Page 21 of Silence of Deceit
Greer had smartly remained outside with Carrigan. Audrey lowered her hand and forced herself not to comment on his dire need to bathe. “Why have you refused to give my driver your message? He is more than trustworthy.”
“Mister Hugh always says I got to deliver his messages m’self,” he replied, springing up from the bench. “Says I’m to fetch you.”
Her heart gave an involuntary stammer. Lady Rumsford’s comment, however, clung like a briar, and she tamed her pulse. “For what purpose?”
The boy sat forward, his pale cheeks streaked with dirt and a smear of what appeared to be jam. “There’s been a murder.”
Alarm strummed through her, and Audrey sat taller. “Do you know who it is?”
He nodded and grimaced. “A girl named Miss Mary Simpson.”
ChapterSeven
Hugh paced the carpeted lobby outside Mary Simpson’s bedchamber. He had his arms crossed, his eyes skipping to the clock at the top of the stairs on every pass. A footman stood there, one of the scant few Mr. and Mrs. Simpson employed. Their home was modest, their staff numbering a half-dozen, and all wore the shock of the afternoon’s grim discovery upon their faces.
At just around two, a messenger had come to Bow Street with an urgent request for Officer Marsden to hasten to High Holborn. He’d recognized the address.
“A woman is dead,” the messenger, young and scrawny like Sir, yet not half as fragrant, had said, huffing for air.
With his stomach quickly turning to lead, Hugh had set out for the Simpson household. There, he’d found Mr. Simpson, a clerk with the Home Office, attempting to console his insensible wife, while also succumbing to moments of incomprehension. Not unaccustomed to such moments of grief, Hugh turned to the maid who’d seen him into the house the other day—and who’d had the clear-headedness to send for him at Bow Street—and asked her to explain.
Less than an hour before, the cook had found Mary Simpson’s body on the steps of the servant’s entrance. Her throat had been slashed. When Hugh had started toward the kitchen and the back entrance, the maid had hurried to say the young woman had been taken upstairs and lain upon her bed.
“Why?” Hugh asked, trying to temper his fury at the handling of the body.
“Mrs. Simpson insisted,” the maid answered, grimacing. “She couldn’t leave Miss Mary out on the steps like that.”
He’d swallowed his frustration. It wasn’t the maid’s fault, and nor had Mrs. Simpson meant any harm. She and Mr. Simpson had lost their child. Their only child, from what Hugh quickly learned, and he could only imagine the toll it would take on them. He’d seen fathers of dead children expire from heart failure, and grieving mothers screaming for someone to kill them so they could join their child in the afterlife.
After inspecting the steps and shouting at the footman to stop scrubbing the blood from the stones, Hugh had gone up to view Mary’s body. She had been tucked into bed with a sheet lain out over her. Her eyelids were pressed closed, her hands folded over her chest. As if she had merely been sleeping. Only the dark slash of her throat and the blood soaking the neck and bodice of her gown had revealed the grim truth. The maid insisted no one had washed her, and a quick look at her hands and nails showed no signs that Mary had attempted to ward off her attacker.
After questioning the staff as to what they knew, and then attempting to also question Mr. and Mrs. Simpson—without success—Hugh had gone outback, behind the kitchen, for a breath of air. Sir was waiting there, a ready and willing assistant. How the lad found him and how he knew just when to appear continued to impress him.
“What d’you need, Mister Hugh?”
With the connection to Shadewell shared by the two dead women hanging over his head like a damned guillotine, and because of something Mary’s maid had imparted, he’d had only one need in mind: “Fetch the duchess, Sir. Bring her here. To me.”
Now, he waited in the upstairs hallway, the house feeling isolated from the rest of London. Death was odd like that. One person stops breathing, their life snuffed out, and yet millions of others continue with business as usual. Life was relentless and pitiless, and nothing illuminated that more than a recently dead corpse.
Sound broke through the muffled house as the front door opened and soft murmuring traveled up the stairwell. Even in whispers, his ears knew her voice.
Hugh met her at the top of the stairs, her blue eyes round with disbelief, the apples of her cheeks, normally pink, now pallid. “Tell me Sir was wrong.”
He shook his head and stepped aside for her join him on the landing. Audrey grasped the newel post.
“How?”
“A knife to the throat,” he replied. The footman nearby flinched, and Hugh drew Audrey away, lowering his voice. “She was on the servant’s entrance steps when she was attacked. No one saw or heard anything. The maid claims Mary was preparing to go out on a social call.”
“Oh, good Lord.” Audrey closed her eyes. “She was coming to see me, at Violet House.”
“For what reason?”
Audrey shook her head, still holding onto the newel post as if it was the only thing keeping her upright. “Her note said she had something pertinent to discuss regarding Delia and the blackmailing, but she didn’t write specifics.” She paused and drew in a deep breath. “Do you think whoever did this wanted to stop her from speaking to me?”
“It’s possible,” he replied. In fact, he thought it most likely. He only wished he knew what Mary had wanted to say to the duchess. Something that she had not been willing to say the other day when in the company of her mother, or something she had learned since then?
“Mrs. Simpson…” Audrey murmured. “Does she know anything?”
