“What else happened that night, Jeremy?” Lord Gray peeled his coat off his shoulders and handed it to Sophia. “For the boy,” he said gruffly, before he turned back to Jeremy. “You claim you didn’t kill Henry Gerrard. If you didn’t commit the murder, who did?”
Jeremy’s face paled at the wordmurder. “I c-could never…I w-wouldna hurt no one, milord. It were s-someone else who d-d-done it.”
“Was it the man in the courtroom yesterday?” Sophia asked, draping the coat over Jeremy’s shoulders. She had as low an opinion as one could of Peter Sharpe, but he was a petty, trifling sort of villain. She couldn’t quite convince herself he had the savagery to take a man’s life.
“Nay, not him. It were…it w-were the other one.” Jeremy squeezed his eyes closed, shuddering.
Beside her, Lord Gray stilled. “The other one?”
Sophia’s heart began to pound. According to Sharpe’s testimony, only himself, Jeremy, and Henry Gerrard had been at St. Clement Dane’s at the time of the murder. He hadn’t mentioned a word about a fourth man. “How many men were there that night, Jeremy? This is important, love, so think carefully.”
Jeremy stared at her with wide, frightened eyes. “Four, miss, if ye count the one as got hurt.”
Four?Sophia turned to Lord Gray, speechless with shock.
“Can you tell us who each of the four men were, Jeremy?” Lord Gray asked in a calm,measured tone.
Jeremy thought about it, his face screwed up with concentration. “There were me, and poor Mr. Gerrard as was, and t’other one—the one who said as I’d taken his watch and fob, but I didna, Miss Sophia! I never took nuffin. I didna even get close enough to him to take nuffin, but he set up screaming, an’ calling me a thief—”
“The fourth man, Jeremy,” Lord Gray said, gently guiding him back to the question at hand. “Did yourecognize him?”
Jeremy’s shoulders sagged. “Nay, milord. I never saw him a’fore.”
“All right. That’s all right, Jeremy.” Lord Gray was making an obvious effort to curb his urgency. “Can you tell us what he looked like?”
Jeremy leaned forward, eager to tell the story he’d been unable to communicate in the terror of the courtroom. “He were biggish, milord. Not big like me, he being thinner, but tall, like, with black hair.”
“Very good.Anything else?”
“I-I’m not sure. Something hit my head, and I can’t remember very well—”
Jeremy didn’t get any further before succumbing to a hacking cough. Sophia patted and soothed him, but her gaze met Lord Gray’s over Jeremy’s head, and she saw at once they were thinkingthe same thing.
Peter Sharpe was a liar, andthe fourth man…
The fourth man was a murderer. Whoever he was, he’d killedHenry Gerrard.
Eventually Jeremy’s cough faded to a wheeze, and his head fell against the stone wall behind him, his face pale with exhaustion. Sophia waited as long as she dared for him to catch his breath, but she heard a step in the corridor beyond, and knew they were running out of time. “You did very well, sweetheart. Now, tell us one more time everything you remember from that night, but you’ll have to do it quickly, all right?”
Jeremy nodded. “I come down the Strand from the Turk’s Head. Mr. Sharpe were at the front of the church, sort of wandering about, ye see. I were about to pass through, but Mr. Sharpe started carrying on, calling me a thief, and I were arguing with him when Mr. Gerrard came up, sudden, like. Mr. Sharpe were still shrieking, an’ I thought Mr. Gerrard were going to take me up for theft, him being a Runner.”
Sophia cast a fearful look over her shoulder toward the corridor. “He didn’t, though?”
“Nay. It were strange, Miss Sophia. He didna pay me much mind at all. He turned on Mr. Sharpe and started going on, saying he knew what he were about, knew everything, like, an’ then Mr. Gerrard tried to take up Mr. Sharpe, an’ that was when t’other man came out of the shadows, like he were there the whole time, and he…he…”
“What did he do, Jeremy?” Sophia whispered, squeezing his hand.
“Quick like that, he s-stabbed poor Mr. Gerrard in the chest. Mr. Gerrard fell down, an’ the man, he…he grabbed his head and run the sword across his throat—”
“Sword?” Sophia interrupted. “Mr. Gerrard was killed with asword, Jeremy?”
“Aye, Miss Sophia.”
Not with Jeremy’s knife, then, but something much larger. There’d been a fourth man there that night, and he’d vanished into the shadows with themurder weapon.
“An’ then there was all blood everywhere,” Jeremy said, his voice thick. “An’ Mr. Gerrard, he fell onto his back in the dirt, and I…it were so q-quick. I couldna think what do to, but I tried to help him. I got down on my knees next to him and I tried to stop him bleeding, but it were too late. He was blood all over, and there weren’t nothing I could do. He made a noise—an awful noise, a kind of gasp, like, and then he weren’t breathing no more, and I knew he was dead.”
“This all happened in front of St. Clement Dane’s Church?” Lord Gray asked, his voice not quite steady.
