Ripper

by Michael Slade

  From the Banquet Room they dashed along the corridor to the Receiving Hall, then out the front door to run the gauntlet of hail. Like Radisson and Des Groseilliers braving Iroquois lines, they skirted the Turkish bath in the Billiards Room, rounding the end of the South Wing by the Scullery and Kitchen, to reach the bow containing the nook in the Banquet Room wall. Light from the chandeliers within cast through the stained glass rainbow-lit the unmarked carpet of hail around the stone. No one had entered or exited the nook from out here.

  Lou Bolt was behaving like the Gestapo when they returned, ordering this and demanding that with torture and death waiting for anyone who balked. Melburn told him to go fuck himself as Chandler and Devlin walked in. Smith, Leuthard, and Leech lifted Quirk into his wheelchair while Holyoak, his white dinner jacket now red with blood, probed the crossbow quarrel sunk deep in Cohen’s chest. The pool around the body was four feet wide.

  “The arrow-bolt—I think it’s called—hit his heart,” the doctor said, glancing up at the painting of Saint Sebastian over the mantel. “The artist doesn’t capture the damage done.”

  “Not when it smashed through the glass, punched through the back of the wheelchair, and still had power enough to do that,” Zinc said.

  “Want the body left in place or moved downstairs?”

  “Depends how long we have to wait.”

  What surprised Zinc most was the level of panic in the room: no passing out at the sight of blood, no hysteria, no screaming-meemies. You’d think the sleuths—including Katt—were seasoned cops, responding to the latest squeal just called in. Was that because Cohen meant little to them, or did violence on the tube dull sensitivities?

  Whatever the reason, he was thankful.

  “Everybody with me?” Zinc addressed the group. “It’s obvious the party’s over and we’ve got a serious problem. The positive aspect is no one’s falling apart. Down to brass tacks. Who brought a cellular phone?”

  When no one responded, Melburn said dryly, “We’re writers, not stockbrokers.”

  “I didn’t know we’d be isolated,” Elvira said, taking blame.

  “Anyone come across a shortwave radio? No? Then it looks like we’re cut off till this storm breaks. Sorry, folks, but I’m the police, so what I say goes. Any problems with that?”

  “You heard the man,” Bolt said. “Trouble, and you deal with us.”

  “With me,” the Mountie corrected. “Who brought a camera?”

  “I did,” Alex said.

  “Good, I want you to get it and shoot this room. The body, the cabinet, the works. Don’t anyone touch anything until she’s done. Bolt, Devlin, check the cellar. Find a cool place away from the boiler where we can put Cohen. The rest of you wait in the corridor. Wynn, I need your help.”

  Zinc led Yates to the shattered cabinet and pulled Cohen’s chair around for him to sit down. “Don’t ask me to make sense of this. Let’s just accept we’re here and puzzle it out. Someone acquired this house, which hasn’t seen life for years, and spruced it up like a Gothic theater set. Our host outbid all rivals for Elvira’s Mystery Weekend, then Sent her a list of those to be invited to partake. Fifty thousand dollars was the bait to lure us here, and now we find ourselves enmeshed in this.”

  “Must be someone crazy. Making us live our fiction.”

  “Whoever it is,” Zinc said, “is clever indeed. Unless I missed something, you’ve got your locked room.”

  The front of the cabinet was secure and there was no key, so Zinc reached in through the shattered glass and released die catch from inside. While swinging the door open to expose the seven shelves, the leaky roof above dripped water on his arm. He pulled the top shelf out to check the crossbow on display and found both it and the surface beneath were gray with dust. As he pushed the shelf in, drips pocked the dust layer like a dry moonscape.

  The next shelf down was the same.

  The third shelf, however, was wiped clean. So was the crossbow cocked by a goat’s-foot lever it displayed. Zinc checked the shelves below and found them all thick with dust, then returned to the weapon resting at the same level as the trajectory of the bolt hurled at Cohen.

  Drip, drip, drip, the leak spattered two cards piled on the shelf, prompting Zinc to push the cabinet clear of water damage.

  “The nook behind the cabinet is self-contained,” he said. “Its curve is the solid outer stonework of the castle. Even if the masonry could be breached, no one escaped that way as the hail on the ground outside is unmarked. The only path in and out of the nook is through this room.”

  “Think Craig I or II used the space to eavesdrop on his guests?” asked Wynn.

  “Probably. He pulled the cabinet away from the wall and crawled into the nook, then dragged it back into place from inside and secured it with the hooks. To spy, he opened the upper half of the false Dutch door back of the cabinet. The locked glass front picked up voices in the room, and if the guests whispered it was unlatched from inside.”

  “The problem is our killer didn’t do that,” Wynn said.

  “The floor of the nook is covered with dust undisturbed by footprints, and the airspace above is filled with unbroken cobwebs. Logic says someone fired the bow from inside the nook, opening the cabinet’s false back to reach the weapon, but the physical evidence proves no one was in there.”

  “Not the dust on the floor.”

  “No? Why’s that?”

  “If there was another way out, the killer could cover his tracks through the dust with a fruit-tree sprayer or a vacuum cleaner switched to reverse. Either device would leave the same unmarked thick layer of dust.”

  “Wynn—”

  “I’m not saying it happened. No vacuum was heard. I’m saying don’t jump to conclusions. A devious mind can always find ways to bamboozle logic.”

  “What about the cobwebs?”

  “Got me there. Only a ghost could pass through and leave them undisturbed. It looks like a spiders’ convention was held in there.”

  “So?”

  “The nook’s a red herring. The killer wasn’t inside.”

  “Which begs the question: Who fired the bow how?”

  “Let’s ask the weapon.”

  Careful not to smudge any latent fingerprints, Zinc lifted the crossbow out of its cradle. The display frame consisted of two parts: a notched block holding the stock (or handheld part of the weapon) just behind the prod (or bow), and a separate notched block back near the false panel for the butt (or shoulder end of the stock). The crossbow weighed close to fifteen pounds.

  Piled on one side of the shelf were two hand-lettered cards, wet and warped by water so the ink was smudged. Wynn spread them on the table so he and Zinc could read:

  For hundreds of years, crossbows like the one that killed Cohen were fitted with a “nut-and-trigger” release. The nut was a thick circular disc with a claw groove on its upper curve to hook the string, and a notch cut into its lower curve lo take the snout of the trigger. The trigger, all but the handle of which was lodged inside the stock, looked like a duck with a pointed bill. The trigger mechanism pivoted through I lie duck’s eye. As the string was drawn back, the bill of the duck was wedged into the notch on the undercurve of the nut, which kept it from rotating. The string then dropped into the claw groove on the nut’s top, cocking the weapon. A fletched bolt was placed in the trough that ran along the stock’s top edge. Cocked and loaded, the crossbow was ready to fire.

  Drawing the string required a pull of 100 pounds, so the weapon was cocked with a goat’s-foot lever separate from the bow. The lower fingers of the lever—which looked like a bent tuning fork—engaged pins protruding from both sides of the stock, while hooks closer to the handle gripped the string. The lever was pulled back until the string dropped behind the catch on top of the nut.

  “The answer must be here,” Wynn said as they moved to the second card.

  The trigger had an external handle nine inches long which ran back almost parallel to the belly of the stock. Th
e gap between the stock and handle widened toward the butt. The stock had two grips on top for the first and second fingers of the crossbowman’s hand. When his thumb squeezed the handle toward the stock’s underbelly, the point of the internal trigger—the pivoting duck’s bill—dropped out of the notch in the undercurve of the nut. Now free to rotate, the nut released the bowstring held fast by its upper claw, hurling the bolt target-bound at a speed of up to 200 miles per hour. The handle pressure required to fire was just eight pounds.

  Gingerly, Zinc replaced the weapon in its frame, noting how the handle touched the shelf. The heavier weight of the crossbow squeezed the handle toward the stock.

  “See the problem?” he asked.

  The old man nodded. “If the weapon was cocked, loaded, and placed on the shelf in advance, the difference between the crossbow’s weight and the pressure required to release the trigger would fire the bolt at once.”

  “So how did the crossbow fire itself unless it was held off the shelf with someone’s phantom finger on the trigger handle?”

  HATCHET JOB

  Vancouver International Airport

  7:32 P.M.

  DeClercq’s plane was the last that would land in Vancouver until early Sunday morning. As he walked from the airport terminal to the parking lot, the storm advancing from Vancouver Island hit full force. The typhoon wind almost knocked him off his feet, wrenching the umbrella from his hand to blow it skyward like Mary Poppins’s parasol, before hurling the rain at him in a knifethrower’s act. Robert was soaked by the time he reached the spot where he’d parked his car.

  The spot was there.

  But his car was gone.

  In a universe where the Arrow of Time flows from lesser to greater entropy, carping critics are in their element. Someone, after all, must destroy what’s created. When it came to critics who panned his books, (he had written a history of the Force and an expose of Wilfred Blake) DeClercq thought no one put it better than playwright Brendan Behan: “Critics are like eunuchs in a harem. They’re there every night, they see it done every night, they see how it should be done every night, but they can’t do it themselves.” When it came to those who lauded his work, they, of course, were scholars and gentlemen/women.

  The acerbic critic who’d done the hatchet job on Jolly Roger was named Chas Fowler, the perfect handle for a sour snob. Seated in back of the taxi weaving toward his home, DeClercq ran a penlight down Fowler’s surly review in Publishers Weekly, while the cabbie did a yeoman’s job keeping them on the road, fighting a snarling crosswind that tried to flip them ass over tea kettle. Fowler’s barbs were:

  … the spawn of a mind in need of electric shock and lobotomy, Jolly Roger sinks to the nadir of horror fiction …

  … the best argument for censorship since Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf. Wrap fish in its pages and the fish will surely complain …

  … nondimensional yahoos in a one-dimensional story. Neither plot-driven nor character-driven, this trash slips like a slug on the slime of its own gore …

  Fowler getting his head crushed while cruising off Barbados didn’t surprise DeClercq. In a world where President Reagan was shot to impress Jodie Foster, and John Lennon may have been gunned down by “the Catcher in the Rye,” goading a psychopathic author could turn you into a lightning rod begging to get fried. These days it always paid to know who you were fucking with.

  What surprised him was that the killers took time from their Hanged Man ritual for the Caribbean hit.

  Unless, of course, they contracted it out.

  Were they Nietzschean Supermen?

  Take that, Untermensch?

  A near head-on collision yanked DeClercq from his thoughts. The cab was cresting Lions Gate Bridge high above First Narrows when a howl of wind off English Bay veered the oncoming car into their lane. DeClercq pitched forward when the driver hit the brakes, skid marks fish-tailing from the tires as the car nosedived. Bumper to bumper, a half inch to spare, both vehicles screeched to a halt.

  “Hell’s bells!” the cabbie gulped. “What sign are you, friend?”

  “Scorpio,” DeClercq said, releasing his breath. “Double the influence. That must explain it.” The driver fumbled through the pages of The Province beside him. “The world isn’t against you, but it may seem like it today. Guard against bonking your head. There’s little time to lose. Our joint horoscope. I shouldn’t be driving today.”

  Horoscope, DeClercq thought. The Astral Plane again.

  Marine Drive along the West Vancouver waterfront was deserted. Anyone with any sense was curled up in front of a crackling fire, hot toddy in hand. The cabbie dropped him hi his driveway this side of Lighthouse Park, where he lipped the driver triple for saving his life. The prospect of an all-night stakeout in this storm made him shiver.

  The slope beneath his shoes was a flooding river. The firs that lined the path to his house groaned in agony as branches I urn from their trunks crashed to the ground. Sounds unrelated to the storm were lost in the shriek of the wind, while ominous shadows haunted the woods like A Night on Bald Mountain.

  The telephone line to his home was ripped from its connection.

  The lights on both sides of the door were smashed.

  Something was wrong.

  Despite his ordeal with the Alley Demons during the Cutthroat case, the Chief Superintendent didn’t carry a gun. In any event, he wouldn’t be armed because he had been on a plane. Movement to his left made him stop and squint through the dark at something swaying, twisting, hanging in that copse of trees. “Christ,” he whispered when he got close enough to discern what it was.

  Lyric Stamm, like the other points of the Ripper’s Cross, was naked and suspended by a hook in the base of her skull. In line with Chloe and Zoe, yet dissimilar to Marsh, her face was skinned but none of her hair was scalped. Crossbones weren’t painted on her upper chest, because, like a dugout canoe, her torso was hacked open from her clavicle to her pubic bone, and all the organs in her body cavity were gone. DeClercq could see her spine, white bisecting red, while wedged in her gutted rib cage were two crossed bones. As he stared in awe at this horror jerking like a puppet in the death-grip of the wind, one flailing leg almost kicking him in the face, Tautriadelta’s Pall Mall Gazette article flashed into his mind:

  … in one of the books by the great modern occultist… Eliphaz Levy … we find the most elaborate directions for working magic spells … and it is in the list of substances prescribed as absolutely necessary to success that we find the links which join … necromancy with the quest of the East-End murderer… Among them are strips of the skin of a suicide, nails from a murderer’s gallows, candles made from human fat… and a preparation made from a certain portion of the body of a harlot.

  He stood transfixed by the human carcass twisting, turning, and swaying back and forth on the hook.

  The wind was blowing the wrong way to carry the stink of psychosis from Garret Corke to him, but the lunacy in the demented eyes charging from behind the tree told DeClercq this sudden apparition was unhinged. This guy was crazy. This guy was rabid. This guy was stark staring mad. The hatchet cleaving the air between Corke’s raised arms and DeClercq’s brow corroborated the fact. Too late to escape the ax.

  Corkscrew’s camouflage fatigues dated from the steaming jungles of Vietnam. His eyes shone white in a face greased black, his lips curled back from pearly teeth in a madhatter’s grin, making him look like Al Jolson about to sing “My Mammy.”

  The ax was inches from DeClercq when Lyric kicked it away.

  Though dead, her body jumped with more life than either man, the fluctuating wind from offshore thrashing and swinging her stiff limbs unpredictably.

  The ax hacked all the toes from her interfering foot, before it struck the hanging tree and shaved the trunk of bark. DeClercq ran. With Corke in hot pursuit.

  The mercenary had a good ten years on the Mountie, and Corke had kept himself fighting fit. Dashing past the door they rounded the west side of the
house, scrambling along the wall toward the crashing sea ahead, Corkscrew raising the ax as his other arm reached for DeClercq, fingers gripping the Mountie’s collar and yanking him off his feet. The Canadian slipped in the mud and rolled faceup beneath the window.

  The wind blowing inland rattled the pane above, throwing the sounds of the struggle against the shimmering glass.

  Corke stomped an army boot into DeClercq’s stomach, then straddled him, ax raised to split his head in two.

  Folding like a jackknife, DeClercq was caught mid-whistle.

  “Dumb fuck,” Corke said, pausing just a moment to savor the thrill of the kill …

  Wasting precious seconds he didn’t know he couldn’t afford …

  Making the fatal mistake of every foreign punk dense about this country …

  If you take on one of The Mounted, for God’s sake watch for the dog.

  Fangs bared in a hundred pounds of purebred German shepherd, trained to attack by the OIC of the RCMP Dog Service at Innisfail, Alberta, Napoleon—catching his master’s whistle carried by the wind—ran the width of their living room and took a powerful leap that sent him crashing through the window beside Corke. Fangs locked on to the killer’s ax arm as the dog flipped to the ground, the sharp twist snapping both forearm bones. Before Corke’s grunt died the shepherd was on him again, going for his throat as the ax dropped from the broken hinge of his wrist. The mercenary defended himself the only way he could. He jammed the stump of his mangled arm into the dog’s mouth.

  DeClercq struggled to his knees, holding his bruised stomach as he gasped for breath. The wind was blowing from him to Corke so he didn’t hear the kchuck! of the switchblade opening. But he heard the yelp from Napoleon as the sharp steel sank to the hilt in the shepherd’s belly.

  The yelp brought bile to his throat.

  Humping his shoulders off the wall where the dog’s second leap had pushed him, Corke stuffed the stump of his broken arm into Napoleon’s windpipe, wrenching the switchblade free with a vicious twist, before throwing his own weight at the dog to pin him to the ground. He flipped the knife like a coin magician as he fell on top, grabbing the handle blade-down to sink the steel again, this time in Napoleon’s throat which he exposed by forcing the shepherd’s muzzle back with his stump, there were the arteries, there were the veins, So long, you fucking hound…