Ruler of the Night

by David Morrell

  “You might be surprised how much you can tell us,” Becker said. “Was he tall or short?”

  “Sort of on the tall side.”

  “Young or old?”

  “The speed with which he ran, he had to be young.”

  “Thin or heavy?” Becker continued.

  “Nobody heavy could run that fast.”

  “Did he have a beard?”

  “Couldn’t tell.”

  “Did he have hair or was he bald?”

  “Couldn’t tell that either. He was wearin’ a hat.”

  “I noticed he dipped his boots in a stream farther along this path, then brushed them with a handkerchief,” another beggar said. “And now that I think of it, he was carryin’ somethin’.”

  “Carrying what?” Becker asked.

  “A leather document case. I used to be a clerk in the City. That was before…” The beggar peered down sadly, remembering better times. “Anyway, he had the kind of case that I used to see businessmen carry.”

  “Where did he go after that?”

  “Farther along the path.”

  “There, you see? You noticed quite a lot. Do you gentlemen trust each other?” Ryan asked.

  “We’d better. We’ve been on the tramp together for three months.”

  “Then if I give you a shilling, I can rely on you to share it with these other gentlemen. It ought to be enough for all of you to cross the tracks tomorrow morning and treat yourselves to tea, bread, butter, and marmalade at the lodging house.”

  “They’ll think we’re beggin’ and chase us away like they always do.”

  “Not tomorrow. We promise,” Ryan said. “Gentlemen, we hope you see better times.”

  “Bein’ called ‘gentlemen’ is already better times.”

  “Buying food for beggars. You sounded like Emily,” Becker said, proceeding along the dark path.

  “Three months ago, I wouldn’t have dreamed of it,” Ryan agreed. He shivered as he held the bloodstained overcoat.

  “Here’s my half of the tea and marmalade money. We’ll soon be poor again,” Becker concluded.

  They reached the stream where the killer had been seen washing blood from his boots. Their lanterns showed a log that stretched across the trickling water. Beyond it, they came to a narrow dirt road with darkness to the left and the streetlamps of town on the right.

  “Which way?” Ryan asked.

  “Well, it’s been ten minutes since you gave up your overcoat,” Becker replied. “You’re shaking. So is the killer. I doubt he’d brave the open road and risk freezing to death.”

  “He might find a farmhouse and take shelter in a barn,” Ryan said, testing him.

  “He might also find a farmer with a yappy watchdog and two strong sons who’d make him wish he hadn’t,” Becker countered.

  “Point granted,” Ryan said.

  Becker felt encouraged, adding, “It’s simpler for him to go back to town. He’ll hide until the trains start coming in the morning.”

  “Where would he hide in town?” Ryan asked.

  “A shed or a stable. One of them might even have an old rug or a horse blanket to keep him warm.”

  “And then?” Ryan persisted.

  “Well, just as I said, he could buy a ticket and board a train with no one being the wiser.”

  “Without an overcoat? Wouldn’t he be conspicuous in the cold?”

  Becker suddenly understood what Ryan wanted him to conclude. “Of course. The killer needs to—”

  A bell clanged fiercely. The commotion came from the direction of town. In the distance, men shouted.

  Becker started running even before Ryan did. They crossed the two sets of train tracks and hurried toward buildings, following the urgent din of the bell.

  “There!” Ryan said.

  A fire illuminated a shadowy side street. Rushing closer, they saw flames rising from a stable, where some men hurled water from pails while others worked the squeaking handles of a pump linked to a huge barrel on a wagon. Two other men held a hose and sprayed water at the flames crackling through the stable’s roof.

  Smoke filled the street. As Ryan and Becker made their way through it, men, woman, and children talked nervously, hugging rumpled clothes that seemed to have been put on in a rush.

  Ryan showed his badge to the man who seemed to be in charge.

  “What’s Scotland Yard doing all the way out here?” the man wondered.

  Evidently he hadn’t heard about the attack aboard the train, but that would soon change, Ryan knew. “What caused the fire?”

  “Not sure yet, but I always assume it’s because of an accident with a lantern.”

  Another man stepped forward. “I told you I wasn’t in the stable after dark. I didn’t go anywhere near it with a lantern. Thank God I saw the flames in time and was able to lead my horse out.”

  “Was anybody injured?” Becker asked.

  “Thank the Lord, nobody,” the man in charge answered.

  “What I meant was,” Becker said, “could someone have been in the stable, planning to spend the night there?”

  The owner and the first man looked at each other.

  “Someone hiding inside?” the owner asked. “I was distracted bringing my horse out, but I didn’t see anyone.”

  The other man stepped closer to the flames. “With so much smoke, I can’t see if there’s a body.”

  “A body?” a woman in the crowd exclaimed.

  “We don’t know that, madam,” the owner assured her.

  “Is there a shop around here that sells gentlemen’s overcoats?” Ryan asked.

  “What does that have to do with anything?” the man in charge wanted to know.

  “I have a clothing shop,” a man in the crowd said. He wore spectacles and had a narrow, worried face. A frightened woman and two young children stood next to him.

  “Take us there,” Ryan said.

  “You wish to buy a coat at this hour?” the man asked. “But you already have one draped over your arm.”

  “It’s evidence, so in fact I do need a coat. Where’s your shop?”

  “Around the corner.” Baffled, the man led the way, his wife and children following. “We live upstairs. We were asleep when the fire bell clanged. At first, we feared that it was our house on fire, but when we hurried outside, we discovered that it was the stable around the corner.”

  In the light from the lantern, the man pointed toward a modest two-story house with stairs at the back. All the windows were dark.

  “Does the shop have a back door?” Ryan asked.

  “Yes, but it’s bolted from the inside. The only way to enter is by unlocking the front door with this key.”

  “All the same, I prefer to see the back door,” Ryan said. “Becker…”

  “I’ll take special care of this lady and her children,” Becker assured him.

  The woman looked pleased by the attention.

  Ryan and the owner approached the rear of the house.

  As Ryan’s lantern revealed the back door, the owner suddenly pointed. “The window’s broken!”

  The door was ajar. Ryan pushed it all the way open and studied the darkness within.

  “Stay behind me,” he told the owner.

  He extended the lantern into the shop, dissolving its shadows. Numerous overcoats and frock coats hung from pegs. Some looked like the outline of a man, but Ryan couldn’t imagine that whoever had broken into the shop would have lingered. Nonetheless, he proceeded carefully between counters.

  “We didn’t hear the glass being smashed,” the owner said behind him.

  “Not with the bell clanging and the neighbors shouting,” Ryan explained. “After he started the fire, he waited for you and your family to rush down the stairs and see what was happening. Then he broke in.”

  “This is the fault of the blasted railway’s making it easy for thieves to come here from London.”

  “Has anything been stolen?”

  “Business is so poor, G
od help me if it has.” As the owner stepped into the shop, another thought occurred to him. “Maybe he also broke into where we live!”

  The man hurried back through the door.

  Hearing him rush desperately up the outside stairs, Ryan felt the cold seeping into him and walked toward a rack of shapeless coats of a type that laborers wore. He found a dark blue one that wouldn’t attract attention among ordinary people. After putting the blood-spattered coat on the floor, he pulled on the woolen garment and finally started to feel warm again.

  The owner returned, breathing rapidly. “The upstairs door is intact. At least he didn’t—”

  Then he saw that Ryan had put on a coat. “Oh.” His tone indicated that he believed Ryan planned to take advantage of him.

  “What’s the price?” Ryan asked.

  “Uh…for Scotland Yard?” the man said, looking uncomfortable. “No charge.”

  Ryan noticed a card indicating prices next to the rack of coats. He pulled his remaining sovereign and a few other coins from his pocket. “Will these do?”

  “Thank you.” The man looked relieved.

  “Now show me your best coats—the kind that you’d expect someone to wear in a first-class train compartment.”

  “Over here.” The owner led him toward a wall. “Wait! This peg wasn’t empty when I closed the shop tonight! My most expensive coat is gone!”

  When the horse lurched, the cabdriver jerked his head up. He’d done his best not to fall asleep, but at this late hour, with a long, lonely stretch of road back to London in front of him and nothing to keep him alert, his eyelids had relentlessly closed.

  The horse righted itself and continued along the pulverized-rock surface. Starlight and a half-moon added to the illumination from the cab’s exterior lantern, providing a view of the ditch on either side of the road.

  Perched on his high seat at the back of the two-wheeled vehicle, the driver sat straighter, trying to rouse himself. It had been a profitable night’s work—four pounds. On a typical evening, if he could earn a couple of shillings after feeding and stabling his horse, he was happy. Compared to dodging the chaos of theater traffic near the Strand, this was easy duty, but it wouldn’t do to fall asleep and lose control of the horse, spoiling his good fortune by getting killed in a tumble into a ditch.

  The weary animal proceeded steadily onward, its hooves plodding in a measured, hypnotic beat that caused the driver’s eyelids to droop again. He forced them open and worked to stay awake by thinking about his brother, who—as he’d told the detectives—had joined the army in order to eat and who, poor soul, had been shipped to the war in the Crimea. Two months and several battles later, there wasn’t any word if he was alive or—

  The driver suddenly leaned forward, staring at the window in the tiny trapdoor that allowed him to see into the compartment below him.

  From this angle, the light from the lantern didn’t reveal much of the interior, but without question, the driver was looking at a hat.

  A gentleman’s hat.

  On someone’s head.

  “What the devil?” The driver yanked open the small window. “Where did you come from?”

  The man shifted to the side, the angle preventing the driver from seeing his face.

  “I noticed you taking the road back to London,” a voice answered. “As it happens, I too need transportation back to London. You were sleeping so peacefully that I didn’t want to wake you, so I simply climbed aboard.”

  The driver saw enough to determine that the man was well dressed, with an expensive overcoat. “Out ’ere? At night?”

  “I admit the circumstances are unusual.”

  “I’ll say. Why couldn’t you wait to board a train in the mornin’?”

  “Well…” The gentleman coughed in embarrassment. “You see, to be perfectly candid, there was a lady involved—and a husband who wasn’t supposed to be on the last train from London. My exit was hasty. The husband stormed through the town, searching for me. With nowhere to hide, I decided that I needed the exercise of walking the ten miles to London.”

  “In the cold and the dark?”

  “The alternative would have been worse. Then, like a miracle, you came along. I’m willing to pay two sovereigns if you’ll continue to take me back to London.”

  The driver decided to be bold. “Make it three sovereigns.”

  The gentleman sighed and handed three sovereigns up through the opening.

  The driver silently rejoiced. A total of seven pounds! This was indeed his lucky night.

  A turnpike gate blocked the road. Next to it stood a booth in which a toll-taker slumbered on a chair. In former times, he’d slept in the cottage next to the road, relying on night travelers to be honest and drop a sixpence into a box. Back then, because few vehicles traveled at this hour, it hadn’t been much of a loss if anyone sneaked through without paying. But the coming of the railway meant that fewer vehicles passed through even in the daytime, and the officials in charge of maintaining the road could no longer afford to allow even occasional drivers to cheat them out of revenue, so the gatekeeper had been ordered to sleep in the booth.

  He woke to the sound of approaching hooves and the rattle of wheels. Yawning, he stepped from the booth, removed the lantern from the gate, and held it high to stop the driver of what he saw was a hansom cab.

  “You came through here earlier,” the gatekeeper said.

  “And now I’m ’eading ’ome to sleep. It’s been a good night. I even found a passenger to take back.”

  “At this hour?” The gatekeeper leaned into the cab. In the glare from the lantern, he saw a well-dressed man protecting his eyes by turning away. “Must be a fine story that brings a gentleman in the road at this time of night.”

  “An embarrassing one,” the man said, still averting his eyes.

  “Embarrassing? I’d enjoy hearing…Say, are you hurt?”

  “What makes you ask?”

  “You have blood on one of your trouser cuffs.”

  “Blood?”

  When the man didn’t look down, the gatekeeper wondered why.

  “No, that’s wine,” the man explained. “I spilled some earlier. I was certain that I’d cleaned it off.”

  “Looks like blood to me.”

  From his perch in back, the cabdriver sounded amused. “Maybe you hurt the lady’s husband when he discovered you.”

  “The lady’s husband?” the gatekeeper asked. Leaning farther into the cab, he finally got a view of the man’s features.

  Having bloodied one expensive overcoat and gone to considerable effort to obtain a replacement, this time the well-dressed man chose to employ the blunt end of his knife. He grabbed the gatekeeper’s throat with one hand while he used the other to drive the hilt against the man’s temple, striking repeatedly with such force that he cracked the fragile bone and drove fragments of it into the victim’s brain.

  The tight fingers around the gatekeeper’s throat prevented him from gasping. As he slumped into the cab, the well-dressed man grabbed the lantern and kept it from crashing to the floor.

  “What ’appened to ’im?” the driver asked.

  “I don’t know. He seems to have fainted. I’ll get out and try to help him.”

  But when the passenger stepped from the cab, he set down the lantern and climbed swiftly to the driver’s perch.

  “What are you doin’?” the driver demanded, his hands on the cab’s reins.

  The passenger used the blunt end of his knife to shatter the driver’s temple the same as he’d done to the toll-taker. He dropped the body to the ground. After removing the driver’s hat and cloak, he dragged the body into the booth, then went back and pulled the gatekeeper’s body into the booth as well.

  He put on the driver’s hat and cloak, wrapping the latter around himself so that it concealed his expensive clothes. After raising the gate, he returned the lantern to its position there. He grabbed the horse’s bridle and led the animal and the cab through the opening.
He lowered the gate, climbed to the driver’s perch, and proceeded into London, fog enveloping him.

  At that late hour, few people saw him drive past the dark factories and slums on the city’s outskirts. Those who did chance to notice the cab’s lantern concluded he was only a driver taking his vehicle home after a long night’s work.

  In a deserted street near his destination, he stepped down. Hearing the clink of coins in one of the cloak’s pockets, he found the three sovereigns he’d given to the driver, plus four others.

  The coins meant nothing to him. What he needed was far beyond anything that money could purchase. Nonetheless, he took the coins so as to confuse the police. He angrily realized that he should have stolen the coins from the toll box also to make this seem like a robbery. In the train compartment, he’d made an even greater mistake by failing to take the gold watch.

  Furious at himself, he threw the driver’s cap and cloak into the vehicle. Then he put on his top hat, elbowed the horse so that the empty cab continued onward, and walked away into the darkness. But his night was far from finished. There was much that remained to be done.

  THREE

  THE CENTER OF THE WORLD

  From the Journal of Emily De Quincey

  I awoke to the chugging sounds of a train coming into the station. On the bench next to me, a pot of tea sat next to bread, butter, and marmalade. Presumably gifts from Sean and Joseph, they made me smile. But then I looked toward where Father had been sleeping and saw only a pillow.

  Movement beyond a window attracted my attention. In the morning’s pale light, Father paced on the station’s platform, his breath coming out as frost, his blanket clutched around him.

  Sean and Joseph were on the platform also, exhaustion straining their features as they studied the people who waited to board the early train. A thin, nervous-looking bespectacled man was with them but seemed interested only in the overcoats that the male travelers wore. Not that there were many people on the platform. Their uneasy looks gave me the sense that they’d heard about the murder on last night’s train and doubted the wisdom of exposing themselves to a possible repetition of what had happened.