by Alex Grecian
“Fiona, would you please go find as many towels and blankets as you can find? And I saw two small occasional tables in the hallway downstairs. Please ask the young man to bring them up here. I need more surfaces.”
Fiona turned to the door. He could see the frustration on her face.
“Wait,” he said. “Take this, will you? It’s ruined. Throw it out.”
He gathered the sticky coverlet from the bed and bundled it up, handed it over to his daughter, and guided her out the door by her elbow. He shut it after her and turned to Claire. She had stood and was pacing restlessly around the room. Her nightgown was spotted with the evidence of her ordeal. Kingsley guided her back to the bed, then dragged a chair over from the corner. He sat next to Claire, where she wouldn’t have to strain to see him, but where he could avert his eyes so as to allow her some modesty at this stage.
“Here are the facts,” he said. “This is advancing weeks earlier than expected. That is not a good sign. But it is not the worst.”
“Have I lost him?”
“The baby, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No. I don’t know why you call it ‘him.’ There’s no way to know what gender the child will be. But there is a heartbeat, and that means your baby is alive inside you.”
Claire smiled weakly.
“Claire, your baby is alive and it wants to come out here and meet you. It is our job—mostly yours, but I’ll help where I can—it’s our job to allow the baby to do just that. To allow him or her to come out and be your child. And that’s what we’re going to do now, you and I together. You are not alone and, although it will not be an entirely easy process, it’s a process that countless other women have endured. My mother did it, and your mother did it, and everybody’s mother has done it. And you will do it, too.”
“It hurts.”
He nodded. “It does hurt, and it will hurt even more. And then it will all be over and you will forget how much it hurt and you won’t even care about that anymore because you’ll have a new baby.”
“Have you ever seen anybody die doing this?”
He nodded again. He wanted to lie to her, but lying was not a thing he was in the habit of doing and he didn’t know how to start.
“I have, Claire. But not many times. And for the most part those women were older than you are and they were poor and unhealthy. I do not anticipate that you will have the same problems they did. Have you been eating lots of butter and eggs, like I told you to?”
Claire gasped and her fists clenched as she felt another contraction. When it passed, she whispered into her closed fist, “I want Walter to come home. I want him here.”
“He’ll come as soon as he can come. He’s trying to make things safe for your baby. Isn’t that good? I’m sure he’s thinking of you and the baby even now.”
“I just wish he were here.”
“Well.” Kingsley let out a deep breath and stood, pushing down on his knees to help himself up. He went around to the back of the chair and dragged it to the foot of the bed. “Let’s see how this is progressing. Maybe you can surprise him with the new arrival when he does get here. Wouldn’t that be nice?”
He paused, his hands on the back of the chair.
“Claire, I am a very good doctor. Do you believe that?”
She nodded.
“Good. Because it’s true. And you are going to be just fine because I am going to take care of you now. I promise.”
He smiled, and she smiled back.
Then he sent up a silent prayer to a god he did not believe in that he would be able to keep his promise.
39
Day woke to the sound of a man screaming. He opened his eyes, but it made no difference. The world was still black. There was something covering his face, a bag or a hood. It reeked of sweat. There was a slit in the bag near his chin, and he breathed through his mouth. He was shivering and tried to move his arms, but they wouldn’t respond. I’m paralyzed, he thought. I’ve been hit in the head and I can’t move, and I’ll never move again. Then he heard the faint clink of metal ringing against stone behind him and realized that he was in chains. Now that he concentrated, he could feel shackles on his wrists and ankles. He couldn’t feel the comfortable weight of his gun and his flask and he understood that his jacket had been taken from him. His hat was gone, too. He remembered dropping his gun, so it wouldn’t have been in his jacket anyway. Perhaps it was still on the tunnel floor. Maybe it was within reach, if he could only move a little.
The man stopped screaming and panted as if out of breath. The sound of him was nearby, yet distant, on the other side of a wall. Day realized he was chained up in one of the three alcoves he had seen and someone else was chained in an alcove next to him.
“March!”
There was no answer. He tried again.
“Adrian! Inspector Adrian March! Can you hear me?”
Something moved. Day felt a change in the air in front of him, but there was no change in the darkness under the hood. Then there was a voice, a low rasp, and it was directly in his ear. Someone was standing with his lips against the rough fabric of the hood, pressing it against Day’s ear. He smelled copper and fish.
“You’ll get your turn,” the voice said. It was deep and muffled. “Be patient.”
“Who is it? Who’s there?”
But there was no answer. Day couldn’t tell whether the man had gone or was still standing right there next to him. He turned his head, but it moved slowly, as if his neck needed to be oiled, and a sharp pain lanced through his skull, radiated outward through his face. Warmth moved down his spine and spread out into his torso, down his limbs to his fingertips and his toes.
He blacked out again.
When he woke up, he sensed he was alone. He could feel his pulse in his temples, beating at his brain. He heard low murmuring somewhere far away and he concentrated on the sound, dragged his attention away from his throbbing head. The voice he heard was somewhere to his left, the opposite side of him from the screaming man he had heard before. There was another wall. There were walls on either side of him and, he could tell by the movement of air around him, a wall behind him. But the space was empty in front of him. He was in one of the cells and it opened out into the tunnel. There were other men, possibly also shackled, on either side of him. He listened harder to the murmuring voice.
“Say anything,” it said. “Anything at all.”
“Go to hell, you monster.” That was March’s voice. Loud and defiant, but there was pain evident in the way he clipped his consonants.
“Oh, I will,” the voice said. “But you’ll be there with me. I thought I knew you. And now I do. By your voice. I heard your voice nearly every day of the past . . . What has it been? Did you keep me here for a year? I should look at a newspaper.”
Day heard March coughing.
“Would you like some water? Here.”
March’s cough turned into sputtering and gasping.
“Leave him be!” Day said.
March continued to cough, but Day heard the sound of footsteps approaching. The stranger came through the tunnel, and Day could hear him breathing, standing not more than two feet away.
“I don’t know your voice,” the man said.
“Which one are you? Hoffmann? You’re not Cinderhouse. I’d know his voice.”
“Oh, we’re both playing a game of place-the-voice,” the man said. “Delightful.”
“This is no game.”
“Everything’s a game. Tell me something . . .”
“What? What is it you want?”
“Exitus probatur. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know,” Day said. “I don’t understand. Tell me what you want.”
“What I want? I haven’t decided yet what I want. What’s your name, bluebottle?”
“Tell me your name first.”
“Your name, I said. Don’t make me hurt you. Better yet, don’t make me hurt your friend next door.”
&nbs
p; “My name is Day. Detective Inspector Day.”
He heard the man gasp and then the sound of hands clapping, three loud echoing reports.
“Day? Not Walter Day, by chance?”
Day felt his stomach turn over and he suddenly couldn’t breathe. The man knew his name. Did he know where he lived? Was Claire in danger?
“Oh, my,” the man said. “Have I guessed correctly? Do you know, Walter Day, that we have a friend in common?”
Day shook his head, and the motion sent another spike of pain through the base of his skull. He sucked in a sharp breath. “Who? Who do you mean?”
“It’s really nobody,” the man said. “I thought he was somebody, but I was mistaken. But now I don’t know what to do with you, Walter Day. I think I’ll keep you for a time. Perhaps I’ll feed you to my fly.”
“Listen—”
“Yes?”
“By order of the Queen, I’m placing you under arrest. Surrender now, while you can, and I’ll see that you’re treated well.”
The man took a step back. Day heard his shoes scuffing on the stones. Then he began to laugh. Day felt himself slipping away. When the man stopped laughing, he sniffed and Day heard him blow his nose.
“Thank you for that,” the man said. “I needed a good hearty chuckle. You know, I quite like you, Walter Day.”
The man’s voice had lost its mocking tone. He sounded sincere. And surprised.
“I really really do,” he said. “You’re so marvelously uncomplicated.”
“Let us go free,” Day said.
A hand clamped against the fabric of the hood over his mouth and Day smelled something sharp and acrid, a chemical seeping into the hood.
“Shh,” the voice said. “No more talking. I still have work to do, and I’m suddenly peckish. Why don’t you take a nap?”
As if the man had given him a hypnotic command, Day felt the floor open up under him and he fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
40
Eunice Pye stood just inside the doorway and squinted into the gloom of the Michaels’ house. She listened very hard, harder than she had ever listened before, but heard nothing, no movement, no voice or rustle of paper or cloth anywhere in the house. And so she crept cautiously into the hall, past the coatrack and the little pile of mail on the floor. She left the front door open behind her and sunlight bounced off its painted red exterior, now angled into the hall, and shone deep orange against the wall next to her.
She moved her feet forward, one at a time, barely lifting them from the smooth uneven floorboards. She held her best garden hoe out in front of her with both hands. She knew there was little she could do with it to threaten anyone or protect herself, but it made her feel better and safer to hold it.
The stairway was in front of her, along the right-hand wall. She stopped and looked up. There was a red runner that swam up the middle of the stairs, and she wondered briefly at the extravagance of it. She had a small rug made of rags and cast-off remnants next to her bed that Giles had given her on some long-ago Christmas Eve. She could not even imagine how much such a long strip of carpet must have cost. She blinked and held still and remembered why she was there in that house, and then she took a deep breath and moved forward.
Nothing stirred in the shadows at the top of the stairs, and so she turned her attention to the parlor door, which was now near to her left elbow. That door was standing open, and she could see a giant table painted black just inside the room. She moved two steps sideways and she was standing in the doorway with the table to her right. There were chairs around the table, four of them, but the chairs were empty. There was a bookcase against the wall directly ahead of her, behind the table and next to the fireplace. It held a collection of knickknacks and small painted family portraits and perhaps a dozen books of the kind sold by door-to-door salesmen to the lady of the house. Among the portraits she spotted two or three framed photographs of stiffly posed people in their Sunday finest. She wondered if Mrs Michael would ever be coming back to that house. She wondered if Mrs Michael was dead, perhaps buried in the back garden. But no, that was silly. Eunice had seen Mrs Michael leave the house with three big trunks and ride away in a four-wheeler while Mr Michael was at work.
Eunice finally turned her head and looked at the two objects nailed to the mantelpiece over the hearth. She stared at them for a long time, hoping that they would turn into things one might normally see on a mantel, things that were not tongues. But they didn’t change.
She tore her gaze away from the tongues and saw Mr Michael sitting in a straight-backed padded chair next to the fireplace. He was tied there with mailing twine, and he was watching her. He held perfectly still and his eyes were open, and for just a moment she wondered if he was dead, but then she saw that his chest was rising and falling rhythmically. His hair was tousled and his eyes were red and his mouth was puffy and crusted with blood, much the way the mouth of the bald prisoner had been when she had seen him in the street.
She took a quick glance around the rest of the room, then laid down her hoe and rushed to his side. He turned his head to watch her as she approached, but didn’t make any other movement. She hunched over his wrists where they were bound to the chair and her gnarled fingers worried at the knots, which had been pulled tight and small like hard little seeds. She shook her head and whispered to Mr Michael.
“Rheumatism,” she said. “Can’t move my fingers so well as I might have done once upon a time. But don’t you worry. You sit tight and I’ll be right back.”
She scurried away back to the hall and clucked her tongue at herself. She murmured under her breath. “Of course he’s going to sit tight, you silly old woman. Man can’t move if he wants to.”
She glanced up the stairs again as she passed them and went along the hallway to the kitchen. She tried to move quickly, but she didn’t want to be surprised by anything, so she stopped at the kitchen doorway and entered slowly, checking both corners by the door before she went all the way inside. Nobody was waiting for her there, but the back door was standing open. She went to it and looked around the empty garden before exploring the kitchen. It wouldn’t do to have someone walk in while she was distracted.
There was a knife block on the counter and the biggest knife was missing. There was a butt of ham and some bread crumbs on the butcher block. A honeybee sat on the ham. She brushed it away with the back of her hand and it buzzed around her head.
“Go on, little bee,” she said. “You don’t eat ham and I know you’re not gonna sting me.”
It lost interest in her and zee’d across the kitchen and zigzagged out through the open door. She selected the smallest knife from the block and ran her thumb along its blade to see if it was sharp. She nodded to herself and crept back down the hallway to the parlor, checked it carefully for new people, and then hurried over to the chair where Mr Michael sat in enforced patience, waiting for her.
The knife was very sharp indeed and made short work of the mailing twine. She rubbed Mr Michael’s wrists to get the blood moving in them again.
“Can you stand?”
Mr Michael nodded, but didn’t speak. Eunice looked at his mouth and then looked at the horrible tongues hanging above the hearth, and she blinked back tears at the thought of what the poor man must have endured.
She patted him on his arm and helped pull him up. He clutched the back of the chair and leaned hard against it, and they waited for the feeling to come back to his legs. When he could walk, she led him out of the parlor and turned right and guided him down his own hall to the door, which was still standing open. She was so anxious to leave that house that she practically pulled him out into the sunlight. He stood blinking in the tiny front garden while she pulled the door closed behind them. She didn’t hear it latch, but she turned and took Mr Michael by the arm and led him into her house and put on a kettle for tea. While she waited for the water to heat, she went and got a roll of gauze bandages, a little bottle of iodine, and the pint of rye that Giles had
always kept in the back of the cupboard. Then she broke open her jar of pin money that she had saved from sewing work. She would need pennies to pay the neighborhood boys.
She was going to send out as many runners as she could afford. She was going to send them to Scotland Yard and she was going to send them to HM Prison Bridewell. She wanted every policeman and warder in London to come and look at the tongues hanging in the parlor next door. She would only feel safe when they had caught the Devil and sent him back where he belonged.
41
Jack was hungry.
He sat at a table, far back in the main room of the pub, ignoring what went on upstairs, and when the wench came to ask what he wanted, he tipped his hat forward, dropped two of Elizabeth’s coins on the table, and asked for as much as that would buy.
He sat and waited and watched the people interact. He felt nothing but a distant fondness for their messy flesh. They were his life’s work, and he hoped to someday understand them.
When his food came, the wench had to pull over another table to make enough room for all the plates and bowls. She asked him if he wanted anything else, and he could see the smirk hiding behind her smile. He wanted to leap up and take a scalpel to the corners of her mouth, peel back her cheeks, and expose the ugliness within, but instead he smiled back at her and said, “No, thank you. This will do.” And watched as she walked away with a sway in her hips. He had money and she was advertising her like of it.
He took a bite of kidney pie. Delicious. It was too hot and it burned his tongue and made the roof of his mouth sore, but he ignored the pain and took a sniff of the blood sausage. That turned out to be cool and sliced wafer-thin. His mouth was still sore and so he ate it carefully, and it was perfectly spiced.
He took a deep draught of ale, wiped his hand on his sleeve—or, more precisely, Elizabeth’s sleeve—and took a look around the room. Many of the people there were watching him, but they quickly looked away when his gaze fell on them. One woman didn’t look away. Her hand was on another man’s elbow and she was pressed close against him, but when he looked at her, she raised her eyebrows and he licked his lips. She was his for the taking.