Page 25 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)
As if pushed by an unseen hand, the dead man’s ragged, limp body swayed gently back and forth in the chapel’s dank air. Sir Henry Lovejoy stood beside the dangling corpse, his head tilted back as he followed the rope’s taut line up to the dark beam above. The killer had hanged Harry McGregor in almost exactly the same spot as Lord Preston, near the chapel’s broken rear wall. Except this time he’d fastened the rope around his victim’s neck rather than the dead man’s foot.
“Unbelievable, isn’t it?” said the magistrate as Sebastian walked up to him.
“Yes.” Sebastian breathed in the odor of damp old stone tinged with the coppery smell of fresh blood. “Who found him?”
“An ex-soldier. Says he crawled in here just after midnight looking for a place to sleep and didn’t notice the body until he awoke this morning at first light.”
“Well, that gives us a pretty narrow time of death, then,” said Sebastian. “I saw McGregor myself just before nine last night. He was waiting for me when I arrived home from the inquest.”
Lovejoy stared at him. “Whatever for?”
“He’d heard Bow Street was considering him a suspect in Lord Preston’s murder and he was afraid you might hang him again.”
“How bizarre. He must have left Brook Street and then for some reason come here. The question is… Why? ”
Sebastian shook his head, his gaze on the former convict’s sun-darkened features, now slack-jawed and oddly calm. This was not the bloated, contorted face of a man who’d strangled to death at the end of a rope. Then the wind caught the body again, spinning it around in a way that flapped open the dead man’s ragged coat, and Sebastian saw the bloody, torn mess of his chest. “He was shot?”
“So it appears,” said Lovejoy. “I suppose it’s possible the two deaths—his and Lord Preston’s—aren’t related in any way beyond their location. Men like McGregor do tend to keep dangerous company.”
Sebastian looked over at him. “Except that if the two murders aren’t related, then why hang him here?”
“As some sort of a sick joke, perhaps?”
Sebastian found himself remembering the stricken look on the former convict’s face and the way his hand crept up to touch his throat simply at the mention of the word “neck.” “Hanging the man was a sick joke.”
Lovejoy let out a long, pained breath. “Indeed. Hopefully, he was already dead by then.”
“Hopefully.”
Lovejoy turned to let his gaze drift around the abandoned chapel. “What I’m having difficulty comprehending is why someone who killed a duke’s son would also want to kill a simple thief like McGregor.”
“Given that Harry was following Farnsworth, the killer probably thought McGregor could identify him.” Sebastian fell silent, his gaze on the worn paving stones beneath the dead man’s dangling feet. He could see a few splatters and smears of blood amidst the debris, doubtless the result of the body resting there briefly before it was strung up. But there wasn’t enough blood to suggest that McGregor had been killed at this spot. “Any idea exactly where he was shot?”
Lovejoy nodded. “There’s a fresh spill of blood up near the altar.”
“Again?”
“Again.”
Sebastian was examining the paving stones at the front of the chapel when the sound of raised voices drew their attention to the courtyard, where Lovejoy had stationed one of his constables to keep back any curious onlookers while his partner went off to the deadhouse to fetch a shell and some men to carry the corpse to Tower Hill.
“Oi, hold on!” Constable Jones was shouting. “You can’t go in there!”
“But I’m his sister!” cried a woman. “Ye gotta let me see him. Don’t ye understand? I gotta know if it’s really Harry they’re sayin’ is dead. Please. ”
Moving to the open doorway, Sebastian could see her now: a short, stout woman with a large shelflike bosom and the heavily muscled arms of someone who worked hard for her living. She looked to be somewhere in her late forties or fifties, her hair pewter gray, the plain features that were so similar to Harry’s contorted with fear and grief. She wore a ragged but clean gown of brown fustian and was frantically twisting her red, work-worn hands in the cloth of the apron she had pinned to her dress.
“Please,” she said again.
“Calm yourself, my good woman,” said Lovejoy as he and Sebastian walked toward her. “Who are you?”
The woman swung to face them. “I’m Sally—Sally McGregor.” She raised one shaky finger to point toward the ruined chapel behind them. “They’re sayin’ me baby brother, Harry, is hangin’ in there. I just want t’ see if it’s really him.” Her voice broke, her features crumpling. “Please tell me it ain’t him.”
Lovejoy cleared his throat awkwardly. “Miss—er, Mrs. McGregor, you must understand that you cannot be allowed to enter the chapel at this time. But I can assure you the dead man is indeed Harry McGregor, and I’m—”
“No!” Her unearthly wail cut him off as she swung away to double over in grief, her arms wrapping around her waist as if to hold herself together. “ Oh, no. Oh, no. Not me Harry. Oh, Harry .”
“Sir Henry,” whispered Constable Jones under his breath as Constable Sutton, now escorting two men from the deadhouse, started to turn in through the arch and then drew up abruptly at the scene before them. “You want I should show—”
“No, I’ll deal with the men from the deadhouse,” said Lovejoy hastily. “You stay here, Constable Jones, and keep an eye on the woman.” To the men he said, “This way.”
As Lovejoy disappeared into the chapel with the men at his heels, Constable Jones planted himself in the doorway, his arms crossed at his chest and his expression grim, as if to convey his determination to block Sally McGregor should she try to force her way into the chapel again.
But all belligerence seemed to have leached out of the woman. “Here,” said Sebastian, walking over to where she now stood slumped against an old mounting block, her entire body heaving with her sobs.
“Thank you,” she whispered, groping almost blindly for the handkerchief he was holding out.
He waited patiently while she cried for some minutes, the handkerchief simply clutched in one clenched fist. Then she sucked in a deep, shaky breath, shuddered, and brought up the handkerchief to dab at her wet face. “Poor Harry,” she said, her eyes pinched with anguish as she raised her head to look at Sebastian. “They’re sayin’ somebody hanged him. Please tell me it ain’t true. He was so, so afraid of being hanged again.”
“His body is hanging,” Sebastian said as gently as he could. “But whoever did it shot him first, so it’s likely he was dead by then. I don’t think he knew what was done to him.”
She began to cry again, but silently now, the tears running freely down her cheeks. “Oh, my poor Harry. Who’d want t’ do somethin’ like that to ’im? Who?”
“You don’t have any idea?”
“No.” Her voice cracked.
“Had he quarreled with anyone recently?”
She shook her head. “Harry wasn’t what you’d call real quarrelsome—at least, not anymore. I ain’t denyin’ he was a scrapper when he was a lad, but Botany Bay…” She swallowed hard. “It changed him.”
“When did he arrive back in London?”
“Last month—or maybe it was the month before. He did fourteen years as a convict in Botany Bay, and then when he’s finally able to earn enough money to buy his passage home again, what does somebody do but up and hang him for good this time! How can that be?” Her lips pressed into a tight line. “It ain’t right.”
“What has he been doing since he came back?”
Her gaze slid away from Sebastian in a way that reminded him of her brother. “Oh, this and that,” she said vaguely. “You know.”
Sebastian suspected he knew only too well. “Do you know if Harry had anything to do with Lord Preston recently?”
She nodded. “Harry was watchin’ him. Swore he was gonna get his own back at the bugger; it was pret’ near all he talked about. I think maybe it was a big part of why he came back—that and because gettin’ home again was all wrapped up in his head with survivin’ the hell of being transported. I told him not to be daft, that if he went after Farnsworth he was gonna get himself hanged again, and there was no way he was gonna get lucky twice. But he just got mad and told me t’ shut up. He didn’t like hearing folk talk about hanging. Didn’t like the way people was always callin’ him Half-Hanged Harry.”
“Do you think he killed Farnsworth?”
She stared at him. “Harry? Nah. I ain’t saying he didn’t want to, mind you. But Sarah and me—she’s my granddaughter, ye see—we was with him when we heard about his lordship bein’ found hanging upside down, and Harry, he just laughed and laughed. Said he wished he’d had the chance to kill the bugger himself, but since he hadn’t, he was glad t’ know somebody’d done it right.”
She fell silent for a moment, her face stark as she let her gaze drift over the broken tracery of the chapel’s window, the gaping black maw of the ancient arched doorway. “This is where he was killed, too, ain’t it? Lord Preston, I mean.”
“It is, yes.”
“Why would somebody do that? Kill Harry here, in the same place— hang him here, in the same place they killed that duke’s son?”
“You said Harry was watching Lord Preston. Did he by chance mention seeing Farnsworth quarrel with anyone?”
“Well…” She paused, thoughtful. “There was some priest. A Frenchie, Harry thought he was.”
Father Ambrose, thought Sebastian. “Anyone else?”
Sally was silent for a moment, her mouth screwed up with the effort of memory. “And there was that other cove.”
“What other cove?”
“Don’t know his name. But Harry told me he saw the two of ’em lightin’ into each other somethin’ fierce.”
“Lord Preston and this other cove, you mean?”
She nodded. “One day late last week, it was. Harry said Lord Preston was carryin’ on like he was dicked in the nob—shoutin’ about the Bible and some dead usher and layers of cake.”
“Cake?”
Sally pulled a face and shrugged her shoulders. “Aye. Damned if I know what ’twas about.”
Layers , thought Sebastian as he watched Lovejoy reappear in the chapel doorway, his head turned as he looked back to say something to the men behind him. Layers and the Bible and a dead usher. Usher. Usher…. Enlightenment dawned. “Do you mean Lancelot Plimsoll?”
She stared at him blankly. “What’s that? I ain’t never heard of it.”
“It’s a man’s name: Mr. Lancelot Plimsoll. He’s a geologist.”
“Don’t know nothin’ ’bout him,” said Sally, just as Constable Jones stepped to one side and the men from the deadhouse emerged, carrying Harry on a shell between them.
“Oh, no. It is Harry!” she cried, throwing herself forward so fast that Lovejoy’s constable barely managed to snag her arm and haul her back. “What ye doin’ with him?” she demanded. “Where ye takin’ him?”
“There will need to be a postmortem, obviously,” said Lovejoy, stiff with all the painful embarrassment of a rigidly controlled, unemotional man confronting a frantic, grief-stricken female. “But I can assure you the body will be returned to you after the in—”
“You’re gonna cut him?” screamed Sally, struggling against the constable’s grip. “You bloody bastards! First ye try to hang him, then ye send him off to a living hell on the other side o’ the world, and now ye’re gonna slit ’im open like he was a pig? Fifteen years ago, when he was sentenced t’ hang, he couldn’t hardly sleep, knowing that once he was dead the surgeons was gonna be cuttin’ him open for everybody to gawk at. It ain’t right, you doin’ it to him now. Ye hear me? It ain’t right!”
It was part of the punishment meted out to those sentenced to hang—that after their deaths, their bodies were delivered to the surgeons to be publicly dissected. “Calm yourself, my good woman. This won’t be a public dissection—” Lovejoy started to say, just as Sally squirmed out of the constable’s grip and threw herself on her brother’s body.
“Oi!” shouted Constable Jones, hauling her back again. But she’d managed to grab one of Harry’s arms, dragging him half off the edge of the shell in a way that dislodged from somewhere a thin rectangular piece of cardboard that fluttered down to lie on the cobbles at their feet. It looked like a playing card, its back decorated with a green, white, and red geometric pattern that seemed oddly garish against the worn old stones.
“What’s that?” said Sally, going suddenly limp in the constable’s grasp.
Reaching down, Sebastian picked up the card and turned it over, his throat dry as he stared at the strange, brilliantly colored image on its face. “Do you know if your brother ever had anything to do with the tarot?” he asked Sally, looking up at her.
“What? No,” she said, her features pinched with confusion as Sebastian held up the exquisitely rendered image of a man plunging headfirst from the crumbling battlements of a burning medieval tower.