Page 71 of Secrets of the Heart

So, a short while later, yet another hansom was setting them down in front of the former footman’s residence. They climbed the outside set of stairs, and Michael rapped sharply on the door. To their surprise, the door moved beneath his touch, opening a few inches. It had not been completely shut, only pulled to. Michael and Rachel glanced at each other, a sense of alarm growing in them.

“Stay back,” Michael warned, putting out an arm to shield Rachel and hold her back as he pushed open the door and stepped cautiously inside. “Hargreaves?”

Rachel, now behind Michael’s back, could see nothing, but she heard his sudden sharp intake of breath. Then Michael rushed forward quickly and dropped down on one knee on the floor. Rachel started in after him and stopped abruptly as she realized that Michael was kneeling beside a man on the floor. Michael’s body blocked the man’s chest, but she could see his legs splayed out limply on the floor and his head, turned toward her, eyes open and staring lifelessly. Blood smeared the side of his face.

A small, shrill cry escaped her. “Michael! Is he—”

“Yes,” he replied tersely. “Hargreaves is dead. Go back outside, Rachel. There is no need for you to see this.”

Rachel was not inclined to argue with him. She turned and walked back out the door and plopped down on the top step. She leaned her head forward, fighting the rush of dizziness. She had never seen anything as horrible as the sight of that man’s eyes, pale and devoid of life. She swallowed hard and drew a ragged breath.

There was the sound of footsteps behind her, and she turned to see Michael step out onto the landing. He glanced around, then trotted down the stairs and called to a boy playing in the street, promising him a shilling if he returned with a constable. He returned to where Rachel sat.

“Are you all right? I cannot leave here until the constable comes, but I could hail you a cab and send you home,” he told her, leaning over her in concern.

Rachel turned up her face to him and smiled wanly. “No. I will be fine. I felt a little light-headed for a moment, but it has passed.”

“Good.” He sat down beside her on the step and took her hand. “I am sorry you saw that.”

Rachel nodded, saying candidly, “So am I. Oh, Michael, did someone shoot that man?”

He frowned. “It doesn’t look like it. There was a pistol on the floor beside him, and he left a note.”

“A note? You mean…are you saying he committed suicide?”

“It appears so.”

“What did the note say?”

“That he poisoned Mrs. Birkshaw with arsenic, day by day, in the food he carried to her room.” Michael pulled the piece of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it, handing it to her. “But, as you can see, he also says that Mr. Birkshaw paid him a healthy sum to do it. He was supposed to do it while Birkshaw was out of town, but he felt too guilty and could not finish what he started.”

Rachel’s eyes ran quickly down the page, reading, “‘So Mr. Birkshaw himself came back and did it. I cannot keep silent. I cannot live with the guilt any longer.”’

She stopped and looked at Michael numbly. He took the piece of paper from her fingers and folded it back up.

“I don’t believe it,” Rachel said flatly. “I cannot believe that Anthony killed her.”

“A deathbed confession is a pretty powerful piece of evidence,” Michael pointed out.

“Yes, and it is very convenient, too,” Rachel replied tartly. “Just as we are about to question the man, he writes a note implicating Anthony in the crime, then shoots himself, rendering it impossible to question him about his confession.”

“Still, it seems rather unlikely that he killed himself simply to implicate Birkshaw in the crime.”

“And do you know for sure that he killed himself? Could not someone else have shot him and left the gun there to make it look as if he shot himself? Do you know that the gun was even his?”

“No. But there is the note.”

“Which anyone could have written. I am not familiar with the man’s hand. Are you?”

“No, of course not.” Michael pulled out the note and looked at it again. “It is full of misspellings, as if an uneducated person wrote it.”

Rachel cast her eye over the clumsy, uneven printing. “Or as if someone was clever enough to make it appear that an uneducated person wrote it. We don’t even know whether or not Hargreaves could read and write.”

“You’re right.” He sighed. “It does tie everything up rather neatly. In my experience, life is seldom that neat. But why would anyone kill the man and go to so much trouble in order to implicate Birkshaw? Who hates him? Besides me, of course.”

“I don’t know. Maybe they are doing it to throw you off, give you a false scent. So that you will go haring off after Anthony and not pursue the real killer.” Rachel reached out and took Michael’s arm as a thought struck her. “What if the man who is behind all those crimes is alarmed because you are investigating some of them? What if he set up this entire thing to throw you off? To distract you from the crime you were working on? To set you looking into something that really had nothing to do with the rest of it but that you would be bound to investigate? Suppose someone knew that you would be ready to believe the worst of Anthony, and they used that?”

He looked at her for a long moment. “But who would know that? No one knows how much I dislike Anthony or why. No one was privy to what happened that night except the three of us and your father. Ravenscar would not have told anyone.”