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A sudden fear turned Grey’s bowels to water. Christ, could it be Nessie?
“When you say her mother wouldn’t know her—had she . . . been in the water long?”
Quarry cast him a puzzled look.
“She wasn’t in the water at all. Had her face beaten in.”
He felt bile rise at the back of his throat. Had the little whore gone nosing about, in hopes of helping him further, and been murdered for her interference? If she had died on his account, and in such a way . . . Uncorking the bottle of wine, he took a deep swallow, and another, then handed it to Quarry.
“Good idea. She’s niffy as a Frenchman’s arse; been dead a day or two.” Harry tilted up the bottle and drank, looking somewhat happier afterward. “Nice stuff, that.”
Grey saw Tom Byrd cast a look of longing at the bottle, but Quarry kept firm hold of it as he led the way through the brick-paved stables.
Magruder was waiting for them outside the shed, with one of his constables.
“My lord.” Magruder inclined his head, looking curiously at Grey. “What happened to—”
“Where did you find her?” Grey interrupted.
“In Saint James’s Park,” the constable replied. “In the bushes by the path.”
“Where?” Grey said incredulously. Saint James’s was the preserve of merchants and aristocrats, where the young, the rich, and the fashionable strolled to see and be seen. Magruder shrugged, slightly defensive.
“People out for an early walk found her—or rather, their dog did.” He stepped back, ushering the soldiers ahead of him through the door to the tack room. “There was considerable blood.”
Grey’s first thought upon seeing the body was that the constable was a master of understatement. His second was a sense of profound relief; the body was in fact fairly flat-chested, but was much too tall to be Nessie. The hair was darker than the Scottish whore’s, too—nearly black—and while it was thick and wavy, it was nothing like Nessie’s wild curly mane.
The face was essentially gone; obliterated in a frenzy of blows from something like the back of a spade or a fireplace poker. Suppressing his distaste—Quarry had been right about the smell—Grey circled slowly about the table on which the corpse had been laid.
“Think it’s the same?” Quarry asked, watching him. “The dress, I mean. You’ve an eye for such things.”
“I am fairly sure that it is. The lace . . .” He nodded at the wide trim on the gown, which matched the edging of the kerchief. The kerchief itself straggled loose across the table, torn and soaked in blood, but still pi
“Not common, then.” Quarry fingered the tattered rag of the kerchief.
“Not at all.”
Quarry nodded, turning to Magruder.
“I think we shall be wanting a word with a madam named Maggie—house in Meacham Street, you know it? Rather a pity, that,” he added, turning back to Grey with a sigh. “Did like that blonde with the big tits.”
Grey nodded, only half-hearing. The gown itself was so crusted with blood and dirt that the color was almost indistinguishable; only the draggled folds of the skirt still showed emerald green. The smell was very strong in the confined quarters—Quarry had been right, she did reek like a . . .
He bent closer, hands on the table, sniffing deeply. Civet. He’d swear he smelt civet—and something else as well. The corpse was wearing perfume, though the scent was nearly obscured by the earthier reeks of blood and ordure.
She wears a very expensive scent. Civet, vetiver, and orange, if I am not mistaken.He could hear Richard Caswell’s voice in his head, dry as grave flowers. She has dark hair. Nearly black. Your cousin is fair, I believe?”
Excitement and dread tightened his belly as he leaned over the dead woman. It had to be; this was Trevelyan’s mysterious lover. But what had happened to her? Had her husband—if she had one—discovered the affair and taken his revenge? Or had Trevelyan . . .
He sniffed again, eager for confirmation.
Where did women wear perfume? Behind the ears—no, not a chance; the corpse had only one ear and the other was in no condition . . . Between the breasts, perhaps; he’d seen his mother tuck a scented cloth down into the top of her stays before a party.
He ducked his head to inhale more deeply, and saw the small, blackened hole in the center of the bodice, inconspicuous amidst the general carnage.
“I will be damned,” he said, looking up at the phalanx of bemused faces hovering over him. “She’s been shot.”
“Do you want to know summat else, me lord?” The whisper came at his elbow. Tom Byrd, by now somewhat inured to nasty sights, had edged his way close, and was looking at the corpse’s smashed face in fascination.
“What’s that, Tom?”
The boy’s finger floated tentatively across the table, pointing at what Grey had taken for a smudge of dirt behind the jaw.
“She’s got whiskers.”
The corpse was, in fact, that of a man. Striking as that was, though, it was not the main point of remark, once the rags of the green gown had been removed to verify the fact.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in me life,” Harry Quarry said, eyeing the dead man with a combination of disgust and fascination. “You, Magruder?”
“Well, on a woman, now and then,” the constable said, pursing his lips fastidiously. “Some of the whores do it regular, I understand. Bit of a curiosity, like.”
“Oh, whores, yes, of course.” Quarry flapped a hand, indicating that such usage was not only familiar to him, but positively commonplace. “But this is a man, dammit! You’ve never seen such a thing, have you, Grey?”
Grey had, in fact, seen such a thing, and more than once, though it was not an affectation that appealed to him personally. It would scarcely do to say so, though, and he shook his head, widening his eyes in a semblance of shocked incomprehension at the perversity of mankind.
“Mr. Byrd,” he said, making space for Tom to approach closer. “You are our chief expert on the art of shaving; what can you tell us about this?”
Nostrils pinched against the reek of the corpse, Tom the barber’s son motioned for the lantern to be brought closer, and leaned down, squinting in professional fashion along the planes of the body.
“Well,” he said judiciously, “he does it—did it, I mean—regular. More like, someone did it for him—a nice, professional bit of work. See, there’s no cuts, nor yet no scraping—and that’s an awkward bit, round there.” He pointed, frowning. “Hard to manage by yourself, I should think.”
Quarry made a noise that might have been a laugh, but converted it hastily into a wheezing cough.
Byrd, ignoring this, stretched out a hand and ran it very delicately up the corpse’s leg.
“Oh, yes,” he said, in tones of satisfaction. “Feel that, me lord? You can feel the stubble, sharp-ended, like, when you goes against the grain. It gets like that when a man shaves regular. If he shaves no more than once or twice a month, he’s like to get bumps—the hair curls up under the skin as it grows, see? But no bumps here.”
There were not. The corpse’s skin was smooth, devoid of hairs on arms, legs, chest, buttocks and privates. Other than smears of dried blood and caked ordure, and the small black hole of the bullet wound in his chest, only the deep purple-brown of the nipples and the riper tones of the rather well-endowed expanse between the man’s legs interrupted the pale olive perfection of his flesh. Grey thought the gentleman would likely have been quite popular, in certain circles.
“He has stubble. So the shaving took place before death?” Grey asked.
“Oh, yes, me lord. Like I said—he does it regular.”
Quarry scratched his head.