home to the uncles and sons of kings. Now it was mostly gone, marked only here and there by a half-demolished tower or the fragment of a wall, with most of the rest swept away for the construction of the grand new bridge slowly inching toward completion. Only the small fifteenth-century chapel of Henry VII was to be spared, and it was there that the bodies of Theo Brownbeck and Sir Lindsey Forbes lay.
“How long have they been here?” asked Sebastian, walking up to where Lovejoy stood huddled beneath an umbrella.
The magistrate looked pale in the torches’ light. “A while, I suspect—most likely since last night. They were only discovered by chance when an ex-soldier went searching for someplace to get out of the rain. From the looks of things, it appears that Brownbeck knifed Forbes, and then, as he was dying, Forbes shot Brownbeck.”
“Lovely.”
The two men were near the southern end of the old Tudor chapel, their bodies hidden from both stray passersby and the bridge’s workmen by the crumbling remnants of the stone walls that had once connected the chapel to the rest of the complex. Forbes had fallen on his left side, his head thrown back as if in agony, his right arm extended. The knife that had killed him was still buried in his chest; a flintlock pistol lay in the rubble-strewn weeds near his outflung hand. Brownbeck was flat on his back some eight to ten feet away, one knee bent awkwardly, the chest of his old-fashioned waistcoat dark with his blood.
Sebastian went first to hunker down beside the dead banker. Forbes’s shot had caught Brownbeck square in the chest and probably killed him almost instantly. His jaw was slack, his eyes open and sunken, his body stiff with rigor mortis and wet from the rain.
“I think you’re right about the timing,” said Sebastian, pushing up to go take a better look at Forbes. The knife had been thrust into the East India Company man’s chest at such an angle that it had slid in under the ribs, right into the heart. And that struck Sebastian as odd.
“What in the bloody hell were they doing here last night?” said Sebastian, rising to his feet.
“It’s peculiar, isn’t it?” A wind gusted up, and Lovejoy hunched his shoulders against the driving rain. “A couple of the lads were interviewing Mr. Brownbeck’s servants when word came that the bodies had been found. According to his valet, Brownbeck went out late in the afternoon of Nicholas Hayes’s murder and came back several hours later with blood on his cuffs.”
“The valet is certain of the day?”
“He is. He’s been with Brownbeck for more than twenty years, and when he read about Hayes’s murder in the papers the next morning, he naturally found himself thinking about that blood. So he spoke to Brownbeck’s coachman and discovered that Brownbeck had driven up to Somer’s Town that evening.”
And yet neither man said a thing, thought Sebastian. But then, good positions were hard to find.
“We sent word to the palace as soon as we knew what had occurred here,” Lovejoy was saying. “The papers are to be told that footpads were seen in the area, and a couple of ruffians will no doubt pay the ultimate price—quickly, of course, to calm the inevitable public nervousness.”
“Of course,” said Sebastian.
Lovejoy blew out a long, troubled breath. “At least it’s over and the murderer is dead, even if his infamy will never be known.”
It was raining harder now, and Sebastian stared off across the darkened ruins toward the looming shadow of the unfinished bridge. “I think there’s little doubt that Brownbeck killed Nicholas Hayes, Irvine Pennington, and Adele Bowers. But I’m not convinced that all is as it seems here.”
Lovejoy stared at him. “You’re not?”
Sebastian found himself studying the ungainly sprawl of the banker’s body. “What are the odds that Theo Brownbeck—whom I suspect never killed anyone in his life up until just over a week ago—would manage to hit Sir Lindsey’s heart with his first dagger thrust?”
Lovejoy frowned. “It’s unusual, I’ll admit.”
“And then Sir Lindsey—who admittedly began his career in the military but was already dying with a knife in his chest—likewise managed to shoot Brownbeck right in the heart?”
Lovejoy blinked against the wind-driven rain. “Oh dear.”
Sebastian said, “You’ve sent to the deadhouse for a couple of shells?”
“Yes. They should be here soon.”
“Good. I’d like to hear what Paul Gibson has to say about this.”
* * *
Saturday, 18 June
Gibson must have started work on the autopsies