“If he sat on her chest and held her arms down with his weight,” Sebastian said aloud, “she might not even have any bruises on her arms. But the weight on her chest would have made it that much harder for her to breathe.”
“You’re mad. There are no bruises on her face. I had a good look at her before I had her brought in here, and I tell you there are no bruises. And you couldn’t possibly see ’em in this light even if there were!”
“Get a lantern.”
Higginbottom stared at him a moment, then turned away, grumbling, to light a lantern that rested on a nearby shelf. He was clumsy with the tinderbox, so that it was a moment before he swung back around, the lantern held high, his face twisted into a sneer.
“There. See? No bru—”
He broke off, his lips twitching as he leaned in close to peer at the edge of the dead woman’s jaw. “Well, I’ll be go to Ludlow,” he said after a long, heavy silence. “How the blazes did you see that—especially in this light?”
“I see unusually well in the dark.”
“Huh. You must be part owl.” The doctor shifted around to shine the light on her left cheek. “Yes, there it is.” He shifted the lantern back and forth. “There might also be the vaguest hint of a bruise from the killer’s third finger, just here.”
He set down the lantern, then rubbed his hand across his beard-stubbled face. “There could be some bruising other places on the body,” he said almost to himself. “And sometimes with smothering you’ll see changes in the heart and lungs—but not always.”
He turned abruptly and walked out of the shed into the warm golden sunshine of the morning. Sebastian followed him.
The two men stood together in silence for a moment. Then Higginbottom shook his head and pushed out a painful sigh. “It’s a nasty way to die—trying desperately to suck in air but not being able to breathe. Feeling your lungs burn, mad with panic for a good two or three minutes before everything goes dim and you finally lose consciousness. And then you’ve still got another two minutes till death finally comes. That poor girl. And to think her killer was sitting on her the whole time with his hand over her face, looking into her terrified eyes and watching her die.” Higginbottom glanced over at him. “What kind of man could do something like that?”
The depths of compassion revealed by the old doctor’s words took Sebastian by surprise. He stared off across the sunlit field, where sheep grazed lazily in a tableau of bucolic peace that was so cruelly misleading. “A very cold, dangerous one.”
Chapter 10
Sebastian drove back toward the village through pastures scattered with wild scarlet poppies, past a sunlit field of ripe grain where a half dozen or more men moved in a line, their sickles rising and falling in rhythmic sweeps. Behind them came their women, backs bent as they tied the stalks into sheaves, while the youngest children ran across the stubble, laughing and shrieking as they chased rabbits and rats disturbed by the reaping.
It was a timeless scene, repeated every summer on down through the ages. And the attempt to reconcile this image of cooperation and tradition with the brutal reality of Emma Chance’s last desperate moments left Sebastian feeling oddly disconcerted.
In his experience, most murders were messy things, usually spur-of-the-moment and born of rage, fear, or greed. But Emma Chance’s murder hadn’t been messy. Sebastian didn’t know yet what had motivated it, or if her death had been carefully planned. He didn’t even know where she had actually died. But he did know that whoever took her life had deliberately chosen a method that would be easy to conceal even though it required her killer to hold her down for five long, agonizing minutes while he patiently, coldly watched her die. He’d then acted with stunning calculation to conceal his act by staging the body in such a way that her death should by rights have been deemed a suicide.
Taken all together, those actions suggested a killer with a degree of steady calm that was both rare and chilling. The fact that Emma Chance was a stranger to this small, quiet village only served to make her death all the more inexplicable.
Still lost in thought, Sebastian left the curricle in the stable yard with Tom and was headed toward the Blue Boar when he heard himself hailed by a gentlewoman’s carefully modulated voice.
“Lord Devlin? It is Lord Devlin, is it not?”