answers out of him now.” He glanced over at Sebastian. “You’ve still no idea who hired him to follow Hayes?”
“No. There are four obvious possibilities—namely Forbes, Brownbeck, LaRivière, and Seaforth.”
Lovejoy looked over at him in surprise. “You suspect Seaforth, even though he’s dead?”
“For all we know, Poole got nervous and killed him. The problem is, while I have some suspicions, I’ve nothing specific that ties any of the four to Poole. They all knew Hayes was in England, and each had good reason to believe he was here to kill them. But that doesn’t mean one of them decided to kill him first.”
Lovejoy gave a sad shake of his head. “And you say that all the while, Hayes was here simply trying to find someone to take care of his child after his death. What a tragedy it all is. You’ve seen no sign of this little girl?”
“Not since Lady Devlin stopped Seaforth’s men from grabbing her in Clerkenwell.”
Lovejoy shook his head again. “At least we know she was still alive as of yesterday.”
“Yes,” said Sebastian.
But he knew from the pain in Lovejoy’s eyes that the magistrate found no more comfort in the thought than did Sebastian himself.
Later, after the men from the deadhouse had carried away Titus Poole’s body and the officials from Bow Street left, Sebastian sat with the newly widowed Mrs. Poole beside the Bell’s big, old-fashioned kitchen fireplace.
She was a plump woman probably somewhere in her forties, with a massive bosom and a plain, sad face. The extraordinarily fair hair she had passed on to her children was now mingled with white. She huddled close to the fire, for with the rain had come a cold that felt biting after so many unseasonably hot days. She was shivering with reaction, her shoulders rounded as she held a handkerchief to her eyes with one hand.
Sebastian said, “You need to tell me who hired your husband to follow Nicholas Hayes.” He’d almost said to kill Nicholas Hayes, but he reasoned he’d be more likely to get an answer out of her if he didn’t force her to admit she’d known her husband was in the habit of killing people for money.
She gave a faint shudder and sucked in an audible breath, but otherwise she remained silent.
Sebastian said, “Poole is dead. He just tried to kill me in front of your own son. Telling me whom he was working for won’t stain his memory any blacker than he’s already done himself.”
She brought her hand down to twist the handkerchief between her fingers in her lap. Her face was pale and distorted with shock, but he was surprised to see that her eyes were dry. “I don’t know,” she whispered, keeping her head bowed. “Truly I don’t. He didn’t tell me those sorts of things.”
“Do you know when he was hired?”
She pressed her lips together and nodded. “He came home maybe two weeks ago, flush with money and bragging about how he had a new job. But he didn’t say who for.”
“Do you know if he’d worked for this particular man in the past?” Sir Lindsey Forbes had admitted to knowing Poole.
“No. He didn’t say.”
“How much did you know about the work he did?”
She shifted her gaze to the fire, the orange glow from the flames touching her ashen face with hellish color. “He’d talk to me sometimes about how clever he was, working deals with both thieves and their victims. There wasn’t nothing he liked better than talking about himself, unless maybe it was hearing other people talk about how grand he was. Sometimes I’d hear him bragging in the taproom about how he’d threatened someone and they’d knuckled under, or how he’d cheated some flat.”
“Did you know he killed people?”
She was silent for a moment, her heavy breasts lifting with her strained breathing. “When he was courting me, he was ever so nice. I’d never known anyone so gentlemanlike. I thought I was the luckiest woman alive, that he’d chosen me. But we hadn’t been married a week when he hit me—slapped me on the side of my face with the palm of his big, hard hand. Knocked me clear across the room, he did. Said he was sorry afterward, of course—although he also said it was my own fault for talking back to him.” She brought up the handkerchief to press against her lips. “Sometimes he’d hit me for just looking at him wrong. Hit Jonathan and Mary too—even little Rose. So you see, I ain’t sorry