on his head. “I’ve been wondering if your ability to recall that day might have been hampered by the stress of testifying at an inquest. It’s a shocking thing, murder. It can make it difficult for a man to remember the exact sequence of events.” Sebastian paused. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“Aye,” said the gardener, the big bones of his jaw flexing beneath the skin.
“I’m told you’re a good, reliable gardener, a responsible man.” It wasn’t true, of course; Sebastian knew nothing about Aikens beyond his own observations. “That kind of man tends to check his tools and make certain they’re clean and in good order before he puts them away for the day. So I’m wondering if perhaps you actually realized you’d left your sickle in that clearing earlier than you thought when you were trying to remember things at the inquest. Now, some men might simply shrug and put off retrieving a tool until the next morning. But a responsible man like yourself wouldn’t do that, would he, Mr. Aikens? That kind of man would go back right away.”
Aikens stared out across the rose garden to where a couple of crows were pecking at a section of recently turned earth. When the silence stretched out, Sebastian said, “About what time was it when you reached the clearing?”
For a moment, Sebastian thought his gambit had failed. But Bernie Aikens was obviously a man with a conscience, and the lie he’d told at the inquest must have been weighing heavily upon his soul. He leaned his body into the ladder and brought up both hands to swipe them down over his face and cover his mouth. “I don’t know what time it was, exactly,” he said, his voice half-muffled by his hands. “We start picking up and puttin’ stuff away an hour before closing time, so it was about then.”
“And Nicholas Hayes was already dead by the time you arrived at the clearing?”
Aikens nodded and swallowed hard.
“What did you do?”
He squeezed his eyes shut, as if he could somehow block out the bloody vision that he must be seeing over and over again in his mind. “I didn’t know what to do. At first, all I could think about was just grabbing me sickle and gettin’ out of there. But I realized quick enough that’d be a mistake. I mean, what if somebody’d seen me with that bloody sickle and thought I was the one who’d killed the fellow?”
You’d have been hanged, thought Sebastian. But all he said was “So what did you do?”
Aikens swallowed. “Nothin’. I jist turned around and walked away. I was shakin’ so bad, I was afraid me legs was gonna give out beneath me.”
“Did you see anyone else in that part of the gardens?”
“No. No one. I was walkin’ fast, trying to get as far away as I could, and it was late enough that the gardens was already startin’ to empty—folks know we close early on Thursdays. The only person I seen in that part of the shrubbery at all was Mrs. Bowers.”
“Who’s she?”
“A milliner. Comes here often, she does, which is how I happen to know her.”
Sebastian took a breath, and for a moment he was seeing not dripping trees and a heavy gray sky but an aging widow with a bruised neck lying dead on a stone slab. “A milliner?”
“Aye. Heard she was found murdered herself just the other day. I’m tellin’ ye, the streets has gotten right dangerous, they have. I mean, who’d want to kill some old widow woman who never done anybody any harm?” Bernie Aikens turned his head to look directly at Sebastian as if earnestly seeking an answer to his question. “Who’d do that?”
Chapter 54
M rs. Bowers?” said Paul Gibson, staring at Sebastian. The surgeon was in his favorite pub, sitting on one of the high-backed benches and eating a plate of roast beef when Sebastian tracked him down. “Why do you want to know about her?”
Sebastian slid onto the bench opposite him. The day was so dark and cloudy that the pub had its oil lamps lit against the gloom. “Because I think the same man who killed Nicholas Hayes also murdered her.”
Gibson’s jaw sagged and he stopped chewing, his eyes widening. Then he swallowed, hard. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“But . . . why would he?”
“For the same reason he killed Irvine Pennington: because she saw him that evening.”
“But . . . how would he even know who she was? Dozens of people must have seen him at the gardens that