She patted my chest and swept through the door, off to rally her troops. An amazing and resourceful lady.
I poured myself a cup of the rich coffee Donata’s talented cook had brewed and turned to the package Barnstable had left on my desk. My name and address had been printed in block capitals on a card tied to the brown-paper parcel, which enclosed something soft.
I cut the string with my knife and tugged open the paper. Carefully. Incendiary devices had been delivered to this house before.
Inside, I found a bundle of clothes—a man’s coat, trousers, waistcoat, shirt, cravat, and even his small clothes. Pomeroy, true to his word, had sent me Mr. Pickett’s things to look over.
I thanked him silently as I pulled out the items and spread them across the desk. I smoothed out the coat, and then paused, frowning. I ran my hands over it again, and then sat back, my heart beating faster.
“Good Lord,” I whispered to myself.
Chapter 16
“What is it, Lacey?” Grenville demanded of me as he pushed into my library an hour later. “I received your summons and rushed over as soon as I could.”
He might claim to have rushed, but he was as flawlessly garbed as ever, with an intricately tied cravat, today’s a soft peach color. Now he dropped into the chair I’d reposed in when I’d told Donata of my meeting with Lady and regarded me with eager curiosity.
“The clothes are too dry,” I stated, gesturing to the coat and trousers draped across my desk.
Grenville waited for me to elaborate on that grand statement, then sat up straight when nothing more was forthcoming.
“Whose clothes, for heaven’s sake? And why do you believe them to be too dry?”
“I beg your pardon. They are Pickett’s. Pomeroy sent them to me this afternoon. I asked if he’d mind if you had a look at them, to see if they could tell us anything about the man. That was before we went through the garments at his flat, of course.” I touched the coat’s fabric. Like the ones at Pickett’s lodgings, it was wool of a decent weave, not the quality Grenville wore, but neither was it the coat of a working-class man.
“Ah.” Grenville rose and came to the desk, his pique vanishing. He laid a hand on the coat then lifted one trouser leg and studied its hem. “I agree with you. These are remarkably dry.”
“Do you see my point?” I asked, trying to stem my excitement. “Yesterday morning, it was pelting down rain. Pickett would have been soaked if he’d walked across the city to Seven Dials, or even descended from a hackney and stood before Denis’s door a few minutes. After he was killed, he lay in a puddle in the street before the patrollers trundled his body off to Bow Street. You can see the marks of the puddle.” I traced the discoloration around the coat’s shoulders and where it would have lain across Pickett’s hips. “And it is damp there. But the rest of the coat and trousers are nearly bone-dry.”
“Could they not have dried out at Bow Street?” Grenville asked.
“No indeed. It is dank and cold in that house. I doubt anything would dry there in a week. These things should at least be very damp. My coat from yesterday still is from all the rain, and Barnstable has hung it by a fire in a warm house. Why isn’t Pickett’s?”
“Because he didn’t walk in the rain.” Grenville’s eyes began to sparkle. “Nor took a hired coach, you believe? Didn’t simply manage to stay out of the wet until he alighted in Seven Dials?”
“I think it is simpler than that.” I rested my hands on the desk. “I think Pickett never left his rooms—or wherever he was at the time of his death. I think he was killed somewhere else and then his body was taken to Seven Dials and left on Denis’s doorstep for him to find.”
Grenville ran his hands over the coat once more. “You might be right, Lacey. Which would mean he was killed before the rains began. Which was when?”
“It was a fair day on Monday. I remarked upon it when I went riding that morning. It began to cloud up Monday afternoon.”
“And the rains started later that evening,” Grenville confirmed. “I remember because I wore a new coat, and Gautier fussed like a hen that it would become ruined. So—Pickett had gone indoors by eight o’clock on Monday night. Someone killed him and then transported him to Seven Dials, by carriage or enclosed cart presumably, so that he never got wet. This should put Denis in the clear, should it not?”
“Unless Pickett went to Curzon Street before the rain started, was murdered there by Denis, and taken to the Seven Dials house afterward. Spendlove might say that. Why Denis would do such a thing will not be taken into consideration. Therefore, we must decide exactly where Pickett was on Monday, not early Tuesday morning.”
“Excellent.” Grenville rubbed his hands together. “Let us begin.”
I curbed my ebullience. “I might be wrong, of course. Pickett could have hired a watertight carriage and taken great care not to become wet between his flat and Seven Dials.”
“But, as you say, he’d have been rained on rather heavily when he descended,” Grenville reminded me. “I was awakened by the pounding rain far too blasted early Tuesday morning for my liking. My house has thick windows, and my chamber is nowhere near the roof, which means it was coming down hard. As there was no hackney in sight when Denis walked out of his house, that means Pickett would have been standing there for a time, waiting for whatever he’d come for. Plucking up courage to knock on the door? Or meeting someone else in the street? Either way, he’d have received a soaking. No, I believe your first conclusion is the right one. His body was carried there and arranged in front of Denis’s house.”
“By whom and for what purpose?” I asked in frustration. “It is a maddening question. Was it by Spendlove himself? The man is ready to do anything to bring Denis to trial.”
“I am not certain Mr. Spendlove could be secretive enough,” Grenville said. “He might have hired thugs to carry out the deed for him, it is true, but I imagine we could easily discover this, if so.”
“Pomeroy would bully it out of any accomplice,” I agreed. “And while I do not like Spendlove, he does have a fondness for the law. I do not truly think he’d go as far as murder, even if he felt it justified—for example, if Mr. Pickett was involved with the Cato Street Conspiracy and a traitor, Spendlove would be more likely to drag Pickett by the collar to the magistrates and wait for his reward than kill Pickett himself.”
“Mmm. I am not as generous in my belief of Spendlove’s character as you are but let us hold him in reserve. Do we return to Pickett’s rooms?”
