by Graham Moore
“Hi,” she began, “would you please make a right turn up at that light? Yes, right here.”
“Missus,” the driver replied, “what is going on?”
“Please turn right here, now!” barked Sarah.
The driver switched lanes and took the turn.
“I do not want to be part of any trouble,” he said as they headed south past Imperial College.
“Neither do we. So let’s try to avoid trouble as much as we can, all right, by making a sharp left up ahead.”
“I will drop you off at this corner here.”
“No!” interjected Harold. “We’re being followed.”
“Come on, now,” said the driver. “Time to get out.”
“Sir, I’m being completely serious. Look at the black car behind us. They’ve been following us since we got into your cab.”
The driver looked up into his rearview mirror. There were more than a few black cars.
“Why would someone follow you? What, you are a famous actor or something?”
“Actually,” said Harold as he thought the matter over, “that’s a good question. I’m not sure why they’re following us As far as I can tell, they’re the ones who have something we want.”
“So maybe I pull over here and you can go to figure out who is chasing who.”
“That’s not a bad plan,” said Harold.
Sarah looked at him strangely. “What?” she asked hesitantly, as if she were afraid of the answer.
“I have an idea,” said Harold. He reached into his wallet and removed a tight clump of bills. Without checking to see how much money he was handing over, he folded the clump and handed it to the driver. The cabbie looked pleased as he thumbed through the money.
“I need you to do one more favor for us,” Harold continued. “Speed up. A lot. Then pull a quick left up ahead, at”—he squinted to make out the street sign—”Fulham. Then stop abruptly, as soon as you can.”
The driver glanced down at his new wad of bills, then shrugged. Whatever you say, spoke his gesture.
As the cab accelerated, Harold could feel his back press into the cushioned seat. He looked down to find his hands, of their own accord, gripping the seat below.
The cabbie swung the wheel to the left, diving into a gap between the oncoming cars, and Harold’s body was thrown to the right, against Sarah. He could feel her limbs tensing as the cab pulled the turn. When the car straightened itself, he tried to scoot himself politely away from her but ended up pushing with a hand against her upper thigh. She seemed not to notice.
The driver swerved the car to the curb and slapped the brakes with gusto. Without seat belts, Harold and Sarah were jerked forward against the divider. The car came to a stop.
“Wait here for a second,” said Harold as he exited the car. He stood outside the open door for a moment, waiting for the black car to pull the same turn and appear in front of him.
He didn’t have to wait long. After a few seconds, the car came hurtling through the intersection. But, unlike the cab, it had no plans to stop. It accelerated further as it straightened out on Fulham Street.
Harold, twitchy with adrenaline, stepped out into the street immediately in front of the oncoming car. He could see the confusion on the Goateed Man’s face, at the wheel, when he realized what had happened. For a long moment, as the car raced toward Harold, he began to reconsider his plan. If the Goateed Man wanted to kill him, he now had the perfect opportunity. All he had to do was keep his foot on the gas and Harold would be slammed against the front of his car. He could chalk the death up to a simple traffic accident, and no one would ever know the truth. Harold was playing a classic poker move against the oncoming car—he was paying for information, taking a calculated risk not for the purpose of winning but in order to learn something about his opponent. If he lived, it would be because the Goateed Man did not want to kill him. And that was important information. If he died, however . . . Well, Harold figured, if the Goateed Man really wanted to kill him, then he would have been killed already. Like Alex.
Harold could make out the Goateed Man’s grimace as he pressed on the brakes and yanked the car to the left, onto the curb. The metal screech of the wheels pierced through the midday traffic noise. The car turned to its side, front sticking out into the first lane of the street as it slid across the pavement. It finally stopped a few feet in front of Harold.
He looked directly into the face of the Goateed Man in the driver’s seat. The man scowled. Harold smiled. The Goateed Man wasn’t trying to kill him—in fact, he was going out of his way not to. Harold walked calmly up to the black car and knocked delicately on the passenger-side window.
There was a long, silent pause. The inhabitants of the car seemed not to know what to do. They had signed up for a car chase, not a polite tête-à-tête, and the change of activities was throwing them off their normal role.
Finally the passenger-side window slid down, revealing the man in the leather jacket inside.
“Yes?” said the man, his face glacially serene.
“You don’t have the diary, do you?” said Harold, coming to this realization only after he’d spoken it out loud.
The man said nothing while he considered the situation. This pause worried Harold; perhaps this guy was smarter than he’d hoped.
“You don’t have it either, then,” said the man as his face broke out in a broad smile.
Shit. Harold had given up as much information as he’d gotten. But maybe this trade was worth it. If neither of them had the diary . . .
“You didn’t kill Alex Cale,” said Harold. It was not a question.
“You sure about that?” said the man. He reached into his coat pocket and removed a gun. He pointed it straight at Harold’s face. It appeared impossibly large as Harold stared down its barrel.
Harold’s resolve wavered. How sure was he, really, that this man didn’t want to kill him? Harold couldn’t think anymore. Logic collapsed. Cool, Sherlockian reason was burned up in the heat of his terror.
“I don’t have it,” Harold pleaded. “The diary. I don’t even know where it is. Or who took it.”
Suddenly the black car seemed to shiver. It sighed, then tilted slightly downward, sloping to the pavement away from Harold.
Harold looked over the roof and saw Sarah on the other side of the black car. How did she get there? He saw her rise from a kneeling position by the back tire: She’d punctured it. And, evidently, the front one as well.
“Cab!” she yelled at Harold. “Now!”
Looking down, he could see that the man with the gun was ever so briefly distracted by the commotion. Harold took the opportunity to run as fast as he possibly could.
He yanked open the cab door and flung himself into the backseat. Sarah was half a second behind him.
“Please go now anywhere as fast as you can!” shouted Harold at the driver. There was a recognition in the man’s face that something serious had happened. He didn’t ask questions, but instead threw the cab back into Drive and kicked at the gas pedal.
Harold looked through the back window. No one had gotten out of the black car. And it didn’t give chase. The black car sat motionless, leaning to its left against the curb.
Sarah revealed a small retractable knife in her palm. She folded the blade back into its shell and slipped it into her purse. She looked into Harold’s eyes with an impossible cool.
“So,” said Sarah, “how’d your plan work out for you?”
CHAPTER 21
Virgil and Dante on the Shores of Acheron
“Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.”
—Dante Alighieri,
The Divine Comedy
October 30, 1900
Bram Stoker stood before Aldgate Station, examining the printed image in his hand. It was a three-headed crow, rendered in black ink upon a sheet of clean white paper. The crow’s beaks, in the image, were outstretched and open slightly, as if each were about to devour its own succulent prey. The eyes were ho
llow dots where the white paper showed through. The wings looked like single brushstrokes, or single slices of a knife. The image was menacing. Warlike. Murderous.
Bram handed the paper back to Arthur, who had been waiting in silence while his friend finished his examinations.
“A frightful beast, that one,” said Bram in regard to the image. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“Nor I,” said Arthur with a sigh. “I haven’t a clue as to where it comes from or what it’s meant to represent.”
“Nothing nice, I’d wager. So you discovered these papers in Sally Needling’s rooms? And the Yard had described the same image as having been tattooed onto Morgan Nemain’s leg?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “and I can tell what you’ll want to know next. Did Sally Needling have the image tattooed on her leg as well? The answer, I’m afraid, we don’t have. The useless muffs from the Yard didn’t note anything about a tattoo in their report on the Needling case. But she was a good girl. From a respectable family. Having found her body in a Whitechapel alley was enough trouble for the police. They might have elected to omit a mention of a tattoo, to save the girl’s parents—and themselves, for that matter—a whole lot of bother.”
“Indeed. I gather that your impression of the Yard worsens with every passing day.”
“My God, man, they’re imbeciles! In four days I’m halfway to solving two murders, possibly more, that they’d given up on as lost long ago. They are wretched detectives.”
At that, Bram was forced to smile.
“It’s a good thing, then,” he said, “that we’ve such a master sleuth at our disposal.”
Arthur grimaced. He found Bram to be so flippant sometimes about matters of the utmost seriousness. But he needed the man’s help to once again navigate the East End, and so he held his tongue.
“My hope,” said Arthur, “is to find the tattooist who inked this design upon the leg of Morgan Nemain, and most likely upon the leg of Sally Needling as well. This image meant something to these girls. They kept these papers imprinted with the image, and at least one of them had it permanently inked onto her skin. Perhaps they told the tattooist what it meant. What it symbolized.”
“Have you given any thought to the possibility that the murderer himself drew the tattoo onto Morgan Nemain’s skin, after she died?”
“Lord, Bram, but isn’t that a gruesome thought? I don’t know where you get these ideas. No, I don’t find that a likely scenario. In the first place, the Yard man said that the tattoo had not been drawn recently. Moreover, if Sally was in possession of a stack of the same drawing, it seems most probable that whatever involvement these girls had with the crow image, they had it voluntarily, and they had it long before Sally’s murder.”
“Well reasoned, Arthur. But how do you intend to find the tattooist? There must be a thousand seamen in London who know how to apply ink to a hot needle.”
Now it was Arthur’s turn to smile. He stepped back and gestured to their surroundings. The midday din of Aldgate descended on them. Carriages rattled and banged their way down High Street. A gang of young boys kicked dirt into the air as they jostled one another and chucked pebbles at the passing horses. Beggars shook their rusted tins, and pickpockets followed quietly behind any man with a decent topcoat. And the stench, that horrid dead-fish stench, drifted across it all in gusts from the docks to the south. Arthur inhaled deeply, sucking in the putrid air and puffing it back out again between his grinning cheeks.
“ ‘Now put yourself in that man’s place,’” said Arthur. “ ‘What would he do then?’ Or, in our case, she?”
Bram frowned. “That’s a quote from something, isn’t it?”
“Yes. From A Study in Scarlet.”
“That’s one of your own stories!”
“Indeed. And it’s good advice, don’t you think? Come.” Arthur led Bram east away from the station, along High Street. “Imagine you’re a young girl, fresh-faced and twenty-six years of age, from a northern heath. You come into the city occasionally, for shopping, the theater, and perhaps the occasional suffragist lecture. You and your girlfriends have decided to burn ink onto your bodies, in order to symbolize something or other. Where do you go?”
“To the Strand. She would ask about in the shops there, the places she’d been before, about who in the city could draw the tattoo.”
“Close, Bram, but I fear not quite right. On the contrary, Sally would have gone anywhere besides the Strand. She wouldn’t want to be recognized in those familiar shops, asking around for a tattooist. What if her parents discovered her trip? What would they think? It would be a disaster.”
“But they say that painting on the body is becoming more common in these late days. I haven’t seen a British sailor without a burnt mark on his forearms in years. And, not that I listen to such gossip, but they say that even the Duke of York has been tattooed, that it was done up while he was in Malta.”
“Yes, yes, of course, George of all people would attract such stories. Bit of an Orientophile, that boy. But behavior befitting the rude men who work on the seas, and the rude heir to Wales, is not necessarily behavior befitting a solicitor’s daughter from West Hampstead. If Sally was inked, she was inked in secret.”
Arthur thought that Bram seemed impressed by this reasoning, but that he was doing his best to conceal it.
“Why, she’d go to the docks, of course,” said Bram. “She could have anything she liked done in secret by the river. This neighborhood’s reputation, in matters as unladylike as these, precedes it.”
“Very good,” said Arthur. “Precisely.”
At this, Bram made a strange face, though Arthur had no idea why. He was too busy enjoying the requisite pedantry of detective work. This was ever so much more thrilling than his day at the Yard, sifting through papers. To discover something for oneself was exciting, of course, but to then explain it to a mystified audience . . . Well, a detective needs an audience. Arthur felt that he understood his old Holmes more and more with every passing day. “Now then, our girl is off into London, headed for the docks. Where does she go?”
“The closest stations are the Shadwell and Fenchurch stations on the Blackwall line, or, better yet, Wapping Station on the East London line.”
“Indeed you’re right,” said Arthur. “That’s how a city dweller would get there. But Sally Needling wasn’t from the city, was she? To make it to the Blackwall line, she’d have had to muck about between trains at Cannon Street. Frankly, it’s confusing, even for someone like me. And she doesn’t know the docks at all. She’s a simple country girl. Don’t you think she’d have taken the simplest route possible to any stop that read as next to the London docks on a rail map?” Arthur produced a rail map from inside his coat pocket and stretched it out between his hands. “See here! She’d have taken the Great Northern to King’s Cross, obviously. Then she’d have taken the Metropolitan line here, to Aldgate.”
“But the Mark Lane station is closer to the docks.”
“Yes, but would she have known that? I suspect not. Examine this map.” Arthur stopped walking and turned to face the wall of a tavern. He spread the map flat against the wall with his palms. Inside, he could hear the clinking of pint glasses and the squeaks of boots on beer-sodden boards. It was a tuneful clatter, a song beaten out every afternoon by a drunken rabble on dirty glass and crumbling wood. The Ballad of the Midday Bitters, Arthur thought.
“Does it not look,” he continued, “from the way the streets are drawn, as if it would be easier to get to the docks from Aldgate Station than Mark Lane? You and I know that in the world as it exists, Mark Lane is closer. But in the world as Sally Needling understood it, Aldgate is the nearer. She’d have looked at this great, wide street right here—the Commercial Road—and decided it was an easier route than the crisscrossing mess she’d have had to dodge through by the Tower. So she’d walk east from the station, to the Commercial Road, and then turn right onto Leman. She’d approach the docks this way, right from Wel
lclose Square. Come along!”
Arthur hurried, dragging the rail map through the air behind him like a kite. Bram followed along as Arthur dodged his way between the pickpockets and the whores, south toward St. George. As he ran, Arthur observed the shop fronts they passed: tobacconists, public houses, shipping offices, boardinghouses. As they neared Wellclose Square, Arthur veered off east, but a tap on the shoulder from Bram put him back on track to the south, toward the docks. On the corner of St. George and Well Street, just below the Wellclose Square, he found what he’d been looking for: a Far Eastern spice merchant.
“Tang Spice,” read the hand-carved sign out front. “Import and Export.”
“Aha!” cried Arthur. “Perfect. What does Sally know of tattooing, save that it is an art cultivated in the East? She’d certainly have gone to an Eastern shop to procure its services.” He pulled open the crooked front door and entered the spice merchant’s shop. Instantly a host of smells washed over Arthur and Bram as they stepped past the doorway. Neither man had the faintest clue as to the origins of these intoxicating scents. Strange perfumes clogged their nostrils and lightened their heads. The sensation was dizzying, but oddly pleasurable.
A small Chinese man, old and frail, appeared from a back room. He had a single scrap of white hair atop his head, and he wore a dirty robe, stained with streaks of bright orange.
“Sirs,” whispered the old man. “How do I help?”
“I hope you’re able to help me quite a bit,” said Arthur quickly. “Do you by any chance work with ink?”
The old man frowned. “Ink? I do not import the ink from China, sirs.”
“Not to import, my good man. Rather, to burn it into my skin. I would like a tattoo, you see, and I’m sure that in your days you’ve drawn more than a few for a lost traveler.”
The old man’s frown remained for a moment and then dissipated into a shrug.
“Afraid, good sir,” he said, “that you are in error. Here I sell spice. Not the skin paintings.” He raised his bony right hand, which shook as he raised it. He held his arm straight out, and Arthur could see the twitching of the man’s fingers. “Afraid I could not draw one, if even I attempt it.” Finally the man lowered his hand.