Jasper decided to leave the dog where it was for the moment. Its frenzied barking had marked his and Wiggins’s arrival, and he expected to see Stephen Decamp exiting his home or one of the sheds to seek out the cause of such a disturbance. But Jasper and Wiggins had made it to the flagstone step at the front door and brought down the knocker, and there was still no sign of the home’s owner.
A foreboding crawled along Jasper’s spine and shuttled out along his nerves. Something was wrong. He reached for the door’s handle. It was unlocked.
“Mr. Decamp?” he called as he opened the door a few inches. He raised his voice. “Stephen Decamp, are you in?”
No answer came.
Jasper held up his hand. “Constable, go around to the back. Make sure he doesn’t do a runner.”
It was possible Decamp was waiting to escape out a back door as soon as Jasper entered the home. But as Wiggins left to go around the house, and Jasper stepped inside, the silence that met him was ominous, not tense.
The front hall was cluttered with boots, jackets, hats, and other detritus. Everything belonged to a man, and as Jasper slowly moved toward the narrow set of darkened stairs, he noted the distinct lack of feminine touches. Things were tidy enough but spare. Dust motes floated through the air, illuminated by some rays of sunlight entering through a window at the top of the stairs.
“Decamp,” Jasper called one more time. Nothing.
Outside, the yips of the dog were muffled but still grating. There was a dreary sitting room to the right; Jasper poked his head inside. The stove was cold. A pile of blankets near the hearth looked to be where the dog would bed down. And on the seat of a shabby armchair was an uncorked, empty liquor bottle.
Down the short hall from the front door, there was another room to the left. Jasper anticipated that it would be a dining room and, when he turned inside, saw that he was correct. He also discovered what his intuition had been alerting him to: A man sat slumped in the chair at the head of the table, and he was clearly dead.
Sunlight came through the two windows in the room, brightening the space enough for Jasper to see blood spatter on the wall behind the body, a pool of blood puddled beneath the chair, and that the man had been shot in the left temple. From Jasper’s limited view of the right side of the man’s skull, it looked to be a ruined mess.
Jasper walked forward cautiously, his eyes on the floor to be sure he didn’t disturb anything. No muddy or blood-rimmed footprints like there had been in the house on Craven Hill. No items dropped to the floor. He was glad Wiggins was still outside; it gave Jasper time to take in the rest of the room without interruption.
The man was likely in his late thirties. Stephen Decamp, Jasper presumed. The body was slumped back in the chair, but the man’s head wasn’t thrown back to match. Instead, his chin was tucked, his head drooping forward. In the dead man’s left hand was a loosely gripped snub-nosed revolver. It, and his hand, had come to rest limply in his lap.
Jasper stared at this for several moments, trying to picture what had happened. Decamp had lifted the gun to his temple, pulled the trigger, and then…his hand and the weapon had flopped down into his lap?
There wasn’t much of a fetid odor that met Jasper’s nose, just the faint tang of blood, and the unmistakable sour stench of gin. Without any fires burning, the stone craftsmanship of the home had kept the interior cold, slowing the decay of the body. Much like a morgue. The thought brought Leo to mind. If she werehere, she’d be able to estimate the approximate time of death. Jasper would simply have to do his best on his own.
The congealed blood no longer appeared shiny or wet. And when he reached for the man’s arm, trying to lift it, he found it was stiff. Likewise, the man’s foot, when Jasper crouched and tried to lift it from the carpet, was difficult to move. Based on what Leo had explained in the past about the increasing rigidity of a corpse, the man had been dead for some time. Perhaps half a day or more.
By all appearances, it looked to be a suicide.
On the table in front of the body, another uncorked, empty liquor bottle lay on its side. There was no label, indicating it was some homemade concoction. And underneath the bottle was a slip of paper.
“Inspector?” Constable Wiggins’s voice emanated from the back of the house.
“In here,” Jasper called, reaching for the paper.
The constable arrived a moment later. His coloring paled at the sight that met him.
“Oh, good Lord,” Wiggins said.
“It is Stephen Decamp?”
The constable nodded, still a bit ashen-faced. Jasper read the few words written on the piece of paper. The handwriting was practiced, slanted, and a bit rushed.
I cannot live with what I’ve done.
It wasn’t signed, but it was clearly meant to be Stephen Decamp’s explanation for having shot himself.
The note found in Helen Dalton’s possession was back at Scotland Yard. Jasper would compare the two handwriting samples when he had the chance. But the slanted script seemed, at least from his memory, to be a match.
“Have you ever come upon a person who has taken their own life?” Jasper asked as he crouched yet again next to the chair. This time he was looking at the hand limply holding the gun.
“No, Inspector,” was Wiggins’s reply. “Not in all my years.”
Jasper had found suicide victims before, and more than once. None had ever been as neat a scene as this. Still seated upright in the chair, head lowered, hand in his lap… There was something not quite right about it.
