"I haven't been defrocked," she said. She touched the cloth over the dead man's slashed throat and drew her hand quickly to the side, as if considering force and angle.
"His throat was cut from behind," Sebastien said. He'd noticed the slope of the wound from deep to shallow, as well. "Or by a left-handed assailant."
Abby Irene twisted her hands together and glared doubtfully at the shroud. "How squeamish are you, 'Mr. Nast'?"
The question shocked him into inappropriate laughter, but after a moment's stare, the implications of her question sank in, and she laughed as well. "Not particularly, I take it? Good then. Help me roll this young man over." She rummaged in her bag, and while Sebastien stripped down the sheet again she drew forth a pair of rubberized gloves and various arcane implements: balls of cotton, forceps, covered watch-glasses and the like.
Even on second viewing, the deep bloodless gashes in his flanks and thighs resembled an inept butcher's work. He understood her intent quite plainly. "You think he may have been raped?"
"I think the murderer may have been a. . .a trick," she said. "And if he left behind any traces, then we can prove that both murders were committed by the same person."
"These weren't streetwalkers," Sebastien said. "They had a limited—and exclusive—clientele."
"Indeed. I don't suppose we know anyone who we could ask about their patrons?"
Carefully, impersonally, Sebastien rolled the body onto its stomach, avoiding the worst of the wounds. "Yes," he said. "As a matter of fact, we do."
* * *
Sebastien delivered Abby Irene to her hotel and returned to Phoebe's house before sunrise, where he found Jack at the table, either risen early or waiting up. The morning newspaper sat unfolded on the table before him, heedless of Phoebe's white linens.
The headline justified the carelessness.
It read, quite simply, WAR.
"Oh," Sebastien said, and sat down beside him.
"I tailed Epaphras last night," Jack said. "While you were out with Lady Abigail Irene."
Sebastien hid a frown with his hand. Yes, she wasn't D.C.I. Garrett any longer, was she? "I wish you'd be more careful."
"And huddle like a rabbit from the shadow of a hawk?"
It wasn't the force of Jack's stare that set Sebastien back in his chair, but it certainly felt like it. "If that's the metaphor that pleases you."
Jack turned his cup on the saucer, one fingertip on the peaked handle. "I know better than the others what's at risk," he said. "But you need to know what dangers he's brought down on you, Sebastien, and if he won't tell you and you won't force the issue, someone needs to find out for you."
"And what did you learn?" Sebastien put a hand on Jack's to still him. Jack glanced up, blue eyes quite brilliant in his pallid face.
"Nothing," Jack said. "Nothing useful. He is staying in a pleasant enough rooming house; he had joined a gentleman's club. He did nothing untoward, I noticed no-one else observing him, and he met no one who might have been a courtesan." He shrugged. "I'll try again tonight."
"Be careful," Sebastien said, because it was all he could say. He could forbid Jack, of course.
But Jack would not obey. Any more than he would obey Sebastien if
Sebastien asked him to stay out of the kind of pubs where armchair revolutionaries congregated.
He stood, scraped the chair back, and leaned over the table to kiss Sebastien on the mouth. Sebastien let him, hands flat on the ink-marked tablecloth, and stretched without rising to kiss him back. Jack's lips were wet, warm, flavored with the unpleasant herbal pungency of tea and the nauseating sweetness of sugar. "I always am," Jack said, and patted Sebastien's shoulder before he went upstairs to bed.
* * *
It wasn't difficult to discover where the courtesan in the domino mask lived: not far from the two murdered boys, which was as Sebastien would have wagered. He presented himself at the servant's door slightly after sunset, when he expected she would still be at home. Of course, if he missed her, there was always the salon for a second chance, but he'd prefer to speak first in private.
His knock apparently startled the scullery maid, but a good suit and a silver-headed cane opened many doors, including this one. And if she seemed inclined to shut it in his face again quite promptly, a silver shilling slipped into her hand with his visiting card corrected the matter. "I must speak with Madame," he