What Angels Fear (21 page)

Gibson nodded. “And picture this: the way he had hacked at her throat, she would have been wet with blood. They both would have been.”

Sebastian breathed a harsh sigh. “My God. What manner of man does such a thing?”

“A very dangerous one.” Gibson set aside the basin with a clatter that rang loudly in the cold room. “There’s a name for this particular form of depravity. It’s called necrophilia.”

Sebastian brought his gaze back to the savaged, naked body of the woman before them. He’d heard of it, of course. There were places in London that specialized in catering to every sort of vile perversion a man could imagine—sodomy, sadomasochism, pederasty. And this.

“So he killed her in order to rape her?” Sebastian said. And he thought, What if Kat was right? What if Rachel York was killed by someone who didn’t even know her? What if her death had nothing at all to do with who she was, with the men who had moved through her life, or even with the mysterious rendezvous she had scheduled that night with the Earl of Hendon? How could Sebastian hope to find her killer, then?

“Perhaps,” said Paul Gibson. “Then again, some men are sexually stimulated by the act of killing.” His soft gray eyes grew troubled with the shadow of old, ugly memories, his voice dropping to a pained, torn whisper. “As we both know.”

Sebastian nodded, not meeting his gaze. It was something they’d both seen too many times during the war, the brutal lust of soldiers, still bloody from battle and turned loose on the hapless women and children of a conquered city, or a farm that simply happened to have the misfortune to lie in the army’s path. There was something about the act of killing that could bring out everything primitive and not quite human within a man. Or was that kind of thinking a misconception, Sebastian wondered, born of human arrogance? Because this particular brand of selfishly cruel destructiveness was all too peculiarly human. Many beasts in the wild killed for food, for survival, but there were none who killed for the sadistic, sexual pleasure of it.

“So he could have killed her for some other reason entirely, and found the whole experience so exciting that he felt compelled to ease his lust on her dead body.”

The doctor nodded. “The inner abrasions are slight. He must have already been very excited when he entered her.” He hesitated, then said, “There is one other thing, which may or may not be pertinent. Did you notice the scars on her wrists?”

Sebastian leaned forward to study the blurred, faded outline of old scars encircling each of her wrists like bracelets. Sebastian had scars like that himself, from his days in Portugal: a legacy of twelve painful, bloody hours spent twisting his wrists against the tight bite of a binding rope.

“And look at this.” Reaching beneath one shoulder, Gibson rolled the body so that Sebastian could see the faint lines of white scars crisscrossing her slim, beautiful back. “Someone took a whip to her.”

“How long ago, would you say?”

“I’m not sure.” Gibson eased the body back down. “At least several years ago, I’d say.” He was moving around the room now, assembling instruments on a tray. “I might have more to tell you in a day or two, when I’ve had a chance to do the actual autopsy.”

Sebastian nodded, his gaze caught by the still, beautiful features of the woman before him. Her skin had been pale, even in life; now in the cold morning light she looked nearly blue, her full lips a surprisingly dark purple. “I want to rebury her when you’re finished,” he said.

Gibson came to stand beside him. He had stopped clattering his surgical tools. “All right.”

Sebastian kept his gaze on all that was left of Rachel York. Less than a week ago, she had been nothing to him—a name on a playbill, a pretty face only. Even after he’d been accused of her killing, his thoughts had all been for his own survival, his desire to find her killer driven by his own needs, not hers.

But at some point in the last few days, he realized, that had changed. Rachel York had been less than nineteen years old when she died; a young woman, alone and defenseless, battling to survive in a society that used and discarded its weak and unfortunate as if they were somehow less than human. And yet she had stubbornly refused to allow herself to become a victim. She had struggled against the odds, fought back, brave and determined . . . until someone, some man, had cornered her in the Lady Chapel of an ancient, deserted church and done
this
to her.

The world was full of ugliness, Sebastian knew that; ugliness, and ugly people. But you couldn’t let them win, those men who took what they wanted with never a thought or care for the ones who suffered and died as a result. You could never stop fighting them, never let them think that what they did was right or somehow justified. Never let them triumph unchallenged.

“You’ll have justice,” he whispered, although the woman before him was long past hearing, and he’d lost his belief in an all-knowing, benevolently attentive God long ago, on some battlefield in central Spain. “Whoever did this to you won’t get away with it. I swear it.”

He was suddenly aware of Paul Gibson standing beside him, a strange expression quirking up one corner of his lips. “And here I thought you’d given up believing in either justice or righteous causes.”

“I have,” said Sebastian, turning toward the door.

But his friend only smiled.

Chapter 30

T
he snow began before midday.

Sebastian walked through crooked medieval streets. Ice filmed over the water standing in the open gutters. A ragged women hurried past him, her shawl-wrapped shoulders hunched against the weather, her breath white in the cold, dank air. He walked until the smell of the river was thick in his nostrils and seagulls cried overhead. Beneath his feet the cobblestones turned slippery with the snow that fell in great wet flakes from out of a yellow-white sky.

Cutting between a boarded-up warehouse and a high stone wall, he climbed down a short flight of ancient steps to where the Thames stretched out before him, thick and brown and wide, the wind strong enough now to kick up little whitecaps and fill the air with the scent of the distant sea. Even with the cold and the snow, the river teemed with boats, lighters and culls, and barges and hoys heading downriver to Gravesend and the open sea beyond. It was the lifeblood of the city, this river, and yet how often had he gone through the movements of his days within scant blocks of it and remained essentially oblivious to its existence for weeks on end.

He’d known it was there, of course, yet because it intruded so little on his life, it was easy to ignore, like the distant wailing of hungry children in the night, or the muffled rumble of the parish carts making their early morning rounds, collecting the endless supply of white-wrapped bundles that fed the poor holes of St. Stephen’s and St. Andrew’s, St. Pancreas and the Spitalfields Churchyard.

Easy to ignore, too, was the existence of those dark, unassuming houses in Field Lane and Covent Garden, where for a few coins a man could buy the right to unlock a room and do whatever he liked to the shivering, frightened child or sobbing woman he would find there; houses where whips cracked and bodies twisted in agony, where there was no hope, no God, only endurance and the ultimate deliverance of death. Whatever perversion a man lusted after, he could buy in this city, for a price.

The snow was falling harder now, and faster. Sebastian looked up, letting the small white pellets sting the cold skin of his face. What was becoming a recurrent fear swelled within him, the fear that he was never going to clear himself of this terrible crime of which he’d been accused. And what then? he wondered. What if Rachel York’s killing had been nothing more than a random act of violence? What if he could never find the man who had slashed her throat and sated his lust upon her dead, bleeding body? What then of his promise to see justice done, for her and for himself?

He’d told himself her killer must have been someone close to her, someone who knew she would be waiting alone and vulnerable in that church so late at night. And yet Sebastian realized now he’d been wrong, that her killer could simply have seen her in the streets and followed her, watched as she lit the holy candles on the altar and then come at her out of the darkness, a lethal and intimate stranger.

Sebastian rubbed a hand across his eyes, aching now from lack of sleep. After he’d left his father’s house in Grosvenor Square, he’d spent what was left of the night walking the slowly lightening alleys and byways of the city. He kept turning what his father had told him over and over again in his mind, trying to figure out what Rachel York could have been selling that his father would be so desperate to buy that he agreed to meet her in a deserted church in the dark of the night.

He’d sworn it wasn’t blackmail, but Sebastian had to acknowledge that that could be mere quibbling, a question of semantics only. Whatever it was, Hendon wanted it badly enough that he’d forced himself to overcome his horror and search Rachel York’s bloody, mutilated body in hopes of finding it.

Yet he hadn’t found it. Which could mean either that her killer now had it, or that Rachel York had never brought it to St. Matthew’s in the first place.

Then again, Sebastian couldn’t discount the possibility that his father was lying, that Hendon had found it and taken it, after all.

An unexpected chill shook him. Sebastian turned up his collar against the cold. Hendon’s refusal to talk baffled him. After all these hours of walking the streets, of turning over one possibility after another in his mind, Sebastian was still no closer to understanding. It was only now, as he watched the snowflakes falling thick and fast from a lowering sky, that he was able to admit to himself that beneath the confusion and rage coursing through him every time he thought about his interview with his father, what he felt most powerfully was a deep and abiding sense of hurt. For try as he might, he found it impossible to imagine a secret so important that a father would place its preservation above the life and freedom of his only surviving son.

That afternoon, Sebastian paid an interesting visit to the small goldsmith’s shop across the street from Covent Garden Theater. He was just turning away when he spotted Tom, whittling on a block of wood with a small pocketknife as he waited in the protective lee of the theater’s wide porch.

“What are you doing here?” said Sebastian, walking up to him.

“Waitin’ for Miss Kat. She knows someone she reckons might be able to put me onto this Mary Grant’s whereabouts, but she figures it’d be better if’n she were to introduce me to the cove ’erself.”

“Ah,” said Sebastian, who knew something of the kind of “friends” Kat had from her early days in London. Leaning forward, he peered at the quadruped taking shape beneath the boy’s nimble fingers. “What is it?”

“A ’orse,” said the boy, proudly holding it aloft.

“Like horses, do you?”

Tom nodded. “I always thought it’d be just grand to be one o’ them tigers, sittin’ up behind some sportin’ gentleman in ’is curricle, watchin’ ’im tool a pair of prime ’igh steppers.”

Sebastian personally had little use for the current vogue for employing children as grooms. But as he looked down into the boy’s shining eyes, he found himself saying, “Once I fight my way clear of this wretched mess I’m in, I could take you on as a tiger. If you’re interested.”

Tom’s eyes narrowed. His face was wary and guarded against disappointment, but his breathing had quickened, his jaw going slack with awe. “You got a curricle?”

Sebastian laughed and stepped out into the street. “That I do.”

“Got a tiger?”

“Not yet.”

The boy nodded, struggling to contain a grin. “Where you off to, then?”

Sebastian turned up his collar against the snow. “To have another talk with Hamlet.”

Chapter 31

D
arkness came early that day, settling over the city with a heavy fall of snow.

Across the street from the lodging house where Hugh Gordon had rooms, Sebastian stomped his numb feet and watched the stocky, gray-haired woman who came in daily to “do” for the actor close the street door behind her and set off toward the Strand, the snow blanketing her head and shoulders with white as she hurried through the gathering gloom.

Sebastian waited while a coal cart trundled by, followed by a brewer’s wagon. Then he crossed the street, with each step easing himself into the persona of Cousin Simon Taylor from Worcestershire. By the time he stood outside Gordon’s door, his shoulders had slumped and he was twisting his hat anxiously in his hands as he waited for Gordon to answer his knock.

“Oh, it’s you, is it?” said the actor, his lips pressing together in annoyance as he cast a distracted glance toward the ornate ormolu clock on his sitting room mantel. He kept the door open no more than a foot. “I don’t have a great deal of time at the moment—”

“It won’t take long,” said Sebastian, smiling hopefully.

Gordon hesitated, then pushed his breath out in a sigh and opened the door wider. “Very well. What is it?”