What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

than sufficient motive for murder.”
    Hendon didn’t say anything, just set about the business of filling his pipe. Sebastian watched him tamp down the tobacco, his features set in hard, uncompromising lines. And it came to Sebastian how little, in some ways, he really knew his own father. “And if the man who killed Rachel York has this document now? What then?”
    Hendon shook his head. “I don’t think she brought it with her to the chapel. More likely than not she was planning to try to hold out for a higher price.”
    Sebastian supposed it possible, but it wasn’t particularly likely, given what he’d heard about Rachel’s nervousness and her plans to flee London. A deep disquiet bloomed within him. There was too much going on here that he didn’t understand, that he needed to understand if he were to have any hope of catching Rachel’s killer. “Did she tell you how she got her hands on this affidavit?”
    “No.”
    “You didn’t ask?”
    “Of course I asked. She refused to say.” Hendon swiped one of his big, beefy hands across his lower face. “Good God. If she was working for Pierrepont, then in all likelihood she got the document from him.”
    “But you don’t know.”
    “No.”
    “She could have had another purpose, you know. If it were to become known that you were buying incriminating documents from a French spy, you’d be ruined.”
    Hendon stuck the stem of his pipe in his mouth and bit down on it hard. “It won’t become known.” Lighting a taper, he held it to the pipe’s bowl, his cheeks hollowing as he sucked hard, then blew out a stream of thin blue smoke. “You asked me to look into Pierrepont’s activities last Tuesday night.”
    “And?”
    “He did have a dinner party at his house that night. It was arranged hastily, for he’d only just returned from the country that morning.”
    “So he couldn’t have killed Rachel.”
    “Not necessarily. According to one of the guests, Pierrepont excused himself and was absent for a considerable period of time somewhere around nine or ten.”
    “Long enough to get to Westminster and back?”
    “Perhaps.”
    Sebastian swore softly and crudely. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me about this affidavit from the very beginning?”
    “I thought it irrelevant. I still think it irrelevant. What does it matter why Rachel York was in that church? Some brute simply happened upon her there, alone, and took advantage of it. He raped her and then he killed her. It happens all too frequently these days.”
    “Except that she was raped after she was killed.”
    Hendon’s mouth went slack around the stem of his pipe. “Good heavens. What manner of man would do such a thing?”
    “Someone who enjoys killing,” said Sebastian.

     
    He made his way back to the Rose and Crown through crooked byways filled with sparkling white snow that scrunched audibly beneath each step. A few stray flakes still floated down, lazy and peaceful in the night. It was as if, between them, the darkness and the snow hid all that was ugly, all that was horrible and dangerous about the city, so that he was aware suddenly of the beauty of the row of ancient stone arches fronting a nearby shop, and the intricate fretwork of the old timber-framed Tudor house beside it. And he wondered, which was more real, the ugliness or the beauty?
    He let out a soft sigh, his breath white in the cold air as he turned over and over in his mind what he’d learned that night, about his father, and about Leo Pierrepont and Rachel York. He wondered why a woman like Rachel York would have allowed herself to be drawn into the dangerous shadow world occupied by men such as Leo Pierrepont. What had driven her? Political convictions? Greed? Or had she somehow been coerced into acting against her will?
    Whatever her original motive, something had obviously gone badly wrong in Rachel York’s life. According to her neighbor, Rachel had been packing to leave London. The money she had hinted at, obviously, was to have come from Hendon. But it wouldn’t have been enough to lure away a woman on the threshold of a promising stage career. There was obviously something in Rachel’s life Sebastian was missing. Something important.
    He had nearly reached the Rose and Crown. As he had done so many times in the past, during the war, Sebastian paused just down the street,every sense alert to the subtle differences that could tell him his hiding place had been discovered. But all lay peaceful and