“Oh, yes,” he said, in tones of satisfaction. “Feel that, me lord? You can feel the stubble, sharp-ended, like, when you goes against the grain. It gets like that when a man shaves regular. If he shaves no more than once or twice a month, he’s like to get bumps—the hair curls up under the skin as it grows, see? But no bumps here.”

There were not. The corpse’s skin was smooth, devoid of hairs on arms, legs, chest, buttocks and privates. Other than smears of dried blood and caked ordure, and the small black hole of the bullet wound in his chest, only the deep purple-brown of the nipples and the riper tones of the rather well-endowed expanse between the man’s legs interrupted the pale olive perfection of his flesh. Grey thought the gentleman would likely have been quite popular, in certain circles.

“He has stubble. So the shaving took place before death?” Grey asked.

“Oh, yes, me lord. Like I said—he does it regular.”

Quarry scratched his head.

“I will be damned. D’ye think he’s a he-whore, then? A sodomite of some type?”

Grey would have taken a substantial wager to that effect, were it not for one observation. The man was slight, but well-built and muscular, like Grey himself. However, the muscles of chest and arms had begun to sag from lack of use, and there was a definite roll of fat around the middle. Adding to these observations the fact that the man’s neck was deeply seamed and, despite an impeccable manicure, the backs of his hands thickly veined and knobbed, Grey was reasonably sure that the body was that of a man in his late thirties or early forties. Male prostitutes seldom lasted far beyond twenty.

“Nah, too old,” Magruder objected, fortunately saving Grey from the necessity of finding some way of saying the same thing, without disclosing how he knew it. “This cove would be one as hires such, not one himself.”

Quarry shook his head in disapproval.

“Should never have suspected Maggie of dealing in that sort of thing,” he said, as much in regret as condemnation. “You sure about the dress, then, Grey?”

“Reasonably. It is not impossible that a dressmaker should make more than one gown, of course—but whoever made this one made the one that Magda was wearing.”

“Magda?” Quarry blinked at him.

Grey cleared his throat, a hideous realization coming suddenly over him. Quarry hadn’t known.

“The . . . ah . . . Scottish woman I met there informed me that the madam was called Magda, and is in fact a, um, a German of some type.”

Quarry’s face looked pinched in the lantern light.