What Angels Fear: A Sebastian St. Cyr Mystery

with his friends until nine o’clock, when Wilcox picked him up and brought him home. He never went out again.”
    “That lie might satisfy the authorities this time. But he’ll do it again, Amanda. And then what? For how long do you think you can protect him?”
    An angry flush darkened her cheeks and deepened the sparkle of animosity in the brilliant blue eyes that were so much like their father’s. “Get out of my house.”
    The sound of loud knocking, followed by excited voices and a rough shout, echoed up the stairs. Sebastian turned toward the commotion, his lips pulling back into a hard smile. “You might not have called the constables, my dear sister, but it appears that Bayard did.”

Chapter 42
     
     
    T here were only two constables, both on the wrong side of forty, one tall and bone lean, the other slow and fleshy.
    The first was halfway up the stairs when Sebastian’s fist caught him under the jaw with an audible smack that closed the man’s mouth and sent him arm-wheeling backward.
    “I say,” blustered the second, just before Sebastian buried his fist in the man’s soft gut. His eyes widened, and he doubled over with a wheezing whooph .
    Bayard was standing at the base of the stairs, his derisory, self-satisfied smile fading fast. “You little bastard,” said Sebastian, and punched him, too, just for the bloody hell of it, on his way out the door.
    After that, Sebastian spent the next several hours attempting to disprove Bayard’s alibi, only to discover that Bayard and his two companions had indeed spent the afternoon and evening of the previous Tuesday getting conspicuously and roaringly drunk at the Leather Bottle in Islington. Their subsequent arrival at Cribb’s Parlor, followed by their hasty departure, had been equally spectacular and memorable. In fact, the doorman distinctly remembered helping to load the insensible young gentleman into his father’s carriage. He even remembered the time, for the city’s church bells had begun to toll nine o’clock just as the carriage pulled away.

     
    Tom found Sebastian in a coffeehouse near the Rose and Crown, a tankard of ale cradled in his left hand, a bloodstained handkerchief wrapped around the knuckles of his right.
    “What’d you do to yer hand?”
    “I hit something.”
    “A bone box, you mean?” Tom said with a grin, and slid onto the opposite bench, a paper-wrapped Cornish pasty clutched in one fist. “Find out something on yer nevy?”
    Sebastian took a long, slow swallow of ale. “That he has an ironclad alibi.”
    Tom looked up from tearing the paper off his pasty. “A what?”
    “An alibi. Verifiable proof that he was somewhere else at the time of the crime. In this instance, passed out insensible in his father’s arms.” Sebastian stretched back on the bench. “My pool of suspects is rapidly diminishing. Bayard had the motive and means but not, apparently, the opportunity to commit murder. Georgio Donatelli had the opportunity but no motive that I can see—apart from the fact that nothing we’ve learned about the man suggests he’s capable of such extreme violence. Lord Frederick claims he was with the Prince of Wales at the time of the killings, and while I haven’t had a chance to verify that, I would assume at any rate that a man of his inclinations would be unlikely to indulge in our killer’s particular form of necrophilia.”
    “Necro-what?”
    Sebastian glanced over at the boy’s open, inquisitive face. “Never mind that one.”
    “There’s still the Frenchman,” said Tom. He paused to take a bite of his pasty, but swallowed quickly before continuing. “And that actor, Hugh Gordon. All you got is ’is word for it that ’e was ’ome studyin’ his lines that night.”
    “A love affair that went bad two years ago seems an unlikely motive for murder, but you’re right, it wouldn’t hurt to look into his movements that night. Why don’t you ask around, see if any of his neighbors remember seeing him that night.”
    Tom nodded and swallowed the last of his pasty. “I got somethin’ interesting on yer Lord Frederick. ’E went to see a friend last night. A young friend what ’as rooms in Stratton Street, over Marylebone way.”
    Sebastian drained his tankard and pushed it aside. “Who is he?”
    “Folks around there didn’t seem to know—I take it ’e ’asna lived there long. So I followed ’im this morning.”
    “And?”
    “ ’Is name is Davis. Wesley Davis. Turns out