The Angel of the Crows

by Katherine Addison

  “Quickly!” said Crow.

  She tried the key and the door unlocked, disgorging a red-haired woman, wild-eyed and exhausted-looking and an uncanny double of the false Euphemia, save for the shapes of their faces.

  Mrs. Hebron stared from her double to Crow to me. “What on Earth…?”

  “Mrs. Hebron?” said Crow. “My name is Crow, and I am the Angel of London. Are you hurt?”

  “No,” she said, frowning. “Who is this woman wearing my clothes?”

  Crow raised his eyebrows at the false Euphemia, who blushed blotchily. “My name is Violet Hunter, and I seem to have been hired under false pretenses.”

  That was when a fat man, dreadfully red in the face, appeared at the top of the stairs. “Euphemia!” he bellowed, although his voice seemed thin and hoarse compared to Crow’s.

  Mrs. Hebron said, “Yes, Father? What are you going to do now? Lock us all up?”

  He glared, eyes bulging apoplectically. For a moment, he had no answer, and then he shrieked, “The dog! I shall set the dog on these trespassers and this spying vixen!” He turned and rushed down the stairs.

  “The dog?” Crow said.

  “Carlo the mastiff,” Violet Hunter said. “He is quite savage. Usually Mr. Rucastle doesn’t go near him without Toller.”

  “Stay close to me,” Crow said. “He’s highly unlikely to have had anti-angelic training.”

  “Oh, he isn’t trained at all,” said Miss Hunter. “Just half-starved and ill-treated.”

  “Lovely,” said Crow. “Mrs. Hebron, are you all right?”

  “Yes, yes. Anything to get out of here!” Mrs. Hebron said fervently.

  We had descended the first staircase and were starting down the second when the screaming started.

  “Carlo,” Miss Hunter said, barely a whisper.

  “Oh my God,” said Mrs. Hebron.

  Crow said nothing, for he was already running pell-mell down the stairs.

  I would only fall and break my neck if I tried to keep up with him. I stayed with the women and descended the stairs as quickly as I could.

  When we were on the first-floor landing, Carlo began barking frenziedly, and I knew Crow had managed to back him away from Mr. Rucastle. The sound mingled horribly with Mr. Rucastle’s screams.

  We were just reaching the ground floor when the screaming stopped, though the barking continued.

  “Oh God,” said Miss Hunter.

  “Which way?” I said urgently. “I’m a doctor. I may be able to help him.”

  Miss Hunter pulled herself together admirably. “I’ll show you.”

  We went, at the fastest pace I could manage, back through the baize door and then along a different hallway and out a side door into an otherwise pleasant garden, where Crow, his wings spread to their fullest extent, had Carlo, still barking furiously, backed against a sort of shed-cum-doghouse, and Mr. Rucastle lay on the ground, motionless and bleeding horribly from the throat.

  “All right,” I said and got to work trying to save his life.

  * * *

  I failed. The damage from Carlo’s teeth was too extensive and the blood loss too severe to save Jephro Rucastle. He died there in the garden, killed by his own dog, and although it was callous and un-Christian of me, I could not keep myself from thinking he deserved it.

  I met Crow back at Baker Street. Once Toller arrived and took control of Carlo, Crow had escorted Mrs. Hebron to her home, and had not returned to the Copper Beeches, there being nothing further he could do. I answered his questioning glance with a headshake.

  “I wasn’t fast enough,” he said.

  “I wasn’t fast enough, more to the point,” I said. “But I think it was too late as soon as Carlo got his teeth set. A mastiff’s jaws are a terrible weapon.”

  Crow nodded and seemed to accept my reassurance, such as it was, but he spent the next day staring out the window instead of immersed in his newspapers. By teatime I was unnerved enough to say something.

  “I did warn you I get like this sometimes,” he said.

  “If this is about Jephro Rucastle…”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said irritably, being unable to lie and tell me it wasn’t about Rucastle at all. “I just … I just don’t like getting people killed.”

  “You didn’t get him killed,” I said, a little nonplussed. “He did.”

  “If I hadn’t been there—”

  “He would still be holding his daughter captive, which I do not think is a better outcome. Did you find out what he wanted from her?”

  “His second wife gave birth to a son six years ago. He was trying to consolidate his property. Apparently, he still believed that Mrs. Hebron’s inheritance properly belonged to him.” But he was not distracted. “Doyle, there must have been something I could have done. We knew there was a dog.”

  “We didn’t know it was so savage it would attack the nearest human being,” I said, “nor do I think it is reasonable of you to expect of us that we would. Nor could you have predicted that Rucastle would be fool enough to let the thing out without whatever measures were usually used to control it. Crow.” I waited until he was looking at me, not minding for once the intensity of his stare. “There was no point before the screams started at which you could have predicted what was going to happen, and as I said yesterday, at that point, it was too late. On a man with less fat protecting him, Carlo would simply have torn his throat out. And then I suppose gone rampaging the neighborhood, and you did prevent that.” Crow had kept the beast contained until Miss Hunter found Toller, a drunken old man who nevertheless had a remarkable way with the dog, for he got it back in its shed in a matter of minutes. Carlo would probably have to be destroyed, now that he had killed his master, but that was a matter for the widow, not for us, and I did not mention it to Crow.

  “I suppose,” he said unhappily. “But I just…”

  “You feel responsible,” I said. “I understand.”

  “I suppose you must,” he said, with more interest, “being a surgeon. How do you stand it?”

  “I did the best I could,” I said, “and I know that my best is equal to or better than anyone else’s best. In war, that has to be enough, or the sheer number of dying men you don’t save will kill you—sometimes quite literally, for you leave yourself open to hauntings. Guilt calls to ghosts, often more strongly than grief, and any ghost that can move an object can kill a man. Before you ask, yes, I did once see it happen.”

  His eyes were wide. “Do you think…”

  I coughed instead of laughing. “I think Jephro Rucastle’s ghost, should there be one, would be so tightly focused on either the moment of his death or on his preoccupation with his daughter’s money that nothing else would register on it. But I am not a necromanticist, so that’s really only a guess.”

  His look was suddenly suspicious. “You aren’t making a game of me, are you?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m not. I truly did witness the ghost of a soldier kill a surgeon, one of the young ones who wasn’t calloused yet. It was … not pretty.” I hunched one shoulder against the memory and poured myself another cup of tea.

  Crow did go back to his newspapers after that, although only The Times, and in a subdued mood. The next day he was better, more like himself, and I thought he was making an honorable effort not to brood. I deliberately asked him questions, encouraged him to elaborate on his theory of the Whitechapel murders, which at this point was largely exasperation at the obtuseness of the police. “You can’t trust witnesses,” he said. “And especially you can’t trust witnesses who think they know something. This woman who saw a man talking to a woman she swears was Annie Chapman … well, for one thing, you’ll never shake her that the woman she saw was Annie Chapman—but you know that’s not even a given. For another, she never saw the man’s face and yet somehow perceived that he looked ‘foreign.’”

  “In fairness, one can often pick out a foreigner by the cut of his coat or the shape of his hat.”

 
“Yes, but she doesn’t say that.” He flipped through his press cuttings. “She says she didn’t see his face. But he was a dark-complexioned man over forty, wearing a deerstalker—which is not a particularly foreign hat—and he looked to her like a foreigner. All this from a passing glance at the back of his head. That witness isn’t worth a halfpenny, and she’s the best witness they have.”

  He was just as scathing about the saga of John Pizer, otherwise known as “Leather Apron,” whom the police had been pursuing as a suspect based on the not unreasonable evidence that the prostitutes of Whitechapel were terrified of him. “But he has no reason to start disemboweling them,” Crow said. “He has his tidy little racket all worked out—and I don’t suppose he ever had to do much more than give a woman a black eye. A man like that is not the sort of man we need to find.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A criminal. John Pizer is a criminal, and I would bet you a guinea the Whitechapel murderer is not.”

  “Your Jekyll and Hyde theory.”

  “Yes. Of course, the problem with my theory is that, unless somebody really does see something, it doesn’t provide anything to go on. At least you can look for a man called Leather Apron who extorts money from East End unfortunates. But my hypothetical virtuous citizen—well, there isn’t anything to point to him. If there were, the police would be following it. They know how to proceed with an ordinary murder investigation. But this is something quite different. He’s not killing them for any traceable reason. He’s almost certainly not known to them, nor they to him.”

  “Why—”

  “Again, if he were known to the prostitutes in the East End, the police would have found him by now. That’s the sort of person they’re looking for. I suspect he does live in Whitechapel or Spitalfields. He knows the ground too well to be a stranger. But he doesn’t talk to prostitutes, whether to extort money from them or otherwise. And I doubt he patronizes them. He kills them and somehow leaves no trace of himself behind.”

  “You would think there would at least be a bloody footprint or two.”

  “Maybe there were at the scene of Polly Nichols’s death. There wasn’t enough light to tell—not until the car-men and the constables and the bystanders had been trampling all over the place. And a boy had started washing away the blood. But no, he’s very careful and very sly, like a fox is sly. And maybe he has a charm like the ones Oksana Timofeyevna makes, so that people don’t notice him as he slips away.”

  “That makes it even worse, for that way no one will ever see him.”

  “Not unless he makes a mistake,” said Crow.

  PART SIX

  LONDON’S NIGHT FACE

  21

  Dear Boss

  On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth of September, a wire came for Crow. He read it with a puzzled frown and said, “Well, I wasn’t expecting that.”

  “Expecting what?”

  “This is from Lestrade. He says they’ve got a letter from the Whitechapel murderer.”

  I truly believed I had misheard him. “They’ve got a what?”

  “A letter. Lestrade wants to know if I want to look at it.”

  “I assume the answer is yes.”

  That got me a flicker of his smile. “Oh, of course. Do you want to come?”

  “I am agog with curiosity,” I said. “Let me get my coat.”

  I changed from my dressing gown to a suitable coat, picked the stoutest of my three remaining sticks (for the one I had lost at the hemophages’ warehouse had never been recovered), and joined Crow on the pavement outside the glossy black door of 221 Baker Street.

  He hailed a hansom. I was getting very good at squeezing myself into a two-person carriage with the equivalent of three people. The touch of Crow’s wings was still unpleasant, but practice was making me better at enduring it, and the drive to Scotland Yard was not long.

  Lestrade met us at the door. The Angel of Scotland Yard, who was standing in the broad lobby, beautiful swan’s wings half-spread, looked pointedly away from Crow. I noted that he (she?) was haggard and almost translucent, and then remembered the new building going up and felt like an idiot. New Scotland Yard would have a new angel. Whatever plans there were for the old building, the Angel of Scotland Yard would no longer be the Angel of Scotland Yard and might well be forced back into the ranks of the Nameless. No one was supposed to coerce angels into renouncing their habitation—and I had come to feel very strongly about that, knowing that it was essentially the same as death—but of course it happened all the time. Angels were civic-minded creatures.

  Lestrade took us to an empty office, where there was a piece of paper lying on the desk. “There it is,” he said. “You, too, Dr. Doyle. The more eyes on this, the better.”

  Crow read the letter and handed it to me. It was written in red ink, in a well-formed and literate hand. It read:

  25 Sept: 1888.

  Dear Boss

  I keep on hearing the police have caught me, but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the lady’s ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldnt you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work then give it out straight. My knife’s so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good luck.

  Yours truly,

  Jack the Ripper

  Don’t mind me giving the trade name.

  And there was a postscript, written sideways:

  wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it

      No luck yet. They say I’m a doctor now ha ha

  I put the letter back on the desk and said inadequately, “What an unpleasant person.”

  “That’s not the murderer,” said Crow.

  “What?” said Lestrade.

  “The man who wrote that thinks he’s funny. ‘My funny little games.’ He has quite a turn of phrase—Jack the Ripper, indeed—and he’s ridiculously verbose. I don’t think the real murderer is playing games. I don’t think he could talk about what he does that way. And I don’t think he’d take the incredibly stupid risk of writing to the police. I don’t think he needs to.”

  “That’s a very elaborate explanation,” said Lestrade. “Ain’t—aren’t you the one always going on about the gentleman with the razor?”

  “Occam,” Crow said reflexively. “And, no, I don’t think that’s simpler. Aren’t you already getting letters from people about the murder?”

  “Well, yes, but—”

  “You’ve never gotten a letter like this,” Crow said. “That’s because it’s a fraud.”

  “We’ve never had murders like these, either,” said Lestrade. “A man vicious enough to do one is vicious enough to do the other.”

  “You can’t equate them like that! Vicious as they are, these are just words. Words, not murder.”

  Lestrade shook his head. “But why should anyone but the murderer write such a letter?”

  Crow shrugged. “To make a stir. Which they most certainly have done. I wouldn’t be surprised if it turns out they sent letters to the newspapers, too.”

  “Well, actually,” Lestrade said, looking embarrassed.

  “What? This was sent to a newspaper?”

  “The editor at the Central News Agency sent it to us,” said Lestrade. “He actually got it on the twenty-seventh, but at first he thought it was a hoax.”

  “Did he indeed?” Crow said, one eyebrow rising pointedly.

  Lestrade stared at him. “You’re
not suggesting…”

  “I think you should be alive to the possibility. To me this looks like how someone thinks the Whitechapel murderer ought to talk.”

  “I think you are making this complicated because you love complicated things,” said Lestrade—which was an accurate character assessment, if nothing else.

  “You aren’t listening to me,” said Crow. “It isn’t complicated. It’s a hoax. That’s a much simpler explanation than trying to explain why the man who murdered Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, and Annie Chapman should write that letter.”

  But I could see in Lestrade’s face that his mind was made up. Crow saw it, too; his wings flared and settled, and he said, “Clearly I cannot persuade you.”

  “It’s always good to hear your opinion, Mr. Crow,” said Lestrade.

  Crow snorted, his wings resettling again. “There’s no point to this conversation. Do let me know, Lestrade, the next time you want to waste my time by not listening to me.”

  He stalked out. I shrugged at Lestrade and followed.

  * * *

  Crow grumbled all the way home and spent the rest of the day muttering at intervals, “It must be a hoax. Must be.”

  Finally, I said, “If I tell you I think you’re probably right, will it help?”

  “Do you think I’m right?” he asked, eagerly enough that I had my answer.

  “I think something is off in that letter,” I said truthfully. “I find it unlikely in the extreme that the murderer wrote it. But I don’t think any of us really knows what such a man would be likely to do.”

  “I suppose not,” Crow said grudgingly. “But still—!”

  “No, no! Pax! I believe you! If the police proceed on the assumption that the letter writer is the murderer, I believe wholeheartedly that they will make fools of themselves.”

  “Thank you,” said Crow. We were silent for a long time before he added, “Lestrade was right about one thing.”

  “Was he?”

  “It is a vicious letter,” said Crow, and I agreed.