Tenfold More Wicked

by Viola Carr

  “Finch,” croaked Hipp woefully, “leave town.” He scuttled out, a flash of brass.

  Over. Done. Finished. What a coldly scientific concept. Sick laughter bubbled. She’d imagined herself so logical. Such ugly vanity.

  The mantel clock ticked, pressing. She ignored it. What was the hurry? The case was over, too, one way or another. Had Nemo lied? Was he the Pentacle Killer after all? She’d never know, not until another corpse turned up. She’d no further clues to unravel.

  Not one.

  On her desk, Remy’s ring glittered, splashed scarlet by the sun. She wandered over, listless. A flat pasteboard box sat on her blotter, tied with string. Had Mrs. Poole put it there? Where was Mrs. Poole, anyway?

  A letter poked from the knot. Wanly, she pulled it out.

  Dear Doctor Perfect

  Her heart lurched, tipping her from her stupor. Unevenly spaced words, jerky underswirls . . .

  I watched you last night, at that imbecilic gathering. What a farce! Saw you run, too. What a sticky end for that fool Nemo! I’m glad that hooded fellow stuck a knife in him. The lying runt deserved it!

  Ha ha! Did you think he was me? Wrong AGAIN!

  Here’s a thing I harvested, just for you. A flash cove this time, just for a change. Take a good look. If you don’t want this to happen to you—STOP LOOKING FOR ME.

  See you in Hell

  The Pentacle Killer

  (nice nickname! I’ll carve one in YOU)

  Her gaze swiveled to the box. Dry-mouthed, she folded back the lid.

  Arranged neatly on a paper lining sat a golden ring, soaked in gore. A man’s finger, severed at the big knuckle, greenish with corruption. And a pale, soft blob of . . .

  She recoiled, sick.

  A face. Peeled from its skull like rind from ripe fruit.

  Part of one, anyway. One eyelid hung crooked, dark-lashed. The flesh looked oddly misshapen. As if the pitiable fellow had a spongy growth around his eye socket.

  That headless corpse in Soho had been missing two fingers. Rings stolen, reddish coat torn. Concealing the victim’s identity . . . or something else about him.

  Images of Seven Dials, gin and guilt. Men playing cards, a weird-looking fellow in a russet coat, his arm around a lady. His face is bulbous, malformed, and he blows me a kiss over gold-ringed fingers. Willy, you handsome devil.

  The headless corpse was Strangeface Willy. The man who filed off the manufacturer’s marks, reset the jewels, melted the silver to ingots. Made your stolen loot untraceable.

  But why would the Pentacle Killer—who was demonstrably not Nemo—slaughter a petty fence?

  New possibilities flowered, the petals of a dark rose. Sir Dalziel Fleet’s closet, ransacked, that yawning safe emptied. Evidence clearly faked. A burglary gone wrong, Reeve had insisted, and she’d laughed at him.

  Searching for something, I’ll warrant, and not only revenge . . .

  What if it really was a burglary?

  What if the murderer stole something from that secret cabinet, and killed Dalziel in the process? Something from the safe? Or . . .

  Eve and the Serpent flashed through her mind. Taken from a police vault by Carmine Zanotti and his gang of thieves. That frame-maker’s shop, the Mad Queen’s missing portrait.

  Stolen artwork.

  The box hit the desk, fallen from her numb fingers.

  What if Carmine killed Dalziel, and stole an artwork from Dalziel’s fabled collection? Something Strangeface Willy could christen . . . and then someone else killed them both to retrieve it?

  But who? And what could be worth murdering so gruesomely for?

  Fresh determination steeled her nerves, and she headed for the study door. She’d return to Dalziel’s, search it top to bottom. Break in, if she must. Find Mr. Brigham and demand to know what was missing from that cabinet . . .

  The door blew open, knocking her onto her backside.

  “At last!” cried Marcellus Finch. “I’ve been looking for you all day. I say, what are you doing on the floor?” He hauled her to her feet.

  She shook her dizzy head to clear it. “Did you get my telegram already?”

  “Eh?” Finch goggled, wild white hair bobbing.

  “The Royal are onto you. It’s serious. You must leave town right away—”

  “Oh, never mind that.” He slapped a pocketful of clutter onto the table. “Please explain. Chop chop, don’t have all day!”

  Her mind boggled. “Marcellus, there’s a face in a box on my desk. Forgive me if I’m a little distracted.”

  “So there is. Spectacular one, too, my goodness.” He sniffed, dismissive. “Well, forget it, dear girl! Concentrate!” He tapped a forefinger on her forehead. “You really should eat more turnips. Why, you’re positively puffy-eyed—”

  She warded him off. “Will you kindly tell me what’s going on?”

  “That.” He jabbed an indignant finger at the clutter. Scrunched papers, a ball of string, a wrapped sweet, her collection of sample phials. And a white-wrapped packet labeled LADY GRAY’S FAMOUS PARISIAN ENAMEL. “That substance is evil. He’s killing them. He must be stopped!”

  “Who? Don’t bounce, Marcellus. Slow down.”

  “Moriarty Quick, of course.” Finch scrabbled at his hair, raising a white bird’s nest. “It’s the stuff that killed Sibby! I told you not to trust him, but did you listen to wise Marcellus? Of course not! He’s a maniac, I tell you. Souls in jars, heads boiling on the stove . . . Oh, those empty eyes!”

  She guided him to the sofa. “Take a breath. Shall I fetch tea?”

  She poured a cup, and Finch gulped, not noticing it was long cold. “Haven’t anything stronger, perchance?”

  I could murder a whiskey . . . “I’m afraid not.” Her wine carafe was missing. She sat, but her gaze kept flicking impatiently to Willy’s disembodied face. “From the beginning. Who’s Sibby?”

  “We were to be married. Sibyl Finch, eh? Never cared for marriage, me. Always seemed irrational and pointless. But she was something special.”

  Vague, Lizzie-flavored memory stirred. “Quick told me she fell ill?”

  “I tried everything. Alchemy, of course. Homeopathy, hypnosis, even a witch doctor or two, and you know what I think of that, eh? But nothing helped. Moriarty . . . he wasn’t calling himself that then . . . he said he’d distilled a new elemental essence that could restore her.”

  “Don’t tell me: he lied?”

  “It altered her. She became cold and jealous and cruel. She’d bait people, steal, trick them just to laugh at their pain. I thought her illness had warped her temper, but the more of Quick’s essence she took, the worse it got.”

  “Quick insinuated that he and Sibby . . .”

  “Oh, yes,” said Finch darkly. “Quite shamelessly. I couldn’t understand it. She’d always loathed him. Called him a sly fellow, which for a lady with Sibby’s sweet tongue was a veritable rain of curses, eh? But now it was as if they were made for each other. A pair of sniggering devils. And that’s when I knew the vile little stoat had tricked us.” He sniffed, teary. “Tricked me, I should say. Didn’t care for her in the slightest.”

  “So what did you do?”

  “I had to look, didn’t I? Stay away, Marcellus, Henry told me, there are things we’re not meant to meddle with. But I needed to know.”

  Eliza nodded grimly. She understood that compulsion all too well.

  “So one night, I sneaked into Quick’s secret laboratory.” Finch’s face greened. “I’d known he was dabbling with the occult, but I’d never seen anything like it. A shelf of jars, with things trapped inside. Creatures with pale flesh and staring eyes. Coiled up tightly, straining against the glass, writhing to get out . . . and screaming. Over and over. Not words. Just . . . despair.” His voice cracked. “One was Sibby. It didn’t look like her. Just a lump of flesh. But I knew.”

  Icy wire threaded her veins. Those oily silver snail-squeezings, sliding down Lizzie’s throat. Eliza’s own horrid nightmare of beating
against cold walls, trapped . . . Was that what Quick’s potion did?

  “Moriarty was studying the consciousness, you see. Life force, eh? With every dose of his treatment, the thing in the bottle grew, and the rest of her . . . rinsed thin.” At last, Finch met Eliza’s eye. “And once he’d finished with her—ruined her utterly, of course, to spite me for turning Henry against him—Sibby died. The thing in the bottle withered away, and took her with it.”

  She swallowed, sick. “I’m so sorry.”

  “For the best in the end, eh?” Finch’s eyes shimmered. “Better die than live in thrall to that maniac.”

  “So you had him arrested?”

  “Not for the bottled souls, who’d have believed that? Human eyeballs in his icebox, kidneys roasting on the spit. No proof of murder, sadly, but enough to get him transported.”

  “And now Quick’s doing it again? That sample I gave you is the same substance?” She blanched. That coveted porcelain-white skin. BEAUTIFUL FOR EVER. Quick was poisoning ladies with that twenty-guinea enamel. They were paying for the privilege of being murdered. “But why? Is he extorting money, or favors?”

  Finch leapt up, re-energized. “Who knows? Put a stop to it, say what? You must tell me where you got this right away.”

  “But I already told you. I found it at Quick’s beauty parlor.”

  He swiped the enamel aside. “No, you nitwit! That’s just lead steeped in a barbiturate. Ladies spend their husbands’ money, develop cravings, come back for more. A money trap, eh? Not that. This!” He shook the sample phials before her eyes.

  Shreds of dark flesh. A ball of bloodied canvas. Coagulated plasma. “From Sir Dalziel’s cadaver? It’s only Quick’s alchemical hallucinogen. From the cigar. Remember?”

  “Have your wits shriveled? That scintillating stuff isn’t the hallucinogen. It’s dark alchemy, imbued in the linseed oil and mineral traces. The same essence that stole Sibby’s soul!”

  “Linseed oil? But—”

  “Only now he’s added a retrograde tincture of aqua vitae. Made the whole process more aesthetic and profitable.” Finch waved his arms. “Don’t you see? No one would pay to have their soul sicken in a jar while they waste away. No, they want to watch their souls rot with sin, while they stay young and beautiful. Never heard anything so repellent in my life. We must stop him!”

  Eliza blinked. “But . . .”

  Finch wiggled the bottles, frantic. “It’s on the canvas the killer stuffed down his throat. It’s the paint, dear girl. Paint!”

  Her thoughts ricocheted, all the evidence she’d collected zinging with fresh meaning. Arterial spray on Dalziel’s carpet, unobstructed by the killer. A crucifix, dangling inexplicably from the dead man’s neck. Not the murder weapon. Twin slices under the chin, a neat “X.” Left to right, right to left.

  Just like the cuts in that scrap of portrait shoved down the corpse’s throat. Dalziel’s painted face, healthy, years younger than his sallow cadaver.

  Paint. Stealing the soul. Murder.

  BEAUTIFUL FOR EVER.

  “That’s why the blood spatter didn’t make sense,” she whispered. “The killer didn’t stab the man. He stabbed the painting! Shoved in the crucifix to hide the fact. And then cut his face off. Not to obscure his identity. So no one would see Dalziel had aged.”

  Finch bounced. “This is what I’m trying to tell you!”

  She gripped his arm. “How’s it done?”

  “Well, you’d have to attune the essence somehow, to the subject’s vital force.”

  Old Dalziel were nutty as a fruitcake. Bargaining for eternal life with the “gray man.” LADY GRAY’S FAMOUS PARISIAN ENAMEL. Moriarty Quick. Very funny. “Might an occult blood ritual do the trick? The kind Dalziel attempted at his parties?”

  “Bunkum,” muttered Finch. “But it’s easy enough to make alchemy look like a ritual. Moriarty loves an audience.”

  “And then your soul”—your shadow, she almost said—“your soul would be trapped in the picture, and you’d be immortal? Indestructible?”

  “Forever young.” Finch shuddered. That’s what the retrograde aqua vitae is for. “Until you die, that is. Then the link’s broken, and everything goes back where it should be. But while you’re alive, your painted soul still decays. I’d imagine the portrait would be quite frightful, after a while.”

  “So frightful, one might kill to keep it hidden?”

  “The kind of person who’d pay to have this done? Shouldn’t think they’d hesitate, old girl.”

  “Or had it done against their will,” she mused. “An artist’s model. Someone in the black-magic coven, who knew Quick’s secret. Someone like . . . Oh, my.”

  Shaking, she unfolded the killer’s letter onto the desk. Unevenly spaced hand, jerky underswirls, hooked letters below the line.

  Dear Doctor Perfect. Here’s a thing I harvested, just for you.

  Next, she pulled the sheaf of Dalziel’s papers from her bag, and smoothed out the secret milk message.

  He is a Traitor and Wicked beyond sense.

  Carmine’s, they’d assumed. But Carmine was no bleeding-heart republican to be writing letters about traitorous French spies.

  In her mind flashed a grim scene of naval warfare, foreshadowing the doom of a revolution. Nelson at Trafalgar, the artist’s signature in the same jerky letters with that sharp-hooked “G.” The laboriously written English, not of a foreigner, but of an apprentice who wanted to be an artist. An intelligent but poorly educated boy, aiming above his station.

  She scattered the papers, spilling Dalziel’s sketches over the blotter. Fine-lined faces, large liquid eyes, flowing hair and gowns. Beautiful models, all. But particularly one, with perfect cheekbones and striking, sorrowful dark eyes . . .

  “I say,” remarked Finch, “he looks better in a dress than you do. Handsome lad, say what?”

  The prettiest girl in Dalziel’s sketches wasn’t a girl.

  Eliza’s throat squeezed tight. She’d thought at the Exhibition that Sheridan looked familiar. She’d thought herself so clever, finding a secret political motive for the Pentacle Killer. But the motive wasn’t elevated. It was banal. Hatred. Jealousy. Fear.

  Sheridan had done frightful things to win Dalziel’s patronage. The students get it worse, Brigham had said. What was worse than a beating? Cruelty, humiliation, degradation. Surely these sketches were only the beginning. The kind of sins a penniless watch-maker’s apprentice who wanted to be a painter could go to prison for, while a baronet escaped scot-free.

  She shuddered to imagine what Sheridan had endured. What he might have done to others, too, covering his anguish with a fake smile . . . and Carmine had just laughed at him. Threatened blackmail, stole Penny Watt’s affection, tried to purloin Dalziel’s favor with art that wasn’t even his.

  “Sheridan,” she burst out. “Carmine stole a magic painting of Sheridan . . . and Sheridan killed him trying to get it back . . . but Carmine had already sold it to Willy, so Sheridan killed Willy because he was the only one left alive who knew Sheridan’s secret . . .”

  But one other person knew. The one who’d pointed Eliza towards Moriarty Quick with a cleverly plausible misdirection. Who’d lied all along to keep Sheridan safe.

  “Oh, my.” Eliza all but tripped again in her haste. “Marcellus, you have to go.”

  Bewildered, Finch blinked. “But I’ve only just arrived. Who’s this Sheridan?”

  “The Royal are onto you. Go! But don’t go home, it’s no safer than here.” She scribbled an address and pressed it along with the sapphire ring into his hands. “The man who lives here is Remy Lafayette’s brother. Show him this ring, tell him I sent you. He’ll help.”

  Finch examined the gemstone through his pince-nez. “Egad! Quite flawless. Indian, you know, the only place they find precisely that color. Deep in the Kashmiri jungle, say what? I’m so pleased! Are congratulations in order?”

  “Um . . . no. Not really.”

  His face fell. “You really
ought to marry that poor fellow. Put him out of his misery, eh? Foolishness, of course. Highly irrational. But if you insist on falling in love, you could do a lot worse.”

  “Please, Marcellus, not now. This is important.”

  “Very well,” he muttered. “Not very dignified, all this scuttling about like a rodent. And where are you going?”

  She slung her bag, already halfway out the door—and tripped over Hippocrates, who’d bounded back from the telegraph with an excited whir! “To find Sheridan, before he goes hunting for a friend.”

  A FACE WITHOUT A HEART

  A GLIMMERING, REDDISH DARKNESS SWAMPED TRAFALGAR Square like a mockery of hellfire. Smoky wind whistled over the pebbled roads, ooh! ahh! Arc-lights glittered over the main gallery entrance. Nelson’s Column loomed, the admiral casting an evil red-rimmed shadow. A pair of Enforcers strutted before the statue of dead King Charles, red eyes glinting in the dark. Their brassy feet kept perfect rhythm, clunk! clunk!

  Unholy giggles bubbled in Eliza’s throat as she crept along, keeping to the shadows. Fooling the metal monsters was fun. Apart from the threat of sudden death.

  Lizzie? Are you there?

  Bleak silence.

  Eliza stifled another disembodied laugh, and slipped down alongside the gallery. Hippocrates quivered inside her bag, muttering to himself. An owl hooted above, making her hair prickle on end. Somewhere, a rat whickered, claws skittering.

  Ahead, a side door led away from the exhibition rooms, the workers’ entrance. She stole up the steps, and slipped inside. The Academy’s classrooms lay on the first floor. The corridor was silent, gaslights unlit.

  Her heart thudded, echoes of another occasion when she’d crept into a killer’s lair alone. This was stupid. Would she never learn? She should call the police.

  But it would be fruitless. Reeve would never believe her, his smug “apology” notwithstanding. What’s that you say? A magic painting was the murder weapon? Shut up, you foolish chit, and leave police work to the professionals. And she refused to get Harley Griffin in trouble for helping her. His career had suffered enough. Besides, after her frustrating lack of weapons at Moriarty Quick’s sinister theater, she’d brought a small electric pistol as well as her stinger. She could defend herself.