Page 2 of Merry Lover

“Run and fetch a constable to my house,” she begged him, thrusting a coin into his willing hand. “Tell him it’s important that there is a dead man outside my house.”

“Blimey.” Awed, Jake propped his broom against the lamp post and bolted.

Griz hastened back to the house. She gave the dead man a wide berth, but even so, he drew her gaze. His smile was ridiculously happy, quite incongruous beneath the dead, lifeless eyes. She wondered if he had really died so merrily or if some odd, physical response to illness or pain had caused him to grimace. That seemed more likely.

She could see no blood, no obvious injury or tear to his clothing. But it seemed disrespectful to leave him on display. She opened the door with her key and closed it again behind her. Vicky was still cowering in the hallway. In need of comfort herself, Griz scooped her up and cuddled her.

“I know,” she told her ruefully. “Not such a merry Christmas so far. Shall we find something to cover the face of the poor gentleman?”

Before she did that, she hastily cleaned out and set the fire in the drawing room, for she expected to be invaded by policemen and saw no reason for anyone else to freeze to death.

Was that really what had happened to her smiling gentleman? Had he sat there all night, freezing to death while she slept? She did not like that idea. It made her feel guilty as well as sad. But neither did it make much sense. He was not a friend or family member who had knocked on her door unheard. Nor was he some poor, homeless man without the means of shelter.

Or was he? Had he been robbed, attacked in the street, and bolted to this house for safety, only to die before he could raise an alarm?

She did not like that idea either.

She went upstairs and rummaged in the linen cupboard. For some reason, she chose a blanket, as if that would somehow make him warm.

He still sat upright, his head resting against the wall. She wondered if he would keel over with the weight of the blanket on his head. She began at his fine, polished shoes, and drew the blanket up over his legs to where one gloved hand lay in his lap, and paused, for a whole flower showed there now, its stem tucked between his fingers. A single Christmas rose.

That was not there before!

Abandoning the blanket, she ran down the garden path once more and glanced both ways up and down the lane. Was that a skirt disappearing into Half Moon Street?

She hesitated, curiosity, as always, her besetting sin, urging her to run after the vanishing skirt. But common sense told her the passer-by was as likely to have merely crossed the narrow lane as come from her front door.

Returning to the body, she hesitated again. It felt disrespectful to take the flower someone had clearly put there. Instead, she drew from her pocket the single petal she had found earlier and compared it to the flower in the dead man’s hand.

The petal was the same shape, clearly from another Christmas rose. But her petal was pure white. The one in the corpse’s fingers was tinged with pink. Frowning, she sat back on her heels. Then, with a quick glance over her shoulder to see if the awaited policeman approached, she felt inside the man’s pockets.

She found a fat purse and a notecase, so it seemed he had not been robbed. She also found a card case, and although voices and footsteps now sounded in the lane, she whipped out one of the cards and shoved the case back in his pocket. Hastily, she covered him with the blanket—flower and all—draping the folds lightly over his head, which, to her relief, still did not move. Then she whisked herself inside the house again, took off her cloak and bonnet, and waited to be summoned.

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