his bed when the household awakened.”
“He was taken from the house? I thought you had Bow Street Runners watching him.”
“Two of them. Someone broke the lock on the back door.”
“And where were your Runners while all this was happening?”
“One was watching the front of the house from across the street.”
“And the other?”
“Was found insensible in the garden.”
Sebastian suppressed an oath. If the killer followed his established pattern, the boy’s butchered body would be discovered in some prominent spot early tomorrow morning. It was still possible that the boy was alive someplace. But their chances of finding him before he was killed diminished with each passing minute.
“Let me see the boy’s room,” said Sebastian.
Atkinson stared at him. “What?”
“You heard me. I want to see the room from which the boy was taken. Quickly.”
Anthony Atkinson had occupied a chamber on the third floor, just off the schoolroom. It was a typical boy’s bedroom, its shelves crammed with books and birds’ nests and all manner of wondrous and special things.
Standing on the braided hearthrug, Sebastian thought about the towheaded lad he’d glimpsed in the Square, his cheeks flushed, his eyes bright with merriment. The boy might have been younger than the other victims, Sebastian realized, but he was a sturdy, healthy lad; he would not have been easy to subdue. Especially without waking either his family or the servants.
A small girl’s voice came from the doorway to the schoolroom. “Are you looking for Anthony? He’s not here.”
Sebastian turned to find young Miss Atkinson watching him with wide, solemn eyes. He went to hunker down before her.
“Did you hear Anthony leave this morning?”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t hear anything.”
“Have you noticed anyone watching you the last few days? A man, perhaps? Or maybe a woman?”
Again, she shook her head.
Frustrated, Sebastian shoved to his feet. It was when he was turning to leave that he saw it: a glint of blue- and-white porcelain peeking out from beneath the counterpane. He knew what it was even before he stooped to pick it up.
It was a Chinese vial. An opium vial.
Sebastian was paying off his hackney outside Newgate Prison when he heard a man’s high-pitched voice calling his name.
Sebastian turned to find Sir Henry Lovejoy coming out of the prison’s formidable gates.
“I stopped by your house this morning, my lord, but was told you were not in. I assume you’ve heard the news about young Anthony Atkinson? Dreadful business this. Just dreadful.”
Sebastian stepped out of the path of a passing ironmonger’s wagon. “Who was it pushed for the arrest of Brandon Forbes?”
“Sir James Read and Sir William both. Lord Jarvis has brought considerable pressure to bear on Bow Street to solve this case, and the magistrates are always anxious to curry favor with the Palace.”
Sebastian squinted up at the prison’s dark, oppressive facade. “And now that Anthony Atkinson is missing? Will Mr. Forbes be released?”
Sir Henry sighed. “I fear not. Sir James in particular contends that the disappearance of the young Atkinson boy in no way absolves Mr. Forbes of the earlier murders.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“That’s the law. Thanks to your admirable detective work, it appears that Mr. Forbes possesses a powerful motive to have committed the murders, and I fear the gentleman has no verifiable alibi for the nights in question.”
Sebastian swore long and hard. “So what exactly is being done to find Anthony Atkinson?”
“As I understand it, Bow Street has some twenty men combing the countryside around Forbes’s estate.”
“Bloody hell. The boy’s not there.”
“So it would seem.”
Sebastian found Brandon Forbes seated at a writing desk in one corner of a surprisingly large room overlooking the street. The rattle of the jailer’s keys brought the gentleman’s head around. At the sight of Sebastian, he grunted.
“It’s you I’ve to thank for my being here, I take it.”
Sebastian ducked his head through the doorway and waited while the jailer locked the door behind him. Newgate could be relatively comfortable for those with a few extra pounds to buy themselves a private cell, some furniture and bedding, and food. But the dank air still reeked of excrement and despair, and the threat of the hangman’s noose was like an unseen presence in the room.
“Indirectly,” Sebastian admitted.
Forbes laid aside his pen. The bluff, good-humored country squire who’d walked the fields of his Hertfordshire estate was gone. The man before Sebastian now was pale and anxious. “You think I did it?” he asked. “You think I butchered all those young men?”
“No.”
Forbes grunted. “Why not? Everyone else does. My arrest ties it all up in a neat package.”
“Except for this morning’s disappearance of young Anthony Atkinson.”
“Yes, well, I could have an accomplice, couldn’t I? That’s what they’re saying. Someone who nabbed young Atkinson to confound the authorities and make it appear that I’m innocent.”
“I don’t think so.”
Forbes pushed up from his desk and went to stand at the window overlooking the front of the prison. “That’s where they hang them, you know. Those who have been condemned to death. Right there in front of the prison. You ever see a hanging?”
“Yes.”
“I saw one once. In St. Albans when I was a boy. My father took me to see it over my mother’s objections. Some lad who’d pinched a bolt of cloth from a shop. I was ten at the time, and I don’t think the boy was much older. They botched his hanging something terrible. Took him fifteen or twenty minutes to die. In the end, the hangman wrapped his own arms around the poor lad’s legs and pulled in an attempt to break the boy’s neck, but even that didn’t work. He suffocated slowly. Very slowly.”
“I won’t let you hang for this,” said Sebastian.
A wry smile touched the man’s lips. “Pardon me if I’m not comforted.”
Sebastian searched the other man’s plain, weather-darkened face. “Is there anything else you can tell me about your son—anything at all—that might help?”
“No.”
“No one you know who might have felt compelled to avenge the boy’s death?”
The man’s face paled, and Sebastian knew he was worrying about the suspicion that would now also fall on his surviving sons, the boy studying at Cambridge and his older brother. “No!”
“I didn’t mean your older sons,” said Sebastian.
Forbes went to sit on the edge of the bed, his hands clasped between his knees, his head bowed. After a moment, he said, “It is possible that someone…” He hesitated, then swallowed hard. “You see, Gideon wasn’t actually my own child. Oh, I raised him as my son, and God knows I loved him like a son. But he was not the issue of my loins.”
