Page 45 of What Angels Fear

Sebastian had to force himself to look down at what lay on the slab before them. Rachel York had been a beautiful woman, her body long limbed and gracefully made, slim of waist and hip, with full, ripe breasts. Now her soft flesh was deadly pale, and smeared with the mud from her grave. But he could see other marks, bruises left by hard fingers digging into her wrists. More bruises, on her arms, her cheeks. And ugly slashes across her neck so deep that one might almost imagine her attacker’s objective had been to sever her neck. Reaching out, Paul Gibson untied the band around her head and her jaw fell open. Sebastian looked away.

“It would have been better if I could have examined her before she was bathed and laid out and dumped in the mud,” Paul said. “Much will have been lost.”

Sebastian didn’t like the way the small, stone-walled outbuilding smelled. Or the way it felt. He knew a sudden, driving urge to get away. “How long will it take?”

Paul Gibson reached for what looked like a butcher’s apron and tied it around his neck and waist. “I might be able to tell you something in the morning, although, of course, the full postmortem will take longer.”

Sebastian nodded, the smell of death so thick in his nostrils that each breath became a labor. He realized that Paul Gibson was looking at him strangely. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard?” said the doctor.

“Heard what?”

“This afternoon, your father walked into the Queen Square Public Office and confessed to the murder of Rachel York.”

Chapter 29

Sebastian had been about nine years old when he’d begun to realize that there was something different about him, that most people couldn’t overhear whispered conversations held in distant rooms, or read the titles of the books on the shelves of the library in the dark of the night, or from across the room.

Sometimes he wondered if most people experienced the world around them a little bit differently from their fellows, if the assumption of commonality was simply an illusion. Once he’d met a man who thought a yellow dog was the same color as the swath of vivid green spring grass in which the dog played, and who swore the gray cloth of his suit was blue. It had been a stray remark made by Sebastian’s sister, Amanda, that had first made Sebastian aware of the fact that most people couldn’t see colors at night, that for them, darkness reduced the world to a shading of grays through which they moved almost blind.

He’d found his ability to see in the dark particularly useful when he’d undertaken special assignments for the army during the war. He found it useful now as he slipped over the garden wall of St. Cyr House on Grosvenor Square, and crept toward the terrace.

Alistair St. Cyr, the Fifth Earl of Hendon, slept in a massive Tudor tester bed that had once belonged to the First Earl’s great-grandfather. He came awake slowly, lips pursing in his sleep, eyelids fluttering open, closed. Open.

He sat up with a rasping gasp, jaw slack, eyes flaring wide as he took in the clusters of candles burning on the bedside table and along the mantel. His gaze lifted to where Sebastian leaned against the bedpost with his arms folded across his chest, and he let out a sigh of relief. “ Sebastian. Thank God. I’ve been hoping you’d come to me.”

Sebastian shoved away from the bedpost to stand with his arms at his side, anger thrumming through him. “What the bloody hell did you think you were about, walking into that Public Office and trying to convince people that you’re the one who killed Rachel York?”

The expression on Hendon’s face was one Sebastian had never seen before, a strange mingling of grief and worry and what looked very much like guilt. “Because I’m the one she went to meet that night.”

Tuesday, St. Matthew’s, St. Cyr.

“Oh, Jesus,” whispered Sebastian, one hand coming up to shade his eyes.

Hendon thrust aside the bedclothes and stood up, a powerful figure of dignity despite nightshirt and cap. “But I swear to you, she was already dead when I found her.”

Sebastian huffed a laugh, his hand falling back, loosely, to his side. “What do you think? That I’m going to believe you’ve taken to rape and murder in your old age?”

Turning, he went to crouch before the fire and stir up the coals on the hearth. He felt the heat fan his cheeks, lick at the graveyard chill left deep within his being. A whirl of disparate, incomprehensible facts suddenly clicked into place, making perfect, awful sense. “So it was your pistol they found,” he said, his gaze on the flames before him.

A cough rumbled deep in the older man’s chest. “I took it with me, just in case. I didn’t even realize I’d dropped it until I arrived home and found it missing. I thought about going back, looking for it, but...” He hesitated. “I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I guess I was hoping I’d lost it someplace else.”

Sebastian threw another shovelful of coal on the fire and watched it lay there, dark and smoldering. “And why, precisely, were you meeting Rachel York alone in a Westminster church in the dead of the night?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

Sebastian twisted around, one knee pressing into the hearth rug. “You what?”

Wordless, his father stared back at him, that strange mingling of emotions shading his brilliant blue eyes.

“Was she blackmailing you? Is that it?”

“No.”

Sebastian thrust aside the coal scuttle and stood up. “What else am I to believe?”

Hendon scrubbed a hand across his face, his jaw working soundlessly back and forth in that way he had when he was thinking, obviously deciding what he was going to tell Sebastian and what he was going to keep to himself. “She contacted me early Tuesday,” he said at last. “She had something she thought I might be interested in purchasing.”

“So she was blackmailing you.”

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