Page 1 of The Business of Blood
1
The arrangement of Frank Sawyer’s corpse was queer enough to lend me pause. He hung upside down in the common room, suspended from the rafter by one foot, the other bent behind him, his spindly legs forming a strange triangle.
I’d seen too many bodies to recall the exact number but, in my experience, those hanging from a rope most often did so by their throats. In this case, there didn’t seem to be enough left of a throat to manage a proper hanging.
“You should know better than to linger at a threshold, Fiona, lest a demon take you.”
I whirled to face the voice behind me with my hand over my startled heart, thanking all the saints I could conjure that it wasnotInspector Croft who’d caught me snooping at a murder scene before a body had been removed.
Especially after he’d told me some time ago, in no uncertain terms, tonotenter a structure until the evidence of a crime had been conducted forth. And I hadn’t.Technically,the threshold was still out on the street.
“Aidan, you startled me,” I reproached. “What are you doing here?”
Whitechapel was a long way from Limerick, Ireland, where Aidan Fitzpatrick and I had been whelped and raised. It’d been an eternity since my elder brothers, Flynn and Finnegan, followed Aidan around like two identical twin shadows.
And not because they’d fallen out with each other, but because neither Aidan nor I believed in ghosts. And chances were good that Finn and Flynn had conned St. Peter into letting them be angels, though they scarcely did anything in their tragically short lifetimes to deserve the designation.
“I’m here for the same reason as you, I suspect. To clean up after death.” He looked past me into the common house, and his winsome smile died a slow death, taking with it the rogue I’d known before he donned the cassock. “I have to keep telling you, Fiona. Call me Father Fitzpatrick,” he reminded me with idle distraction.
“Just so,Father Fitzpatrick.” I cringed at the taste the title left on my tongue—like bitter herbs and disappointed expectations. “And you can call me Miss Mahoney if we’re being proper folk.”
One shouldn’t look at a priest the way I looked at Aidan. But surely God forgave me, because every other lady in his congregation did the same. He had the countenance and figure of a fallen angel, not to mention the voice of a seraph.
I knew that he’d pledged his life—his heart—to God. But he’d promised it to me first upon a day and, saints preserve me, I felt downright proprietary about it sometimes. I supposed a vow of fidelity was easier to break to your best mate’s freckled and bespectacled little sister than to the Almighty.
“I thought a man of the cloth wasn’t supposed to pay mind to superstitious pagan beliefs like thresholds and the in-between,” I chided.
“Perhaps not, but we do believe in demons, and there are plenty to be found hereabouts.” All traces of good humor vanished, and we locked eyes for a solemn moment before his big, tentative hand settled on my shoulder.
He knew what this place did to me. He understood the demons that awaited me here.
I hated that he could identify my weakness. That he knew what it looked like because he’d seen it before. He’d witnessed me at my worst.
I was no stranger to Father Aidan Fitzpatrick’s touch. There was a time that his hands thrilled me with carnal delight. They sent me to my own priest to confess when they’d found their illicit way beneath my bodice when we were young and, I’d thought, in love.
Now, his touch was simply offered as a balm. A comfort. The only familiar warmth to be found in a cold, pitiless world.
He scrutinized the gruesome corpse with dark eyes that had always seemed incongruous with the gold in his hair. Aidan didn’t cringe at the inky sight of Mr. Sawyer’s blood, all drained from his open throat onto the floorboards. I would give him that much. I imagined him being a soldier contributed to his stoic mien. He’d witnessed countless wounds and plenty of blood. Perhaps even sinew and bone, like that of Mr. Sawyer’s spine, visible through his open throat.
I winced at the sight, more because I felt I ought to, rather than out of sympathy.
I wouldn’t identify my feelings about this murder until much, much later. Not because I didn’t possess them, mind, but because something inside of me long ago decided I didn’t get to have emotions in the presence of death.
They came for me later, when I least expected them.
“They told me Frank Sawyer died when they summoned me here, not that he’d been murdered,” Aidan said with grave solemnity. “Where’s Agnes?”
“Agnes, who?”
“Agnes Sawyer.” He glanced at me as though I were daft. “Frank Sawyer’s wife.”
“I imagine she’s being guarded by Constable Fanshaw over there.” I pointed in the direction of a dozen doorways, indicating one boasting a sentinel from the London Metropolitan Police.
Aidan took a step toward it, instantly alert. “Is she alone?”
I blinked. Weren’t we all alone at a time like this?
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, Fiona, how could you leave her at such a time?”
