“Pah.” Spendlove’s spittle touched me, and I forced myself not to flinch. “My patrollers were all over that street the entire night, knowing Mr. Denis was in his burrow. They saw no one else but him with Mr. Pickett.”
“Did they see Pickett enter the street?” I asked. “Was he searching for an address? Was he nervous? Excited? Or simply walking from one point in London to the next with no thought of visiting Mr. Denis at all?”
“Useless speculation,” Spendlove said. “Give up, Captain. My quarry will go to trial swiftly, and just as swiftly hang.”
“I’d like to have a look at Mr. Pickett’s body, if I may,” I said. “To satisfy my curiosity about a few points.”
“Have some respect,” Spendlove growled, though the corners of his mouth remained stubbornly tilted upward. “The man is dead. As I said, all this is useless speculation.”
“If it useless, then what harm can I do?”
Spendlove managed to frown and maintain his infuriating grin at the same time. After a moment of silent deliberation, he pushed past me hard enough to nearly knock me down. “Very well. Come.”
He marched along a side passage, not waiting to see if I kept up. I hobbled behind him, resisting the urge to strike him with my walking stick.
I’d entered the small building in the yard behind the Bow Street house once before, when a pathetic, small woman had been fished out of the Thames. I’d been sent for because they’d thought her Marianne Simmons, who had lived upstairs from me at the time.
The interior of the structure was as cold as it had been then, as tinged with the scent of death, and as sad.
Two bodies lay here today, each concealed by a long sheet. The table that Spendlove moved purposefully toward held the shape of a grown man, while the other hidden body was smaller and slighter. A woman, or a child. I shivered, and pity touched me.
Spendlove unceremoniously yanked back the cloth that covered Mr. Pickett and presented him with a flourish.
I looked down at a gentleman of middle years. He’d been on the slim side, neither handsome nor plain, his brown hair touched with gray. He was clean-shaven, bearing the smooth skin of a man who didn’t have to scrape his face free of whiskers every day, as I did.
The man’s shoulders were a bit spindly, his arms slender and without much definition. Not one who did much activity. An inspection of Pickett’s hands would no doubt show me soft fingers and evenly trimmed nails, but I was distracted from further examination by the dark hole in the man’s chest.
The wound was not large, a slit, though one wider than I’d have assumed. Thinking about the paperknife I’d found in Denis’s desk, I agreed it would fit in the wound, but would have about a quarter of an inch to spare on either side. Then again, I hadn’t seen the actual knife in question, which might correspond perfectly.
The man’s chest was the same shade as the pale sheet that covered him, the few wisps of dark hair there stark against his skin. His back, from what I could see, held purpling bruising.
“How long did he lie in the street?” I asked.
“Not many minutes at all,” Spendlove answered readily. “Denis had just stabbed the wretch.”
“I meant before your men carted him here.”
Spendlove shrugged. “Three quarters of an hour? Perhaps less. I was more interested in escorting Mr. Denis to the magistrate than as to how long Mr. Pickett reclined in the street.”
I’d asked because a surgeon had once told me that he could tell how long a man had been dead by the amount of blood pooling in his back—or side, or whatever part of his body he’d come to rest on. The temperature of the body could indicate that as well.
“Was he warm?” I persisted. “When you touched him to ascertain he was dead?”
“I didn’t touch him at all. It was obvious he was gone, wasn’t it?”
Spendlove hadn’t cared. He’d seen Denis with a knife and had pounced. Mr. Pickett hadn’t been given much thought.
This morning had been cold and rainy, so Pickett’s skin might already have been cool even if he’d been killed the instant before Spendlove rounded the corner to find Denis.
“What did the surgeon say who examined him?” I asked. “If one has been here yet.”
“Said he was dead.” Spendlove snapped the sheet over Pickett. “Stabbed through the heart. That’s all the coroner needs to know.”
I was no expert on bodies. I’d like to ask the surgeon who’d examined him or find someone to look over Mr. Pickett independently to tell me if anything was unusual. I did not fancy my odds on either of those things happening.
A coroner would have to view the evidence of the death and find that it was murder before Denis could be brought to trial for it. Not that there was much uncertainty about the cause of death in this case, but the process of the law had to be carried out.
Spendlove started to hustle me out, but I paused beside the other covered body. “Who is this?”
