The corpse was, in fact, that of a man. Striking as that was, though, it was not the main point of remark, once the rags of the green gown had been removed to verify the fact.
“I’ve never seen anything like that in me life,” Harry Quarry said, eyeing the dead man with a combination of disgust and fascination. “You, Magruder?”
“Well, on a woman, now and then,” the constable said, pursing his lips fastidiously. “Some of the whores do it regular, I understand. Bit of a curiosity, like.”
“Oh, whores, yes, of course.” Quarry flapped a hand, indicating that such usage was not only familiar to him, but positively commonplace. “But this is a man, dammit! You’ve never seen such a thing, have you, Grey?”
Grey had, in fact, seen such a thing, and more than once, though it was not an affectation that appealed to him personally. It would scarcely do to say so, though, and he shook his head, widening his eyes in a semblance of shocked incomprehension at the perversity of mankind.
“Mr. Byrd,” he said, making space for Tom to approach closer. “You are our chief expert on the art of shaving; what can you tell us about this?”
Nostrils pinched against the reek of the corpse, Tom the barber’s son motioned for the lantern to be brought closer, and leaned down, squinting in professional fashion along the planes of the body.
“Well,” he said judiciously, “he does it—did it, I mean—regular. More like, someone did it for him—a nice, professional bit of work. See, there’s no cuts, nor yet no scraping—and that’s an awkward bit, round there.” He pointed, frowning. “Hard to manage by yourself, I should think.”
Quarry made a noise that might have been a laugh, but converted it hastily into a wheezing cough.
Byrd, ignoring this, stretched out a hand and ran it very delicately up the corpse’s leg.
“Oh, yes,” he said, in tones of satisfaction. “Feel that, me lord? You can feel the stubble, sharp-ended, like, when you goes against the grain. It gets like that when a man shaves regular. If he shaves no more than once or twice a month, he’s like to get bumps—the hair curls up under the skin as it grows, see? But no bumps here.”
There were not. The corpse’s skin was smooth, devoid of hairs on arms, legs, chest, buttocks and privates. Other than smears of dried blood and caked ordure, and the small black hole of the bullet wound in his chest, only the deep purple-brown of the nipples and the riper tones of the rather well-endowed expanse between the man’s legs interrupted the pale olive perfection of his flesh. Grey thought the gentleman would likely have been quite popular, in certain circles.
“He has stubble. So the shaving took place before death?” Grey asked.
“Oh, yes, me lord. Like I said—he does it regular.”
Quarry scratched his head.
“I will be damned. D’ye think he’s a he-whore, then? A sodomite of some type?”
Grey would have taken a substantial wager to that effect, were it not for one observation. The man was slight, but well-built and muscular, like Grey himself. However, the muscles of chest and arms had begun to sag from lack of use, and there was a definite roll of fat around the middle. Adding to these observations the fact that the man’s neck was deeply seamed and, despite an impeccable manicure, the backs of his hands thickly veined and knobbed, Grey was reasonably sure that the body was that of a man in his late thirties or early forties. Male prostitutes seldom lasted far beyond twenty.
“Nah, too old,” Magruder objected, fortunately saving Grey from the necessity of finding some way of saying the same thing, without disclosing how he knew it. “This cove would be one as hires such, not one himself.”
Quarry shook his head in disapproval.
“Should never have suspected Maggie of dealing in that sort of thing,” he said, as much in regret as condemnation. “You sure about the dress, then, Grey?”
“Reasonably. It is not impossible that a dressmaker should make more than one gown, of course—but whoever made this one made the one that Magda was wearing.”
“Magda?” Quarry blinked at him.
Grey cleared his throat, a hideous realization coming suddenly over him. Quarry hadn’t known.
“The . . . ah . . . Scottish woman I met there informed me that the madam was called Magda, and is in fact a, um, a German of some type.”
Quarry’s face looked pinched in the lantern light.
“Of some type,” he repeated bleakly. It made considerable difference whichtype, and Quarry was well aware of it. Prussia and Hanover—of course—had allied themselves with England, while the duchy of Saxony had chosen up sides with France and Russia, in support of its neighbor Austria. For an English colonel to be patronizing a brothel owned by a German of unknown background and allegiance, and now with an evident involvement in criminal matters, was a dicey proposition, and one that Quarry must devoutly hope would never come to official notice. Or the notice of the unblinking Mr. Bowles.
It wouldn’t do Grey’s reputation any good, either. He realized now that he ought to have mentioned the situation to Quarry at the time, rather than assuming that he must know of Magda’s background already. But he had allowed himself to be distracted by alcoholic excess, and by Nessie’s disclosure about Trevelyan—and now he could but hope there wasn’t the devil to pay for it.
Harry Quarry drew a deep breath and blew it out again, squaring his shoulders. One of Harry’s many good points was that he never wasted time in recrimination, and—unlike Bernard Sydell—never blamed subordinates, even when they deserved it.
“Well, then,” he said, and turned to Magruder. “I think we must have Mrs. Magda taken into custody and questioned without delay. We shall need to search her premises, as well, I should think—will you require a warrant?”
“Yes, sir. Given the circumstances”—Magruder nodded delicately at the dead man—“I shouldn’t think the magistrate would be reluctant.”
Quarry nodded, straightening the coat on his shoulders.
“Aye. I’ll come myself and speak to him now.” He drummed his fingers restlessly on the table, making the corpse’s slack hand tremble with the vibration. “Grey—I think we shall have the Scanlons taken up, too, as you advised. You’ll question them; go round to the gaol tomorrow, once Magruder has had a chance to lay them by the heels. As for . . . the Cornish gentleman . . . use your best judgment there, will you?”
Grey managed a nod, cursing himself for his idiocy, and then Quarry and Magruder were gone, leaving the faceless corpse naked and staring in the flickering light.
“You in trouble, me lord?” Tom Byrd was frowning worriedly at him from the shadows, having evidently divined some hint of the undercurrents in the preceding conversation.
“I hope not.” He stood looking down at the dead man. Who the devil was he? Grey had been convinced that the body was that of Trevelyan’s lover—and it might still be, he reminded himself. True, Caswell had insisted that it was a woman whom Trevelyan entertained at Lavender House, but Caswell might have been mistaken in his own powers of olfactory discernment—or lying, for reasons unknown.
Use his best judgment, Harry said. His best judgment was that Trevelyan was in this up to his neck—but there was no direct evidence.
There was certainly no evidence to connect the Scanlons with this business, and precious little to connect them with O’Connell’s murder—but Harry’s motive in ordering an arrest there was apparent; if inquiries were eventually made into the conduct of the investigation, it would be prudent to make it look as though affairs were being pursued aggressively. The muddier the waters, the less likely anyone might be to take up the matter of Magda’s inconvenient nationality.