The Dastardly Miss Lizzie

by Viola Carr

  Was “S” for Starling? So much for his visit to Mr. Finch’s, seeking Faraday’s forbidden books. Sources I dare not reveal, indeed.

  Or was “S” for Seymour Locke? The man who’d claimed he knew nothing of physics. Just a lowly assistant.

  But who was “B,” and what were the negotiations? An escape, indeed. And who was that sniveling serpent across the hall? Across from where—Crane’s office at the RI? She recalled Princess Victoria, insulting an impervious Remy. A baby snake. Again in the Regent’s office, concerned for the drooling king. I don’t want that reptile to see him like this.

  She checked the torn envelope. Dr. E. Jekyll, it said, Russell Sq. As if Crane didn’t know her full address and had done the best she could in a hurry. The return address was printed in the corner.

  Ireton House, Red Lion Square

  Bloomsbury WC

  Only a few blocks away.

  Eliza glanced at her unfinished report, and back to Crane’s letter. Hide it in your safest place. Tell no one.

  In a few minutes, she was out the door, dinner forgotten on the desk, hastily re-stuffed bag over her shoulder, and sleepy Hipp stumbling after.

  MY POOR AND SOLITARY ENDEAVORS

  IN FIFTEEN MINUTES, SHE REACHED RED LION SQUARE, a dismal yard of broken cobbles and muddy weeds. A chill wind swept through the wet trees. Icy raindrops stung her face as she crossed to a four-story relic of the previous century that hunkered like a grim mausoleum on the corner, its coal-blackened walls marred with dark flourishes of wrought iron.

  She craned her neck, holding her umbrella aloft. Smoke hissed from a single chimney to the rear. Rows of empty, rain-splashed windows glowered. In the window to her left, a weak light burned. She glimpsed a well-stocked library, an armchair, the glint of a wall mirror. Otherwise the place was dark.

  The stone-carved lettering above the forbidding brick entrance read

  IRETON HOUSE ~ A.D. 1764

  QUID ME RESPICIS, VIATOR? VADE

  “Why do you look back at me, traveler?” she translated in a murmur, and shivered. Vade, the house commanded. Go on your way, indeed.

  Unwillingly, she climbed the steps to the black lacquered front door. Hipp moped sullenly beside her, his red unhappy light gleaming. “Quiet. Home, one quarter mile. Make greater speed.”

  Eliza shivered again beneath her dripping umbrella. “I wish we hadn’t come, too. But we’re here now.” She banged the iron knocker.

  Clunk! Clunk! A deadened echo.

  No sound from within.

  “Professor Crane?” She knocked again. Perhaps the servants were for bed, exhausted. Perhaps they were all dead, slain by Antoinette de Percy’s killer. That’ll teach you to do science, woman . . .

  She gripped the spiked fence and peered in the library window. Just the candlestick—not an electric light?—on a tea table by a winged armchair, alongside ancient oak shelves stuffed with books. She recalled Sir Isaac’s total internal reflection experiment, the observer he’d imagined peeking in her bedroom window. Do you suppose the corpuscles know what to do? Do you suppose they’re spying on you, Eliza, noting your every move and reporting to me? Dare you imagine I’m not watching you right this minute?

  The library was deserted . . . but tension scraped her nerves. Why did the candle flicker? The window was fastened. The curtain swayed, invisible breath. As if a man lingered there, gripping a bloodstained knife . . .

  Her heart thudded. No one. Just her imagination.

  The harsh epigram above the door glowered down, admonishing her. Why do you look at me, traveler? Go on your way. Out, fool, before I lose my temper.

  “Something’s not right, Hipp.” She marched over weedy, broken cobbles to the corner, where a lane cut in towards a shadowy rear yard. Somewhere, a horse snorted and pawed a stone floor.

  Hipp trod reluctantly after her. “Courage. Certain death. Does not compute.”

  She popped on the little electric light on a chain at her belt. Zingg! Purple shadows leapt. To her right, the dark outline of stables. To her left, the back stairs of Ireton House clumped up to a servants’ door. Somewhere, too, a noisome cesspit. She wrinkled her nose. Lovely. That wasn’t only mud wetting her skirts to the ankle.

  A gust slapped freezing raindrops into her face. Her light hissed, flickering.

  Criiiickk! The back door swung ajar. Inside, darkness shifted, beckoning. Quivering, she pushed it open and entered.

  “Hello? Professor Crane?” Crane . . . Crane . . . Crane . . . Her voice echoed, forlorn. Her light bled away into a world of creaking darkness. Walls decorated with crumbling plaster curlicues, distant ceilings lost in moldy gloom. A stale smell hung, of coal scuttles and neglect.

  She walked on, lifting her light high. Cobwebs dusted her face, and she sneezed. Atishoo!

  “Araneae.” Hipp’s brassy joints chattered. “Trajectory unpredictable. Advise retreat.”

  She brushed away a spindly long-legged creature. “Don’t be silly. They won’t hurt you.”

  “Hearsay evidence. Inadmissible. Re-examine conclusion.”

  Hsst! Air whistled, pulling at her skirts, and boom! The back door slammed shut.

  She whirled, startled. “Who’s there?” Just shadows and wind. Shakily, she caught her breath, feeling foolish—but doubt chilled her spine. She’d closed that door. Hadn’t she?

  At last, flagstones gave way to venerable floorboards that creaked with menace. Crack! Crunk! Photographic portraits frowned down, silver-nitrate eyes tracking her as she passed.

  Finally, the front hall loomed from the dark. The massive front door was locked, the bar rammed home. A vase of dahlias wilted on the hall table beneath a dusty painting of Marston Moor, orange-sashed Civil War cavalry arrayed in faded splendor. The grand staircase coiled upwards, an iron-railed serpent. To her right, candlelight leaked beneath the library door.

  She knocked, rat-tat! “Professor Crane? Forgive me for bursting in. It’s me, Eliza Jekyll. I received your letter and came at once. I trust everything’s well?”

  Silence. Just rain pounding on the slate roof.

  Heart thudding, she turned the handle.

  The fire was just a dull glow, a frigid draught chilling the room. On the tea table, the candle burned low. Smoke curled from a charred spot on the Oriental silk rug, where a coal had spat unheeded.

  She edged inside. A large wall mirror gleamed, its ancient silver speckled with corrosion. Shadows flickered over cabinets and bookshelves. Next to the wrought-iron mantel, a single shelf had been swept clear, and books scattered the rug, pages curling.

  Professor Crane sat stiffly upright in the armchair. Jaw thrust upwards, cervical spine wrenched back at an impossible angle. A fat oblong of iron wrapped in copper wire had been forced deep into her throat.

  An electrical coil. It stuck out grotesquely between her cracked teeth. Her neck bulged black where the coil had been rammed home, and blood had spurted from her mouth, staining the front of her dress.

  Beside the chair lay a long blue silken scarf, crusted with dark stains. On the mirror, smeared in blood beside Crane’s feet, was the word THIEF.

  “Hipp,” said Eliza steadily, “run back to Bow Street and fetch Harley Griffin. Now.”

  CORPUS DELICTI

  WELL,” SAID INSPECTOR GRIFFIN TWENTY-THREE minutes later, “I don’t think it was suicide, do you?”

  Bright gaslights threw the body in the chair into sharp relief. Eliza had waited in the hall, pacing impatiently, guarding the door should anyone arrive to disturb the scene. Hipp had found Griffin in his office, working diligently on the Slasher case—when did he ever sleep?—and he’d arrived as quickly as he could, but it had still seemed an age.

  Now she examined the corpse, her hands encased in white cotton gloves. “Bruises on her chin and neck. Fingermarks, most likely.” Crane’s hands curled loosely over the chair’s arms. Eliza eased a sleeve back, revealing purplish-green marks on the wrists. “Here, too. And look, broken hair strands. Someone grabs her;
she fights. She was alive while the coil was inserted.” She fingered a white stain on the brown bodice. “Tears, or mucus. The poor lady probably drowned in blood before she had time to exsanguinate.”

  She tested the corpse’s finger joints. “The body is cool, but still pliable. Rigor has not yet set in. And it’s freezing in here. It’s possible she died only a short while before I found her.”

  Griffin made fastidious notes in his book. “What time did you say that package of yours arrived?”

  “I received it at half past eight. But it could have been waiting for hours.” Frustration and guilt bit at her. Crane’s horrible, cruel death only made her more determined to solve these crimes. If only she’d arrived sooner, lingered less, walked home faster . . .

  “Oh, aye? Stuff your damn vanity, Eliza. As if you’re the only one who can save the world.”

  Wildly, Eliza spun around. Lizzie wasn’t there. Curse her. It’s not your turn, Lizzie. Clear off.

  Griffin eyed the bloody writing on the mirror with faint disgust. Even the incessant rain hadn’t spoiled his immaculate black suit or sharply combed hair, but dark bruises circled his eyes, and he looked thin and weary. “First whore, now thief. Lady Redstoat’s catalogue of sins lengthens by the day.”

  Eliza held up the bloodstained blue scarf, its silken tassels drooping. “Our mysterious long-haired visitor strikes again. A man Lady Redstoat didn’t recognize.” She fingered the faded stains. “These marks look old, but Crane’s been dead less than two hours.” She scraped a fragment onto a glass slide and peered at it through a lens on her optical. “Weeks old, at the very least,” she said happily, pushing the optical back on her forehead. “This is not our victim’s blood.”

  Griffin looked pained. “Whose, then? Why would our man carry around a gory old scarf?”

  “Least of all drop it at the scene. That kind of malice aforethought”—she nodded at the body—“doesn’t make such an elementary mistake. Perhaps it’s a message.”

  “Like what? Beware the blue scarf bandit?” He pointed at the bloody mirror. “That’s the message, Doctor. Steal from me, and you die.”

  “But what did Crane steal, and from whom?” Her thoughts flicked back to Crane’s strange journal, now safely stashed in Lizzie’s cabinet. Project Interlunium. Advanced side effects that will destroy us all. “The servants’ door was unlocked when I arrived. The killer came in that way. Or,” she added, inspired, “he went out the back and left it open. As in, he arrived via the front door, and Crane let him in.”

  “Someone she trusted?”

  “Or at least someone she was expecting. They fight, he kills her, then ransacks that shelf, looking for whatever she supposedly stole.” She turned to the window. “Any ideas, Mr. Locke? You do have a habit of turning up early to murder scenes.”

  Seymour Locke hunched in the window seat, damp and disheveled, clutching a glass of Scotch in one trembling hand. He’d arrived while she was waiting for Griffin. He dragged back snarled blond hair. “I explained already. We had a meeting this afternoon to discuss what to do next. Then I went back to the library at the RI to study, but I’d left some papers here, and I’ve classes tomorrow, so I returned to fetch them on my way home.” He gulped a mouthful of liquor, seemingly without tasting, and waved at the ransacked bookshelf. “Who the hell cares? I told you: her latest experimental journal is gone. Schematics, final test results, the lot. She’d collected it all, said she was preparing for . . .” Another gulp, this time with a grimace. “Oh, God. This is a disaster.”

  “The missing journal, or the murder?” asked Griffin sharply.

  A reproachful glare. “They amount to the same thing, you idiot. Can’t you see? Her work is gone!”

  “Can’t you reconstruct it from copies?”

  “There are no copies. Ephronia made sure of that. It was too dangerous.”

  “Another first name, Mr. Locke. You’re certainly well blessed with close friends.” Griffin tapped his pencil on the desk. It, too, had been cleared of its papers. Only an empty brass phonograph machine sat by the overturned inkpot, its coil glimmering. “So who attended this meeting?”

  “She already asked me that,” snapped Locke, but his flashing eyes had dulled. Eliza had seen him falter when he walked in. She’d watched the color drain from his face. Crane’s death had badly shaken him, even more so than Antoinette’s. Whatever defiance he’d mustered—if it had ever been real—had died.

  So she’d forborne to mention the book, to see what he’d say unprompted. And sure enough, he’d come through. Not the behavior of a guilty man.

  “Should already know the answer, then.” Griffin studied his notebook, waiting.

  Locke sighed. “Me, Starling, the Professor. We’re the only ones left, with Ormonde out of action. Someone’s killing us off, or hadn’t you noticed? Don’t you think I want as badly as you to catch them?”

  Eliza frowned. “Mr. Wyverne didn’t attend?”

  A blank look.

  “Your chemist friend. He seemed willing to help with your project.”

  “Oh.” Locke snorted. “Him. Shouldn’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why does everyone ask that?” Irritated, Locke jumped up to stalk to and fro before the speckled mirror, his reflection keeping pace. “Because we don’t trust him, all right? Because he’s a professional pest who doesn’t have the first clue about multi-dimensional aether physics—”

  “But you do?” Eliza pounced. “I thought you didn’t understand Antoinette’s work. A lowly assistant, you said.”

  Locke subsided, dark. “I know enough,” he muttered. “I’m not an idiot. I hear things.”

  “I see. So what was decided?”

  “Eh?”

  “At the meeting. What to do next?”

  “Oh.” He tried another sharp smile, but it came out weary and woebegone, as if the effort to be rude to cover his grief was finally exhausting him. “Professor Crane was shaken by what happened at the demonstration. At first she didn’t want to go on. But we resolved to start work with the back-up prototype tomorrow. She said she was approaching the final solution. I thought she meant the equations.”

  Eliza fumbled in her bag for the scrap of paper. “These? From Antoinette’s?”

  “Starling’s work. He said he’d found an error in the numbers, that the electrical field would never self-sustain, or some such. But Crane is the real brains, not Starling. She said she had the answer.” He swallowed. “Don’t you see? They found out what she was building and they killed her for it. Antoinette as well.”

  Eliza fixed him in her stare. “Time to stop misleading us, Mr. Locke. This isn’t about the miniature engine, is it? You mean Project Interlunium.”

  Locke swallowed, pale. “How do you know about that?”

  “Never you mind. What is this project, and why is it so secret?”

  He rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger, muttering a curse. “Promise this goes no further, Doctor. If you squeak on me to your god-awful lover at the Royal for this . . .”

  “This maniac has murdered two of your friends. Help me catch him before he kills someone else. Maybe even you.”

  A defeated sigh. “The first prototype moved things. In three dimensions. A matter transference machine.”

  Griffin glanced at Eliza, alarmed. “A teleporter? Like the one the Chopper used? Wasn’t that infernal thing destroyed?”

  “So I was told.” Her palms itched. The Chopper had nearly killed her in the course of his dark mission of murder.

  “Fabulous, really.” Locke gave a haunted smile. “A homing device, to be more specific. You activate the beacon, it transports you away from the generator to a predetermined location, and back again. Antoinette got the idea from a gentleman friend. Said he showed her an old book with some diagrams.”

  “I see.” Eliza’s heart stung in sudden disappointment. An old book. Like the one the Chopper had worked from. Dr. Frankenstein’s journal, which she’d once stolen from
a secret library at Bethlem Asylum, aided by crafty Malachi Todd. A book which, along with everything else that remained of Frankenstein’s, now belonged to Marcellus Finch.

  She ought to have known Finch would never destroy such a marvelous book, no matter how terrible the consequences. His unquenchable curiosity often overcame his good sense. Still, why hadn’t Marcellus mentioned he knew Antoinette?

  “She built one,” said Locke, “but it was too inefficient to be useful. Made the most frightful noise, you know, and the generator was so big, and the aether burned so fast that its performance was shoddy and unreliable. So Crane helped her make an improved one, incorporating the principles of her miniature engine. The entire thing was portable, generator and all. No more homing.”

  “Hence the secrecy?”

  “Of course. Efficient energy is one thing. Cheap instantaneous travel? Quite another. And we almost had it working, the day before Antoinette died. But then Starling had this idea for a modification. Some new device he wanted to attach, to further extend the capability. Something about propagating the right sort of wave before the de-phlogistication could destroy the medium. He called it his advanced solution.”

  Advanced side-effects. She recalled Starling’s visit to Finch’s, that dusty book belonging to Mr. Faraday, and her lips set hard. Marcellus had lied about the whole affair from the beginning. About her mysterious “illness,” too.

  So what else had he lied about?

  “What kind of wave?” she asked sharply. “What did it do? Come, don’t dissemble. I’ve heard enough evasion to last me a lifetime.”

  Locke’s eyes shimmered. “Don’t waste your effort, Doctor. I honestly don’t understand much of it. All I know is that Ephronia was horrified, and ordered Starling not to go ahead. He’d already destroyed the original machine trying. But he and Antoinette were determined. They wanted me to help. Naturally I refused.”

  “You weren’t curious?” put in Griffin.

  A sniffle. “I’m Ephronia’s assistant, not theirs. They wanted me to steal her back-up prototype. I said I didn’t know where she kept it. The truth, for what it’s worth,” he added, with a flash of ire. “Ephronia hid it away, to guard against precisely that contingency. A secret workroom. Not even I knew where it was.” Unflinchingly, he stared at his own reflection in the spotted mirror. “Now I suppose we’ll never find it.”