by C. S. Harris
“Because I only just heard about it myself.”
“Oh? So what’s your friend’s name?”
“I can’t tell you that!”
“Yet you expect me to believe you?”
“I’m telling the truth,” said Kneebone with great dignity.
Sebastian gave the actor a hard smile. “How was she killed?”
Kneebone swallowed and looked away. “He said she was strangled.”
• • •
Sebastian had no reason to believe the actor’s tale. But Kneebone’s willingness to provide him with the dead girl’s name lent a certain amount of credibility to his story.
Before heading to Pickering Place, he drove first to the Tower Hill surgery of Paul Gibson, where he found the Irishman in the high-windowed outbuilding at the base of the yard, surrounded by boxes of freshly washed bones and the draped body of Rory Inchbald. A tub of water had been set up on the stone table in the middle of the room, and Gibson was scrubbing the contents of the last box and laying the bones out to dry. A second tub stood nearby, suggesting that someone—probably Alexi—had been helping him at his task. The room smelled of wet stone, dank earth, and death.
“I hope you’re not here looking for answers,” said Gibson, glancing up from his task, “because I don’t have any.”
“Nothing?”
He jerked his head toward the one-legged soldier’s silent form. “Well, I can tell you Rory Inchbald there was stabbed in the back. But beyond that, I have the bones of five dead youngsters—”
“Five?”
“We found another grave after you left. Two boys, two girls, and one who could be either. One of the girls’ bones are small enough she could have been as young as twelve, and the oldest is likely this fellow.” Gibson shook water from a femur stained dark for reasons Sebastian didn’t want to think about and laid it to dry with the others on the stone slab. “He was perhaps as much as seventeen, although he wasn’t very big, either.”
Sebastian studied the unknown boy’s collection of bones. Some of the graves they’d found were shallow enough to have been disturbed by stray dogs and pigs. But this skeleton looked fairly complete. “How much do you know about Number Three, Pickering Place?”
“Not a great deal. And most of what I do know comes from Alexi—she’s delivered babies to several of the girls there. I never have. Why?”
“She told me the other day she thinks it’s not as bad as Chalon Lane.”
“It isn’t. Nowhere near as bad.”
“So you don’t think there’s a chance these children could have been killed there?” It didn’t seem likely, given what Hamish had told him. And yet . . .
Gibson shook his head. “Every brothel occasionally loses workers to customers who turn violent. But five or six? I think I’d have heard about it. I mean, I heard about the Chalon Lane house. You can’t keep that sort of thing secret for long.” He paused. “Can you?”
“Where does Number Three get their boys and girls?”
“Off the streets, mainly. Some are runaway apprentices, but most are orphans or abandoned children. There are some places in London that snatch them off the street, but it’s not that difficult simply to lure them in. When you’re starving and unbearably cold and alone, what the Bligh sisters are offering probably doesn’t look so bad—a roof over your head, a bed to sleep in, lots of food, and warm clothing. Beats dying of starvation in a ditch someplace.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not.” Sebastian stared down at the hideously grinning skull Gibson had set at the edge of the stone slab. Stripped of flesh and sinew, one skull looked much like any other. And it occurred to him just how lucky they’d been, to identify Mick Swallow by the coin he’d worn around his neck. The rest of these dead youngsters were utterly anonymous and would doubtless remain so. “We’ll never know who any of them were, will we?” he said after a moment.
“Probably not. If they’d been buried in their clothes, we might have been able to identify them that way. But they weren’t.”
Sebastian went to stand in the doorway, his hands braced against the frame as he stared out at the windblown sky. And he felt it again, that welling of frustration and anger that was as potent as it was pointless. “Whoever is doing this doesn’t simply rob these poor children of their lives,” he said, watching the wind ruffle a nearby patch of pretty blue Michaelmas daisies. “He dumps them in shallow, unmarked holes like they’re garbage. If we can’t identify them, no one is ever going know what happened to them.” Sebastian pushed away from the door and swung to face the room full of bones again. “There must be some way to figure out who they were.”
Gibson fished the last of the skeleton’s ribs from the tub, then shook his hands and reached for a rag to dry them. “A bone is just a bone. I don’t see how we’ll ever be able to tell one person’s bones from the next. Maybe it’s better this way—that at some point we all lose our individual identities and simply become part of the earth.”
Sebastian stared at the boxes filled with the remains of unidentified children and felt his heart break for the unnamed, forgotten lives so cruelly cut short by untold hours of unimaginable pain and fear. “At some point, perhaps,” he said. “But not yet. And not like this.”
Chapter 38
Sebastian arrived at Pickering Place to find the small square nearly deserted in the flat light of a cloudy afternoon. He rapped on the shiny black door of Number Three and listened to the approach of a man’s footsteps. But the door remained closed.
“I know you’re there,” said Sebastian. “Tell your mistress we need to talk about Jane Peters.”
The footsteps went away. His acute hearing picked up a distant, hushed argument in which the unseen doorman hissed, “Ye shoulda let me kill the bugger the first time he come round.” His female employer answered calmly—and ominously, “Don’t be a fool; there’s a time and place for everything.” Then the heavy footsteps returned and the squinty-eyed prizefighter with the scarred eyebrow and jutting jaw yanked open the door.
“Ye were told ye ain’t welcome hereabouts,” he growled.
“So remind me: Are you Thomas? Or Joshua?”
The pugilist’s scowl deepened. “Joshua.” He stepped back and jerked his head toward the end of the corridor. “Ye know where t’ find her.”
Grace Bligh sat drinking a cup of tea in the chair previously occupied by her strangely silent sister. Her long, golden hair hung loose about her shoulders, and she wore nothing except a thin silk wrapper that clung to every swell and hollow of her body. And even though she was a woman grown, there was something about her diminutive size that caused Sebastian to feel vaguely uncomfortable, seeing her like this.
As if she knew exactly what he was thinking, a gleam of amusement lit up her pale gray eyes. But all she said was, “Who told you about Jane?”
“Does it matter?”
She raised the delicate, rose-sprinkled teacup to her lips. “Our customers usually know better than to be telling tales out of school.”
“In my experience, most people find the sight of murder disturbing. As a result, they tend to feel the need to talk about it.”
Grace Bligh shook her head. “I fear you’ve been misinformed; Jane Peters committed suicide.”
“By strangling herself?”
“It can be done.”
“Benji Thatcher—the Clerkenwell boy who was raped and tortured—was strangled.”
She lifted her silk-clad shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “It’s a common enough means of murder.”
“I thought we were talking about suicide?”
She took another sip of her tea. “So we are.”
“And in point of fact, strangling deaths are not as easy to accomplish as you might think.”
“Oh? Well, you would know more about that than I.”
“Would I?” Since she hadn’t invited
him to sit, Sebastian wandered the room, taking in the expensive marble-topped commodes and massive Sevres vases bracketing the fireplace. “Where’s your sister?”
“Hope rarely leaves her room before three.”
“Why doesn’t she speak?”
Grace Bligh shook back her loose hair in a mockingly seductive gesture. “Perhaps you can ask her, next time you see her.”
“You’re from—where?” He paused beside a glass-fronted bookcase ornamented with engraved brass brackets. “Sussex?”
“Kent.”
He scanned the titles in the bookcase, looking for de Sade, but found only the likes of Shakespeare and Donne and Chaucer. “You have an interesting taste in literature.”
Something flashed in her eyes. “Why? Did you imagine us illiterate? Our mother was a vicar’s daughter and our father the village schoolmaster.”
He wanted to ask how she and her sister had ended up in Pickering Place, running a London brothel that catered to some of the male sex’s most depraved tastes. Except that he suspected he already knew the answer. Village schoolmasters lived a desperate, hand-to-mouth existence. If the unfortunate Mr. Bligh and his wife had died while their daughters were still young, the sisters would have been left dangerously vulnerable. Someone had obviously exploited that vulnerability. The girls must have learned very quickly that certain men like their females young—or at least to look young. And the Bligh sisters were astute enough—and ruthless enough—to have capitalized on that knowledge.
He said, “Who killed Jane Peters?”
Two tight white lines appeared to bracket Grace Bligh’s lips. “I told you: She killed herself.”
“And the authorities believed this tale?”
She gave an exaggerated sigh. “Why bother asking questions if you don’t listen to or remember the answers? I told you when you were here before: The authorities do not bother us.”
“So you did.” He let his gaze drift, significantly, over the rows of exquisite paintings in heavy gilt frames, over the tables crowded with fine porcelain pieces and impressive bronzes. He found it difficult to believe that even a house as exclusive as this one was profitable enough to enable its owners to pay off the local authorities and still have enough left to fund the acquisition of such treasures. West End magistrates could most certainly be bribed, but they did not come cheap.
He said, “It occurs to me that a business such as this would lend itself handsomely to blackmail.”
She watched him with those strange, silver-gray eyes. “Blackmail is a dangerous game best left to experts.”
“Actually, I think you’d be rather good at it.”
Her lips curled up into what looked like a smile of genuine amusement. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He said, “Of course, there is another possibility. An establishment of this nature would also be quite useful to the French.”
She laughed out loud. “An interesting theory. But you’re still wrong.”
And then he knew. He looked into her cold, still smiling face, and he knew why she was so untroubled by the threat of exposure. The sisters weren’t beholden to some corrupt, petty local magistrate for protection. They didn’t need to be. Their nasty little establishment was shielded by the most powerful man in the Kingdom—a man who no doubt made very good use of whatever information they passed him.
“I see,” said Sebastian, and he knew by the utterly controlled way she held herself still that he was right.
He started to turn toward the door, then paused. “Someone tried to kill me Thursday night. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
She stared back at him, her eyes glittering but her face a mask. And he found himself thinking, They’re all actors; not just Hector Kneebone, but also de Brienne and Grace Bligh. All three presented a carefully constructed and utterly false facade to the world.
And then she lowered her lashes, hiding her eyes. “I imagine you have many enemies. My lord.”
“True. But you’re the only one I’ve overheard disputing the proper time and place for my killing with her henchman.”
For the first time he saw her confident smile slip, just as someone rapped an impatient tattoo at the front entrance.
“Bit early for customers, isn’t it?” he said.
Grace Bligh sat stiffly in her chair, her tea going cold in her hands. “Some men have commitments that make it difficult for them to visit us in the evening.”
“You mean, commitments such as wives and children of their own.”
The smile was back in her eyes. “That troubles you, does it, my lord? Why? Are you tempted?”
“I think the word you’re looking for is ‘disgusted,’” he said, and turned away.
He could feel the lethal animosity of her gaze boring into his back as he walked toward the front door. The new arrival had already been ushered into the front room with its gaudy red brocade settees and rich velvet hangings and enormous canvases of naked, nubile women frolicking in vaguely oriental seraglios. As Sebastian passed the room’s wide entrance, he could see the establishment’s latest customer standing in the center of the carpet, his fashionable top hat in his hands, his stocky legs braced wide, his stout torso held ramrod straight as he considered the two painfully young girls being offered for his selection. Even from the back, there was something about the short, middle-aged figure that seemed vaguely familiar. Then the man half turned, and Sebastian recognized one of the more outspoken members of Parliament. Pugh was his name.
Sinclair Pugh.
Chapter 39
“We’ve never been explicitly told that Lord Jarvis controls Number Three, Pickering Place,” said Sir Henry Lovejoy, his elbows propped on his office desk and his cupped hands tapping against his chin. “But we have been warned by the Home Office to leave the place alone. I can assure you it goes sorely against the grain with me. Some of the tales we hear of that establishment are beyond troubling.”
Sebastian leaned back in his chair and—out of respect for the magistrate’s austere religious sensibilities—somehow managed to swallow the oath that rose to his lips. “I gather you heard about the ‘suicide’ a few weeks ago of a girl there named Jane Peters?”
Lovejoy nodded. “The findings of the inquest were preposterous, of course. But I’m afraid in such cases the coroner does what he is told.”
“And was she buried at the crossroads with a stake through her heart?” It was the common fate of those found guilty of having committed the crime of self-murder, considered by the church the greatest sin of all.
The magistrate rose abruptly and went to stand looking out the window at the crowded, raucous street below. His silence told Sebastian all he needed to know. After a moment Lovejoy said, his voice hoarse, “You think Number Three is behind the bodies discovered in Clerkenwell?”
“I honestly don’t know. I spoke to a boy who was abducted from near the Charterhouse last year, and the story he told doesn’t suggest any involvement by the Bligh sisters. Yet simply because I don’t see a connection doesn’t mean there isn’t one.”
“Let us hope there is not.”
“And if there is?”
The two men’s gazes met, and Lovejoy’s features took on the pinched, troubled look of a conscientious man whose hands are tied by the ominous power of the authorities above him.
Pushing to his feet, Sebastian turned toward the door, then paused as another thought occurred to him. “There’s a bookseller in Holywell Street named Clarence Rutledge who hasn’t been seen for several days. He could simply have been arrested or he could have decided to lay low for a while. But it’s also possible something has happened to him.”
“Holywell, you say?” The disapproving frown on Lovejoy’s face told Sebastian the magistrate was well aware of the sort of literature to be found in the street’s bookstalls and shops. “I’ll set one
of the lads to look into it. You think this bookseller could be connected to the murders?”
“Not connected, precisely. But he may know more about this killer than is healthy. For him.”
• • •
Sebastian was crossing Bow Street toward where Giles waited with the chestnuts when he heard a familiar cockney voice hollering, “Gov’nor. Gov’nor!”
Sebastian turned to find his tiger pelting down Bow Street, dodging barrows piled high with turnips and cabbages, and nearly tripping over an Italian musician’s dancing monkey.
“Tom? What the blazes are you doing here?”
The boy skidded to a halt, his chest jerking, his face red and damp from his run. “I found it!”
“Found what?”
“That old black ’n’ white ’ouse yer lookin’ for.”
Sebastian rested his hands on the boy’s heaving shoulders and somehow resisted the urge to give him a good shake. “How the devil do you know about that?”
“I ’eard Calhoun askin’ the scullery maid about it. She’s from Pentonville, ye know.”
“No, I didn’t know.” Pentonville was a small village to the west of Islington. “And was the scullery maid familiar with such a house in the area?”
“No. But once I knew why Calhoun was askin’—”
“He told you?”
Tom grinned. “I reckon ye didn’t warn ’im not to.”
Sebastian studied the boy’s sharp-featured, freckled face. He was right; Sebastian hadn’t thought to issue such a caution. “How did you find it?”
“I asked the drovers at Smithfield. This cove name o’ Striker Bolton told me ’bout a place sounded just like what yer lookin’ for. So I went and took a gander—”
Sebastian felt his stomach give an unpleasant lurch. “You went out there by yourself? My God. Have you any idea what kind of monster we’re dealing with here? I ought to thrash you within an inch of your life.”
Tom’s jaw jutted out mulishly. “’Ow else was I t’ know it was the right place? Besides, Striker went with me, to show me where it was.”
