Chapter 1 #2
Likely no more than five and twenty, her cheeks were smooth and unlined, the delicate skin around her eyes still firm.
Her eyebrows were groomed to thin arches, darkened with kohl, and the pallor of death made the rouge on her cheeks more prominent.
A cluster of onyx gems dangled from one ear lobe, while the other was bare.
She was not the man’s wife, that much Hugh knew.
Though she wore stays and a chemise, she lacked a pair of drawers, which left her lower half exposed.
The chatter in the hallway stroked Hugh’s attention; five people crammed themselves in the doorway, all of them craning their heads for a gander.
“Shut that door,” Hugh growled to the watchman. The old man startled but did as told, limping over to slam it.
“Did you find her as she is now?” Hugh asked. The night watchman didn’t answer. “Have you touched the body, or moved anything?”
Hugh would not give anyone, even an old man with a bum leg, the benefit of the doubt.
He knew too much about base human compulsion to not automatically wonder if this man, or any of the vultures outside, had moved her, or what little she wore, for a look at her.
Hugh also knew when he was being fed a lie, and so he watched the old man as he returned to the bed.
“Haven’t touched a goddamn ‘fing,” the man said. “Check me hands for blood if ye like.”
He didn’t need to. The old man grimaced, looking as if he’d rather take a swim in a latrine than touch a dead body.
She’d kept herself shorn, Hugh noted, feeling a bit of a violator himself.
However, the simple fact spoke volumes. She was likely a prostitute, and a costly one who wished to keep herself clean for the man currently muttering to himself on the floor.
He probably let these rooms just to meet with her.
These were not furnishings a female would surround herself with.
No, this was a man’s room. She had come to him.
“When did you arrive?” Hugh asked the watchman next.
“Half hour since. Forty minutes, most.”
With a sigh, Hugh touched the gore coating her neck. His fingers drew back with blood, tacky and just starting to congeal. He then turned his hand and touched the woman’s bare arm. Her flesh wasn’t warm, but it hadn’t gone stone cold either. She’d been dead for perhaps an hour.
“And you’ve sent for the parish constable?” Hugh asked.
Bow Street wouldn’t be dealing with the woman’s body.
That responsibility fell to the constable, who would fetch a cart and deliver the body to the coroner, who would then hold an inquest to determine how the woman had died.
It would be a brief inquest. Hugh glanced at the man on the floor.
This was the person Bow Street would be dealing with—and Hugh would be the one to deliver the bastard.
Hugh left the tester bed and approached the man, whose head was still tucked down with his forehead pressed against his knees.
Had he killed the woman in a fit of rage and then collapsed in hysterics? Most killers would have fled before someone could stumble upon the scene and make the hue and cry out over the streets to draw the night watchman. Finding a corpse and the killer in the same room was not common.
In fact, it felt just a little bit wrong.
“The nob wouldn’t budge,” the watchman said.
Hugh circled the man. Something glinted in the oil lamplight on the floor by his right hip.
Using the toe of his boot, Hugh nudged it aside.
The knife looked like a utility blade, shaped long and thin.
A fillet or boning knife. Blood colored the steel and the simple wooden handle.
He sent the blade skimming across the floor, just far enough aside so that the man wouldn’t be able to reach for it should he get the urge.
Hugh lowered himself into a crouch. “What’s the woman’s name?” There was no point in pleasantries.
“Audrey.” The man’s drawn-up legs muffled his voice.
“And her surname?”
“Audrey.”
Hugh sighed. “Why don’t you tell me your name?”
“Audrey.”
Audrey, Audrey, Audrey. The bounder had either lost his senses or was playing at it.
Hugh, tired of staring at the crown of dark blond hair streaked with blood, asked the man to lift his head. He got the same response: Audrey.
So, he grabbed a fistful of the man’s hair and tugged his head back, exposing his face. Tears and blood left bisecting rivers down the man’s cheeks. His lids fluttered, as if he were fighting to stay awake.
“Oh, hell,” Hugh muttered. He released the man’s hair, and his head flopped down again. Hugh got to his feet, his knees cracking as they straightened.
“What?” the watchman asked.
Sir had said it was a nob, a wealthy gentleman from the other half of London, and he’d been dead on. However, this was no run-of-the-mill gentleman. No wealthy merchant or businessman, or even a member of the landed gentry.
“He’s a peer,” Hugh answered. He knew him too, from a time when Hugh possessed more ties to le bon ton than he did to lower society, as he did now.
The man sitting at Hugh’s feet, soaked in his dead mistress’s blood, was Philip Sinclair, the Duke of Fournier. A goddamned duke.
“This tap-hackled bloke’s a peer?” the watchman crowed. Hugh took a whiff of the duke. He certainly looked and acted intoxicated, but he didn’t smell it.
Hugh hooked Fournier’s arm and wrenched him to his feet. Though taller than Hugh, he was probably a stone lighter. Still, it proved difficult to hold him. The duke’s legs were like two poles of gelatinous aspic.
“Ye lettin’ him loose then?” the watchman asked.
As a peer of the realm, the duke would be granted some protection from the law. As if being born into wealth and titles were not enough, these men and women were also exempt from the basic rules that governed the masses below them.
It was something Hugh despised.
The lack of justice, the favoritism, the elitist mindset that decreed that certain people with certain blood were fundamentally better than others, had been a thorn in his side for a very long time.
There were many constables and foot patrolmen who would have chosen to handle the duke swaying at Hugh’s side with kid gloves.
They would have rather trundled him back to his fine home located on whatever stately square it sat upon rather than face the public blow back that would come with arresting him.
Hugh Marsden was not one of them.
“He’ll come with me to Bow Street,” he replied, and then jerked his chin toward the dead woman behind them. “And for her sake, I’m going to do everything I can to see he gets a rope at Tower Hill.”