Page 76 of A Murder in Bloomsbury

“Anything else?”

“A broken nose. Or one that had been broken more than the once—it sat crooked on his face.”

I had the man drawn in my mind before she finished. Not a gentleman. Not a clerk, nor a tradesman, nor any creature whose living depended on being thought respectable. A bruiser. The sort hired to settle a difficulty for people unwilling to soil their own gloves—plentiful enough in any city, and never far from where money met inconvenience.

“Had you ever seen him before that afternoon?”

“Several times.”

That brought my head up. “You had?”

“Oh yes. About Gower Street, this twelvemonth and more.”

“Doing what?”

She lifted one shoulder. “Lingering, mostly. Standing where a man stands when he is waiting, and means you to know it. Talking with rough company. Carrying a parcel here and there. Running errands.”

“For whom?”

“That I couldn’t tell you.”

“But you knew his face.”

“I did.”

“Would others?”

A small, dry smile touched the corner of her mouth. “Certainly.”

“Why so certain?”

“Because men of that kind are rarely invisible in a neighborhood, Lord Everthorne. They put down roots in the public houses and the lodging houses. They want to be known—it is half of what they are paid for. Someone always has a name to put to them.”

“Did you ever hear his?”

“No.”

A disappointment, but a small one only. She had given me a great deal more than a name.

“But I heard enough,” she added, “to know what sort he was.”

“What sort?”

“The sort who’ll do near enough anything, my lord, if someone is willing to pay him for it.”

Silence settled between us, broken only by the fire.

Twenty-one days. For twenty-one days the death of Lydia Gray had been written down as a tragedy of the streets—a distracted woman, a careless carriage, the ordinary cruelty of a crowded city. And now, in the space of a quarter hour in a stranger’s parlor, with a half-darned stocking in her sewing basket, that careful fiction had come apart.

It was a murder. Deliberate. Arranged. Paid for in coin.

“One last question, Miss Preston.”

“Of course.”

“Why answer my solicitors’ notice at all? You had given your statement once and been ignored. Few would trouble to give it twice.”

She looked faintly surprised that I should ask.