“You can, can you?”

“Yes, me lord. Father’s a barber, and us boys’d shave the bristles from the scalded hogs he bought for to make brushes of. For practice, like.”

“Hmm.” Grey glanced at himself in the looking glass above the chest of drawers. His beard came in only a shade or two darker than his blond hair, but it grew heavily, and the stubble glimmered thick as wheat straw on his jaw in the morning light. No, he really couldn’t forgo shaving.

“All right,” he said with resignation. “Adams—give the razor to Tom here, if you please. Then go and brush my oldest uniform, and tell the coachman I shall require him. Mr. Byrd and I are going to view a body.”

A night lying in the water at Puddle Dock and two days lying in a shed behind Bow Street compter had not improved Timothy O’Connell’s appearance, never his strongest point to begin with. At that, he was at least still recognizable—more than could be said for the gentleman lying on a bit of canvas by the wall, who had apparently hanged himself.

“Turn him over, if you please,” Grey said tersely, speaking through a handkerchief soaked with oil of wintergreen, which he held against the lower half of his face.

The two prisoners deputed to accompany him to this makeshift morgue looked rebellious—they had already been obliged to take O’Connell from his cheap coffin and remove his shroud for Grey’s inspection—but a gruff word from the constable in charge propelled them into reluctant action.

The corpse had been roughly cleansed, at least. The marks of his last battle were clear, even though the body was bloated and the skin extensively discolored.

Grey bent closer, handkerchief firmly clasped to his face, to inspect the bruises across the back. He beckoned to Tom Byrd, who was standing pressed against the wall of the shed, his freckles dark against the paleness of his face.

“See that?” He pointed to the black mottling over the corpse’s back and buttocks. “He was kicked and trampled upon, I think.”

“Yes, sir?” Byrd said faintly.

“Yes. But you see how the skin is completely discolored upon the dorsal aspect?”

Byrd gave him a look indicating that he saw nothing whatever, including a reason for his own existence.

“His back,” Grey amended. “Dorsum is the Latin word for back.”

“Oh, aye,” Byrd said, intelligence returning. “I see it plain, me lord.”

“That means that he lay upon his back for some time after death. I have seen men taken up from a battlefield for burial; the portions that have lain bottom-most are always discolored in that way.”

Byrd nodded, looking faintly ill.

“But you found him upon his face in the water, is that correct?” Grey turned to the constable.

“Yes, my lord. The coroner’s seen him,” the man added helpfully. “Death by violence.”