Austen gave a startled laugh. “You must. I’m not convinced even my sister Jane could have come up with that one.” The banker stared off across a sunlit pasture dotted with grazing brown cows. His eyes narrowed, as if he were struggling to come to some sort of decision. Then he said, “Jane told me something the other day that might interest you, by the way.”
“Oh? What’s that?”
“You know that fellow who keeps a curiosity shop in Chelsea?”
“Basil Thistlewood?”
“That’s him. Well, it seems that when she arrived at Alford House to take Anne up in my carriage, Preston and Thistlewood were standing in the middle of the street, shouting at each other. She didn’t think too much of it at the time-Preston was always squabbling with someone, you know. But while she has no desire to say something that might throw suspicion on an innocent man, she’s begun to wonder if perhaps you shouldn’t know about it.”
“This happened last Sunday evening?”
“Yes; around nine,” said Austen. “That surprises you; why?”
Sebastian swung his horses in a wide loop at the crossroads and headed back toward Brompton Row. “Because Thistlewood claims he never left his coffeehouse that day at all.”
Chapter 44
Basil Thistlewood was standing beneath the elms lining the Thames at Cheyne Walk and throwing chunks of bread to a gathering of some half a dozen ducks when Sebastian walked up to him. The spring sunlight glimmered on the wide stretch of river beside them, and the limbs of the budding trees overhead throbbed with birdsong.
The curiosity collector cast a quick, sideways glance at Sebastian, then went back to pitching bread. “Didn’t expect to see you again.”
“You should have,” said Sebastian, watching the ducks dart after the bread, their feathers iridescent in the sunlight. “When you stand in the middle of the street shouting at someone who turns up dead later that very evening, you have to expect that sooner or later someone is going to remember it.”
“How’d you hear about that?”
“Does it matter?”
“S’pose not.” Thistlewood tore off another chunk of bread and pitched it at the ducks.
“Care to tell me about it?”
Thistlewood twitched one shoulder. “Not much to tell. Friend of mine’s got a shop in Knightsbridge. I was walking back from visiting him and just minding my own business when Preston comes barging out of his house and chases after me, accusing me of all sorts of outlandish stuff.”
“What sort of outlandish stuff?”
“Watching his house.”
“Were you watching his house?”
“Well, I may’ve stopped and looked at it. But I weren’t watching it. I was coming back from having a game of chess with Rory. You can check; he’ll tell you-Rory Lemar, lives over his tobacco shop in Knightsbridge. You ask him, and he’ll tell you I was there.”
“You told me you never left your coffee shop that Sunday.”
Thistlewood sniffed. “What you think? That I’m gonna step forward and volunteer the information that Preston and me had words an hour or two before he got himself killed?”
“It does rather make it look as if you have something to hide.”
“Just ’cause I hid the fact I saw him that day don’t mean I killed him!”
“Some might interpret it that way.”
The curiosity collector pressed his lips together and thrust them out in a way that made him look somewhat like a disgruntled turtle.
Sebastian said, “It was Rowan Toop who showed you the lead-wrapped bodies of the woman and child you told me about; wasn’t it?”
Thistlewood’s eyes widened. “I read about what happened to him in the papers. What are you saying? That I maybe killed him too? I didn’t.”
“But you did know him.”
“I knew him. Never bought nothin’ from him, though. I told you before-I can’t afford to pay for the things I put on display.”
“And Toop wanted to be paid?”
“He did indeed.”
“Did Toop ever sell items to Stanley Preston?”
“I can’t say for certain, but I ’spect so.” The curiosity collector shot Sebastian another one of his sideways glances. “You think whoever lopped off Preston’s head also done for Toop?”
“I think it more than likely.”
“Well, all I know is, it weren’t me. Ask anyone, they’ll tell you: I’m not a violent man.”
“Despite your fascination with swords and headsmen’s axes and executioners’ blocks?”
“You don’t find ’em fascinating?”
“In a macabre sort of way, I suppose I do. But they also repel me.”
Thistlewood tore off another piece of bread and chucked it at the ducks. “I reckon we’re all afraid of death. We know we’re gonna die, but none of us wants to.” He gave a strange, watery chuckle. “Some folks, they’ve got this notion that if they think about death, they’re inviting it closer. So they don’t want to be reminded of it in any way. But then there’s others who think that by gettin’ close to death-by staring it in the face, so to speak-we make it less scary.”
“I take it you fall into the latter category?”
Thistlewood gave another of his odd chuckles. “Reckon I do. And you too.”
“Me?”
“Why else would you do what you do? Look for murderers, I mean.”
Sebastian started to deny it. If asked, he’d have said his dedication to finding a measure of justice for the victims of murder had far more to do with guilt and a need for redemption than with a fear of death. And yet. .
He watched as the curiosity collector crumpled the last of his bread and scattered it in the water. The branches of the elms overhead cast shifting patterns of light and shade across the waves washing gently against the riverbank; the air smelled of damp earth and the wild mint that grew in the hollows between the gnarled roots. He listened to the splash of a wherryman’s oars farther out on the Thames, heard the squeals and laughter of children playing in a nearby pasture. And he was forced to acknowledge that, in a sense, Thistlewood was right. Except it wasn’t his own death Sebastian feared but the death of those he loved, lest they be forced to pay with their own lives for the lives of the women and children he’d failed to save.
“Have you ever killed anyone?” Thistlewood asked suddenly. “Surely you have-you being in the Army and all.”
“Why do you ask?”
“I attend the hangings at Newgate, sometimes. I watch the hangman pull that lever and I think, What must it feel like, to kill someone? To know that one minute they’re living and the next they’re not, and it’s you who’s done that.” He looked at Sebastian expectantly, his lips pulled back in a hopeful, almost eager half smile.
But Sebastian only shook his head, unwilling to satisfy the man’s ghoulish curiosity.
Until that moment, Sebastian would have said he doubted that Thistlewood had anything to do with the recent string of murders. Despite Thistlewood’s lies, despite the public arguments and intense professional and personal jealousy, Sebastian had largely discounted him as a suspect, instead becoming more and more convinced that the grisly killings were the work of someone hired by Sinclair Oliphant or Priss Mulligan, or perhaps even by Preston’s own daughter, Anne.
Now he wasn’t so sure.
Mica McDougal leaned against his donkey cart, his beefy arms crossed at his chest, first one cheek, then the other puffing out with air as he stared thoughtfully at Hero.
“Stanley Preston? Ain’t ’e the cove what got ’is ’ead cut off out at Bloody Bridge?”
Hero nodded. “He visited Bucket Lane just hours before he was killed. I’m trying to find out why he went there and whom he saw.”
McDougal squinted up at the thick gray clouds scuttling in overhead to rob the day of its promise of warmth and sunshine. A cold wind had kicked up, ruffling the feathers of the gulls screaming overhead and intensifying the odor of raw fish that rose from both the man and his cart. “Ye thinkin’ maybe some coster done fer ’im?”