Page 28 of What Cannot Be Said

“Who?”

“Gilly Harper. Sixteen years old but looks much younger. Apprenticed to a Piccadilly chocolatier.”

“Never heard o’ her. Wot ye askin’ me about her for? Wot’s she got to do with anything?”

“Possibly nothing,” said Lovejoy.

“Then why ye askin’ about her?”

“Someone murdered her last night.”

“In London? An’ ye come all the way out here, worryin’ me over it? Ain’t ye got enough riffraff in London t’ bother wit this nonsense?” Coldfield swung his ax, the blade digging deep into the wood of the stump before him, then turned to point one meaty finger at Lovejoy. “I didn’t have nothin’ to do wit them two women who was killed out here Sunday, ye hear? Nothin’. An’ I didn’t have nothin’ to do wit whatever yer sayin’ happened in London yesterday. Ain’t nobody can tell ye nothin’ different. Ye hear? Nobody.”

With a rude snort, the thatcher turned away, the muscles of his broad shoulders working beneath the worn cloth of his shirt as he swooped up an armload of kindling. Watching him, Lovejoy felt the gentle breeze caress his face, heard it lifting the leaves of the dying elm beside them. For fourteen years now he had found a measure of solace in the thought that the man who had killed his Julia and Madeline had paid the ultimate price for what he’d done. But that faint comfort, as pitiful as it might have been, was gone now. He felt a cold rage sweep through him, curling his hands into fists at his sides and twisting at something deep inside him. He wanted to seize this crude man by his thick arms and spin him around to slam him back against the elm and make him—make him—tell the truth. Not only about these new deaths but about what had happened fourteen years ago.

Except that Lovejoy knew only too well that he was an old man, barely five feet tall, and never, even in his youth, either strong or pugnacious. Trembling beneath the onslaught of unwanted and unfamiliar emotions, he swiped the back of one hand across his lips, swallowed hard, and forced himself to turn and walk away.

?Lovejoy’s next stop was a small whitewashed cottage on the banks of the river Thames.

“I shan’t be long,” he told the driver as he stepped down into the dusty lane. He was only dimly aware of the jarvey nodding in response, for Lovejoy’s attention was all for the older woman he could see bent over pulling weeds near the cottage’s door.

It had been fourteen years since he’d last been here, but the cottage still looked much the same, its windowsills painted a jaunty yellow, the climbing rose rioting around the front door thick with fat pink blooms, the small garden a well-tended jumble of honeysuckle and jasmine, hollyhocks and daisies. He wasn’t certain that the woman he could see weeding and the woman he had come here to speak to were one and the same. But as he walked toward the garden gate, she straightened, her eyes narrowing as she recognized him, and he was surprised to realize that he’d been secretly hoping he wouldn’t find her still here.

He supposed she must be in her sixties or seventies by now, Mrs.Mattie O’Toole. Her hair was iron gray and thinning, her face deeply lined, her dark eyes cloudy and nearly lashless. But she was still sturdy, her back still straight, her expression still closed and guarded. Once, she’d had four sons and a daughter. But her youngest boy drowned in the Thames when he was only eight; one of his brothers had been impressed and died in the Battle of the Nile; another succumbed to fever while in the West Indies with the Army. Her last surviving son, Daniel, had lost an arm and suffered a debilitating head wound fighting for the Crown in the Irish Rebellion of 1798. The Crown had expressed its gratitude for his service by hanging him for the murder of Julia and Madeline Lovejoy.

Lovejoy paused at the gate, his hand on the latch, as the woman continued to stare at him. He wondered how she recognized him, for he himself had changed much in the last fourteen years. He wondered if she’d been there in the crowd outside the Old Bailey when they hanged her son for a crime he died insisting he hadn’t committed. He wondered if she still believed her son innocent; if she still wept for him the way Lovejoy still wept for Madeline and Julia. He figured she probably did.

He cleared his throat. “Mrs.O’Toole?”

Her nostrils flared as she sucked in a deep breath. “And what would you be wantin’ from me, then?” She might have lived in England for decades, but her accent was still very much that of the Emerald Isle.

“May I come in?”

She shrugged and went back to her weeding. “Suit yourself.”

He pushed open the gate and closed it carefully behind him. But he made no attempt to approach any closer.

Her attention still on her weeding, she said, “I heard about them new killings in Richmond Park. That’s why you’re here, ain’t it? You’re thinkin’ maybe you made a mistake all them years ago? You’re thinkin’ maybe you should’ve believed my boy Danny when he told you he didn’t do nothin’ to nobody?” She tilted her head, looking up at him sideways. “Hmm?”

Lovejoy found himself at a loss for words, unsure precisely why he had come. “I frankly don’t know what to think,” he said, surprised by his own honesty.

She huffed a mirthless laugh. “Is that a fact? Well, I’ve no more boys for you to be hanging for somethin’ they didn’t do. Unless maybe you’re thinkin’ about hanging me?” Straightening, she reached for the cane he now noticed leaning against the cottage wall beside her. Her green-stained, gnarled hand tightened around the stick’s curved handle as she limped toward him, not stopping until she was only a few feet from him. “Now, why would I be killin’ some woman and her child I never met?”

He could think of one very good reason why she would do such a thing, but it was obvious that the murders in Richmond Park were physically beyond her. She might have been able to shoot Lady McInnis and her daughter, but she was obviously too crippled to have staged the bodies and then escaped quickly enough to avoid being seen by the Barrows brothers.

When he remained silent, her face creased in a faint, derisive smile. “I see what you’re graspin’ at. You’re thinkin’ maybe I shot that woman and girl so’s everyone would think my boy must’ve been innocent of those other killings.” She gave a faint shake of her head. “But if I was gonna do somethin’ like that, why would I wait fourteen years? Why not do it when it might’ve helped my Danny?”

“I’m not here to accuse you.”

“No? Then who are you accusin’? My girl Bridget? She died six months ago, you know. Her widower and my three grandbabies live all the way down in Plymouth now.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, you aren’t. You couldn’t give a rat’s arse about either me or mine.”

He wanted to protest, to let her know that he did indeed care. What decent man would not? Instead he said, “Is there anyone else? Anyone you can think of who might have done such a thing?”

“You think I would give you their names if there were? So’s you could hang them, too?” She snorted. “Not likely. But the truth is, there ain’t nobody. Nobody but me and”—she nodded to the gray striped cat with white paws stretched out asleep on a nearby sunny windowsill—“maybe old Toby Cat there.”

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