Not Quite a Duchess by Alyssa Alexander

Author:Alyssa Alexander
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Alyssa Alexander

Twenty-Six

Queen’s Head Alley, Wapping

East End, London

Dried blood snaked brown tendrils over wooden planks, just as a weed might overtake the rigid rows of a kitchen garden. Other stains discolored the floor where the body had been found, releasing the stench of urine and excrement.

Tess held back the bile in her throat and focused on facts.

They had been too late.

Jameson was already dead.

Tess and Northfield had arrived at the same time as the coroner. The mutilated body had been removed—along with the tools the murderer had used—but not before Tess had sent for Gideon. He’d studied and sketched the scene, the ropes, and even the stock and bit that had drilled small holes in each of Jameson’s fingernails.

Torture.

Methodical. Premediated. Vicious.

Why?

Once the torture was over, Jameson’s throat was slashed, and he had been left to bleed out, lying in his own fluids.

Tess gritted her teeth and opened her mouth so she did not have to breathe death through her nose. Even as experienced as she was, the stench turned her stomach.

Northfield stood just inside the door to Jameson’s lodgings. His face was pale, but his expression was grim, and his chin firmed with determination. Such grisly scenes were hard for her, and she had already seen more than her share. Northfield, however, had likely never experienced violent death. While he’d not stepped close to examine the body, he also hadn’t vomited or left the room. He had watched everything, focusing on every detail, and swallowed hard from time to time.

But he stayed.

She had never respected him more.

“Tell me what you know.” Tess crouched beside Gideon and jerked her thumb at Northfield. “And the duke stays—he deserves to know. Jameson was his man.”

“Aye,” Gideon said absently, already bent over the stains on the floor. “Poor bastard died badly.”

She did not need to see Gideon’s face to know it affected him. Violent death always did, even as he evaluated every drop of blood and the position of a body.

Gideon splayed his sketches over a clean area of the floor, lining them up carefully. He stepped back and studied the drawings, then the room before him.

“I spoke with the runners and the coroner.” Tucking a black lead pencil behind his ear to tangle with his flaming red hair, he began to roam the room, bending occasionally to observe something more closely. Tess stepped back and simply let him work. While some of his conclusions she could make herself, Gideon saw things, understood things, no one else did. “Jameson was discovered by his longtime lover, a young woman who often visited when he returned to London from sea.”

The woman would never be the same. Not after seeing that carnage.

“The runners found no other carpentry tools aside from those used on Jameson,” Gideon continued. Northfield made a small, strangled sound but did not speak. “The mortise chisel with its sharp point on the man’s shins would have been the worst, I would think, but the stock and bit drilled into his fingernails—”

Gideon broke off suddenly, dropping to the floor as if his knees had given way.

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