Lestrade strode up and shook Crow’s hand, then mine, and said, “Good of you to come,” as if he had somehow been worried we wouldn’t.
“Of course,” said Crow, frowning around the court. “What have you done with the body?”
“She’s in there,” said Lestrade, pointing to a room that jutted out at the head of the court. “We haven’t gone in because Abberline’s waiting for the werewolf.”
“Did Sir Charles talk them into it, then?” said Crow. “Last I saw, the packs were still debating.”
It was highly unorthodox for a human police officer to ask for help from the werewolf equivalents, who were called pack guardians. But Sir Charles was understandably desperate, and the packs of London had no desire for a monster like Jack the Ripper to be running around loose, either. One version said that the packs had actually approached Sir Charles, rather than the other way around—but if that had been the case, I was fairly sure Sir Charles would have said yes without hesitation.
“One of their younger guardians volunteered,” said Lestrade. “His name is Clifton Barnaby, and Abberline sent a runner for him at the same time I sent for you, so he should be here soon. Then we’ll see if he can find anything.”
“You sound unconvinced,” I said.
“Eh,” said Lestrade. “Tracking in the city is hard, and werewolves aren’t magic. It might work and it might not.”
“It’s certainly worth trying,” said Crow.
“Anything’s worth trying,” said Lestrade. “This fellow’s not going to stop until we catch him.”
“Or worse,” I said, “he does stop and you never catch him.”
“Bite your tongue, Dr. Doyle,” said Lestrade. “We don’t catch him and we’ll be the laughingstock of England.”
“If you aren’t already,” Crow said with blinding tactlessness.
Lestrade was fortunately too used to him to take offense. He said only, “The newspapers are a cruel lot.”
“Tell me about the victim,” Crow said. “Do you know who she is yet?”
“The deceased is believed to be the occupant of the room, one Mary Jane Kelly. We aren’t sure because, well, one, we haven’t gone in yet and, two, the poor thing’s been butchered so badly her own mother wouldn’t know her. He really took advantage of having some privacy.” Lestrade shuddered and shoved his hands in his overcoat pockets.
There was a little stir at the entrance of the court. “That must be Mr. Barnaby,” said Crow. “Or, at least, it’s definitely a werewolf.”
The werewolf was a square-built young man, with a thick cap of reddish-blond hair and flourishing muttonchop whiskers. He went straight to the portly Inspector Abberline and shook hands vigorously. Abberline said something to him in a low voice, and then they walked over to the door of that single jutting-out room.
“Number 13,” Lestrade said with gloomy satisfaction. “Couldn’t be anything else, could it?”
Abberline reached through a broken pane of the window beside the door and freed the lock.
“Deceased had lost her key,” said Lestrade. “We’ve got any number of witnesses to testify that she’d been getting in and out like that for weeks.”
“That rather obviates the point of locking the door,” I said.
Lestrade made a what-can-you-do face. “Deceased didn’t have anything worth stealing, from the looks of it.”
Abberline, having had another quick discussion with the werewolf, opened the door and he and the werewolf stepped inside.
“Come on,” said Crow. “I want to watch what I’m eavesdropping on.”
“Mr. Crow!” Lestrade expostulated, but Crow was already in the doorway of No. 13. I followed him.
The smell of blood hit me full in the face, the thick copper reek of it invading my sinuses, my mouth, blurring my eyes. I knew what was going to happen the instant before it did, but there was utterly nothing I could do. My knees were buckling, my stomach twisted into a sick knot, and I changed.
The smell of blood only became stronger. I struggled out of the torn and constricting clothes, snarling at the men surrounding me. The angel said, “Oh, Doyle, no,” and I whined and edged sideways away when he tried to come too close. He stopped.
A man behind me said, “God almighty, what is that?” and another man said, “A hell-hound, Dew. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen one before.”
I lowered my head, scenting, then followed the scent to the bed, where lay bones and flesh and blood, all horribly disorganized and incomplete. I put my front paws up on the bed and inspected what was there, but I already knew it was missing.
He had taken her heart.
“What is it doing?” someone whispered. “It’s not going to eat the body, is it?”
“It’s scenting for something,” said the wolf. “You gentlemen may not need me after all.”
The angel said, “Doyle, this is very awkward.”
I grumbled deep in my throat and turned to the door. Several men scrambled out of my way. The scent of her was thick, the trail unmistakable. I followed it out of the room, through the crowd (which shrieked) and up the alley back onto the street. People scattered; there were more screams. I lowered my head and started tracking.
I had to find the rest of her. I’d failed before, and I could not bear to think of failing again. I could pay attention to nothing but the scent of her. I loped along the track, moving as fast as I could, streets and streets and finally stairs. Stairs going down into an areaway, and then a locked door.
I whined, thwarted, and paced in a circle. There were voices from street level: “I think it’s found something.” “Who does the house belong to?” “Oh for God’s sake, Dew, how should I know?”
I bumped the door, testing, then backed up and hurled myself at it. The door broke in a hail of splinters and I found the trail again.
The basement was dank, mold everywhere, but her scent was like a crimson ribbon, and I followed it easily through a twisting warren of hallways, then down a long, tight corkscrew of stairs, along a broader, danker, darker corridor, dirt and mold and cobwebs and her.
I ran faster, urgency coming from somewhere, the memory of the Thames in the middle of the night, up another set of stairs, through a hole into a tunnel. I was splashing as I ran, and the smell was rank and raw and like fists pounding on my nose and eyes, but her scent was still stronger, still clear, and I ignored everything else and followed it. Up a set of narrow, mossy, brick stairs and a door I hit without breaking stride.
It shattered and I leapt on the man in the room, a little man with a blotchy face and a broad overhanging mustache. He shrieked as we crashed together to the floor. Her scent was all over him; he had held her dying heart in his hands. I growled, glowing saliva dripping from my jowls, and started to lower my head. There were noises behind me, but they didn’t matter.
“JOANNA, STOP!”
The voice was like a bell; it clanged through my head unforgivingly. I whimpered and dropped to the floor, pinning the little man beneath me.
The angel strode past me in a terrifying, painful blaze of light and said to the man, “Don’t make me sorry that I saved your life just now. Especially when this thing on the table is clearly a human heart.”
The little man said, “Oh my God, get it off me!”
The angel said, “No, I don’t think so. Is this a human heart?”
“How should I know?”
“No, that strategy won’t work. You have her blood all over you.”
“I’m a slaughterman.”
“Maybe. But that doesn’t explain what you’re doing here with what I am quite sure is a human heart. Any time you wanted to give me a proper answer so that I could stop employing this circular logic, I would very much appreciate it.”
“I don’t know what you want!”
“Well,” said the angel. “You are Jack the Ripper, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I growled and edged a little up his body. I sm
elled deception.
“That’s a foolish sort of lie,” said the angel. “There isn’t a soul in London who doesn’t know who Jack the Ripper is—or, rather, who doesn’t know what Jack the Ripper has done. What’s your name?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Your name. You must have one.”
“Never give your name to strangers.”
“Oh, quite right. My name is Crow. I am the Angel of London. This is my friend and colleague, Dr. Doyle.”
“You’re friends with a hell-hound?”
“No one is to blame for being afflicted by the metaphysicum morbi,” the angel said. “Dr. Doyle encountered one of the Fallen in Afghanistan and is truly to be commended for not dying on the spot. Now. We only have a couple of minutes before the others catch up to us—they have a werewolf tracker, and your trail is not hard to follow. What is your name?”
“Why d’you want to know?”
“I can’t protect you without your real name,” said the angel, and the little man went off in what seemed to be genuine laughter.
“Protect me?” he said. “You’ll do nothing of the sort.”
The angel cocked his head. “Whyever not?”
“Well,” said the little man. “I am Jack the Ripper.”
A voice from below us shouted, “I see a light!”
“Quickly!” said the angel.
“Ta, guv, but I’ll take my chances. I’m not giving my name to a bloody angel.”
And then a voice said, “For God’s sake, Mr. Crow, furl your wings,” and the police were there—the bulldog detective, a long-faced constable, a stout man in a homburg, and the werewolf.
“Good Lord,” said the homburg. “Is this him?”
“That’s certainly a human heart on the table,” said the angel.
“Get this thing off me and I’ll go peaceably,” said the little man.
“Well, that’ll be a bit of a trick, I reckon,” said the bulldog. “Mr. Crow?”
“I can try,” said the angel. “Doyle, we can’t all wait here until dawn tomorrow. You need to let the police have him. Come here.”
I whined.
“No, really,” said the angel. “They’ll telegraph to the Registry for a handler, and none of us wants that. Come here.”
I went, though I kept my gaze on the little man covered in her scent.
“I’d say it was a pleasure to meet you,” said the bulldog, “but it would be a lie. Up you come.” He and the long-faced constable hauled the little man to his feet. “What’s your name?”
“Jack Ketch.”
“A comedian,” said the bulldog. “Well, Mr. Ketch, you are under arrest for the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.”
“Oh,” said the little man. “Was that her name?”
* * *
We emerged from the tunnels under the city into the teeth of a mob. There were police officers guarding the areaway, but when we came up the stairs, the crowd drew back a little, then surged forward when they saw the little man.
“Jack the Ripper!” someone shouted. “They caught Jack the Ripper!” The crowd surged forward again, nearly breaking through the line of police officers. I began barking in warning. But nothing would deter the mob, which was growing larger by the second. They rushed the line of officers, clawing, straining, shouting obscenities, and someone yelled from the rear, “Let’s get the bastard!” A second surge followed hard on the first, and the sheer weight of bodies shoved through the police officers’ line.
The angel’s hand descended onto the scruff of my neck, where it burned like a live coal. “Stay with me, Doyle,” the angel said under the roar of the mob, so softly that I couldn’t tell if it was an order or a plea.
My barking deepened, phosphorescent saliva flying in all directions, and I pushed against the angel’s legs. We were quickly cut off from the bulldog and the others; they would have to look out for themselves. I herded the angel along the building, snarling and snapping at anyone who came too close. The crowd kept growing; we couldn’t seem to get free of them, and I knew angels were fragile. I could not make enough space for the angel’s wings to spread, not without actually savaging someone. The angel’s hand stayed, burning, on my neck.
“Doyle,” said the angel. “Doyle, I, ah, don’t want to sound unnecessarily alarmist, but I think they’re about to lynch our sanguinary friend.”
My jaws nearly closed on the leg of a man in a sailor’s uniform, who yelped and swore, but pushed ahead toward the center of the disturbance instead of trying to stand fast. Somewhere, I heard glass breaking.
“No, really,” said the angel. “Someone’s come up with a rope, and I can’t see Lestrade or Abberline anywhere, but there’s that carrot-orange hair. He may have wanted to take his chances, but he doesn’t have a chance—they’ll tear him apart like the Bacchae, and that’s even if he manages to get free of them at all, which he’s not going to. I should—”
The angel’s hand left my neck. I swung my head around and growled a warning.
“Doyle! What do you think—but I have to do—”
I boxed the angel in along the wall, pushing always away from where the crowd was thickest and loudest and most dangerous.
“But I can’t let him just be hanged in the street!”
I shoved the angel as hard as I dared, trying to get us both to open, safe ground.
“Doyle, stop! You have to let me—Doyle! Doyle! Let— Oh God, it’s too late.”
The crowd around us made a terrible noise. I got the hem of the angel’s suit coat in my teeth and began pulling. The angel followed, face stricken.
“Oh God, I should have done something.… I should have tried.… I should have…” A dry sob, face now in hands.
I wished for a hansom or an Underground station or anything that would get us home faster. Behind us, the crowd was cheering hysterically. Someone shouted, “Bloody Jack the Ripper’s bloody dead!” and I heard more glass breaking.
“I can’t blame them,” the angel said in a harsh whisper. “Well, that is, of course I can, but I understand. But what if he wasn’t Jack the Ripper? What if there was some explanation, although I admit I can’t think of one? But God help us, what if there was? What if they just hanged an innocent man and the Ripper is holed up somewhere laughing … He should have had a trial, whether he was innocent or not.”
We had finally come to the end of the mob, around a corner where they couldn’t even see us. I let go of the angel’s coat and sat down, panting. The air tasted of fear and rage and something even darker, uglier, something like the smell of her blood on the little man’s hands.
“They would have torn him apart,” the angel said. “If there hadn’t been a rope handy. And God, God, he was covered in her blood like he’d been bathing in it. And we don’t know so much as his name. God.”
Already, the noise of the crowd was getting louder, the news spreading. I got up and shook hard, as if I could get the reek of blood and death out of my fur, then tugged at the angel’s coat.
“What— Doyle, that’s a dreadful habit.”
I tugged again.
“All right,” the angel said. “I don’t want to stay here, either. Let’s go home. The rest of the story can find us there.”
EPILOGUE
THE REST OF THE STORY
33
The Angel and the Solicitor
I spent the rest of that day hiding in my bedroom. I could not find the way to change back as I had on the moor, even here where it was safe to. The angel came in and out, talking nonstop, bringing a bowl of water, which I drank gratefully, and a soup bone, which I disdained until sometime past midnight, when I gave in and crunched it satisfyingly to smithereens.
At dawn, I changed back, and found myself in too much pain to crawl into bed, as if for all the time I had been a hell-hound, my human body had been crammed into the animal’s shape.
Crow was almost immediately in the room, saying, “Oh thank goodness, Doyle, are you all right?”
“I do
n’t know,” I said. “No, don’t try to help me up, you’ll just end up on the floor with me. The height of my ambition at the moment is to make it into bed.”
I managed, awkwardly and painfully, to uncramp my limbs far enough to crawl from the floor into my bed, Crow dashing over to turn the sheets down as if it was the only thing he could think of to do that might help.
The mattress was a miracle of softness. I cautiously stretched limb after limb, reminding myself that this one was an arm, this one a leg, and finally the cramped pain receded enough that I could lie, if not comfortably, at least without actual agony. I looked over at Crow, who was watching with wide, anxious eyes.
“I’m not dying,” I said, and surprised myself with a laugh.
“Oh. Oh! That’s good!”
“Is it? I seem to remember that all Scotland Yard now knows I’m a hell-hound.”
“Um,” said Crow. “Yes. Well. That is true. But you also caught Jack the Ripper.”
“And promptly let him get lynched by a street mob.”
“That,” Crow said firmly, “was not your fault.”
“You might have saved him if I hadn’t stopped you.”
Crow shrugged. “I doubt it. It might have been an interesting experiment, to see if a lynch mob would balk at harming me, but if they were willing to overrun a line of police officers, I don’t think I would have deterred them for long. And I don’t actually want to explore the question of how much damage I can take before I am trapped and drawn down into dissolution. Thank you, because I was going to get myself in a great deal of trouble, and you stopped me.”
“What happened to Lestrade? I heard his voice earlier.”
“Inspector Abberline was hit in the head. Lestrade said he did his best to protect both of them—the inspector and the murderer—but he couldn’t rally the constables fast enough to save Jack, as I suppose we must call him until he is identified—”
The Angel of the Crows Page 40