“So when was it?”
Her smile shifted subtly, became something reflecting true humor, although the source of her amusement escaped him. “A month or more ago it was, to be sure.”
“Who do you think killed him?”
“Someone who wanted him dead, I expect.”
“Know anyone who falls into that category?”
“Not so’s I can think of, offhand.”
“You had no disagreements with him?”
Her eyes widened with a practiced intensity and semblance of earnest honesty that almost—but not quite—struck him as comical. “I did not,” she said.
“How often would he buy from you?”
“Now and then.”
“Did he ever put in a request for anything special?”
“On occasion.”
“Such as?”
“Och, this ’n’ that.”
The breathing from the far side of the curtain grew harsher. Faster.
Sebastian said, “Must be something of a disappointment, to lose one of your best customers.”
Priss Mulligan worked the wad of tobacco in her jaw. “I got others.”
He touched his hand to his hat. “Thank you for your help.”
“Anytime, yer lordship. Anytime.”
He didn’t bother to ask how she knew he was a lord. The truth was, asking any question of the Irishwoman was unlikely to elicit either a direct or an honest response. People like Priss Mulligan lived their lives behind a miasma of subterfuge and deliberately generated fear. It said something about Stanley Preston that he had done business with the woman. Repeatedly.
Sebastian walked out of the shop into the ragged crush of Houndsditch’s overcrowded, desperately poor residents. The light was beginning to fade from the sky; whatever warmth there might once have been was gone from the day.
As he turned toward Bishopsgate, where he’d left Tom with the curricle, he was aware of a nondescript, slope-shouldered man slipping from the noisome alley alongside the shop to fall into step behind him.
Chapter 21
W ith the approach of evening, a fierce bank of clouds had scuttled in from the east, their roiling dark underbellies tinged with a strange, coppery green glow. Billowing gusts of wind sent handbills fluttering over the uneven paving stones and flapped the worn black shawl of a stooped old woman hawking nuts from a rusty tray. The knots of dirty, pinch-faced children huddled closer to the braziers of the coffee stalls and hot-potato sellers, their hollow eyes following Sebastian without curiosity or comprehension as he passed.
He paused as if to study the colorful caricatures displayed in a print shop’s dusty window, being careful not to glance toward the slope-shouldered man in polished black boots who drew up abruptly and started fumbling in his pockets as if in search of a handkerchief. When Sebastian walked on, the click-click of the man’s bootheels was just audible above the din of rattling cartwheels and the shouts of the children and the singsong cries of the street sellers.
Sebastian quickened his pace and heard that distinctive click-click speed up. When he slowed, so did his shadow. Then, as they neared the end of the lane, Sebastian turned abruptly and strode back toward Priss Mulligan’s shop.
The slope-shouldered man paused, his eyes widening ever so subtly. Of medium height and lanky despite his small potbelly, he had stringy black hair worn long enough to hang over his collar and a noticeably asymmetrical face with a bulbous nose and crooked mouth. But he was obviously convinced that Sebastian remained oblivious to him, because he simply turned as if to watch a brewer’s wagon full of empty casks that was rattling up the street, its tired horses hanging their shaggy heads, the malty aroma of ale mingling with the smell of roasted nuts and hot coffee and dung.
“Who are you?” demanded Sebastian, walking right up to him. “And why the devil are you following me?”
He expected the man to run, or at least to deny following him. Instead, the man laughed, his face instantly transforming from bland abstraction into a mask of glee. “I’d heard you were good,” he said. “But I didn’t credit it, meself.”
“Your mistake.”
“Ain’t it just?”
Sebastian studied the man’s beard-shadowed face, the grimy collar and filthy hair. His clothes were those of a workman down on his luck—or someone who had other reasons for doing his shopping at the rag fairs of Rosemary Lane.
“Who are you?” said Sebastian again.
The man tipped his hat and bobbed his head, as if making an introduction. “Name’s Flynn. Diggory Flynn.”
“Why were you following me?”
Diggory Flynn’s eyes slid away, his tongue flicking out to wet his full, oddly misshapen lips. “Didn’t mean you no harm.”
“And why should I believe you?”
“Never did you nothing, now, did I?”
“Maybe. Maybe not. Someone took a shot at me, just last night. Could have been you.”
“I don’t know nothin’ about that.”
“Who set you after me?”
“What makes you think anybody did?”