Page 51 of Who Will Remember (Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery #20)

S ebastian reached Bow Street to find Sir Henry Lovejoy standing on the pavement before the public office’s front steps, one hand on the open door of a hackney carriage drawn up before him.

“Ah, Lord Devlin,” he said, closing the carriage’s door again and dismissing its jarvey. “I was just on my way to Brook Street to see you. I take it you’ve heard?”

“About Major Chandler? Yes, just now. Have they taken him up to Coldbath Fields? Or is he already at the Old Bailey?”

“What? Oh, so you haven’t heard, then, have you?”

Sebastian shook his head. “Heard what?”

“Sir Nathaniel has ordered the Major released. Some French priest turned himself in and confessed to Lord Preston’s murder. At first we were inclined to dismiss his claims, but he knew several important details that were never made public.”

Sebastian stared at him. “Are you talking about Father Ambrose?”

Lovejoy put up a hand to grab his hat as a sudden gust of wind whistling up the narrow street threatened to carry it away. “Yes. You know him?”

It was some time before Sebastian was able to arrange to speak to Father Ambrose alone, in a small room tucked away behind the Bow Street Public Office’s central staircase.

The oak-paneled chamber was sparsely furnished, with an aged barley twist table and four chairs in the center and a row of worn, dusty cabinets lined up along the back wall. The French priest sat in one of the straight-backed wooden chairs, his shoulders hunched and his clasped hands resting on the table before him. He looked up, his face expressionless, when Sebastian entered the room.

“Lord Devlin,” he said, his accent unusually pronounced. “I owe you an apology. From the beginning, I should have told you the truth. I never intended for anyone else to suffer for what I did.”

“That’s why you turned yourself in?”

Father Ambrose nodded. “As soon as I heard that major was to be charged.” He brought up one hand to swipe a spread thumb and fingers down over his thick, graying beard. “I did not intend to kill him, you know—Lord Preston, I mean. It was an accident.”

“You ‘accidently’ bashed in his brains, did you? And then you ‘accidently’ hanged him upside down in a careful imitation of Le Pendu ?”

“I see I must explain.”

Sebastian pulled out the chair opposite him and sat. “Please do.”

The priest sucked in a deep breath. “You know Farnsworth kept rooms in Saville Street?”

“Yes, although I only discovered that recently. How the hell did you know about it?”

He gave a very Gallic shrug, as if it were immaterial. “So you see, I was in the area that night—”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?”

“What were you doing up by Saville Street?”

“I was walking. I…like to walk.”

“Quite far, evidently. And you just happened to walk up Saville Steet?”

“No, Glasshouse Street. I was walking on Glasshouse Street. But Lord Preston, he must have seen me, because when I turned up Swallow Street, he followed me.”

“You’re saying he followed you ?”

“Yes.”

“Why? Why would he follow you?”

“Because I had just that morning accused him of murdering a number of impoverished young women he considered ‘morally deficient.’?”

Sebastian studied the Frenchman’s lined, aged face. “So that confrontation you told me about—the one in the Strand; it wasn’t actually about a boy who had died in Newgate?”

The priest tilted his head to pull awkwardly at one earlobe. “No, it was about Cian Donahue. Or at least, that’s how it began. Then I lost my temper and moved on to the young women.”

Sebastian shook his head. “I still don’t understand why he would follow you later that evening in Swallow Street.”

“I’m getting to that. The thing is, you see, I didn’t realize he was following me. I mean, I could hear a man’s footsteps behind me, but I didn’t bother to glance back and see who it was. Why should I? Look at me; no thief in his right mind would see me and think I had anything worth stealing.”

“So precisely how did the two of you end up in the chapel?”

“Ah. Well, it was raining, you see? Not hard at first. But then it began to come down harder, so I ducked into the chapel to wait it out.”

“And Farnsworth came in after you?”

The priest looked Sebastian straight in the eye and said, “Yes. As I said, it was raining quite hard by then. He was carrying that walking stick of his—you know the one? The one with the short sword hidden in it? He told me he was going to shut me up once and for all; then he pulled the blade and came at me. I grabbed one of the chunks of wood scattered about the chapel floor and hit him with it, just here—” The priest pointed to the right side of his head. “Above the ear. I’ll admit I swung hard—I wanted to stop him. But I wasn’t trying to kill him. Only then, when he staggered back, he stumbled over some rubble and fell.”

“And hit the back of his head?”

The Frenchman nodded.

“And Half-Hanged Harry and Letitia Lamont? Why did you kill them?”

“I did not kill them. I had nothing to do with either of their deaths.”

“So who did kill them?”

“I don’t know.”

Sebastian pushed up from his chair and went to stand in the open doorway. One of Lovejoy’s constables was waiting just outside the room, but the man was picking his teeth in uninterested abstraction, his vacant gaze fixed on nothing. It was a moment before Sebastian turned back to where the priest still sat at the table, calmly watching him.

“No one is going to believe you,” Sebastian said. “You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course they will believe me. The Palace wants someone to hang for this murder, as quickly as possible.” The old priest spread his arms wide. “And here I am.”

Sebastian shook his head and switched to French. “Who are you trying to protect?”

Father Ambrose stared up at him with wide, solemn eyes, his arms dropping to his sides again as he answered in the same language, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Sebastian wanted to grab the priest by the front of his worn black habit, haul him up out of that chair, and shake him. Instead, he said, “Something made you—you and Jamie Gallagher both—suspect Farnsworth of killing not only Jamie’s sister but any number of other women as well. What the devil was it?”

“That I can’t tell you.”

Sebastian slammed his fist down on the tabletop between them. “Why the bloody hell not?”

“It was told to me in confidence.”

Sebastian took a deep breath and forced himself to say more calmly, “The first time I spoke to you, you could have said something about the growing number of young women being fished out of the Thames. You could have told me you thought they weren’t all suicides, that some of them were being murdered. You could even have told me that ‘someone’ suspected Lord Preston was involved in their deaths. So why didn’t you?”

“Because I was a coward. I was hoping you’d hear about what was happening to the young women some other way. I was afraid that if I were to tell you about my suspicions—if I were to be the first to mention the dead women—it might somehow lead to Bow Street realizing that I was the one who had killed Farnsworth.”

“You? Or Jamie?”

“Me!”

Sebastian shook his head. “You say Farnsworth attacked you with a blade from his walking stick. But there was no walking stick in that chapel.”

“No. I took it with me and threw it in the Thames.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know,” said Sebastian, making no effort to keep the incredulity out of his voice. “You want me to believe you were afraid of being caught, and yet you took the time to hang Farnsworth upside down? Why? If you’d taken his purse and watch and left him lying where he’d fallen, everyone would have assumed he’d been killed by footpads.”

“But I didn’t want his death to be dismissed as the work of footpads! I wanted the authorities to look at his life and discover what he had been doing.”

“Why? He was dead. Even if what you suspect is true—that he was murdering impoverished young women and making their deaths look like suicides—you ended that by killing him.”

Father Ambrose glanced toward the open doorway, then leaned forward and lowered his voice even more, although they were still speaking French. “Except that Lord Preston wasn’t killing those women alone.”

Sebastian held himself very still. “You know that for certain?”

The priest hesitated a moment, then nodded.

“And let me guess: You can’t tell me how you know that, either.”

Father Ambrose stared back at him with wide, earnest eyes.

“Bloody hell,” swore Sebastian, flattening his hands on the tabletop and leaning into them. “These other men—do you know who they are?”

“No. All I know is that there were three of them, including Farnsworth.” He hesitated, then said, “There is what looks like an old sarcophagus in the ruins of the palace of the Bishops of Winchester, in a small courtyard near the river. The men would fill it with water, hold the heads of the women they wanted to kill under until they were dead, then throw their bodies in the river. That way, if the bodies were found, a postmortem would show that the women had drowned. Any superficial bruises could be easily explained away.”

By saying the women must have jumped off a bridge or dock and hit something as they fell, thought Sebastian. Aloud, he said, “Someone saw them?”

The priest leaned back in his chair. “I can’t tell you that.”

“No, of course not. And yet you claim not to know the identities of these two other men.”

“If I knew, I would tell you. Believe me.”

“Believe you?” Sebastian pushed away from the table. “Why the bloody hell should I believe a bloody thing you say?”

The priest drew a deep breath. “I have thought about the death of Harry McGregor, and I think it’s possible he saw Farnsworth and the others murdering one of those young women. That’s why he was killed.”

“And Letitia Lamont? She was in the Bridewell until after Farnsworth was dead. Why would someone kill her?”

“That I don’t know.”

Sebastian fixed him with a hard stare. “How does a priest become so familiar with the tarot?”

The Frenchman shrugged. “Someone I was close to once used the cards. The images have always fascinated me. They are very”—he paused as if searching for the right word—”evocative, yes?”

“They are indeed. So how do you explain the tarot cards this other, ‘unknown’ killer left with McGregor and Lamont?”

“I can only assume it’s an attempt to make all three deaths look like the work of the same killer.”

“If so, it’s been very effective.” Sebastian paused. “Tell me this: Why the hell did you send Jamie to me?”

An expression of chagrin flashed across the priest’s face, then was gone. “I didn’t send him; that was something he decided to do on his own initiative. I was…very upset with him for doing it.”

“How did he even know that Farnsworth was dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“Obviously, the boy didn’t just ‘happen’ to duck into the chapel that afternoon to get out of the rain the way he claimed. So how did he know Lord Preston was dangling upside down in Swallow Street? You’ll never convince me you told him.”

The priest drew a quick breath, then another.

“Didn’t think of that, did you?” said Sebastian.

Father Ambrose licked his lips. “He…he overheard me telling someone else about it. Someone I can’t name and—and someone Jamie does not know. I was concerned because the body hadn’t been discovered yet. And so Jamie, he decided to go tell you.”

“You know, Father, you’re a very accomplished liar for a man of God.”

The priest shrugged again.

Sebastian blew out a long, frustrated breath. “I can’t help you if you’re not honest with me.”

The Frenchman leaned forward. “You want to help me, my lord? Truly? Then find the men who were working with Lord Preston Farnsworth to kill those young, impoverished women. I’m an old man; what happens to me at this point is not important. But the women those men killed were young—some little more than children. They should have had their entire lives ahead of them. Instead, no one even knows they were murdered. They’re completely forgotten, their families ashamed of them, their bodies dumped in unmarked graves or swept out to sea. You need to find out who besides Farnsworth has been killing these women, and you need to stop them. Please. Before they can kill again.”