Why Mermaids Sing: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery Page 5

  “Yet you encourage her,” said Sebastian.

  “Her projects have proved to be surprisingly good for business. I encourage anything that’s good for business.”

  “And Barclay? Did he interest himself in his mother’s projects?”

  “At twenty-seven? Hardly.”

  Sebastian’s gaze fell on a dark wooden statue prominently displayed on a table near the window. Some fourteen inches high, it depicted what he thought might be a woman, although the figure was wrapped in an Eastern cloak, making it difficult to be certain. Seated on a lion, she waved something like eight or ten arms in the air. “An interesting piece,” said Sebastian, moving to examine it more closely.

  “It’s from Ceylon.” Carmichael’s tongue flicked out to moisten his lips in a quick gesture. And Sebastian thought, He’s nervous. Why is he nervous?

  “I have interests in a firm that imports tea,” Carmichael was saying. He moved to take the statue into his large hands. The hands were scrubbed so clean they were pink, the nails carefully manicured. But these were no gentleman’s hands; the fingers and palms still bore the calluses left by the labors of his youth. “It’s a statue of the Hindu goddess Shakti.”

  “Have you been to India?”

  “Several times.”

  Sebastian thought about the page from a ship’s log shoved in Barclay Carmichael’s mouth by his killer. “What about your son? Did he ever travel with you?”

  “I travel on business. My son was a gentleman,” snapped Carmichael. It was, after all, the reason Sir Humphrey Carmichael had paid through the nose for the privilege of marrying the daughter of a marquis, so that his son might call himself a gentleman. A gentleman’s wealth came from land, or investments, or inheritance; he never actually took a direct hand in the vulgar business of earning money.

  “Your son was a remarkably well-liked man,” said Sebastian. “Do you know of anyone who might have wished him harm?”

  “No.” Carmichael’s eyes narrowed. “But if I did, do you really think I would tell you?” It was said without any apparent heat, only a glimmer of something that was visible for an instant in those hooded eyes, then gone.

  Sebastian stared at the man’s sad, fleshy face. “It might help to make sense out of what is happening in this city.”

  “And what concern might that be of mine at this point?”

  “To ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen again?” Sebastian suggested.

  “My son is dead. You think I care if it happens to some other man’s son?” He swiped one large, work-worn hand through the air in a quick, dismissive gesture. “Well, I don’t.”

  Sebastian’s fingers twitched on the brim of his hat. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me. Good day, sir,” he said, and strode from the room.

  Behind him, Sir Humphrey Carmichael’s hand tightened around the head of the Shakti. With a sudden oath, he whirled, his arm jerking to send the statue hurtling across the room.

  Chapter 14

  “A curious conversation,” said Paul Gibson, when Sebastian met with the surgeon later that day.

  They were drinking ale and dining on a joint of cold ham at a battered old table overlooking the surgery’s neglected back garden. “It reminded me of my meeting with Lord Stanton yesterday morning,” said Sebastian. “There’s more than arrogance going on here, more than suspicion or resentment of my involvement. Their reaction is simply not…natural.”

  “Grief can drive men in strange ways.”

  Sebastian swallowed the last of his ale and set aside his tankard. “Perhaps.”

  Gibson pushed awkwardly to his feet. “Come see what I’ve found…although I’m afraid it’s not much.”

  Sebastian followed the surgeon through the weed-grown garden to the small stone building behind the surgery. The scent of blood and decaying flesh hit them halfway across the yard. Sebastian breathed through his mouth.

  What was left of Dominic Stanton lay on the room’s altar-like table, covered with a sheet. Sebastian stared at that long, silent form and said, “I suppose in all honesty it’s impossible for anyone to truly grasp what it would be like, knowing this had been done to his son.”

  “Probably.” Gibson flipped back the sheet. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more about his death. I still believe it’s the wound across his throat that killed him…which I suppose would be a relatively merciful way to die, considering the horrors of what came after.”

  “It’s the way you’d slaughter a lamb,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the boy’s face. Dominic Stanton’s features were relaxed in death; he might have been sleeping.

  “Except this was no lamb but a big, hale young man. I would think it must have taken more than one assailant to subdue him.” Gibson rolled up the sheet and shoved it aside in a rough gesture. “Although it’s difficult enough to imagine one man committing such an act of barbarity, let alone two.”

  Slipping a hand into his pocket, Sebastian drew forth the small blue-and-white Chinese vial he’d picked up from the grassy verge on the road to Merton Abbey. “I found this where I think the boy was set upon.”

  Taking the vial, Gibson raised it to his nostrils and sniffed. He looked up, one eyebrow raised. “Opium?”

  Sebastian watched Gibson’s hand clench around the vial, then relax. Gibson’s own dark love affair with opium dated back three years or more, to the blood-soaked surgeon’s tent in Portugal where he’d lost the mangled remnant of a leg left him by a French cannonball.

  “Is there any way to tell if Stanton ingested the drug before he died?” Sebastian asked.

  Gibson sighed and held the vial out to him. “Unfortunately, no. You think Stanton was a habitual user?”

  “I suppose it’s possible, although I’ve found nothing that would suggest it. I’m thinking perhaps the drug was used to make him more manageable.”

  “It would do that. Particularly if the lad were unused to its effects. But to force it down his throat wouldn’t have been easy if he resisted.”

  “No. But if someone held a gun on him and gave him a choice between the opium and instant death, he would drink it.”

  As bad as the room had smelled yesterday, today it was indescribably worse. Sebastian went to stand in the open doorway and breathe. “According to Mr. Stanton’s friends, the boy was nervous the past few weeks, convinced someone was following him. Whoever killed him must have been watching him. Waiting for the chance to catch him alone. His friends thought he was imagining it. They even laughed at him for being afraid.”

  “Aye, he was afraid, poor lad. He wet himself at some point before he died.”

  “Not at the moment of his death?”

  “No. It was when he was still wearing his shirt.”

  Sebastian turned to gaze at the fair curls and full cheeks of the silent face on Paul Gibson’s granite slab. Dominic Stanton had probably thought himself a downy one, awake on every suit. Whereas in fact, he’d been little more than a child. A scared child. “Jesus.”

  His gaze rose to the enameled basin on a nearby table, where something bloody and vaguely familiar lay. “The object he had stuffed in his mouth, what was it?”

  Gibson followed his stare. “The hoof of a goat. It probably came from a butcher’s stall. Whoever dismembered that goat was far more familiar with a cleaver than the man who hacked up Stanton’s legs. Any idea what it signifies?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “No. According to Lovejoy, Barclay Carmichael had a page from a ship’s log stuffed in his mouth.”

  Gibson nodded. “I spoke to Martin, the surgeon who did the postmortem on young Carmichael.” His lip quivered in disdain. “The man’s a bloody idiot. I asked him if the body showed signs of having been bound and gagged before death, and he said he’d never thought to notice. But you were right: Carmichael’s throat was slit and the body drained of all blood. The flesh was hacked from his arms.”

  “Not the legs?”

  “No. Just the arms.”

  Sebastian wal
ked around the slab. He had to force himself to look, really look, at the mangled boy. “Barclay Carmichael’s body was found at dawn in St. James’s Park,” he said, “hanging upside down from a mulberry tree. Dominic Stanton was found in Old Palace Yard, again at dawn. Both very public places. Both young men were last seen the night before their deaths by friends whom they then left. Sometime between when they were last seen and when their bodies were discovered at dawn, both young men were set upon by at least one assailant, perhaps more. They were taken God only knows where, stripped of their shirts, their throats slit, and the blood drained from their bodies. Then the killer—or killers—hacked the flesh from Carmichael’s arms and from Stanton’s legs and dumped the bodies where they’d be quickly found the next morning.” He glanced up to find Gibson watching him. “Does that sound right?”

  “I’d say so, yes.”

  Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Was there nothing to indicate where Stanton might have been killed?”

  “Just these.” Gibson walked over to pluck what looked like pieces of straw from the table and hold them out. “I found one in his hair, the others caught in his shirt and coat.”

  Sebastian took the fragile stems between his fingers and sniffed. “It’s hay.”

  “I asked Martin if Barclay Carmichael had hay in his hair and clothes. He said yes—although he couldn’t imagine why it might be significant.” Reaching for the sheet, Gibson shook it out over the body, his motions unexpectedly gentle as he smoothed the covering over the boy’s mutilated feet. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the silent, shrouded form before him. When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “What kind of person would do something like this? Butcher a human body like a slab of meat?”

  “You do it.”

  Gibson looked up, his lips pressed together so tightly that two white lines bracketed his mouth. “I dissect cadavers for knowledge, to help save lives, and I respect and honor every body that comes to me. Whoever killed those two young men was acting out some twisted hatred, not pursuing any scientific inquiry. He desecrated their bodies in a way that violates every standard of decency, every tenet of civilization as we know it.”

  “Yet we’ve both seen men do such things—and worse. Well-bred young men of birth and fortune.”

  There was a silence as both men’s thoughts drifted back to another time and another place, and a fellow officer who had once delighted in the pain and dismemberment of his enemies.

  “That was war,” said Gibson. “This isn’t war. And besides, he’s not here.”

  “No, this isn’t war. But he is here in London.”

  “Quail?” said Gibson.

  Sebastian nodded. “Captain Peter himself.”

  Captain Peter Quail was not the kind of fellow officer one easily forgot. A tall, lanky barrister’s son from Devon with corn-flower blue eyes, a shank of straight blond hair, and a ready laugh that came loud and often, he had served with Gibson and Sebastian in Portugal. He was every regiment’s dream with a cricket bat and poetry in motion on horseback. And he had taken a fiendishly sadistic delight in butchering informers—or men he suspected of being informers. He used to dump his victims’ mutilated bodies on their families’ doorsteps. As time passed, he developed what he considered his calling card—various parts of his victims’ anatomy sliced off and stuffed into their mouths.

  “I’d heard he lost an arm at Ciudad Rodrigo.”

  “He did. But he was able to use an inheritance from his wife’s people to buy a transfer to the Horse Guards.” Commissions in the Horse Guards were the most expensive in the Army.

  Gibson stared at the silent figure before them. “What possible reason could he have to do this?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sebastian. “Maybe he simply developed a taste for it.”

  “I want you to find someone for me,” Sebastian told his tiger, Tom, as he drew Sebastian’s curricle up before the surgery.

  Tom handed over the chestnuts’ reins and scrambled back onto his perch. “Who?”

  “A captain in the Horse Guards named Quail. Peter Quail.”

  Chapter 15

  Kat set the casquet at a rakish angle on her head, then turned this way and that, studying her reflection in the shop’s looking glass. Once she’d dressed in rags, a frightened child alone on the streets of London who’d learned to beg and steal just to stay alive. Now she owned a wardrobe full of clothes, but it wasn’t enough. It would never be enough to make her forget.

  After the death of her mother and stepfather, Kat had found a brief refuge with her mother’s sister, an ostentatiously religious woman named Emma Stone. Determined to prevent Kat from following her mother’s path to sin and damnation, Aunt Emma had wielded her whip with brutal purpose. But it was the lecherous advances of Mr. Stone that had finally driven Kat to escape into the night. The experience had left her with a bitter contempt for sanctimonious piety and a child’s delight in the joys of soft sheets and fine clothing.

  This particular hat’s brim was of cherry velvet, with a bunch of silk flowers tucked beneath a darker ribbon at the crown, and the entire effect was—

  “Charming,” said a deep male voice behind her.

  Kat spun around to find a tall, dark-haired man regarding her through a quizzing glass. Nattily dressed in buff-colored breeches, an olive coat, and gleaming Hessians, he leaned casually against the frame of the shop’s open doorway. Behind him, she could see the bright sunshine of a fine September afternoon, the street crowded with dowagers and matrons in elegant carriages and town bucks on horseback. Yet she felt—and understood herself to be—utterly alone.

  She knew him, of course. His name was Colonel Bryce Epson-Smith. Once an officer in the Hussars, he had for some three or four years served as the personal agent of Charles, Lord Jarvis, cousin to the King and the acknowledged power behind the Regent.

  “Why, thank you.” Lifting the cheery confection from her head, Kat reached for a chip hat with a forest green velvet band and a matching wisp of a veil. “Or do you prefer this one?”

  “Why not take both?”

  Kat smiled. “Why not, indeed?” She turned to the woman behind the counter, a thin slip of a thing who had suddenly gone very quiet. “Wrap them up for me.”

  Dropping his quizzing glass, Epson-Smith pushed away from the doorframe and took a step toward her. “Miss Boleyn will be sending someone to pick them up.” He spoke to the girl behind the counter, but he kept his gaze on Kat.

  Kat met his inflexible stare. “I’d rather take them with me now.”

  “Unfortunately, that won’t be possible. Lord Jarvis would like a word with you. He doesn’t appreciate being kept waiting.”

  In spite of herself, Kat knew a flutter of fear. People had been known to simply disappear when Jarvis expressed an interest in seeing them. Others were later found dead, dumped in outlying fields after frightening things had been done to their tormented bodies. “And if I refuse?”

  Epson-Smith’s eyes were gray and hard. It took all of Kat’s courage and determination to continue to hold his stare. “I don’t think you’re that stupid.”

  Chapter 16

  That afternoon, following a tip from Tom, Sebastian tracked Captain Peter Quail to the horse auction yard of Tattersall’s.

  Even in that crowd, Captain Quail was easy enough to spot: a tall, blond-haired man with the left sleeve of his regimentals hanging conspicuously empty. He was inspecting a carriage horse, a glossy bay with a gracefully arching neck and regally held tail, when Sebastian came up behind him.

  “Showy,” said Sebastian. “But a bit short in the back, wouldn’t you say?”

  Quail turned, the expression on his face closed and watchful. “I wouldn’t have said so, no. But then, you always did have the best horses in the regiment.”

  “I heard you’d purchased a transfer to the Horse Guards. How comforting for your wife to have you once again by her side.”

  Quail’s eyes narrowed. When they’d served together in the Peninsu
la, Quail had never been without a Portuguese mistress, sometimes keeping two whores at a time. “What’s this about, Devlin? I don’t flatter myself that you’ve sought me out simply for the sake of auld lang syne.”

  Sebastian ran one hand down the bay’s neck. She really was a splendid animal. “I suppose I’m curious. You didn’t by any chance know a young gentleman named Dominic Stanton?”

  “You mean the lord’s son who just got himself butchered?” Quail gave an abrupt huff of laughter. “Not hardly.”

  “Yet you’ve heard what happened to him.”

  “Who in London has not?”

  The bay nosed Sebastian’s pockets, looking for a carrot. “What about Barclay Carmichael? Did you know him?”

  A muscle twitched along the man’s handsome jawline, his nostrils flaring on a quickly indrawn breath. “I know where you’re going with this.”

  “I should rather think you would,” said Sebastian, his attention seemingly all for the horse. “That’s what happens when you acquire a reputation for torture and mutilation. Young men start showing up butchered, and suspicion naturally turns toward you.”

  Quail’s chest swelled, the brass on his regimentals gleaming in the late-afternoon light. “I did what I did in Portugal for King and country.”

  “And loved every minute of it, didn’t you?” Sebastian turned to study the man beside him. “So what happened? Did you acquire a taste for it, and then find you missed it when you had nothing to do besides parade up and down the Mall and provide an ornamental backdrop for the Prince?”

  Quail stared back at him, breathing hard but saying nothing.

  The afternoon sun struck the dust in the air, turning it to gold. The smell of expensive horseflesh and manure drifted on the afternoon breeze. “Where were you Saturday night, anyway?” Sebastian asked.

  “At home. In bed with my wife.” Quail leaned in close, his blue eyes like ice. “Why? Whose bed were you in? My lord.”