lips and squint as he drained his glass again. “So why did Hayes really come to see you?”
“I told ye: ’E wanted t’ thank me.”
“You weren’t tempted to turn him in?”
Tintwhistle’s eyes bulged. “Hell, no. Grace’d gut me fer even thinkin’ o’ such a thing.”
Sebastian refilled the man’s glass. “Do you know why Hayes came back to England?”
“Said ’e ’ad somethin’ ’e ’ad t’ do. I didn’t ask ’im what. Ain’t too hard t’ figure out, though, if’n ye gets me drift?”
“You mean, you think he came back here to kill someone.”
“Ain’t no other reason I can think of, now, is there? Well, is there?”
“Who do you think he came to kill?”
“That cousin o’ ’is, of course.”
“Can you think of anyone else?”
“Well, if I were ’im, I reckon meybe I’d wanna kill me da too. That old Earl was one nasty son of a bitch. But he’s already dead, ain’t ’e?”
“How about someone Hayes quarreled with while at the Red Lion? Anyone?”
“Nah. Weren’t a real quarrelsome fellow, ’is nibs.”
“He was convicted of murder.”
“Yeah. Well, sometimes things happen different from what we expect ’em to.” Tintwhistle emptied his glass again and squinted at the brandy bottle. “Anythin’ left in there?”
* * *
“Four men?” said Hero after Sebastian relayed the conversation to her when they were alone after dinner. “Hayes told Tintwhistle any one of four men could have hired the ex-Runner to follow him?”
“Four,” said Sebastian. They were sitting in the drawing room, Hero drinking a cup of tea with the cat on her lap, Sebastian with a glass of port. “Seaforth and LaRivière, obviously, and possibly Brownbeck. He seems a bit of a stretch, although he could have feared Hayes was nursing a grudge over his refusal to allow him to marry Kate. But that still leaves one.”
“The fourth could be Forbes.”
Sebastian took a slow sip of his port. “Perhaps. Hayes did once run off with the man’s wife, but it also seems something of a stretch.” He swirled the dark fortified wine in his glass. “The problem is, why didn’t whoever hired Titus Poole simply turn Hayes over to the authorities rather than setting an ex-Runner to follow him?”
“Perhaps that was the intent. But then Hayes confronted Poole and was killed in the resultant struggle.”
“It’s a scenario that would make more sense if Hayes hadn’t been hit in the back with a sickle.”
“There is that.” Hero sipped her tea in silence for a moment. “It’s interesting that, unlike Lady Forbes, Mott Tintwhistle had no trouble at all believing that Nicholas Hayes came back to London to kill someone.”
“I suspect that, in some ways, Tintwhistle knew Hayes’s capacity for violence far better than the former Miss Kate Brownbeck.”
“Do you believe Tintwhistle’s claim that they broke into the old Earl of Seaforth’s house simply to take a watch?”
“It seems a reckless thing to do, I’ll admit. But then, Nicholas was only twenty—and very, very angry with his father. So I can see it, yes.”
The cat jumped down, and Hero rose from her chair to go stand at the bowed front window overlooking the street. The window was open to the evening air in the hopes of catching a breeze, but the room was still hot.
She was silent for a moment, her gaze on the street below. Then she said, “I keep looking, hoping he’ll come back—Ji, I mean. I don’t understand why he is staying away from Grace and Jules Calhoun.”
“It doesn’t make sense unless he’s afraid.”
“Of what?”
“Someone who knew about his ties to both Chick Lane and this house. Someone like Titus Poole and whoever hired him.”
She glanced over at him. “If Ji is Hayes’s son—and if Hayes somehow managed to marry the boy’s mother and Ji can prove it—he would be the rightful heir to his grandfather’s earldom, would he not?”
“I think he’d have a very good case to make. And it might explain one thing that’s been bothering me.”
“What’s that?”
“Why Hayes brought the child back to England with him.”
She drew a deep breath. “Would Seaforth do such a thing, do you think? Kill both Nicholas and that little boy, I mean.”
“To keep his titles and estates?” Sebastian drained his port and set aside the glass. “I don’t think he’s a particularly evil man, but he is weak. And weak men can do some surprisingly evil things when they convince themselves that they’re the victims in a situation—which they are very good at doing.”
“Dear God,” whispered Hero, her gaze on the dark, hot street below. “Where is that poor