some reason he could not have named, he found himself thinking about those long-dead victims as he knocked at the door of the old stone house Gibson shared with a mysterious Frenchwoman named Alexandri Sauvage. She had lived with Gibson for more than a year now, although she steadfastly refused to become his wife. And she both disliked and distrusted Sebastian for reasons he had to admit were more than valid.

  “Ah, it’s you,” she said when she answered his knock. She was a small woman perhaps a few years older than Gibson, fine-boned and thin, with pale skin, a head of luxurious flaming hair, and eyes that told Sebastian she had not forgotten—would never forget—that he had killed her lover four years before in the mountains of Portugal.

  She took a step back to allow him to enter, then closed the door behind him with a snap. “You know where to find him.”

  Sebastian turned to look at her. “Still? I thought he’d completed Ashworth’s autopsy.”

  “He has.”

  Gibson performed his autopsies in a stone outbuilding at the base of what had not long ago been an overgrown, vaguely sinister yard. But he also used the building for surreptitious dissections performed on cadavers filched from London’s overcrowded churchyards by gangs of body snatchers known euphemistically as resurrection men. Sebastian assumed the Irishman must be working on some new “specimen.” But when he reached the dank single-roomed building, he found Ashworth still lying on the elevated stone slab that stood in the center of the room. Gibson was bent over him, doing something in the cadaver’s abdomen that Sebastian had no desire to look closely enough to identify.

  “I thought you were finished with him?”

  “With the postmortem,” said the surgeon, looking up with a grin. He was in his mid-thirties, although he looked older, his dark hair heavily touched by gray, his face gaunt, and his frame leaner than it should have been, thanks to the opium. But he was still the most brilliant anatomist Sebastian knew, and he’d made death and its effects on the human body his specialty. “I was just taking a wee look at a few things. No point in letting a perfectly good cadaver go to waste.”

  “It’s getting dark,” said Sebastian.

  “Unfortunately.” Gibson laid aside his scalpel with a sigh. “I wish to God I had your bloody eyesight.”

  Sebastian starred down at the raw, pulpy mess that Ashworth’s murderer had made of his chest. “You’re certain this was done by a butcher knife?”

  “Either that or something like it.” The surgeon reached for a rag and wiped his hands. “It wasn’t a hatchet or an ax, if that’s what you’re thinking. The killer stabbed him over and over again—and then hacked at him a few dozen more times, just for good measure. Your killer obviously wanted to make damned sure he was dead.”

  “I suppose someone might do that if they were very frightened.”

  “Either frightened, angry, or just plain crazy.”

  “Any whip marks on him?”

  “No, none. Why?”

  “There was a whip mixed up in his bedclothes.”

  “It wasn’t used on him.”

  Sebastian shifted his gaze to the Viscount’s calm, handsome face. “He died quickly?”

  “Quickly but not instantly—at least not from all the blood I’m told was splattered over his bed. One of the first stab wounds must have hit a major artery rather than the heart itself. So the heart kept pumping, sending the blood everywhere. Unless you know what you’re doing, the heart itself is hard to hit. Too protected by the sternum and ribs.”

  “So he—or she—kept stabbing, trying to get the heart to stop beating.”

  Gibson nodded. “And then just kept stabbing and stabbing. I’m surprised he didn’t break the knife.”

  “I’m wondering if the killer brought the knife with him or found it in his lordship’s bedchamber.”

  “Well, this is Ashworth we’re talking about.”

  “True.”

  Sebastian went to stand in the open doorway, looking out over the yard. Little more than a year ago, this had been a wasteland of dying weeds and the occasional inexplicable mound of raw earth. But over the passing months, Alexi Sauvage had managed to turn it into a place of peace and beauty, with clumps of sweet-smelling gillyflowers, tulips, wallflowers, and peonies, their blooms now showing pale and ghostlike in the gathering gloom.

  Unfortunately, her attempts to rescue Gibson from himself had been less successful.

  “How is your niece taking this?” asked Gibson, watching him.

  “To be honest, she’s grateful he’s dead—as is virtually everyone who knew the bastard except, I suppose, his father. And maybe one very indulgent old butler.”

  “You still think Ashworth helped kidnap those street children out at Clerkenwell and Bethnal Green?”

  “Yes.”

  “So maybe someone connected to one of them did this.”

  Sebastian watched him reach for a sheet to cover the dead nobleman’s corpse. “Now, that’s a possibility I hadn’t considered. Except how would they know to blame him?”

  Gibson shook his head. “That I can’t explain.”

  “Hang on a minute.” Sebastian came to crouch down beside the body, his gaze on the dead man’s left wrist. He went next to check the other wrist, then pushed the sheet aside to look at the ankles. Someone had cut away the silk ties that once bound him, and it was as if they had never been. “I don’t see any sign of abrasions on either his wrists or ankles from the cords that tied him to the bed frame.”

  “There aren’t any.”

  Sebastian looked up. “There’s no doubt in my mind that he was murdered in that bed. But he must not have been tied down until after he was killed.”

  “Maybe. Except the only blood on his hands was splatter, and there are no defensive cuts or bruises of any kind, the way you’d expect if he were fighting someone off. Those first stab wounds didn’t kill him. So if he wasn’t tied down, why wasn’t he grabbing at the knife and trying to stop whoever was killing him?”

  “I suppose he could have been drugged.”

  “He could have been. Although it’s just as likely he simply passed out drunk, and whatever frightened woman he was abusing took adva
ntage of his stupor to kill him. He had enough alcohol in him that you can still smell it.”

  Sebastian leaned forward and sniffed. But all he smelled was blood and death.

  He straightened and went to stand at the doorway again, his hands on his hips, his gaze on the darkening sky. The light had almost vanished from the day, leaving a world of death-haunted shadows and secrets.

  “You’re worried about something,” said Gibson, watching him. “What?”

  Sebastian glanced back at his friend. What could he say? I’m afraid because this bastard’s twisted evil was too close to my family, and even though he’s dead, I’m not convinced he’s done hurting them. I’m afraid because the darkness within men like this seems to seep into everything and everyone they touch. I’m afraid because it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that a vulnerable, fragile young woman I love might actually have done this.

  But, of course, he couldn’t say any of those things.

  He saw light flicker in the kitchen of the medieval house, and the slender form of a woman passed on the far side of the ancient mullioned window. Gibson said, “How about a pint before dinner?”

  Sebastian let out a long breath. “Sounds good.” But as the two friends walked back across the yard, he thought for one suspended moment that he caught the echoing scream of a long-dead man.

  And the roar of the crowd that had once assembled for the joy of watching him die.

  Chapter 10

  By the time Sebastian made it back to Brook Street, night had long since fallen, bringing with it a haze that wreathed the rows of streetlamps with pale, misty haloes.

  He sent Tom off to the stables with the horses, then paused for a moment, his gaze on the wind-tossed trees in the distant square, his thoughts far, far in the past. He was remembering a sunny day long ago when he’d been a young man about to go off to war and Stephanie a child of perhaps eight. He’d taken her out for an afternoon of simple pleasures—a regatta at Chelsea, ices at Gunter’s, a walk in the park. She’d been so absurdly delighted, so obviously grateful for his attention, that it cut him to the quick to realize how lonely her life must be. And it grieved him too to realize how oblivious he had been to the pain and want of a niece he professed to love.