by Alex Grecian
“We’d be delighted,” she said.
“Well, let’s see if we can find the thing you’re after,” Mr Goodpenny said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Plumm’s carries it.”
They had no idea what he had in mind, but he led the way down a narrow path between two counters and Fiona followed. Claire and the boys and the nanny with her double pram all came along.
• • •
AMBROSE CRAWLED OUT of the storeroom and crept along behind the counter. He had awoken as the latch clicked shut, and his boss was walking away from the room by the time Ambrose rubbed the sleep from his eyes and peeked out the door. He’d been abandoned there.
He knew he’d be thrown out of the store as soon as anyone of authority saw him. He didn’t look like he had money or a reason to be there. The only way he could think to explore Plumm’s and catch up to the guv was to pretend he was running deliveries for someone posh. He stood up and straightened his threadbare jacket and tried to look like he imagined a delivery boy might look. He marched past a grouping of chairs and tables and sofas, then along in front of the cabinets of jewelry and scarves without paying attention to any of the fineries on display. These things, he thought, don’t impress me. I see finer things all day long at my employer’s home. He kept this silent mantra going, in hopes that if he thought a thing, however false it might be, it would manifest itself in his face and his bearing. His real employer barely had a home at all and didn’t seem to care about much of anything except tobacco leavings, but thinking about that was of no use in this situation. He passed several shopgirls and not one of them stopped him, so he imagined he was carrying off the internal disguise well. His manner was almost regal.
But he couldn’t keep himself from looking upward, past the huge installation that was being constructed. Somewhere up there was a skylight, on beyond the vaulted ceiling and the shops and offices. Somewhere up there Ambrose had watched two women being murdered.
And the man who had murdered them was right there, standing in plain sight above him!
Ambrose actually gasped when he saw him and ducked down behind a display of silk trousers. The murderer was taking the guv’s hand, escorting the boss of Reasonable Tobacco to a little table as if they were going to have tea together right there in front of God and everybody.
Like they was friends.
Was his employer going to turn him over to the killer? Had Ambrose been lured to the store on purpose so they could do away with the only witness to the murders? But no, if the guv planned to betray Ambrose, surely he wouldn’t have left him sleeping in a closet with the door practically open. He would have locked Ambrose in until he could make his arrangements. At least, that’s how Ambrose thought he would have done it if he were that sort of person.
So it wasn’t a trap for him. But it might be a trap for his employer. He’d told the guv all about it, and now the killer was saying something to him up there, telling the guv something, and the guv didn’t look none too happy about it, either. The killer was threatening him.
And then Ambrose understood: His employer was protecting him by hiding Ambrose and diverting the killer’s attention.
Ambrose wasn’t the bravest boy on the streets, but he was loyal. He’d never let anyone down, so far as he knew. He had to do something and he had to do it fast.
“Excuse me, young man, but you’re blocking the aisle.”
Ambrose turned and saw a nasty old nanny pushing a pram that held two babies. Behind her were two more children, boys who were maybe a little younger than Ambrose himself. There was a slender girl with her nose in a sketch pad and a fat little clerk who was jabbering about something. And behind them all was the most beautiful woman Ambrose had ever seen, with golden hair that shone brilliantly under Plumm’s yellow lights.
“Well, get a move on, why dontcha?” The nanny raised her hand as though she meant to swat at Ambrose from three feet away and with a pram between them.
The beautiful woman frowned at her governess. “Tabitha, be nice.” Then she smiled at Ambrose and said, “This place is amazing, isn’t it? I’ve never seen a store so large.”
Ambrose managed to nod at the beautiful woman, stunned that she had spoken directly to him. She was the nicest posh lady he had ever seen.
Before he could find his voice and answer her, the nanny said, “Yes, Mrs Day.” And all eight of them swept past Ambrose and into the furniture department behind him.
• • •
TABITHA WAS SIMPLY NOT going to work out. Claire scowled at the nanny’s back and tried to figure out how to let her go when she had no one to take up the slack. Tabitha was the third governess the babies had been through in the past year. And none of them had worked out. The first had left them because there always seemed to be a killer of some sort prowling about the house. (Claire couldn’t blame her.) The second had hit one of the boys. And now Tabitha was acting willfully awful.
Imagine! Talking to a poor delivery boy as if he were street scum.
She rolled her eyes and noticed something familiar at the outside edge of her vision. Her attention was drawn by two workmen having a row over something they were building, a huge globe, perhaps fifty feet around, in a glassed-in box. She ignored them and focused on one of the men taking tea at the gallery above.
The big gas lamps behind them shone down through a mass of dark hair, and it only took her a moment to place the man. She had once met Jack the Ripper. He had even come into her bedroom. And the man sitting above her, having tea like any other ordinary person, was that same man. She was certain of it.
“Missus?”
Claire came to herself and shook her head.
Tabitha touched her arm. “What is it, ma’am?”
“Can’t you leave me alone for a single moment and let me think?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Watch after the children. Isn’t that your job? Isn’t that the whole of your job?”
“Yes, ma’am.” The nanny hung her head and hurried after the boys, who had taken the pram and were pushing their way into the books department. Mr Goodpenny and Fiona had disappeared together around a bank of tall wardrobes with double doors. Claire could hear the cheerful little gentleman going on about the quality of the wood finish.
Claire made a mental note to apologize to poor Tabitha. She looked up again at the tea shop near the railing. And Jack was still there. He was sipping from a cup and he was . . . He was looking down at her. He saw her. His features were sketched out in grey upon grey, like the mist outside, but she could see a smile crease his face. He was smiling at her. He set down his cup and raised his hand, touched his forehead in a salute.
Claire looked away and closed her eyes. She heard a train racing through the department store and she nearly jumped before realizing it was her own heavy breath. Her heart was racing, her lungs were laboring. She opened her eyes and looked up again. The devil was sitting across from someone, and Claire finally turned her gaze on him. His back was to her, but she had known him most of her life and she knew him now. She knew him like she knew the freckle on the back of her ring finger, knew him like she knew the strawberry birthmark on the small of Winnie’s back.
Walter Day did not turn around and look at her, but she knew him. Oh, she knew him! And he was alive. And he was taking tea at Plumm’s with Jack the Ripper.
Claire Day felt the room rush at her from all directions, and she fell unconscious at the feet of a mannequin.
• • •
AMBROSE HAD MOVED ON, humiliated by the angry governess, but he turned back when he heard a loud thump. Her companions were gathering round her, so it took Ambrose a minute to realize that the beautiful woman had fallen. Several people had already noticed, and a commotion was in its beginning stages. Shopgirls were coming from every corner of the store now, and an officious-looking manager-type with a waxed mustache popped his head up over a partition
across the main floor, craning his neck to see what was going on. Ambrose hurried and got to the beautiful woman right away. He bent over her, pushing the nasty nanny away. He heard the nanny squawk, but he didn’t care. He was in love. He patted the beautiful woman’s cheeks. Gently. And her eyelids fluttered.
“Danger,” she said.
“Yes, missus?”
She raised one tremulous arm and pointed above them. She pointed at the gallery, at the killer, who was smiling down at them. She knew about the killer the same as Ambrose did. They had something in common. The guv, sitting up there with his back to them, started to rise at the sound from below, but the killer pushed the guv back down, physically turned his head so that he wouldn’t see what was below him. Ambrose wanted to call out, wanted to shout at the guv, tell him to get away. But the beautiful woman grabbed his arm.
“Walter,” she said.
“Ambrose, mum,” he said. “My name’s Ambrose.”
“He’s up there,” she said. “Save him.” She tried to point again, but failed and fell unconscious once more.
It didn’t matter. He understood. This beautiful woman had seen Ambrose’s employer and she loved him as Ambrose did. She somehow understood the danger the guv was in. And Ambrose knew that he had to save his employer if he wanted this woman, this angel, to ever look at him again. If she had fallen for the guv, then Ambrose might have to give her up, but he still wanted to win her favor.
He let the awful governess take his place at the beautiful woman’s side and he rose and hurried away. He picked up his pace and elbowed his way through the other shoppers that had gathered round, through the gaggles of shopgirls and the officious managers like green-headed mallards, went to the spiral staircase, and took the steps two at a time to the top.
20
We have to move on,” Jack said.
“Wait,” Day said. “I didn’t come here to be manipulated by you.”
“Yes, you did.” Jack took Day’s arm and almost bodily lifted him from his chair. Day looked to his left and right, embarrassed, wondering if anyone saw, but no one reacted. At this time of the late morning, people were not quite ready for their lunch and had long ago finished their breakfasts. There were only two other occupied tables, and the old ladies at both of them were rising now, approaching the railing, curious about some sort of row that had broken out below them.
He glanced over the railing and saw that a blond woman had collapsed. He opened his mouth to call her name, but then closed it and looked away. He didn’t know her. She was a stranger to him.
“Tut tut,” Jack said. “It won’t do if you and I are seen together at the moment you’re discovered.” He leaned in closer. “We’ll have to get this done another way. Work first, play later.” And he ushered Day up and away, past a phalanx of workmen in canvas trousers who were wrestling with sheets of glass bigger than they were, along the queue of tables, to the back of the floor, where there was a long hallway lined with heavy oak doors.
“What do you mean? What do you mean when you say ‘discovered’?” But Day allowed himself to be led. If Jack was concentrating on him, he wasn’t killing anyone else, he wasn’t exploring the other floors and finding the urchin in the storeroom. He wasn’t hurting the unconscious woman with blond hair. If Day could keep Jack distracted, then Jack would continue to be Day’s own private monster.
“Never you mind. Come in here.” Jack opened a door and led Day into a quiet office, really nothing but a small room with a desk and two chairs. A typewriter and a telephone sat atop the desk, next to a blotter arranged with a pen, a letter opener, a small stack of plain envelopes, and an inkwell.
Jack was breathing hard and he moved round to the other side of the desk. He sat with a grunt and winced. “I shouldn’t have exerted myself quite so much,” he said. “Listen, do you trust me?”
“No, of course I don’t trust you,” Day said. “You’re horrible and you’ll most likely kill me once I stop providing you with amusement.”
Jack leaned forward in his chair. Day could smell his breath, all copper and rot. Jack moved from the waist, his shoulders straight up and down, as if he were one of those wind-up automatons that swiveled back and forth, performing some simple task over and over. In this case the task was murder. Back and forth, again and again, until Jack’s rusted gears wound down.
“I could never kill you, Walter Day,” Jack said. (That name again.) “You’re my mirror image, the flip side of my spinning coin.”
“You’re not the other side of my coin,” Day said.
“No, I’m the edge of it. And I circle round and round and never stop, so don’t think that I will.” Had he read Day’s thoughts about the declining automaton? Day almost believed that he had, that he could. Nothing seemed impossible where Jack was concerned.
“Whose office is this?”
“You know, I don’t remember his name,” Jack said. “I call him Kitten because he makes a lovely soft animal noise when I hurt him. Like a pleading cat. I’d have you in sometime so you could hear it for yourself, but I don’t know how much longer poor Kitten can hold out.”
Day shuddered.
“I went to your house,” Jack said. “Except it’s not your house anymore, is it? And I’m not talking about that new place your wife’s moved to. That was never your home. You’ve never even seen it. No, I went to the house with the blue door, the one where we had so many adventures. I knew you weren’t there, but I’ve missed you lately and I wanted to bask in the air that you’d walked through so many times.”
“I don’t know the place you’re talking about.”
“If you ever go back, you’ll have a surprise waiting for you. I left something there.”
“Left something?”
“It wasn’t easy, either. Cost me more than a little.”
“What do you want?”
“Ah, yes, to business, then.” Jack picked up the letter opener from the desk. He poked the tip of his finger with the dull blade and frowned. “Not as useful as one might wish,” he said under his breath, as if he were talking to himself, not to Day. “Anyway, let’s be done with all this silliness. I’m a patient man, I really am, but you’ve drawn it all out to the point that it’s no longer much fun, I’m afraid.”
“I’ve drawn what out? You talk in riddles, in maths I don’t understand. If you want to take me back there, back to that cell, you can try, but I won’t go quietly and I’m no longer afraid of you.”
“Ah. That draper woman, the one with the little shop in the gardens, she’s influenced you, hasn’t she? Turned you against me.”
“You leave her out of this.”
“That’s just it, you see,” Jack said. “I didn’t include her in the first place. You did. I let you go free and you should have gone home, should have returned to your employment, but you didn’t. And you didn’t return to me, either. I would have taken you back in, cared for you as I always have. But instead of coming back to me, or doing anything at all useful, you took up with this slattern—”
“Don’t say that,” Day said. He felt his face getting warm. “Don’t you dare say that about her.”
“Oh, it wasn’t meant to be an insult. She’s quite my type. Yes, my type indeed. You’ve good taste in female flesh, Walter Day.” He closed his eyes and seemed to gather himself, his shoulders hunching and his fists clenching, unclenching. Then he opened his eyes and smiled. “But regardless of how you’d describe her, you brought her into this, and so I should leave it to you to get her out of it.”
“Get her out of what? I don’t know what you mean.”
Jack sighed and waved his hand at a cabinet on the opposite wall. “I wonder if you wouldn’t help me out and fetch some gauze from the top drawer there.”
Day opened a door in the top of the cabinet and Jack snapped at him. “The drawer, I said. It’s in the drawer. You never listen to me!”
<
br /> Startled, Day slammed the door shut and slid open the drawer, found a roll of gauze, and tossed it over the desk to Jack.
“Thank you. The scissors, too, if you’d be so kind.”
Day found a pair of surgical scissors and laid them on the desk, slid them across. He wondered if Jack planned to use them on him, to stab him to death.
“Now sit,” Jack said. “Let’s pretend we’re adults discussing something of importance.”
Day stepped forward as if in a dream, everything moving in half- time, his limbs heavy, and he was reminded of his underwater dream. Jack was like some unceasing, irresistible tide. Day sat and laid his cane across his lap.
Jack smiled. He pulled off his jacket, leaning forward to tug on the sleeves, then unbuttoned his waistcoat and removed it. The front of his white shirt was soaked in blood. He untucked it and pulled it up, revealing a nasty gash under his ribs on the right side of his torso. “I’m afraid they may have nicked my liver,” Jack said. He smiled again and winked at Day, then unspooled some of the gauze and began wrapping it round himself.
“What happened?”
“Those Karstphanomen are getting tricky. They laid an ambush for me. But don’t worry, I took care of them.”
“You killed them?”
“Four of them. They’re waiting for you. Oh, but I’ve ruined the surprise.”
“I don’t think I care for any more surprises.”
“Walter Day, I must admit something. There is something about you, some stolid . . . justiceness. Is that a word? You look exactly like justice. You need only a scale and a blindfold. And perhaps a surgical alteration or two. You are Lustitia, the symbol of fair play. Lust. Lustitia. We want what we see and we take it, the basis for all our modern ideas of justice. Might makes right? It was always so, and I may be misappropriating the words of our cousin in the colonies. But it doesn’t matter.”
“I don’t understand anything you say,” Day said.
“Of course, your intelligence is not what attracted me to you. It’s, as I say, your solidity. You are a marble slab of sheer goodness.”