What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

old when she died; a young woman, alone and defenseless, battling to survive in a society that used and discarded its weak and unfortunate as if they were somehow less than human. And yet she had stubbornly refused to allow herself to become a victim. She had struggled against the odds, fought back, brave and determined . . . until someone, some man, had cornered her in the Lady Chapel of an ancient, deserted church and done this to her.
    The world was full of ugliness, Sebastian knew that; ugliness, and ugly people. But you couldn’t let them win, those men who took what they wanted with never a thought or care for the ones who suffered and died as a result. You could never stop fighting them, never let them think that what they did was right or somehow justified. Never let them triumph unchallenged.
    “You’ll have justice,” he whispered, although the woman before him was long past hearing, and he’d lost his belief in an all-knowing, benevolently attentive God long ago, on some battlefield in central Spain. “Whoever did this to you won’t get away with it. I swear it.”
    He was suddenly aware of Paul Gibson standing beside him, a strange expression quirking up one corner of his lips. “And here I thought you’d given up believing in either justice or righteous causes.”
    “I have,” said Sebastian, turning toward the door.
    But his friend only smiled.

Chapter 30
     
     
    T he snow began before midday.
    Sebastian walked through crooked medieval streets. Ice filmed over the water standing in the open gutters. A ragged women hurried past him, her shawl-wrapped shoulders hunched against the weather, her breath white in the cold, dank air. He walked until the smell of the river was thick in his nostrils and seagulls cried overhead. Beneath his feet the cobblestones turned slippery with the snow that fell in great wet flakes from out of a yellow-white sky.
    Cutting between a boarded-up warehouse and a high stone wall, he climbed down a short flight of ancient steps to where the Thames stretched out before him, thick and brown and wide, the wind strong enough now to kick up little whitecaps and fill the air with the scent of the distant sea. Even with the cold and the snow, the river teemed with boats, lighters and culls, and barges and hoys heading downriver to Gravesend and the open sea beyond. It was the lifeblood of the city, this river, and yet how often had he gone through the movements of his days within scant blocks of it and remained essentially oblivious to its existence for weeks on end.
    He’d known it was there, of course, yet because it intruded so little on his life, it was easy to ignore, like the distant wailing of hungry children in the night, or the muffled rumble of the parish carts making theirearly morning rounds, collecting the endless supply of white-wrapped bundles that fed the poor holes of St. Stephen’s and St. Andrew’s, St. Pancreas and the Spitalfields Churchyard.
    Easy to ignore, too, was the existence of those dark, unassuming houses in Field Lane and Covent Garden, where for a few coins a man could buy the right to unlock a room and do whatever he liked to the shivering, frightened child or sobbing woman he would find there; houses where whips cracked and bodies twisted in agony, where there was no hope, no God, only endurance and the ultimate deliverance of death. Whatever perversion a man lusted after, he could buy in this city, for a price.
    The snow was falling harder now, and faster. Sebastian looked up, letting the small white pellets sting the cold skin of his face. What was becoming a recurrent fear swelled within him, the fear that he was never going to clear himself of this terrible crime of which he’d been accused. And what then? he wondered. What if Rachel York’s killing had been nothing more than a random act of violence? What if he could never find the man who had slashed her throat and sated his lust upon her dead, bleeding body? What then of his promise to see justice done, for her and for himself?
    He’d told himself her killer must have been someone close to her, someone who knew she would be waiting alone and vulnerable in that church so late at night. And yet Sebastian realized now he’d been wrong, that her killer could simply have seen her in the streets and followed her, watched as she lit the holy candles on the altar and then come at her out of the darkness, a lethal and intimate stranger.
    Sebastian rubbed a hand across his eyes,