Page 4 of What Angels Fear

His knees creaking in complaint, Lovejoy lowered himself into a squat, his gaze still fixed on that pale, blood-streaked face. “Know who she is?”

The question was addressed to the only other person in the chapel, a tall, well-built man in his mid-thirties, with fair, fashionably disheveled hair and an intricately tied cravat. As Queen Square’s senior constable, Edward Maitland had been the first authority of any consequence called to the scene and had been the one handling the investigation to this point. “An actress,” he said now, standing with his hands clasped behind his back, his weight rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet as if to contain his impatience with Sir Henry’s slow, methodical ways. “A Miss Rachel York.”

“Ah. I thought she looked familiar.” Swallowing hard, Lovejoy eased the cloth from the rest of the girl’s body, and forced himself to look.

Her throat had been repeatedly, viciously slashed in long, savage gashes. Which explained the sprays of blood on the walls, he supposed. So much blood, everywhere. Yet Rachel York’s death had not been quick, or easy. Her fists were clenched as if in endurance, and bruises showed dark and ugly against the pale, bare flesh of her wrists and forearms. The skin high on her left cheek had been split by a harsh blow. The torn, disarrayed emerald satin gown and ripped velvet pelisse told their own story.

“He had his way with her, I take it?” said Lovejoy.

Maitland shifted his weight back onto the heels of his expensive boots and balanced there, his gaze not on the girl but on the high, blue and red stained glass of the eastern window. “Yes, sir. No doubt about that.”

No doubt indeed, thought Lovejoy. The inescapable tang of semen still hung in the air, mingling with the heavy metallic odor of blood and the pious sweetness of incense and beeswax. He let his gaze travel over the girl’s carefully composed limbs, and frowned. “She was lying like this, when you found her?”

“No, sir. She was there, before the altar. Weren’t proper to leave her that way. This being a church and all.”

Lovejoy straightened, his gaze drifting back to those blood-smeared marble steps. Every candle on the altar had guttered down and gone out. She must have lit them all, he thought, before she died. Why? In piety? Or because she was afraid of the dark?

Aloud, he said, “What was she doing here, do you suppose?”

Maitland’s brows twitched together in a swift, betraying movement instantly stilled. It was obviously a question that hadn’t occurred to him. “That I can’t say, sir. The sexton found her when he came to open the church this morning.” He pulled a notebook from the pocket of his greatcoat and flipped it open with the ostentatious display of attention to detail that sometimes grated on Lovejoy’s nerves. “A Mr. Jem Cummings. Neither he nor the Reverend”—there was a brief ruffling of pages—“Reverend James McDermott say they’ve ever seen her before.”

“They lock the church every night, do they?”

“Yes, sir.” Again Maitland consulted his notebook. “At eight sharp.”

Reaching down, Lovejoy carefully replaced the cloth over what was left of Rachel York, only pausing at the last moment to study, once again, that pale, beautiful face. She had a French look about her, with the fair curls and widely spaced brown eyes and short upper lip often found in Normandy. He’d seen her just last week, with Kat Boleyn in the Covent Garden Theater’s production of As You Like it. Seen her and admired her, not simply for her beauty but for her talent. He had a clear image of her upon the stage, her hands held high in the clasp of her fellow cast members as they took their final bow, her eyes bright and shining, her smile wide and triumphantly joyous.

He jerked the cloth back over those still, bloodstained features and turned away, his gaze narrowing as he took in the layout of the old church, the aisled nave and wide transepts, the choir and broad apse. “This Mr. Cummings... does he say he came back here, to the Lady Chapel, before locking up last night?”

Maitland shook his head. “The sexton says he glanced back here from the retrochoir and gave a loud halloo, warning that he was about to lock up. But he didn’t actually venture into the chapel itself, sir. And he wouldn’t have seen her from the retrochoir. I checked myself.”

Lovejoy nodded. In the damp coolness of the church, some of the pools of blood had yet to dry. Glossy and thick, they shimmered darkly in the lamplight, and he took care to avoid stepping in them as he walked slowly about the chapel. There’d been so many big, careless feet tramping in and out of the chapel in the past six hours that it would be impossible to accurately reconstruct what the floor had looked like, before the sexton’s arrival. But it seemed somehow disrespectful, a violation of that poor girl lying there against the wall, to be tromping heedlessly through what had once been her life’s blood. So Lovejoy tried to avoid it.

He stopped in front of the small altar’s white marble steps. The blood was thickest here, where she’d been found. A lantern lay on its side, its glass shattered. He twisted around to glance back at his constable. “Any idea who was the last person to use the Lady Chapel?”

Once again, Maitland thumbed through his notebook. It was all for effect, Lovejoy knew. Edward Maitland could recite the entire contents of his notebook from memory. But he thought it gave weight to his pronouncements, to be seen looking up each fact or figure. “We’re still checking,” he said with a slowness that was again for effect, “but it was probably a Mrs. William Nackery. She’s a haberdasher’s widow. Comes to the Lady Chapel here every evening at about half past four and prays for some twenty to thirty minutes. She says the church was empty when she left, just afore five.”

Lovejoy lifted his gaze to the blood-spattered walls, his lips tightening into a smile that had nothing to do with humor. “It appears to be a fairly safe assumption to say she was killed here.”

Warily, Maitland cleared his throat. He always grew uncomfortable when Lovejoy began stating the obvious. “I should think so, sir.”

“Which seems to place our murder between the hours of five and eight last night.”

“That’s the way we figured it, sir.” The constable cleared his throat again. “We found her reticule some two or three feet from the body. It was open, so most of the contents had spilled out. But her pocketbook was still there, undisturbed. And that’s a fine gold necklace and earrings she’s wearing.”

“In other words, no robbery.”

“No, sir.”

“But you say the reticule was open? I wonder if it simply fell open when she dropped it, or if our killer was searching for something?” Lovejoy glanced again around the cold chapel, felt the damp chill of the stones seeping up through the soles of his boots. He shoved his gloved hands deep into the pockets of his greatcoat, and wished he hadn’t forgotten his scarf. “I’m waiting, Constable.”

The planes of Edward Maitland’s broad, handsome face pinched with puzzlement. “Sir?”

“For you to tell me why you felt it necessary that I come here myself.”

The frown eased into a self-satisfied smile. “Because we’ve figured out who did it, sir.”

“Really?”

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