“I’m Devlin, yes. I take it you’re Hiram Higginbottom?”
The doctor straightened and shuffled forward with a peculiar, splayfooted gait. He held the bowl of a burl wood pipe in one hand; the hem of his old-fashioned, bottle green frock coat flared as he walked. He was a small man, his frame solid and compact. But his head was huge, as if it should by rights have belonged to a much larger man, and it looked as if it had been stuck onto his body without a neck. In age, he could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, his sagging jaw gray with several days’ growth of beard, his shoulders rounded and already tending to stoop.
“Young Archie Rawlins said you might be coming by. Said I was to give you my findings if you did. Well, here they are: She committed suicide.”
He started to turn away toward the barns.
Sebastian said, “You’ve already completed the autopsy?”
Higginbottom kept walking. “There’s no need for an autopsy, and it wouldn’t show nothing anyway. It’s obvious how she died: opium poisoning.”
“I’m told it’s impossible to detect an opium overdose in a postmortem.”
Higginbottom swung around to jab one pointed finger into the air at him. “No need to detect it when you’ve got an empty laudanum bottle lying right there, and a suicide note in her hand.”
“Suicide note? What suicide note?”
Higginbottom jerked his head toward the farm outbuildings. “I’ll show you.”
He led the way to a lean-to shed attached to one end of the cow barn. He’d left the door open, and Sebastian could hear the buzzing of flies as they approached, smell the sickly sweet scent of insipient decay. Instead of a stone slab like the one used by Paul Gibson for his official autopsies and surreptitious dissections, Higginbottom had only a stained wooden table. Emma Chance lay upon it still fully clothed. As far as Sebastian could see, the only thing the doctor had done was to lay her arms straight down at her sides before the rigor rendered her completely stiff.
“Here,” said Higginbottom, plucking a small slip of paper from a shelf near the door. “See? Suicide.”
Sebastian found himself staring at a narrow strip of heavy, aged paper that looked as if it had been sliced from an old book. It contained only four words, printed in an elegant Baroque typeface.
The rest is silence.
Sebastian looked up at him. “You call this a suicide note?”
“Well, what would you call it, then? Hmmm?”
“Actually, I’d call it one more deliberate misdirection by the killer—just like the empty laudanum bottle.”
The other man’s nostrils quivered, his gray eyes narrowing with annoyance. “This is ridiculous. It’s as if you’re determined to make this out to be a murder. Why can’t you simply accept that it is what it is? A suicide!”
“How the bloody hell do you know? You didn’t even look.”
“Of course I looked. She hasn’t been strangled. And if she’d been stabbed or shot, there’d be stains on her clothing. Well, there are none—except for the usual seepages of body fluids that are to be expected after death.”
Sebastian shifted his gaze to the pale, slack face of the murdered woman on the table. She looked so very young—younger by far than twenty-seven or twenty-eight. Her nose was small and delicately molded, the tender flesh of her eyelids nearly translucent, her lips brown and dry now in death. And he suddenly felt swamped by a tide of inexplicable, useless fury. How did you die? he wanted to rage at her. How did he kill you? How?
And then Sebastian saw it: the faintest blur of purpling, almost like a shadow along the lower edge of her jaw.
He stared at it, then walked around to examine the other side of her face. It took a moment to find it, but it was there: a small, faint, elliptical bruise just to the left of her mouth, exactly the size of a man’s fingertip.
Thoughtfully, he reached out to lay his right hand over Emma Chance’s lower face, positioning it just so.
“What are you doing?” demanded Higginbottom.
Sebastian looked up at him. “I know how she was killed.”
“What the devil are you talking about?”
“She was smothered.” He lifted his hand, then carefully placed it back in position. “The killer put his palm over her mouth like this. He used the heel of his hand to shove up her jaw and hold her mouth closed while he pinched her nostrils together with his thumb and first finger. You can see the hint of a bruise here, on her cheek, where his little finger dug into her face as he applied the pressure.”
Sebastian took his hand away and shifted to study the dead woman’s wrists. Higginbottom was right; there was no sign of bruising. And any marks on her arms were hidden by the sleeves of her dress. Although . . .