“Oh,” Thornhollow said, after a pause. “That’s . . .” He cleared his throat. “It definitely serves to prove my point.”
Grace tightened her hands on her coffee cup. “Forgive me, Doctor,” she said, the heat from her words lighting her cheeks a bright red. “I didn’t mean—”
“No,” he interrupted her. “Do not apologize. You did mean. You meant every word exactly as you said it. And no one, least of all me, will ever judge you for that.”
She looked down into the swirling dregs of her coffee, as the headache gained traction. “Thank you,” she said.
“As I was saying, your proposed actions illustrate my point very well. And now a second scenario. I want you to imagine that you need money. You’re a poor girl on the streets and you may starve before the day is out. You see a well-dressed man on the corner in the dark of night. You’re going to kill him and take his money. How will you do it?”
“I . . .” Grace’s voice faltered as she pictured the scene. Though she came from wealth, she understood desperation, and her mind picked over the imaginary scene.
“I’d pick up a brick, I suppose, or a rock. I’d sneak up on him, hit him on the head, and take his wallet.”
“Precisely,” Thornhollow said. “In our first instance you have a personal connection to the victim—your father. You are motivated by emotion and revenge. You commit the proposed crime with your bare hands, even mutilate his face in order to strip him of the power to look at you as he’s dying.”
“But with the man in the alley I don’t care,” Grace said, filling in the gaps on her own. “I’m killing him because I need his money, not because I want to hurt him. It’s not . . . it’s not personal.”
Thornhollow nodded. “Spot-on. Falsteed was right to call you a quick study. Now, earlier I said that tonight’s murder was a simple one. Why?”
“Because—”
“Wait,” he said, stopping her. “Don’t be too hasty. Close your eyes and see.”
Grace did so, letting her mind slip back into the moments where she’d stood immobile on the wet bricks, the rivulets of blood trailing past her shoes.
“He was shot in the head,” she said, her eyes roving over where the body lay on the ground. “In the face,” she corrected.
“And so?”
“So . . . the killer probably knew him. They wanted to disfigure him.”
“Not only that”—Thornhollow’s voice sidled into her reverie—“but the killer also wanted to be seen by attacking from the front. The killer wanted the victim to know who was taking his life.”
“They knew each other,” Grace said, her eyes still closed while internally roving over the picture in her mind. “He was married,” she said quietly, when she spotted the ring on his left hand.
“He was,” Thornhollow agreed.
Her inner gaze left the body, traveled over the surroundings, lit only by the sputtering gas lamps and the feeble light streaming from the windows of the building the victim was killed in front of. “Why was a married man at a pub in the dead of night?” she asked.
“Why indeed?”
Grace opened her eyes. “You searched his pockets,” she said. “Why?”
“To see if he was robbed. Which he was not.”
“So a married man is shot in the face by someone he knows when leaving a pub in the middle of the night, but he’s not robbed,” Grace said. “His wife killed him.”
“My thoughts as well,” Thornhollow agreed. “For what it’s worth I imagine that in an establishment as run-down as that particular one seemed to be, the women probably serve more than drinks if the price is right. I can’t imagine a wife killing her husband for being thirsty at an inopportune time.”
Grace set her now cold coffee on the edge of Thornhollow’s desk. “You said this was simple, but how do we know if we’re right?”
“I’ll follow up with the officers in the morning. Even they will be smart enough to identify him and go to his house. It’s an unfortunate side effect of matrimony that the majority of people killed participating in it were brought to that pass by their other half.”
“I see,” Grace said, her fingers going to her bandage, where the headache had laid full claim.
“Are you well?” Thornhollow asked.
“Doctor, I’ve been cut to my skull on both sides of my head, traveling with a strange man for days, and pulled from my bed in the dead of night to view a corpse. Oddly, I feel