Sam regarded her intently. “What are you thinking, lass?”
“I’m thinking . . . it would make sense if Lady Westford’s murder wasn’t premediated.”
The Bow Street Runner lifted a skeptical eyebrow. “He just happened ter followed her ter the theater? What did he want? Ter talk?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I think.” She turned back to Sam. “Remember Lady Westford’s reputation. She was interested in finding cures to diseases. She even corresponded with Edward Jenner about his smallpox vaccine. Somehow, Lady Westford learned about the experiments being done on Clarice.Exitus acta probat. The end justified the means.”
“Aye, but the means resulted in the death of a girl.”
“If Clarice’s death was an accident, our killer might have believed he could talk Lady Westford into . . . understanding what he was trying to accomplish.”
“He expected her ladyship ter ignore Clarice’s murder?”
“In his mind, Clarice wasn’t murdered. She was an experiment that went wrong. And, yes, I think that’s what he hoped for when he approached Lady Westford. When she didn’t get onboard, he knew he couldn’t let her leave the theater alive.” Kendra tapped the piece of slate against her chin. “He had to think fast. He didn’t want her death to look like murder. That would mean an investigation. Scrutiny. So, he forced her up the stairs and threw her over the balcony.
“He then made certain that Dr. Thornton oversaw the postmortem and planted the seed that the victim had killed herself while he ruled her death an accident. Who wanted to be the person to suggest someone like Lady Westford, a lady-in-waiting to the Queen, had committed suicide?”
“God’s teeth, I take back what I said. The fiend is clever. No one in Bow Street would raise doubts. Certainly not Parker. It would’ve been left alone—if not for the Queen.” He shook his head, then scanned the list in his hand. “Dr. Thornton must have known the truth. Was he part of this experimentation?”
“I don’t know. His wife died from diabetes, and he still mourns her. I don’t think it would’ve been too difficult to get him to look the other way if someone was trying to cure diseases with unethical research.”
“Even if it caused a girl to die?”
Kendra shrugged. “There are winners and losers in all medical research.” Even in her own time, sick people were given placebo treatments while others were given experimental drugs. Both could die. Or be saved. It was the price of research. The difference was that the participants in medical trials knew the risks.
Not always, though. History echoed with unethical experiments. One of the more infamous was the Tuskegee Experiment, which, ironically, was also an attempt to cure syphilis. Beginning in the early 1930s, researchers enlisted more than six hundred Black men from Alabama’s Tuskegee College. Four-hundred-thirty-one men had syphilis, and were studied as the disease developed. When penicillin became available to treat the disease in 1947, the doctors chose to supply the men with placebos in order to study how the disease progressed. Doctors—scientists—allowed the men to go blind and insane—and give birth to nineteen syphilitic children. It took decades before the experiments were halted, thanks to a whistleblower.
Lady Westford would have been a whistleblower if she hadn’t been killed.
“Why did the fiend murder Dr. Thornton, then?” Sam asked.
“Clarice died in a treatment. In his eyes, it was for the greater good. But Lady Westford . . . that crossed a line.”
“He still ruled it an accident.”
“He was an accessory after the fact,” Kendra agreed. “Probably hoped the whole thing would go away. The investigation forced him to think about his actions. If he showed any doubt, he became a threat. And just like Lady Westford, he needed to be eliminated.”
“The villain is bloody ruthless.”
“Yes. He also thinks he’s the smartest person in the room. Do you know who thinks they’re smarter than everybody else, Mr. Kelly?”
“The French, the royals, most noblemen and women, the clergy—”
Kendra had to laugh. “Point taken. You can add to that list: doctors. Surgeons, physicians. They tend to have a god complex.”
“They think they’re God?”
“Sometimes.” She remembered Dandridge arguing that surgeons played God every time they operated on a patient. “Or they consider themselves superior to other men. Infallible in their thinking, their decision-making, their feelings.”
Like my father.
“We know the why—his motive for killing. Now we need to find out the who.” Kendra gestured to the sheet of paper that Sam held. “He’s one of the names on that list, Mr. Kelly. I’d bet my life on it.”
Chapter 27
At two o’clock, Kendra entered Munroe’s shadowy subterranean morgue to find Munroe and Barts flanking the middle slab that held Thornton’s mortal remains. They’d lit all the candles in the room—including the lanterns hanging from the wagon wheels above each slab—and the flickering light spotlighted Thornton’s ashen face bracketed by his bushy muttonchops. A dirty linen sheet covered the rotund figure, tucked almost modestly under the physician’s chin. The physician would’ve looked as if he’d laid down to take a nap, if it wasn’t for his milky, sightless eyes.
On the slab to the right was a small, shrouded form.Jenny.
