Who Speaks for the Damned (Sebastian St. Cyr #15) - C. S. Harris Page 0,26

steps of his Brook Street house, his thoughts lost in the troubled past, when a breathless messenger boy came running up with a note.

“It’s from Sir ’Enry Lovejoy, ’im o’ Bow Street,” said the boy with a gasp.

Sebastian handed the boy a coin and broke the missive’s seal to read Sir Henry’s neat penmanship.

Irvine Pennington found stabbed to death in Cat Alley, Somer’s Town.

Chapter 17

T he tea gardens’ owner lay sprawled on his stomach, arms flung stiffly out at his sides, head turned and eyes open wide as if in shocked disbelief. Flies buzzed furiously around the dried blood on the back of his ripped coat and crawled in and out of his gaping mouth. The heat in the close, rubbish-strewn alley was intense, the stench of death overwhelming. After six years at war, Sebastian was painfully familiar with the sights and smells of death. But sudden, brutal murder still troubled him.

“Looks like he’s been dead for a while, doesn’t it?” he said, hunkering down beside the dead man. “Perhaps as much as a day.”

Lovejoy nodded gravely, a folded handkerchief held over his nose and mouth. “According to his wife, he’s been missing since yesterday morning.”

Sebastian remembered the swift expression of consternation that flitted across Sarah Pennington’s face when he’d asked for her father. We don’t know where he’s taken himself off to. . . .

“Damn,” said Sebastian.

Lovejoy cast a thoughtful look around the noisome alley. “Perhaps we’ve been wrong in our thinking about Nicholas Hayes’s death. Perhaps his murder had nothing to do with who he was and everything to do with where he was. Perhaps we should be looking for a killer with a link to the tea gardens or Somer’s Town rather than to Hayes.”

“Perhaps. Although it’s also possible Pennington is dead because he was working the gardens’ entrance when Hayes’s killer arrived and thus could have identified him. His daughter did say her father spelled her a few times.”

“True.”

Sebastian studied the four or five blood-encrusted slits in the back of the dead man’s coat. “I don’t think our killer used a sickle this time.”

“No.” Lovejoy squinted up at the blazing sun overhead. “I sincerely hope the men from the deadhouse arrive with their shell soon. The stench is appalling.”

* * *

The men from the deadhouse took their time.

While waiting, Lovejoy set his constables to interviewing the villagers in the area. Several people thought they remembered seeing Irvine Pennington the previous day . . . although they weren’t quite sure.

“Passed by here all the time on his way to the Grecian Coffeehouse, he did,” said a stout, middle-aged woman with an oyster stall near the corner. “Always thought it queer. I mean, what’s a fellow with his own tea gardens doin’ goin’ t’ a coffeehouse? Hmm?” But she couldn’t recall for certain if she’d seen him that Friday. “Could’ve been the day before,” she admitted. “One day’s pretty much like the other, ye know?”

The owner of the coffeehouse, a Mr. Ned Dashiell, had the same problem. “I think he was here yesterday, but I couldn’t say for sure. He didn’t come this morning, though. That I do know.”

All the villagers agreed on one point: They hadn’t seen anything or anyone suspicious lately.

Sebastian said, “If Nicholas Hayes’s killer is methodical enough to eliminate the person who took his money at the entrance to the tea gardens, then I suspect he was careful to make certain he wasn’t seen again.”

“I almost hope you’re right,” said Lovejoy, his face pink with the heat, “because whoever this killer is, he’s ruthless. Ruthless and deadly.”

* * *

Clarendon Square lay to the west of Pennington’s Tea Gardens, just on the edge of where the shops and houses of Somer’s Town gave way to the rolling hills and open fields of the countryside. Built in the last decades of the eighteenth century on the site of what had once been a Life Guards’ barracks, the square formed a vast rectangle around an unusual inner ring of newish houses with curving facades known as the Polygon.

When Hero arrived at the square midway through the morning, she found only two performers—a harpist who had set up near the French Catholic chapel and a hurdy-gurdy player on a far corner. But like so many street musicians, both were blind, and the hurdy-gurdy player was so awful that Hero suspected the residents paid him to go away. In the end, she decided to interview a penny-profile cutter—a sad-eyed, middle-aged German woman who cut silhouettes out of black