do you know about her?”
“Not a great deal. Adele is her name—Mrs. Adele Bowers. I’m told she was a milliner up until maybe ten years ago, when her eyesight started to go and the arthritis in her hands got so bad, she couldn’t keep making hats. She was living with her daughter at the time she was killed. That’s who we released the body to—the daughter. Or, rather, to the daughter’s neighbor.”
“Do you recall the daughter’s name?”
“Aye, thanks to the fact that she was named after her mother and has never married: Miss Adele Bowers, of Charles Street.”
* * *
Like her mother, the younger Adele Bowers was also a milliner, and kept a small shop just off Oxford Street. It was a respectable area, and the hats in her shop were well made and fashionable even if they weren’t particularly inspired—the work of a milliner who was able to follow a pattern but lacked the creativity to give her work an innovative flair.
A woman somewhere in her thirties or forties, the younger Adele Bowers was built short like her mother but plump, with a round face and small dark eyes and unremarkable features. Her hair was a lifeless shade somewhere between dark blond and brown, and she wore it tucked up under a neatly starched cap. The cap, like her gown, was of unrelieved black as befitted a woman in deep mourning.
Sebastian’s presence in her shop obviously flustered the milliner greatly. She kept dropping curtsies and calling him “your lordship” or “my lord.” At no point did it seem to occur to her that she didn’t have to answer his questions; nor did she appear to give any thought to why he was there expressing interest in the death of a retired milliner. Her mother’s recent murder was currently consuming Adele’s life, so it didn’t strike her as odd that someone else should find it interesting.
“Sorry about the smell, your lordship,” she said, her hands fisting in the skirt of her black mourning gown. “The thing is, you see, we—or, rather, I suppose I should say ‘I’ since it’s just me now—live upstairs. And we—that is, my brother, Henry, and I—haven’t been able to bury Mama yet. So she’s still up there in our—or my—rooms. We’re hoping to have the funeral tomorrow night, God willing. But they’re ever so expensive these days, aren’t they? Funerals, I mean. And my brother, Henry, he says we can’t bury Mama without having two mutes at her funeral—two mutes, six bearers, and all those expensive ostrich plumes on the horses’ heads! So it’s taking more time than we expected to get everything together. Thank goodness for this cold snap we’re finally having.”
Delays of seven to ten days between a death and a funeral were not uncommon, mainly because of the need to organize—and pay for—an increasingly elaborate funeral. Many people also delayed funerals out of fear of burying an unconscious loved one alive, but in this case, that obviously wasn’t an issue.
Sebastian said, “Your mother was killed last Friday?”
Miss Bowers nodded vigorously and dropped another curtsy. “Last Friday night it was, my lord. She’d gone out the way she did every evening at about that time to take a short constitutional around Soho Square. Only, she never came back. After a while, I got to worrying. She was ever so regular in her habits, you see, and she was never gone long. So I sent Robert—that’s the neighbor’s boy, Robert Owens. He’s a good lad, Robert. Runs errands for us all the time, he does, and is ever so reliable.”
She paused for a moment, the confused look on her face suggesting she’d lost herself in her own parenthesis.
Sebastian said, “You sent Robert to look for her?”
“Oh, yes, your lordship. I sent Robert, and in just a few minutes, he was back again. White as a sheet, he was, and his eyes staring out of his head with fright.”
“He’d found her?”
Miss Bowers nodded. “Somebody’d dragged her back into the alley just off the square. It was Mr. Owens—Robert’s father—who called the constables. He told me not to go look at her, so I didn’t.”
“That was probably wise,” said Sebastian. “Did your mother go to Pennington’s Tea Gardens much?”
“She did, yes, my lord. In fact, she went there the day before she died. She loved walking in those gardens. She had ever so much trouble with the arthritis crippling her hands, you see, so she couldn’t make hats anymore. Sometimes her hip bothered her too, but