“Have you been to India?”
“Several times.”
Sebastian thought about the page from a ship’s log shoved in Barclay Carmichael’s mouth by his killer. “What about your son? Did he ever travel with you?”
“I travel on business. My son was a gentleman,” snapped Carmichael. It was, after all, the reason Sir Humphrey Carmichael had paid through the nose for the privilege of marrying the daughter of a marquis, so that his son might call himself a gentleman. A gentleman’s wealth came from land, or investments, or inheritance; he never actually took a direct hand in the vulgar business of earning money.
“Your son was a remarkably well-liked man,” said Sebastian. “Do you know of anyone who might have wished him harm?”
“No.” Carmichael’s eyes narrowed. “But if I did, do you really think I would tell you?” It was said without any apparent heat, only a glimmer of something that was visible for an instant in those hooded eyes, then gone.
Sebastian stared at the man’s sad, fleshy face. “It might help to make sense out of what is happening in this city.”
“And what concern might that be of mine at this point?”
“To ensure that such a thing doesn’t happen again?” Sebastian suggested.
“My son is dead. You think I care if it happens to some other man’s son?” He swiped one large, work-worn hand through the air in a quick, dismissive gesture. “Well, I don’t.”
Sebastian’s fingers twitched on the brim of his hat. “If you change your mind, you know where to find me. Good day, sir,” he said, and strode from the room.
Behind him, Sir Humphrey Carmichael’s hand tightened around the head of the Shakti. With a sudden oath, he whirled, his arm jerking to send the statue hurtling across the room.
“A curious conversation,” said Paul Gibson, when Sebastian met with the surgeon later that day.
They were drinking ale and dining on a joint of cold ham at a battered old table overlooking the surgery’s neglected back garden. “It reminded me of my meeting with Lord Stanton yesterday morning,” said Sebastian. “There’s more than arrogance going on here, more than suspicion or resentment of my involvement. Their reaction is simply not…natural.”
“Grief can drive men in strange ways.”
Sebastian swallowed the last of his ale and set aside his tankard. “Perhaps.”
Gibson pushed awkwardly to his feet. “Come see what I’ve found…although I’m afraid it’s not much.”
Sebastian followed the surgeon through the weed-grown garden to the small stone building behind the surgery. The scent of blood and decaying flesh hit them halfway across the yard. Sebastian breathed through his mouth.
What was left of Dominic Stanton lay on the room’s altar-like table, covered with a sheet. Sebastian stared at that long, silent form and said, “I suppose in all honesty it’s impossible for anyone to truly grasp what it would be like, knowing this had been done to his son.”
“Probably.” Gibson flipped back the sheet. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more about his death. I still believe it’s the wound across his throat that killed him…which I suppose would be a relatively merciful way to die, considering the horrors of what came after.”
“It’s the way you’d slaughter a lamb,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the boy’s face. Dominic Stanton’s features were relaxed in death; he might have been sleeping.
“Except this was no lamb but a big, hale young man. I would think it must have taken more than one assailant to subdue him.” Gibson rolled up the sheet and shoved it aside in a rough gesture. “Although it’s difficult enough to imagine one man committing such an act of barbarity, let alone two.”
Slipping a hand into his pocket, Sebastian drew forth the small blue-and-white Chinese vial he’d picked up from the grassy verge on the road to Merton Abbey. “I found this where I think the boy was set upon.”
Taking the vial, Gibson raised it to his nostrils and sniffed. He looked up, one eyebrow raised. “Opium?”
Sebastian watched Gibson’s hand clench around the vial, then relax. Gibson’s own dark love affair with opium dated back three years or more, to the blood-soaked surgeon’s tent in Portugal where he’d lost the mangled remnant of a leg left him by a French cannonball.
“Is there any way to tell if Stanton ingested the drug before he died?” Sebastian asked.
Gibson sighed and held the vial out to him. “Unfortunately, no. You think Stanton was a habitual user?”
“I suppose it’s possible, although I’ve found nothing that would suggest it. I’m thinking perhaps the drug was used to make him more manageable.”
“It would do that. Particularly if the lad were unused to its effects. But to force it down his throat wouldn’t have been easy if he resisted.”
“No. But if someone held a gun on him and gave him a choice between the opium and instant death, he would drink it.”
As bad as the room had smelled yesterday, today it was indescribably worse. Sebastian went to stand in the open doorway and breathe. “According to Mr. Stanton’s friends, the boy was nervous the past few weeks, convinced someone was following him. Whoever killed him must have been watching him. Waiting for the chance to catch him alone. His friends thought he was imagining it. They even laughed at him for being afraid.”
“Aye, he was afraid, poor lad. He wet himself at some point before he died.”
“Not at the moment of his death?”
“No. It was when he was still wearing his shirt.”
Sebastian turned to gaze at the fair curls and full cheeks of the silent face on Paul Gibson’s granite slab. Dominic Stanton had probably thought himself a downy one, awake on every suit. Whereas in fact, he’d been little more than a child. A scared child.
His gaze rose to the enameled basin on a nearby table, where something bloody and vaguely familiar lay. “The object he had stuffed in his mouth, what was it?”
Gibson followed his stare. “The hoof of a goat. It probably came from a butcher’s stall. Whoever dismembered that goat was far more familiar with a cleaver than the man who hacked up Stanton’s legs. Any idea what it signifies?”
Sebastian shook his head. “No. According to Lovejoy, Barclay Carmichael had a page from a ship’s log stuffed in his mouth.”
Gibson nodded. “I spoke to Martin, the surgeon who did the postmortem on young Carmichael.” His lip quivered in disdain. “The man’s a bloody idiot. I asked him if the body showed signs of having been bound and gagged before death, and he said he’d never thought to notice. But you were right: Carmichael’s throat was slit and the body drained of all blood. The flesh was hacked from his arms.”
“Not the legs?”
“No. Just the arms.”
Sebastian walked around the slab. He had to force himself to look, really look, at the mangled boy. “Barclay Carmichael’s body was found at dawn in St. James’s Park,” he said, “hanging upside down from a mulberry tree. Dominic Stanton was found in Old Palace Yard, again at dawn. Both very public places. Both young men were last seen the night before their deaths by friends whom they then left. Sometime between when they were last seen and when their bodies were discovered at dawn, both young men were set upon by at least one assailant, perhaps more. They were taken God only knows where, stripped of their shirts, their throats slit, and the blood drained from their bodies. Then the killer—or killers—hacked the flesh from Carmichael’s arms and from Stanton’s legs and dumped the bodies where they’d be quickly found the next morning.” He glanced up to find Gibson watching him. “Does that sound right?”
“I’d say so, yes.”
Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Was there nothing to indicate where Stanton might have been killed?”
“Just these.” Gibson walked over to pluck what looked like pieces of straw from the table and hold them out.
