Why Mermaids Sing

Chapter 14

“A curious conversation,” said Paul Gibson, when Sebastian met with the surgeon later that day.

They were drinking ale and dining on a joint of cold ham at a battered old table overlooking the surgery’s neglected back garden. “It reminded me of my meeting with Lord Stanton yesterday morning,” said Sebastian. “There’s more than arrogance going on here, more than suspicion or resentment of my involvement. Their reaction is simply not…natural.”

“Grief can drive men in strange ways.”

Sebastian swallowed the last of his ale and set aside his tankard. “Perhaps.”

Gibson pushed awkwardly to his feet. “Come see what I’ve found…although I’m afraid it’s not much.”

Sebastian followed the surgeon through the weed-grown garden to the small stone building behind the surgery. The scent of blood and decaying flesh hit them halfway across the yard. Sebastian breathed through his mouth.

What was left of Dominic Stanton lay on the room’s altar-like table, covered with a sheet. Sebastian stared at that long, silent form and said, “I suppose in all honesty it’s impossible for anyone to truly grasp what it would be like, knowing this had been done to his son.”

“Probably.” Gibson flipped back the sheet. “Unfortunately, I can’t tell you much more about his death. I still believe it’s the wound across his throat that killed him…which I suppose would be a relatively merciful way to die, considering the horrors of what came after.”

“It’s the way you’d slaughter a lamb,” said Sebastian, his gaze on the boy’s face. Dominic Stanton’s features were relaxed in death; he might have been sleeping.

“Except this was no lamb but a big, hale young man. I would think it must have taken more than one assailant to subdue him.” Gibson rolled up the sheet and shoved it aside in a rough gesture. “Although it’s difficult enough to imagine one man committing such an act of barbarity, let alone two.”

Slipping a hand into his pocket, Sebastian drew forth the small blue-and-white Chinese vial he’d picked up from the grassy verge on the road to Merton Abbey. “I found this where I think the boy was set upon.”

Taking the vial, Gibson raised it to his nostrils and sniffed. He looked up, one eyebrow raised. “Opium?”

Sebastian watched Gibson’s hand clench around the vial, then relax. Gibson’s own dark love affair with opium dated back three years or more, to the blood-soaked surgeon’s tent in Portugal where he’d lost the mangled remnant of a leg left him by a French cannonball.

“Is there any way to tell if Stanton ingested the drug before he died?” Sebastian asked.

Gibson sighed and held the vial out to him. “Unfortunately, no. You think Stanton was a habitual user?”

“I suppose it’s possible, although I’ve found nothing that would suggest it. I’m thinking perhaps the drug was used to make him more manageable.”

“It would do that. Particularly if the lad were unused to its effects. But to force it down his throat wouldn’t have been easy if he resisted.”

“No. But if someone held a gun on him and gave him a choice between the opium and instant death, he would drink it.”

As bad as the room had smelled yesterday, today it was indescribably worse. Sebastian went to stand in the open doorway and breathe. “According to Mr. Stanton’s friends, the boy was nervous the past few weeks, convinced someone was following him. Whoever killed him must have been watching him. Waiting for the chance to catch him alone. His friends thought he was imagining it. They even laughed at him for being afraid.”

“Aye, he was afraid, poor lad. He wet himself at some point before he died.”

“Not at the moment of his death?”

“No. It was when he was still wearing his shirt.”

Sebastian turned to gaze at the fair curls and full cheeks of the silent face on Paul Gibson’s granite slab. Dominic Stanton had probably thought himself a downy one, awake on every suit. Whereas in fact, he’d been little more than a child. A scared child. “Jesus.”

His gaze rose to the enameled basin on a nearby table, where something bloody and vaguely familiar lay. “The object he had stuffed in his mouth, what was it?”

Gibson followed his stare. “The hoof of a goat. It probably came from a butcher’s stall. Whoever dismembered that goat was far more familiar with a cleaver than the man who hacked up Stanton’s legs. Any idea what it signifies?”

Sebastian shook his head. “No. According to Lovejoy, Barclay Carmichael had a page from a ship’s log stuffed in his mouth.”

Gibson nodded. “I spoke to Martin, the surgeon who did the postmortem on young Carmichael.” His lip quivered in disdain. “The man’s a bloody idiot. I asked him if the body showed signs of having been bound and gagged before death, and he said he’d never thought to notice. But you were right: Carmichael’s throat was slit and the body drained of all blood. The flesh was hacked from his arms.”

“Not the legs?”

“No. Just the arms.”

Sebastian walked around the slab. He had to force himself to look, really look, at the mangled boy. “Barclay Carmichael’s body was found at dawn in St. James’s Park,” he said, “hanging upside down from a mulberry tree. Dominic Stanton was found in Old Palace Yard, again at dawn. Both very public places. Both young men were last seen the night before their deaths by friends whom they then left. Sometime between when they were last seen and when their bodies were discovered at dawn, both young men were set upon by at least one assailant, perhaps more. They were taken God only knows where, stripped of their shirts, their throats slit, and the blood drained from their bodies. Then the killer—or killers—hacked the flesh from Carmichael’s arms and from Stanton’s legs and dumped the bodies where they’d be quickly found the next morning.” He glanced up to find Gibson watching him. “Does that sound right?”

“I’d say so, yes.”

Sebastian blew out a long, slow breath. “Was there nothing to indicate where Stanton might have been killed?”

“Just these.” Gibson walked over to pluck what looked like pieces of straw from the table and hold them out. “I found one in his hair, the others caught in his shirt and coat.”

Sebastian took the fragile stems between his fingers and sniffed. “It’s hay.”

“I asked Martin if Barclay Carmichael had hay in his hair and clothes. He said yes—although he couldn’t imagine why it might be significant.” Reaching for the sheet, Gibson shook it out over the body, his motions unexpectedly gentle as he smoothed the covering over the boy’s mutilated feet. He stood for a moment, his gaze on the silent, shrouded form before him. When he spoke, his voice was hushed. “What kind of person would do something like this? Butcher a human body like a slab of meat?”

“You do it.”

Gibson looked up, his lips pressed together so tightly that two white lines bracketed his mouth. “I dissect cadavers for knowledge, to help save lives, and I respect and honor every body that comes to me. Whoever killed those two young men was acting out some twisted hatred, not pursuing any scientific inquiry. He desecrated their bodies in a way that violates every standard of decency, every tenet of civilization as we know it.”

“Yet we’ve both seen men do such things—and worse. Well-bred young men of birth and fortune.”

There was a silence as both men’s thoughts drifted back to another time and another place, and a fellow officer who had once delighted in the pain and dismemberment of his enemies.

“That was war,” said Gibson. “This isn’t war. And besides, he’s not here.”

“No, this isn’t war. But he is here in London.”

“Quail?” said Gibson.

Sebastian nodded. “Captain Peter himself.”

Captain Peter Quail was not the kind of fellow officer one easily forgot. A tall, lanky barrister’s son from Devon with corn-flower blue eyes, a shank of straight blond hair, and a ready laugh that came loud and often, he had served with Gibson and Sebastian in Portugal. He was every regiment’s dream with a cricket bat and poetry in motion on horseback. And he had taken a fiendishly sadistic delight in butchering informers—or men he suspected of being informers. He used to dump his victims’ mutilated bodies on their families’ doorsteps. As time passed, he developed what he considered his calling card—various parts of his victims’ anatomy sliced off and stuffed into their mouths.

“I’d heard he lost an arm at Ciudad Rodrigo.”

“He did. But he was able to use an inheritance from his wife’s people to buy a transfer to the Horse Guards.” Commissions in the Horse Guards were the most expensive in the Army.

Gibson stared at the silent figure before them. “What possible reason could he have to do this?”

“I don’t know,” said Sebastian. “Maybe he simply developed a taste for it.”

“I want you to find someone for me,” Sebastian told his tiger, Tom, as he drew Sebastian’s curricle up before the surgery.

Tom handed over the chestnuts’ reins and scrambled back onto his perch. “Who?”

“A captain in the Horse Guards named Quail. Peter Quail.”