Why Kings Confess

Chapter 3

At the base of the frost-browned, unkempt yard that stretched to the rear of the surgery stood a low stone outbuilding where Gibson conducted both his official postmortems and the surreptitious, illegal dissections he performed on cadavers filched from the city’s churchyards by body snatchers. Of one room only, with high windows to discourage the curious, the building had a flagged floor and was bitterly cold. At its center stood a granite slab with strategically placed drains and a channel cut into the outer edge.

The body of a man, still fully clothed, lay upon it.

“I haven’t had a chance to begin with him yet,” said Gibson, hooking the lantern he carried onto the chain that dangled over the slab.

It sometimes seemed to Sebastian as if every suicide, every bloated body pulled from the Thames, every decaying cadaver that passed through this building, had left a stench that seeped into its walls, their muted howls of anguish and despair echoing still.

He took a deep breath and entered the room. “If St. Katharine’s authorities are convinced he was killed by common thieves, I’m surprised they agreed to an autopsy.”

“They weren’t exactly what you might call enthusiastic. To quote Constable O’Keefe”-Gibson puffed out his cheeks, narrowed his eyes, and adopted a decidedly nasal accent-“‘Wot ye want t’ be botherin’ wit’ all that fer, then? Sure but any fool can see wot killed him.’” The lantern swung back and forth on its chain, casting macabre shadows across the slab and its grisly occupant. He put up a hand to still it. “I had to promise I wouldn’t be charging the parish for my services. And I paid the lads who carried the body here myself.”

Sebastian studied the slim, slightly built man upon the surgeon’s slab. He was young yet, probably no more than twenty-six or twenty-eight, with a pleasant, even-featured face and high forehead framed by soft golden curls. His clothes were of good quality-better than the woman’s and considerably newer, fashionably cut in the Parisian style and showing little wear. But what had once been a fine silk waistcoat and linen shirt were now ripped and soaked with blood, the chest beneath hacked open to reveal a gaping cavity.

“What the hell? He looks like he was attacked with an axe.”

“It’s worse than that,” said Gibson, tucking his hands up under his armpits for warmth. “His heart has been removed.”

Sebastian raised his gaze to the Irishman’s solemn face. “Please tell me he was already dead when this was done to him.”

“I honestly don’t know yet.”

Sebastian forced himself to look, again, at that ravaged torso. “Any chance this could be the work of a student of medicine?”

“Are you serious? Even a butcher would have been more delicate. Whoever did this made a right royal mess of it.”

Sebastian shifted his gaze to the dead man’s face. His eyes were large and widely spaced, the nose prominent, the mouth full lipped and soft, almost feminine. Even in death, there was a gentleness and kindness to his features that made what had been done to him seem somehow that much more horrible.

“You say he was a physician?”

Gibson nodded. “He was staying at the Gifford Arms, in York Street. The constables brought round a gentleman from the hotel-a Monsieur Vaundreuil-to identify him.”

“Yet he couldn’t identify the woman?”

“Said he’d never seen her before. He also said he’d no notion what Pelletan might have been doing in St. Katharine’s.” Gibson rubbed the back of his neck. “I should mention that, along with his papers, the constables also found a purse containing both banknotes and silver.”

“Yet they’re convinced he fell victim to footpads?”

“The theory is that the thieves were interrupted.”

“By you?”

“I certainly didn’t see anyone. But then. .”

“But then-what?” asked Sebastian.

Gibson colored. “I was rather lost in my own thoughts.”

Sebastian watched his friend look pointedly away but remained silent.

Gibson said, “If he were English, the circumstances might be strange enough to prod even St. Katharine’s authorities into taking action. But he’s not; he’s a Frenchman-a stranger-which makes it all too easy to simply dismiss the murder as the work of footpads and forget it.”

Sebastian lowered his gaze to the pallid corpse on the slab between them. For some reason he could not have named, he knew a faint, unsettling echo of that night’s troubled dream and all the unwanted memories it had provoked. For two years now he had dedicated himself to achieving a measure of justice for murder victims who would otherwise be forgotten. And it occurred to him, not for the first time, that those faraway events in Portugal had more to do with his preoccupation than he cared to explore.

He said, “Where exactly in Cat’s Hole were they?”

“There’s a small passage that opens up between a cooperage and a chandler’s shop, on the river side of the lane. I suspect he was attacked in the street and then dragged back into the passage before this was done to him.”

“And the woman?”

“Was lying in the lane, just before the passage.”

Sebastian nodded and turned toward the door. “I’d best have a look around the area now, before the neighborhood begins stirring.”

“Now? It’s the middle of the bloody night.”

Sebastian paused to look back at him. “You think it unwise of me to go wandering about St. Katharine’s, alone, in the dark, do you?”

Gibson grunted and reached to unhook the lantern. “Here. At least take this.”

“Thanks. But I don’t really need it.”

Gibson gave a rueful laugh, his fist tightening around the lantern’s handle. Sebastian was as famous for his ability to see in the dark as for his keen hearing and sharp eyesight. “No, I don’t suppose you do. But, Devlin. . be careful. Whatever this is, it’s ugly. Very ugly.”

• • •

The ancient district known as St. Katharine’s ran along the northern bank of the Thames, just to the east of the ancient Tower of London. A warren of crooked lanes, crowded tenements, and dark courts, it was named for the hospital of St. Katherine’s that lay at its center.

Although called a “hospital,” St. Katharine’s was not so much a medical institution as a benevolent establishment dedicated to the care of the poor. As one of London’s medieval “liberties,” the area surrounding the old monastic buildings had long been a haven for foreign craftsmen seeking the protection it offered from the city’s powerful guilds. But along with the Flemish coopers, French artisans, and German brewers who flocked to the area had come thieves and whores, beggars and vagabonds. It was not an area a wise man wandered after dark, and Sebastian found himself wondering, again, what the hell Paul Gibson had been doing here, alone, on such a cold winter’s night.

Or what Damion Pelletan and his unidentified female companion had been doing here.

Sebastian walked up the dark, narrow lane with one hand on the double-barreled pistol in his pocket, his footsteps echoing hollowly in the icy silence, his senses alert for the slightest hint of movement or whisper of sound. The wind had died, and with the approach of false dawn a mist was beginning to creep up from the water’s edge, thick and stealthy. In another hour, these streets would begin to fill with costermongers, apprentices, and dustmen. But for the moment, all was still.

He found the passage readily enough, just beyond the battered, shuttered facade of a cooperage. Like virtually all the lanes in St. Katharine’s, Cat’s Hole was too narrow for footpaths; the dilapidated, closely packed tenements and tumbledown shops rose directly from the worn, ice-glazed cobbles of the roadway itself.

It took Sebastian only a moment to find the smear of blood near the corner of the passage. The woman’s blood? he wondered. Or Pelletan’s?

Squatting beside the bloodstain, he studied the surrounding jumble of muddy footprints and crushed ice. But between Gibson, the constables, and the men who’d helped carry Pelletan and his injured companion to Gibson’s surgery, any traces left by the murderer had been hopelessly trampled over and destroyed.

The sound of a soft snort brought up his head, and he found himself staring into the soft brown eyes of a half-grown pig that had been rooting through a nearby pile of garbage. “So,” said Sebastian. “Did you see anything?”

The pig snorted again and trotted away.

Sebastian rose thoughtfully to his feet, his eyes narrowing against the thickening fog as he turned to consider the deserted lane. From here he could see the massive, soot-stained walls of the Tower rising at the far western end of the lane. Which direction had Pelletan and the unknown woman been traveling? he wondered. Toward the relatively open ground surrounding the old medieval fortress? Or had they been headed east, deep into St. Katharine’s warren of dark, dangerous alleys and courtyards?

He turned his attention to the foul passageway beside him. Unlike the lane, the passage had never been paved. Beneath the soles of his Hessians, the thick, ice-crusted muck reeked of offal and manure and rotting fish heads. Yet despite the trampling of so many feet, Sebastian was able to find the impression left by the dead man’s body in the lee of a pile of broken crates and hogsheads.

He hunkered down, his gaze carefully assessing the surrounding area. He noted the blood-splattered wood of a nearby crate, the piece of torn, bloodstained linen trampled into the mud, more footprints, hopelessly muddled. Then he widened his search, looking for something-anything-that might give a hint as to who had killed Damion Pelletan. He was also looking for the dead man’s heart.

He did not find it.

Frustrated, he brought his gaze back to that blood-splattered pile of broken crates. What kind of a murderer hacks open his victim and steals his heart? Sebastian wondered. A madman? It was the obvious answer. Yet Sebastian had known British soldiers-even officers-who laughingly collected from their fallen enemies mementos ranging from severed fingers to ears. It was, after all, the British and French who had taught the American natives to collect scalps.

Was that what they were dealing with here? Some half-mad collector of war trophies? He supposed it was always possible. But a heart? Why would a murderer steal his victim’s heart? The heart was a potent symbol of so many things: of love, of courage, of life itself. Was the theft of Damion Pelletan’s heart symbolic? Or was it something else, something darker, something more. .

Evil.

And he knew it again, that whisper of memory, elusive and troubling.

He pushed quickly to his feet.

He was turning to leave when he saw it: the clear imprint of a shoe left on a broken slat of wood half trampled into the mud. It wasn’t an entire footprint, only the heel and part of the sole. But there was no mistaking that mingling of mud and blood. The shoe’s wearer had obviously trod here after Damion Pelletan’s death.

Reaching down, Sebastian freed the piece of wood from the muck, careful not to disturb the telltale outline of mud and blood it bore.

He stared at the imprint thoughtfully. It was always possible that the shoe’s owner had come through the passage in the last several hours and had nothing to do with the murder. So Sebastian began, again, to study the confusion of footprints in the garbage-strewn muck.

It took some time, but he finally found a place where a similar shoe print had been clearly pierced by the imprint of a peg leg. Whoever left these footprints had been in the passage after Pelletan’s death, but before Gibson.

Sebastian shifted his gaze, again, to the slat of wood in his hands. The shoe print wasn’t much to go on-certainly not enough to identify the killer. But it forced Sebastian to reassess completely every assumption he’d made about that night’s events, for there was no mistaking the curve of that arch or the fashionable shape of the small, narrowed heel.

It was the print of a woman’s shoe.