Ripper

by Michael Slade

  Whatever strings or elastics held this sack of bones together gave, causing his posture to collapse in a heap.

  “Angus Craig III,” the elitist sighed.

  Angus Craig III was born June 30, 1964. He was now twenty-eight.

  The Craig family pioneered the Province of British Columbia, amassing a fortune from natural resources and land development. Angus Craig I immigrated from Scotland in 1871. In 1909 he built Ravenscourt, one of the most impressive mansions in Shaughnessy. Ravenscourt was lavishly designed, with a 2,000-bottle wine cellar, grounds laid out like Kew Gardens, tennis courts, and indoor-outdoor pools. Until the 1930s, Shaughnessy was home to the city’s upper crust: mayors, MPs, senators, lieutenant-governors, and supreme court justices. All Craig scions attended Havelock Ellis School, which was supported by large family grants.

  Grants too large to jeopardize.

  The cops sat in the Headmaster’s office leafing through school records to get a fix on Craig. Hair slicked back like Rudolph Valentino, the matinée idol beside Coy in the grad photograph had a world-belongs-to-me look in his hooded eyes. Lithe and muscular, he excelled at cricket, tennis, aquatics, and rowing. Well turned out, Craig preferred ties to casual clothes. “I doubt he’s done an honest day’s work in his life,” the Headmaster said.

  Craig was a natural leader among his hedonistic friends. The group always did what he wanted even if the others agreed on something else. A kinetic bundle of energy addicted to “kicks,” he was a rah-rah enthusiast who had to be top dog. On the surface, Craig was the perfect Havelock Ellis boy. “But inside he seethed with psychological turmoil,” the Headmaster said.

  “Why?” asked DeClercq.

  Philip Craig, the boy’s father, was a devout Calvinist. He punished Biblical transgressions by his son the Old Testament way. Calvinists blindly accept the supreme authority of the Scriptures and the irresistibility of divine grace. Spare the rod and spoil the child was Philip’s creed.

  Age four, young Angus came under the care of a governess. Miss Struthers, in her forties, was prim and repressed. A harsh disciplinarian, she was critical of minor faults and quick to remedy them with the bristles of a hairbrush. Ambitious in molding her silver-spoon charge, she was anxious he become “the ideal boy.” All playmates were “unworthy” of him, especially girls who were all “little tramps.”

  Miss Struthers called her live doll “Angel Face,” and in private insisted Angus call her “Sweetie.” She liked to bathe in the same tub as him, repeatedly washing his genitals so they were “spanky clean.” She encouraged Craig to rub her head to foot, then suck her toes, which were “piggies that went wee-wee-wee all the way home.” Her breasts were tipped with “strawberries” he was told to lick, and playing “doggy and pussy” was his reward for being good. This meant wrestling naked with “pussy” on all fours while “doggy” wriggled up her back … until the day Philip Craig caught them in the act.

  Threatened with never working again unless she “burned the demon lust out of the boy,” Miss Struthers tied Angus to her bed and dabbed his balls with Absorbine Junior while reading The Bible aloud. Angus didn’t speak a word for the next two years, forcing his mother to confide in the Headmaster when it was time for school. Craig boarded at Have-lock Ellis though his family lived nearby, and that was the year the Craigs’ grant to the school doubled.

  The first sign of trouble emerged in his art. Angus drew pictures of faceless women and crucifixion scenes. Then he began to steal articles that had no value to him, thrilled by knowing where the booty was hidden while its unhappy owners didn’t. When questioned about the pilfering he lied, sometimes by omitting facts, sometimes by artful misleading, sometimes by false claims. “Not once did he show any sign of guilt or fear. I felt he was destined to be a lawyer,” the Headmaster said.

  Craig was fascinated by criminals and crime. After lights out, he read by flashlight in bed: evil mastermind books like Christie’s And Then There Were None and the James Bond SPECTRE novels. Angus dubbed himself Dr. Jekyll and “Mr. Hide,” bragging he was Jack the Ripper, Billy the Kid, Al Capone, John Dillinger, “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Heath, Haigh, Christie, and the Boston Strangler all rolled into one. Above his bed hung a paperback cover torn from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Bat. Picture: a Hydelike face from the eyes up peering out a window. Blurb: He was the master criminal of all time!

  The boy had daily sessions with the guidance counselor. Asked whom he admired most, the answer was Moriarty. Asked why, he said, “Like him, I want to lead a devoted gang.” Life’s greatest pleasure was proving yourself intellectually superior to others. So adept would Craig be at planning crimes that he and his gang would escape detection by the finest sleuths. Only the gang would know his secret identity, leaving the rest of the world baffled by “Mr. Hide.” Asked why his fantasy didn’t include crimes committed alone, his answer was “Then there’d be no one to appreciate my skill.”

  “Craig’s IQ?”

  “One sixty.”

  “Fifty points below Coy’s,” DeClercq noted.

  His final year, Angus acted like he owned the school. “In a way I guess he did,” the Headmaster said. “His parents died in a plane crash in 1988, leaving him sole heir. The day he inherited, our funding stopped. That’s what forced us to turn to Asia.”

  Craig’s grad year was marked by three incidents. When one of his English essays earned a failing grade, someone called the school and asked for the instructor. On answering, the teacher was told “Drop your pants and stick the receiver up your ass.” Ten minutes later, the heckler phoned again. Informed the instructor wouldn’t take the call, he left the message “Tell him he may pull it out now.”

  Incident two involved a stripper named Brittany. The night before elections, Craig smuggled her into the senior dorm. Every boy was offered the chance to lie on the floor with a fifty-dollar bill between his teeth while Brittany squatted and picked it up with her nether lips. The next day’, Craig was elected school president.

  Incident three concerned a game of Dungeons and Dragons. As Dungeon Master, Craig controlled the roles played by the other boys. His friends were stunned when he brought Samson Coy into the game, peeved at having a geek infiltrate their clique. Craig conjured a pair of demons—“the vanguard from Hell”—which lurked about the players, threatening to possess them. Eventually the fiends chose their human hosts, and that night a junior boy was sodomized in the latrine. Afraid, he refused to finger the culprits.

  “The demons had names?” DeClercq asked.

  The Headmaster nodded. “Skull, the master demon, possessed Angus Craig. Crossbones, the slave demon, possessed Samson Coy.”

  While DeClercq and Craven were at Havelock Ellis School, Chan returned from the King of Siam to Special X. It was slippery going, thanks to the wintery storm. Waiting for him on his desk in the Computer Room was a printout from the Motor Vehicle Branch listing every Nissan 300ZX licensed in the province. The Capilano Watershed guard, according to Craven’s report, thought the owl-prowler’s plate was ZMY 353. The Seymour Watershed guard thought it started with a Z and had a Y. There was no ZMY 353 on the list.

  The Inspector checked for Samson Coy to no avail, then began to fiddle with the letters and numbers. It was dark and the car was moving when the plate was viewed, so like the Cap guard said, he may have got it wrong. But not all wrong.

  ZMY 353.

  The candidates for error were …? Z to 2?

  Forget it. Plates start with a letter. M to N?

  Possible. A common eye chart error. Y to V?

  Less likely. Both guards mentioned Y.

  3 to 8?

  Two 3s. A double candidate.

  Substituting each in turn, Chan checked the list. The only similar plate he found for a Nissan 300ZX 2+2 was ZNY 358.

  When DeClercq and Craven returned from Havelock Ellis School, Nick with several thick files under his arm, the first thing Chan said was “I found a possible match for the owl-prowler’s car. The registered owner of
ZNY 358 is Angus Craig III of Ravenscourt in Shaughnessy.”

  “Corporal,” DeClercq said to Craven. “Get a search warrant.”

  DYING MESSAGE

  Deadman’s Island

  10:20 A.M.

  The origin of the Turkish bath is lost in history, but the pleasure goes back at least two thousand years. The Turkish bath on Deadman’s Island was constructed so Craig II’s Demoniacs attending the bacchanalian orgy of the Witches’ Sabbath could, the morning after, sweat the poisons from their flesh and wash the blood from their skin. The pleasure of this Turkish bath was gone for these three men, who stared down at Devlin’s throat slit from ear to ear.

  “How?” Chandler asked.

  “Christ!” Melburn growled. “Who cares how? Who is the question. If Devlin isn’t the killer, who in hell is? You think he walked into his own trap to knowingly die like this? There’s someone else on the island. Got to be.”

  “Wynn?”

  “Uh?”

  “You okay?”

  Yates was pasty-white. He looked as if a vampire had drained him. “I’m going to piss first,” he said with a death’s door sigh.

  “You can’t. It’s a locked room. We need you, Wynn.”

  “Fuck,” Melburn cursed, kicking the door. “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” hammering the tiles. “God damn fucking fuck,” booting the bench. “The steam bath’s solid. What the fuck’s going on!”

  Chandler’s migraine had him in a vise. “Finished? Cause if you’re not, kick it again.” He thought his skull was going to crack into a hundred pieces. “The killer’s picking us off like cattle in an abattoir. He’ll use our frustration and exhaustion to his advantage. We’ve got to form a firing line to hold him at bay.”

  “We got rifles?” Melburn said.

  “No, but we’ve got minds. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three … To coordinate against him.”

  “We don’t know where to fire.”

  “How means who,” said Zinc.

  The construction of a steam bath is standard and simple. The room is self-contained and sealed with grouted tiles. Half the width is occupied by a two-tier tile bench up one wall. A large thermometer is fastened behind the top step. A floor-level hole in the opposite wall admits the steampipe from the boiler. The steampipe is capped with an oblong head perforated by tiny holes and opened with a tap. As steam cools it condenses back to water, so a floor drain removes runoff. The single door always opens out, a safety precaution in case someone feels faint. No locking devices of any kind are used.

  Foraying to the Banquet Room, the trio returned with candles, knives, and the hearth spit. Lined along the bench to give them more light, the trembling flames bottom-lit their faces so they resembled Halloween masks.

  “Your ballpark, Wynn. Where do we start?” Zinc pushed Yates’s intellect onto the playing field in hope he’d leave his qualms in the bleachers.

  “The puzzle,” said the old man. “Always start with that.”

  “You with us, Barney?”

  “Yeah,” Melburn said. He gripped the spit as if it were a Zulu assegai.

  “Watched by us, Devlin entered the bath,” Chandler said. “Seconds later, his throat was cut in the misty room. I ran in, fanned the steam, and found no killer. So where did the phantom come from? And where did he go?”

  “Clues?” said Yates. “Are there any clues?”

  “Devlin was standing when he was cut.” The Mountie indicated blood splashed neck-high on the wall above the steampipe. “Forensic techs call that a cast-off pattern. Blood’s a liquid that spills according to principles of physics. Slash a razor across a throat and the follow-through of your arm will fling blood from the blade like that. The height of the mark is the height of the cut.”

  “Was Devlin attacked from in front or behind?” Melburn asked.

  “Normally a cut throat sprays out in a mist. Block the spray by standing in front and your outline is left on the floor. By the time the vapor cleared, Devlin’s wound had re-sprayed the tiles, erasing any outline. We do know the cut ripped from the bench toward the opposite wall.”

  “Where’s the weapon?” Yates asked. “The razor or the knife? Unless the killer took it, it must be in the bath.”

  Melburn got down on his hands and knees to search the drain. Three inches in diameter, it was screwed in place. Chandler joined him, candle in hand. “The holes are too small,” Melburn said, “so it’s not in the bow of the pipe.”

  Tile by tile, they examined the floor and two-tier bench, then moved the body to search beneath. Chandler pried Devlin’s mouth open to look inside. “Unless it’s in his stomach, the weapon’s gone,” he said. “The blade cut his esophagus, so I doubt he could swallow.”

  “That eliminates suicide,” said Yates. “Devlin didn’t kill himself and posthumously leave us to deal with his traps. If the killer was in the bath, he had to get out. No one escaped by the walls or roof, so that leaves the floor.”

  Melburn struck each floor and bench tile with the spit. “No trapdoor. The base is solid,” he said.

  “The walls and roof are too thin for the killer to hide inside. But pound ‘em anyway,” the old man said.

  Melburn struck each tile with the spit, the blows producing solid thuds except above the steampipe. Floor to ceiling, he hit those tiles again, hard enough so they shattered and exposed a narrow hollow. Five inches square, the vertical cavity ran the height of the room, bisecting the bloody cast-off pattern on the wall. The niche accommodated the steampipe from the cellar, which rose from the boiler directly below, curving to end at the steamhead inches off the floor. The space above was empty, except for heat.

  “Nothing,” Melburn said. “Now what?”

  “The light.”

  The bulb was encased in a glass cover screwed to the ceiling. The screws were rusted and hadn’t been turned in years.

  “No go,” Melburn said.

  “The steamhead,” Yates suggested.

  Backed by tiles broken by the spit, the steamhead and shutoff valve were firmly attached to the pipe from the boiler.

  “Thermometer?” Yates said. But it was what it seemed: a large unbroken tube of mercury secured to the wall directly opposite the vertical hollow.

  One by one, the candles in the bath sputtered and died.

  “No killer. No weapon. Now what?” Melburn asked.

  Yates shrugged. “Damned if I know. Conjure John Dickson Carr?”

  Chandler and Melburn lugged Devlin’s corpse down to the makeshift morgue, where Cohen, Leuthard, Leech, and Smith lay in a row. They’d abandoned Holy oak and Quirk on the beach, while Bolt and Darke were locked in the snakepit upstairs.

  Nine down, six to go, Zinc thought.

  “Jesus, Wynn. What are you doing in here?” Chandler and Melburn stood at the Library door.

  “I think best surrounded by books.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “There are no traps. I checked it out. I’ve sat in here several times since we arrived. Who gets killed in a library?”

  “Colonel Mustard. With a wrench.”

  Yates cracked a squiggly smile like Charlie Brown in Peanuts. He sat in a mammoth upholstered wing chair with flanks so large they could be Dumbo’s ears. The world beyond the windows was white on white on white, anemic light leeching all color from the room, shadows stumbling upside down across the checkered ceiling. A bespectacled bookworm in bookworms’ heaven, the old man was surrounded by volumes of Twain, Tennyson, and Voltaire.

  “Devlin’s dying message? The Y he scrawled?” said Yates. “I’m the only person with Y in his name.”

  “You’re not a killer,” Zinc said. “I’ll stake my life on that.”

  “Y,” Yates repeated. “What does it mean? Was Devlin trying to tell us who the killer is?”

  “Muscle spasm may have moved his finger. Not everything in life is a puzzle a la Carr.”

  “Queen,” Yates corrected. “Ellery Queen. Dying messages were his—their—specialty.”


  “Assume it is a message,” the Mountie said. “Devlin’s throat was cut so he had little time to write. Y may be a shortcut for some longer word. Perhaps it’s a rail at God, as in ‘ Why me?’ ”

  “Did he struggle to make the sign?”

  “Yes, if it wasn’t spasm.”

  “Then Y meant something important to him.”

  “Perhaps it wasn’t Y. It could be X instead. But Devlin died before the second downstroke was completed.”

  “X marks the spot? X for the unknown?”

  “Or XX, for double cross, if he was one of two killers.”

  Like a pair of cupboards slamming shut, the wings of the wing chair snapped in on Yates’s face. Heavy iron plates masked by the upholstery whapped together as powerful springs closed their hinges. The seat of the chair was a timing device which sprung the trap when it was pressed for a set duration. Squashed between the iron plates, Wynn’s head erupted, blood, bone, and brains spewing up like Mount St. Helens.

  A cry of shock behind him caused Zinc to whirl.

  Alex, Katt, and Elvira stood at the door.

  The cry was from Elvira.

  A moment before she fainted.

  LUCIFER’S LIBRARY

  Vancouver

  11:01 A.M.

  The first cop through the door was Mad Dog Rabidowski. The name suited him.

  The Mad Dog was the meanest-looking member in The Mounted: in many ways the Lou Bolt of the Force. The son of a Yukon trapper raised in the woods, he could take the eye out of a squirrel with a .22 at 100 yards before he was six. A man of latent violence, he lived to kill: hunting grizzly bears at Kakwa River, packs of wolves near Tweedsmuir Park, elk on Pink Mountain, and punks with the ERT. There was a time when people said he looked like Charles Bronson—a comment he welcomed before Bronson went soft—but now he aped the screen presence of Harvey Keitel. The Mad Dog made a point of only dating whores, for as he put it, “Why mess with amateurs if you can blow with a pro?” The Mad Dog was the Mountie DeClercq sicked on barbarians so he could follow with the Charter of Rights and Marquis of Queensberry Rules. The best that could be said for having the Mad Dog on your side was then you could be sure he wasn’t on the other.