He dragged Crow almost to the window before the Nameless jumped on his back. Both angels’ wings were flaring and flapping as the cabman roared with fury and tried to shake them off. Lestrade, showing a bulldog’s courage as well as its lack of common sense, leapt into the struggle. Gregson stood and tried to look superior. I did the only thing I could and rescued the teapot from certain destruction.
The cabman’s strength was as extreme and convulsive as an epileptic’s, and he seemed not to feel pain, although his nose began to drip blood almost immediately. It wasn’t until Lestrade actually hooked his fingers in the man’s neckcloth and began cutting off his air that the two angels and the police officer gained the upper hand. Finally, though, the cabman dropped to his knees and a spark of sanity returned to his eyes. He and Lestrade were both panting, and the cabman’s face had turned an alarming shade of fuchsia. Neither Crow nor the Nameless was winded, of course, but their wings were ruffled, the feathers plainly askew, and Crow’s hair was standing mostly on end. But he was also beaming triumphantly. “Are you all right, Dr. Doyle?”
“Yes,” I said, carefully restoring the teapot to the tempest-tossed table.
“Then, gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to the man who murdered Enoch Drebber and Joseph Stangerson.”
The cabman sighed and used his sleeve to wipe sweat and blood off his face. “Dead to rights,” he said in a flat, strongly American voice. “My name is Jefferson Hope, and I’d better tell you to start with that I’m not sorry and you are welcome to hang me tomorrow.”
Even Crow was a little taken aback, while Lestrade and Gregson looked like they’d swallowed a live goldfish each. The cabman—Jefferson Hope—said, “I don’t have any reason to deny it now. There isn’t a lot of time remaining to me, and I’d’ve rather not spent it in a jail cell, but I’m not going to complain. Providence saw fit to give me my vengeance.”
“What do you mean?” Crow said at the same time Gregson said, “I must warn you that you are under arrest. If you choose to speak, your words will be taken down and used against you.” Lestrade already had his notebook out.
Hope laughed. “What does that matter? I’m not about to deny what I’ve done.”
“Then tell us?” Crow said.
“I’d like someone to know,” Hope said, sounding faintly surprised. “Here, are you a doctor?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Then come have a listen,” he said. “You’ll understand.”
There isn’t a medical doctor alive who can restrain his curiosity, which I think is the true lesson of both Frankenstein and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I went and fetched my medical bag. When I came back, Jefferson Hope was in one of our armchairs, a handkerchief pressed to his nose, with the Nameless standing behind the chair as a guard.
I got out my stethoscope and put the bell to Hope’s chest. The commotion inside his chest was exactly the sound of a death sentence. “That’s an aortic aneurysm,” I said and only then realized how close I was to a man I knew for a cruel and violent murderer. Curiosity.
His eyes were dark and fierce, the eyes of a hawk in a man’s ordinary, florid face.
“Underfeeding and overexposure in the Salt Lake Mountains,” he said, and the fierce eyes begged me to agree.
“Overexposure would certainly do it,” I said. It was unnecessary to specify overexposure to what—unnecessary to embarrass Hope by announcing that he had gotten himself infected with syphilis.
“I went to see a doctor about it last week,” Hope said, “and he told me it is bound to burst here soon. So you may consider that you are looking at a dead man. I won’t lie to you, gentlemen, and you may take what I say as the Gospel truth.”
Lestrade flipped to a fresh page in his notebook. Gregson said, “Is this true, Dr. Doyle?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “He might as well be carrying a lit fuse and a charge of gunpowder in his chest.”
“Thank you,” Gregson said, although it sounded like it pained him.
“The seed of this matter,” said Jefferson Hope, “was planted in Deseret some thirty years ago. I suppose the ins and outs aren’t important. There was a man named John Ferrier, one of the wealthiest Gentiles—as Mormons call all non-Mormons—in Deseret. He ran a trading post, started it in the crazy Gold Rush of 1848 and then traded with the Indians and all the settlers taking the South Branch of the Oregon Trail. Supposedly, he’d traded with the Donner Party, but I was never sure of the truth of that. His trading post was called Fort Ferrier as a joke, but it was busy enough and successful enough that it attracted the only Gentile angel in all Deseret. Ferrier called her Lucy after his dead wife, and she never seemed to mind.”
“A name is a name,” Crow murmured.
“I suppose,” said Hope. “Lucy was the kindest creature I’ve ever met, and she was lovely, tall and blond and with a snowy owl’s silent white wings. She was good to me whenever I stopped at Fort Ferrier—and it was rare to find a friendly face in Deseret if you weren’t a Saint yourself. I can’t tell you the degrees by which we fell in love with each other.”
He stopped and stared at us defiantly.
“Oh dear,” said Crow.
Gregson looked shocked; Lestrade merely looked worried. I had known many young soldiers in love with the Angel of Scutari, but this was the first suggestion I had ever heard that an angel could love back.
“Ferrier was a good man, and I guess he liked me. He said he wouldn’t interfere as long as Lucy wasn’t hurt, and I swore a Bible oath I’d never harm her. So the next time I brought my gold ore and trade goods to Fort Ferrier, I was going to stop and settle down and let Ferrier teach me how to be a trader instead of a miner. But when I got there, it was burned to the ground. I found Ferrier’s body in the ruins, murdered by a shotgun blast to the chest, and in Lucy’s chapel I found her dissolution feather, and I am not ashamed to tell you gentlemen that I wept like an orphan child.” He wiped his face on his sleeve again.
“I went to the nearest farmstead and asked what had happened. They told me it was the Danites—Brigham’s Avenging Angels, they called themselves, which is the cruelest joke I’ve ever heard, for they were nothing but a roving gang of murderers. The Danites put the word around that Ferrier was living sinfully with Lucy, which I didn’t dare say otherwise. But I knew who was behind it, because I knew who wanted Fort Ferrier to burn.”
“Drebber,” Crow said softly.
“And Stangerson. I remember Lucy thought Stangerson knew about us. She said he’d ask her questions, when he and Drebber came to trade, and I said, ‘What kind of questions?’ but she wouldn’t tell me. Drebber and Stangerson both made their fortunes on the destruction of Fort Ferrier, and I swore salt and iron vengeance on them both.”
Hope sighed. “I kept Lucy’s feather, although there were times when I could surely have used the money from selling it, because it was a little like having her near me. And I watched and I waited. I couldn’t get at them in Deseret, not both at once, and I couldn’t afford to move against one if by doing so I guaranteed the other’s escape. I knew it was Drebber who’d killed John Ferrier, as surely as if I’d been standing there to watch him do it. When Stangerson was unfellowshipped—it’s like excommunication, but not as bad—not long after, I knew he was the one who had destroyed Lucy. Not even Brigham Young could stomach destroying an angel.”
“He may have realized how close Mr. Stangerson came to destroying all of Deseret,” Crow said. “If Lucy had Fallen…”
“She wouldn’t,” Hope said positively.
“No, clearly not,” Crow said.
“I missed them when they left Deseret—I was back at the mines in Arizona, trying to scrape together a grub stake—and it has taken me all these years to catch them again. I read somewhere that RACHE was the German for revenge and I wrote it over Drebber’s body in my own blood.” And he held up the bloodstained handkerchief in explanation.
“Why two pills?” Crow said.
“A fair chance,” Jefferson Ho
pe said and smiled an ugly smile. “The fair chance they didn’t give Lucy. Drebber was sure he’d detected a difference between the two pills. He hadn’t, for I couldn’t tell them apart myself. Stangerson believed it was a trick because it was just the sort of trick he would have pulled, and he jumped me. I was glad to spill his blood. Really, there’s nothing more to say.”
Lestrade and Gregson looked as if they wanted to disagree. Crow said, “You need tell us nothing more if you do not wish to.”
“You are nothing like her,” Jefferson Hope said, “but I perceive that you are kind. Thank you. I bear you no grudge.”
“Thank you,” Crow said in turn.
Lestrade said, “I can drive a four-wheeler, if we may bespeak your Nameless to help us with the prisoner, Mr. Crow?”
“Of course,” said Crow, and between them, the two police officers and the pigeon-winged angel removed Jefferson Hope from our sitting room.
* * *
Jefferson Hope died that night. Lestrade told us that they found him in the morning, stretched out on the floor as peaceful as a statue.
“Probably yesterday’s exertion was the last straw,” I said.
“I suspect he wanted it to be,” said Crow. “He had quite literally nothing to live for. I wish I could have given him Lucy’s feather back. But Gregson and Lestrade wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“They would have taken it as evidence,” I said, “and it would be lost.”
“At least we can keep that from happening,” Crow said and put the dissolution feather of the Angel of Fort Ferrier, Deseret Territory, carefully on the mantelpiece.
PART THREE
AN UNEXPECTED TREASURE HUNT
9
A Visit to New Scotland Yard
On the night of August thirtieth, I dreamed that I was Mr. Hyde, trying to find my way out of Dr. Jekyll’s house. It was the sort of dream in which as ardently as I, as Mr. Hyde, wished to escape from the house so that I might go marauding through London, just so ardently did I, as J. H. Doyle, wish that I should be thwarted. I was at once mad with frustration and sick with dread, and I suppose really I shouldn’t have been surprised when I woke myself falling out of bed and discovered I had changed. The allegory was all too embarrassingly clear.
Unlike Mr. Hyde, however, I had no desire to leave my bedroom. I ended up in the closet again, trying desperately to be silent so that the angel wouldn’t hear me. There was something wrong about that, something askew, but I couldn’t remember what, and it was too complicated an idea to hold on to for long. I curled up in the closet and lay watchful and awake ’til dawn.
When I changed back, I at once remembered what had concerned me dimly in the night: what did Crow hear when I changed and what did he think was going on? He had to know something was happening; even if the change itself was silent, the noise of me dragging the bedclothes into the closet had to be discernable to him, even if not identifiable. But he hadn’t said anything, which meant either he knew exactly what was happening and chose to treat it as a secret or … I could not imagine Crow not asking, if he was at all puzzled by what he had heard. That was his nature.
Ergo, he knew.
That conclusion was mortifying. I wanted to stay wedged awkwardly in the closet; it seemed far preferable to saying anything to Crow, starting with “Good morning” and going on from there. But if he knew … I couldn’t leave it a strained semi-secret between us; it would drive me mad and that in no great length of time.
I dressed with particular care and went out, only to discover that a newspaper bomb had exploded in our sitting room.
“I say, Doyle,” said Crow from the floor, “there’s been another one.”
I didn’t have to ask “Another what?” The headlines were all too visible.
“They found her in Buck’s Row,” Crow said, “with her throat cut from ear to ear. She was still warm—I think the carman who found her probably scared off her murderer.”
“Do they know who she is?” I asked, instead of any of the things I’d planned to say. Crow’s attention was ferocious when focused, and it was pointless, as I knew from any number of experiments, to try to talk to him about anything else.
“No, but she was clearly a prostitute,” said Crow, who bothered with euphemism only irregularly. It was, to be perfectly truthful, a relief to me, for it meant I did not have to mind my tongue. I had had a—not complimentary—reputation at Bart’s for plain speaking, and Afghanistan had, if anything, made the habit worse. A flatmate with conventional sensibilities would have been as offended by me as I would have been exasperated by him.
“And of course they haven’t caught the murderer.”
Crow laughed. “No, there’s no trace of him. And there’s a slaughterhouse a stone’s throw away. No one would think anything of a man covered in blood at three in the morning. Aside from the inconvenient carmen walking to work, he couldn’t have picked a better spot.”
“Do you think it’s the same man?”
“Whitechapel is dreadful,” Crow said, “but two men with a knife and a taste for unfortunates? That seems a bit much.”
“What kind of man do you think he is?” I said, thinking of my dream. By this time I had unearthed my chair and sat down, although I was putting off ringing for Jennie.
“Comfortable with a knife,” said Crow, “but I don’t think a slaughterman or a butcher would have gone after Martha Tabram so wildly. And despite everyone going on about blood-boltered maniacs, he obviously isn’t. Or someone would have noticed him by now.”
“Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” I said bleakly.
“Yes, or something like that. If they ever catch him, he’ll be quite ordinary.”
“A sort of spiritual werewolf.”
“That’s quite the slander on honest werewolves, but I see what you mean. Perfectly ordinary until he turns into a beast. He has to be, or he’d never persuade an East End prostitute to go anywhere with him.”
“No.”
“They know they’re easy prey,” Crow said. Then his attention was caught by something in the newsprint around him. I rang the bell and tried to compose my thoughts around breakfast rather than around savage murder.
I was only marginally successful.
* * *
Unlike the case of the unfortunate woman in George Yard Buildings, this time the police invited Crow in almost from the start. He said it was a sign of how desperate they were. I did not go with him, for I did not want to step on any medical toes, but Crow reported everything, as much for the chance to say it aloud as for any desire for my opinion.
We had followed the George Yard investigation in the papers—Crow by obsession, me by proximity to Crow—so we knew that her name was Martha Tabram, age thirty-nine and identified by a husband who hadn’t actually seen her in years. The sordid tale of her past unspooled in the sad and unfortunately predictable pattern. We also knew that that was essentially all the evidence that had been discovered. Another prostitute had come forward, admitting that she had been with Tabram on the last night of her life and telling a story about two soldiers; a story that, since she could not identify them, led exactly nowhere.
And that was all there was. No other clues, no other leads, and the inquest jury brought in the only possible verdict: willful murder by person or persons unknown.
This new victim was identified as Mary Ann Nichols. She’d gone by Polly. She was also a prostitute and of the same sort as Martha Tabram: a homeless alcoholic who sold herself daily for the pennies to rent a bed in one of Whitechapel’s notorious and vile doss-houses. Everyone seemed to have liked her well enough—even her erstwhile husband—and there was absolutely nothing to suggest she’d been murdered by someone she knew. Which, unfortunately, left the investigation exactly where it had started.
Polly Nichols’s throat had been cut, and she had been savagely disemboweled.
“It wasn’t an autopsy cut,” Crow said. “This fellow knows how to use a knife, but I don’t think he has any medical tr
aining. Probably knows how to dress a cow.”
“Do you still think it’s the same man, then? Because Martha Tabram’s killer didn’t exactly show any skill.”
“No,” Crow agreed. “But it still seems like too much of a coincidence. Two savage knife murders in one month? And the rest of the modus operandi is depressingly similar: murder a prostitute and disappear without a trace.”
Lestrade, too, had been drawn into the Whitechapel investigation, and he started appearing at all hours to argue about it with Crow. One night, I came out of my bedroom, drawn by the raised voices, and found Lestrade trying to argue that Tabram and Nichols had been murdered by a Fallen.
Crow rolled his eyes at me. “No matter how much you want that to be the answer, Lestrade, it can’t be done.”
“You—”
“I did not commit these murders,” said Crow. “There. Settled.”
“The Fallen don’t commit murder, Inspector,” I said. “All the stories to the contrary.”
“But what if one could?” Lestrade said doggedly.
“Then it wouldn’t look like that,” I snapped, startling myself nearly as much as Lestrade. “The Fallen don’t kill one at a time, and they don’t bother waiting until the middle of the night.”
“Besides,” said Crow, “every angel in London would know if there were a Fallen among us. They can’t hide themselves.”
“This man must have been a hide-and-seek champion as a child,” I said.
“Reid keeps sending his constables around,” Lestrade said gloomily. “And I really think if anyone had seen anything, they would have come forward by now. Everyone in the East End is scared out of their wits.”
Crow was pacing, his wings pulled tight against his back. “Your constables have probably talked to him,” he said. “Some ordinary little man.”
“Some ordinary little man,” I said, “with a very sharp knife.”
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