Where Shadows Dance

from the small, stonewalled mortuary at the base of the yard so rank it made his eyes water.

“My God,” he said, pausing in the doorway. “How do you stand it?”

Gibson glanced up with a grim smile. “After a while, you don’t notice it so much.”

“Is there a problem with Jumpin’ Jack?”

“No, no; things are progressing nicely,” he said a bit more airily than Sebastian would have liked.

He dropped his gaze to the bloated, discolored remnant of humanity that lay facedown on the slab between them. Six years of fighting across the battlefields of Europe, and the sight of raw, ugly death still unsettled him. “So what have you found?”

“Watch.” Reaching for a probe, Gibson slid the thin metal rod into a small slit at the base of the cadaver’s skull.

“Bloody hell,” said Sebastian softly. “He and Ross were killed by the same man.”

Gibson limped from behind the table. “Not just by the same man, but on the same night. The difference is, this one was left exposed to nearly a week’s worth of sun and the rain before he was brought in.”

“So who is he?” Sebastian asked, forcing himself to take a closer look at the wreck of a face.

“Last I heard, no one knows.” He nodded to the clothing stacked neatly on a nearby bench. “Those are his clothes.”

Sebastian went to study the coat, stained now with mud and vegetation and other things he didn’t want to think about. It was a gentleman’s coat, although far from the first stare of fashion. The breeches were a trifle worn, the linen fine but serviceable. He looked up. “No identification of any kind?”

“Nothing. Probably stripped off him when the body was dumped.” Gibson rolled the body onto its back with an unpleasant plop. “As far as I can tell, he was a man in his thirties. Well formed, slightly above medium height. Good musculature. Sandy-colored hair.” He pulled back the cadaver’s lips to reveal a ghoulish grin. “This is probably his most prominent feature. Look at the size of those front teeth. They overshot his lower jaw in a way that must have been prominent.”

“That’s all we have to go on? He was a man in his thirties with blond hair and buckteeth?”

“Sorry.”

Sebastian tossed the stained clothes aside. “Maybe Bow Street’s had some luck with him.”

“You could try them.”

Sir Henry was eating a quiet dinner in the Brown Bear across the street from the Bow Street Public Office when Sebastian walked up to him.

“My lord,” said the magistrate. “Please, sit down. You’re looking for me?”

Sebastian slid onto the opposite bench and ordered a tankard of ale. “I’m interested in the gentleman whose body was dumped out at Bethnal Green last Saturday.”

“You are?” said Sir Henry with obvious puzzlement. “Why?”

Sebastian leaned forward, his forearms on the table. “I think he was killed by the same man who killed Alexander Ross.”

Sir Henry took a bite of his pasty, chewed slowly, and swallowed. “You have a reason for this belief, my lord?”

“I do. Only, I’m afraid I can’t explain it to you just yet. Have you made any progress in identifying the body?”

“As a matter of fact, we have. It’s difficult to confirm, given the state of the corpse in question, but we have reason to believe he may be a Mr. Ezekiel Kincaid, who disappeared from an inn called the Bow and Ox on the Blue Anchor Road, near the Surrey Docks.”

“Ezekiel Kincaid?” Sebastian frowned. The name meant nothing to him. “Who was he?”

“As far as we can tell, he was an agent in the employ of the Rosehaven Trading Company.”

“Rosehaven? Now, why does that sound familiar?”

“Perhaps because it is owned by Mr. Jasper Cox, brother of Miss Sabrina Cox, the young lady who was betrothed to the late Mr. Alexander Ross.”

Sebastian stared at him. “The trading company reported Kincaid missing?”

“No, actually. They were under the impression he had sailed for the United States.”

The United States again. Sebastian said, “So what makes you think Mr. Kincaid didn’t sail?”

Sir Henry reached inside his coat. “It seems the young thatchgallows who reported the body to the constables first helped himself to this—” He laid a plain gold pocket watch on the table between them.

Sebastian flipped open the watch and read the inscription. To Ezekiel with love, Mahala. “It’s an uncommon name, I’ll grant you that. But if Mr. Kincaid wasn’t reported missing —”

“Ah, but you see, he was. He never retrieved his possessions from the Bow and Ox. I understand the ship he was set to sail on—the Baltimore Mary—waited as long as they dared. But they were finally forced to sail without him or miss the tide.” Sir Henry rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’ve had a look at the man’s baggage; they were keeping it for him at the Bow and Ox. In it was a letter from his wife, Mahala.”

Sebastian was aware of a suspicion forming on the edges of his thoughts. “A letter from where?”

“Baltimore.”

“Kincaid was an American?”

“Oh, yes. Didn’t I say?”

Chapter 25

The Surrey Docks lay on the south bank of the Thames, some two miles below London Bridge, in Rotherhithe. Once, this had been the center of the great Arctic whaling expeditions that set sail from London every April to return at the end of the season bearing blanket pieces of blubber that were then cut up and melted in vast iron pots. The stink of hot oil still permeated the district, mingling with the foul stench drifting downriver from the tanyards of nearby Bermondsey.

It was a squalid area of canals and basins lined with storehouses, of factories and artisans’ shops and reeking tidal ditches. The air rang with the pounding of hammers, the thwunk of axes biting into wood. Wagons loaded with iron and hemp, canvas and squawking chickens, clogged the mean, narrow lanes. “Place always gives me the willies, it does,” muttered Tom as they rattled over the uneven cobbles. “Too many foreigners, I s’pose.”

Sebastian gave a soft laugh. “That must be it.” He swung the chestnuts in through the arch of the Bow and Ox. “The inn at least appears respectable—and very English.”

An ancient, half-timbered inn with a lichen-covered tile roof and cantilevered galleries, the Bow and Ox catered to the company agents and factors whose business required them to frequent the nearby docks and their less than savory environs. “Water them,” said Sebastian, handing the horses’ reins to his tiger. Despite the lengthening shadows that told of the coming of evening, the afternoon sun was still brutal. “Just don’t let them get carried away. I shouldn’t be long.”

He found the landlady in the taproom. She was a short, rotund, grandmotherly-looking woman with a disarmingly beatific smile, who tsked sadly when asked about Ezekiel Kincaid.

“Aye, I remember Mr. Kincaid all right, poor lad,” she said, drawing Sebastian a pint of ale. “Said he had a wife and two sons, back in America. I keep thinking of them so far away, waiting for him to come home and never knowing what happened to him.”

“What do you think did happen to him?”

She set the tankard on the boards before him. “Footpads, if you ask me. Should’ve known better than to go off alone at night like that. And him so nervous, too.”

“Nervous? In what way?”

“Oh, just ever so anxious, if you know what I mean?” She reached for a towel. “I kept his things for him, in case he came back for them. But that magistrate from Bow Street carried it all away with him.”

Sebastian took a sip of the ale. “How many days was Mr. Kincaid here?”