Free Murder in Grosvenor Square by Ashley Gardner Page A

While I had much experience with injuries made by pistols, carbines, bayonets, knives, and various forms of artillery, I’d never learned about the art of bludgeoning.
    Brewster bent over the bodies with an air of a professional. “Hard to see in this light. But I’d say a piece of wood. One with nails in it.” He touched the side of Travers’s head where the blood was blackest. “He was smacked with the club, and the nails sticking out of the end went right in.”
    I swallowed a sourness in my throat. “What the devil kind of man would do such a thing?”
    Brewster shrugged. “I can see any number of coves around ’ere doing for ’em. They’d want to keep mollies, especially rich ones, away from their boys.”
    “I very much doubt Mr. Travers and Mr. Derwent had any interest in the lads around here,” I said. “Which returns me to the question—what were they doing here ?”
    “Can’t say as to that,” Brewster answered, though I’d spoken mostly to myself. “Need to get ’em away, though, before the Watch stumbles on ’em.”
    He had a point. I could not wait any longer for Grenville’s carriage—I’d have to apologize for the summons later.
    I tried to lift Leland, but my leg was sore from being folded up on the pavement in the cold. I couldn’t hold him.
    Brewster took Leland’s slack body from me with surprisingly gentle hands. “Let me, Captain. You get ’em tucked in all comfortable on the dray and leave the carrying to me.”
    His suggestion was sensible. I stayed with Travers, while Brewster carried Leland away, hoping without much hope that Gareth would blink his eyes, laugh, and tell me he and Leland had played a fine joke on me.
    He didn’t. Travers lay still, dead, and would never joke again.
    *
    I wasn’t certain where to take them. If I rolled up in a dray in Grosvenor Square and carried two bodies inside Sir Gideon Derwent’s house, it would be in every newspaper the next morning. If I took them to Grenville’s, not far from the Derwents, the same thing would occur.
    I contemplated taking them to my rooms in Grimpen Lane, but I had gossipy neighbors, none more than my landlady. Mrs. Beltan often stayed late in her shop, preparing for the next day, and the ladies across the street would visit her, knowing Mrs. Beltan sold her leftover bread at half price and sometimes even gave it away.
    “I know a place, sir,” Brewster said, when I’d voiced my dilemma. “If you need to hide ’em for a bit.”
    “Leland needs a surgeon,” I said.
    “No matter. We’ll get ’em stashed away, and a surgeon can be fetched.”
    Not ideal, but I wanted them out of the rain. “Lead on,” I said wearily.
    Brewster gave me a nod and climbed up onto the seat with the driver. I settled in the back next to the tarp-covered bundle that was Leland and Travers, commending us all to the hands of a man who made a living committing murder for James Denis.

Chapter Eight
     
    Brewster took us to a house in a tiny lane off High Holborn. Not the most affluent address, but the house was private. The narrow abode, the width of one room and a staircase hall on each floor, rose four stories to a ceiling lost in shadows.
    The house was dark, no lights but a candle in a lantern Brewster held. I’d insisted on returning my lantern to the man I’d taken it from, much to Brewster’s amused disdain.
    Brewster led me up two flights of stairs to a front bedroom. I could tell it was a bedchamber only when Brewster’s lantern cut through the vault of blackness to illuminate pale hangings around a large bed. I laid Leland on the bed’s coverlet, ignoring the blood and mud both of us smeared on it. “It’s bloody freezing in here,” I said over my shoulder. “Get a fire going.”
    Brewster grunted, not liking to take orders from me, but he saw the sense in doing so. Soon he was banging around the fireplace and had a blaze going. He lit fresh candles in silver candlesticks, lighting up the small room.
    The