Free Blind Justice by Bruce Alexander

sufficient to the task.”
    Then he fell silent.
    We were all quiet for a moment, then Mr. Bailey cleared his throat and said, “I’ll leave you now. Sir John. I’m past due making my rounds. All the watchmen are likely to be asleep in their boxes. Time to rouse them.”
    Distracted, Sir John failed for a moment to respond. Perhaps he was giving further pious thought to the Creator’s intentions as regards women. But at last he came to himself: “Yes … yes, of course, Mr. Bailey. You’d best be on your way. And thank you for your help.”
    “Don’t mention it. Goodbye, Sir John, and goodbye to you, young Jeremy.”
    I mumbled my own goodbye, then watched him disappear down the darkening street.
    “His is the harder job,” said Sir John to me. “If we could but keep the streets safe, it would be worth three Lord Goodhopes.” Then, about to haul himself up into the hackney, he added, “Or ten.”
    And so he, after calling out the address on Bow Street to the driver, settled back for the drive home. He ruminated still. At last, he said, “A strange woman.”
    “Did she speak strangely?” I had noted it but felt, perhaps, that she spoke as every noblewoman did. I was then in no position to judge such matters.
    Sir John considered this. The horse ahead clip-clopped along. Then: “Perhaps slightly in some foreign mode—though in very good English, of course.”
    “Oh, yes sir, very good.” I thought back, remembering a visitor we had once had to our place in Lichfield. “Would you say … French?”
    He thought about that. “Yes,” he said, “something Frenchy, not so much in her pronunciation as in the rhythm of her speech.” He paused at that. “Very good, Jeremy. I must look into that.” We lapsed into silence again, until he said, “But a lady, certainly, by any measure. Great dignity there.”
    “She had no tears, Sir John.”
    “Yes, I sensed as much.”
    Again I listened to the plodding regularity of the horse’s hooves on the cobblestones. Somehow, his tribute to Lady Goodhope and the dignity she had shown led me to think back to her husband in death there at the desk in the library. What was there to think about him? Not the ruined face, certainly. That was nothing to remember him by. But then, quite unbidden, the picture of his hands came to me: at peace, resting in his lap. I thought of those. “It’s true, isn’t it,” I asked rather sententiously, “that you can always tell a man of quality by his hands?”
    “It may be. What are you getting at, boy?”
    “Well, Lord Goodhope, sir. He had very clean hands, polished nails, not a smudge.”
    Sir John seemed suddenly much taken by this. “Lord Goodhope had clean hands, you say?”
    “Oh, yes sir. Very clean.”
    ”Both of them?”
    “Both of them, sir, as I remember. And I’m sure I remember correctly.”
    He suddenly pounded the floor of the hackney with his stick. “Damn me for a fool!” he exploded. Then said he, “And damn Mr. Bailey, too, for not noticing.” And making an awful racket on the ceiling of our compartment with his stick, he called out loudly to the driver to turn the hackney around and take us back to the house from whence we had come.
    Our second entry into the Goodhope residence was not managed so easily. Potter was at first reluctant to admit us at all, saying that Lady Goodhope had retired for the night. Sir John said he had no need to see her but had returned to give further examination to Lord Good hope’s body. Potter then informed him that the body had just now been removed from the library to be prepared for the casket which would arrive in the morning.
    As if suddenly propelled by that bit of news. Sir John burst past the butler and into the house, and I at his coattails. ”We must see the body at once!” he bellowed.
    “I must ask her ladyship’s permission,” whined Potter.
    “You need ask no such thing,” retorted the magistrate. “May I remind you that we stand here in the City of