his official post mortems and other, less legal activities in a stone outbuilding at the base of the yard behind his ancient house. It was there Sebastian found him that morning, with Nicholas Hayes’s naked body lying faceup on the raised stone slab in the center of the room. Gibson had a scalpel in one hand and was about to make his first cut on the dead man’s chest, but paused when Sebastian’s shadow fell across him.
“Ah, there you are,” said the Irishman, looking up. “Thought I’d be seeing you soon enough. Is it true, what they’re saying? That this is Nicholas Hayes?”
“It seems to be.”
“I thought he died out in Botany Bay.”
“So did everyone,” said Sebastian. “Christ, look at those scars.”
Thick, ugly bands of scar tissue encircled the dead man’s wrists and ankles. Shackles left scars like that on a man, especially when he was forced to do hard labor in them—deep, humiliating marks of base servitude that never, ever went away.
“He must have worn those chains for years, night and day. They obviously festered badly.” Gibson gave a faint, disbelieving shake of his head. “Why the hell would someone like that come back to England?”
“Love? Revenge? Homesickness? I honestly can’t begin to fathom it. What can you tell me about his death?”
“Not a lot so far that you don’t already know, although I’m only just getting started.” Gibson set aside his scalpel. “Here, help me turn him over.”
They rolled the stiff body onto its stomach. The fatal gashes left by the sickle gaped red and raw, but Sebastian found his attention riveted not by the new wounds but by the thick mat of crisscrossing old flogging scars that completely covered Nicholas Hayes’s back.
When he came to, Calhoun had said, he was lying next to a dead man of about the same height, build, and hair color. The fellow was a freeman who’d once been a soldier, and he’d obviously spent some time in irons and been flogged, because his body was scarred. Hayes changed clothes with him, took his papers, and bashed in the dead man’s face with a rock until he was unrecognizable. At the time, Sebastian had wondered how desperate a man would need to be to do such a thing. Now he understood.
“He’s lucky to have survived that flogging,” said Gibson. “Looks like two hundred lashes or more, laid on hard.”
“I’d be surprised if he was only flogged once.”
They called them “special prisoners” out at Botany Bay: men who could read and write, and who were unlucky enough to talk like gentlemen. The soldiers tended to single such men out for particularly harsh treatment. They didn’t usually survive long.
Sebastian shifted his focus from Hayes’s old flogging scars to the wounds that had killed him. “Looks like he was hit with that sickle—what? Two or three times?”
“Depends on how you count them.” Gibson turned to pick up the bloodstained sickle from a shelf that ran across the back of the room. “The blade on this thing is razor-sharp, so it wouldn’t have taken much force for the killer to drive it in deep. It looks to me as if he sank the sickle into Hayes’s back, dragging the blade down through the tissue in a kind of swiping slash the first time. Then he yanked it out and sank it in again deeper. The first blow would have stopped Hayes if he were walking away, but it’s probably the second one that dropped him to his knees.”
“Was he still alive then?”
“I’d say so. I’ll know more when I get a good look at the heart, but I suspect that once Hayes fell, your killer grabbed hold of the sickle’s handle again and twisted the blade in the wound, driving it deeper and hitting either the heart or a major artery.”
“Lovely.” Sebastian went to stand in the doorway and look out at the sun-drenched garden that had recently replaced what was once a weed-strewn wasteland.
“You’ve no idea who did it?” said Gibson, watching him.
“At the moment, my only suspect is the man who’s been calling himself the ‘Earl of Seaforth’ all these years—and that’s simply because he has an obvious motive.” Sebastian turned to glance around the room. “Where are his things?”
“There,” said Gibson, nodding to a shelf behind the door where the dead man’s clothes lay neatly folded beside his boots and an old wooden platter containing a fat purse and the other contents of his pockets.
“Doesn’t look like the motive was robbery,” said Sebastian, reaching