City of Silence (City of Mystery)

by Kim Wright

  The depth of the Queen’s skepticism toward marriage would have shocked the vast majority of her subjects, for her own union with Prince Albert had been a resoundingly successful one. But Victoria knew that she had been lucky, perhaps singularly so; love matches between royals were rare and happy families even rarer. Marriage was a lottery, a gamble that rarely paid off for either gender, but while a bad match could damage a man, it would destroy a woman altogether. The Queen had never attended a wedding without a pit of dread in her stomach, the sense that the spinning wheel of fate could come to rest on disaster just as easily as providence.

  Alix had now leaned back against the trunk of the tree which shaded her, had turned a page of her book, and was frowning intently at its successor. How abstracted she is, the Queen thought. She not only reads, she reads too much. She has the character of a nun, if indeed Lutherans had nuns, and it would be especially intolerable to see this delicate girl cast willy-nilly into the dark pit of marriage, most specifically marriage to a Russian, potentially the deepest pit of all. Ella’s letters were contrived to be amusing, but the Queen had seen the truth behind her droll descriptions of life at court. The imperial family did not fully accept her. Serge was proving cool and distant, not as careful to steer his wife socially through these strange new surroundings as he should have been. The Russians were self-impressed. The very word ”tsar” was derived from ”Caesar” and they considered themselves descendents of gods, placing their crowns on their own heads at their coronations, since they claimed to accept no human authority over their reigns, not even that of a priest or a bishop.

  Arrogant they were - arrogant and barbarous, a bad combination in a race of people. If they had cherished Ella, that would have been one thing, but she had written that the tsar had greeted her as “a minor princess from a minor German principality,” a phrase that made Victoria’s skin prickle. If Alexander III did not deem Ella a fit consort for his brother, it was highly doubtful he would consider Alix good enough for his son. Victoria’s head reeled at the thought that there was somewhere on earth a man presumptuous enough to mock the lineage of the British throne, a man who honestly believed his boys were too fine to marry her girls, a country where even the highest English princess would be expected to curtsy to the lowest Russian empress.

  Of course Ella wanted her sister at her side, an ally and a friend. And it was easy enough to understand Alix’s attachment to Nicky. Any sixteen year old boy could manage to dazzle any twelve year old girl, and besides, even the Queen had to admit that Nicky was a remarkably handsome young man. Everyone agreed that he was furthermore kind and gentle, with the Princess of Wales, his maternal aunt, going so far as to confide to the Queen that the young tsesarevich was “sweet.”

  Sweet. A strange term for a man who would shortly rule one-sixth of the globe.

  So the boy was handsome and sweet and wealthy beyond imaging and he and Alix had now indulged their special friendship for nearly a quarter of their lives. This would not be an easy courtship to disrupt. But the Queen knew she had a powerful ally, for the tsar did not want this match any more than she did. And while the nickname “Sunny” no longer suited Alix, the tsar’s nickname of “the bear” most certainly captured the essence of Alexander III. The man was a clumsy beast, but Victoria was certain that if the Queen of England and the Tsar of Russia aligned forces they could manage to thwart a half-imagined romance between two over-sheltered children. Someone had to save Alix and Nicky from themselves.

  Alix had now closed her book and pushed to her feet. She was slowly walking up the lawn in the direction where her grandmother waited and Victoria beckoned to the girl to approach.

  “We shall go to St. Petersburg,” she told her.

  A wave of pure joy washed across the Alix’s face, lighting her large grey-blue eyes and instantly transforming her from pretty to beautiful. So complete was the girl’s delight that for a moment she failed to notice the killing pronoun. Then she blinked and said “We?”

  “Yes,” said the Queen. “I too desire the chance to visit our Ella.”

  Alix continued to slowly blink, two emotions in clear conflict on her face as she fought to reconcile the welcome news that she would finally see Nicky again with the far less welcome news that she would be accompanied on this romantic journey by the greatest bloodhound in all of Europe.

  “Write Ella and tell her we shall arrive by ship,” the Queen said, before adding, with an indulgent smile, “and perhaps you should write anyone else you think might wish to know this news as well.”

  “Granny,” Alix whispered. “Dearest Granny.” She bent to kiss the Queen’s cheek, which was slack with the years and crusted with a heavy dusting of violet powder. “I’ll sign it ‘Alexandra,’” she added, pulling back with a mischievous tilt of the head. “He always calls me by my Russian name, you know.” And then she sprinted up the lawn toward the palace like a gleeful young fawn.

  Victoria waited a minute to make sure the girl was out of earshot before signaling to one of her guards, a man standing unobtrusively to the side.

  “Send an order to Scotland Yard,” she said. “We wish an audience with a detective there. Trevor Welles.” The man nodded and disappeared up the same hill, as swiftly although perhaps not as enthusiastically as Alix.

  Victoria did not particularly care for travel, but it seemed there was little else to be done. If Alix must go to Russia, then the Queen must go with her - but Victoria had no intention of sailing through the Baltic unprotected. Nor to take up residence in that ghastly city of St. Petersburg where it seemed that the Russians served up murders at approximately the same intervals that the British served tea. Trevor was a discreet and practical man. He would come with them. He knew his duty.

  The Queen sat back in her chair with a sigh and closed her eyes. Alexandra indeed.

  They would certainly see about that.

  Chapter Two

  London – Geraldine Bainbridge’s Home in Mayfair

  11:22 PM

  “I’m not entirely sure what the term ‘criminal profiling’ even means,” Emma said, spooning the last bite of pear tart into her mouth.

  “No one is entirely sure,” Trevor said with a rueful laugh. “But I’ve been assured that the technique will play a pivotal role in the future of forensics.” He had finished his own pear tart a full half hour earlier and now found Emma’s slow savoring of the dessert to be a type of torment - partly because Trevor Welles liked confections, but largely because Trevor liked the girl. The combination of Emma’s mouth, the spoon, and the rounded golden arc of the pears had proven so visually distracting that Trevor was having trouble concentrating on this latest meeting of the Tuesday Night Murder Games Club. Which was a definite problem, considering that he was the one in charge.

  Despite the name, the group did not always manage to meet on a Tuesday, and the choice of the word “games” was intended ironically, at least in light of the appalling particulars surrounding much of their work. But the club did always congregate around this particular table, a long walnut affair in the fashionable home of Trevor’s friend and patron, Geraldine Bainbridge.

  Geraldine’s endless supply of good food and wine was only one of the advantages of taking their games outside the confines of Scotland Yard. While three members of the club were police officers and official members of the Yard’s fledgling forensics team, the other three were not. There was Trevor himself, then Rayley Abrams, also a detective and recently returned from a sabbatical spent studying with the Parisian police. The trip had been both an unofficial admission that the French were ahead of the British in terms of forensics and was also intended as a bit of a consolation price; the previous November, it had been Trevor, not Rayley, who had been named Chief Detective in the case of Jack the Ripper. Trevor’s rise and Rayley’s fall had been painfully arbitrary. The Ripper had at one point ranted against the Jews and Rayley was Jewish, a coincidence which had made their superiors uneasy. Ergo, Trevor had been awarded the plum post and
Rayley had been packed off to Paris, where he had managed to get himself involved in a case which ultimately proved as complex as that of the Ripper.

  At least in Paris they had gotten their man. Armand Delacroix had been convicted and executed with a sort of emotionless efficiency one rarely associated with the French. But Rayley had nearly lost both his life and his sanity in the course of the investigation, and he still bore evidence of the strain. His hands revealed the slightest of tremors as he adjusted his spectacles and looked down at the papers in his lap. Initially Trevor had wondered if having two full detectives on the forensics team would lead to conflict or an unclear chain of command, but now Trevor was beginning to think his worries had flowed in the wrong direction. Rayley had been uncharacteristically deferential and unsure of himself since his return, proving that the events in Paris had shaken him to the very core.

  The third official member of the team was bobby Davy Mabrey, who had also first come to Trevor’s attention during the Ripper case. It had been Davy’s great misfortune - or fortune, depending upon how one looked at it –to discover both bodies on the night of the infamous double murders. But there wasn’t much of an art to merely finding bodies, especially when they happened to be lying in the middle of the street. What had truly impressed Trevor had been Davy’s ability, even when surrounded by a hysterical East End mob, to keep the crime scene pristine. Only a handful of Scotland Yard detectives and inspectors truly grasped the significance of forensics, so discovering a bobby with a natural instinct to preserve physical evidence had been a great gift. Trevor had immediately made Davy his assistant and the lad had been at his side ever since. Davy had further solidified Trevor’s estimation with his ability to draw remarkable levels of detail from witnesses and victims alike. That class of Londoners who might have been intimidated by the likes of Trevor and Rayley had no problem telling their tales to a working class bobby, who stood no higher than a schoolboy and whose wide eyes and rosy cheeks made him appear far younger than his twenty-one years.

  “Shall we open another bottle of wine?” Tom asked.

  “Of course,” said Trevor, wryly noting that the corkscrew had already been in Tom’s hand when he paused to ask.

  If Scotland Yard provided half of the members of the Tuesday Night Club, then this elegant home in Mayfair provided the other half. The unofficial members of the team included Geraldine’s grand-nephew Tom, who was within a year of finishing his medical training. This fact always made Trevor wince a bit, since Tom had likewise been within a year of finishing on the day they’d met, and Trevor knew he was largely to blame for this extended hiatus. Trevor’s ultimate hope was that Tom would join them on a permanent basis as the forensic unit’s designated coroner, but even acting in his present volunteer capacity took so much of Tom’s time that it was uncertain when, if ever, he would return to the ivied walls of Cambridge. The truth of the matter was that they needed him. Tom was energetic and practical and free thinking, while the brotherhood of coroners at the Yard suffered from many of the same limitations as the officers. They seemed to find only what they expected to find. In public Trevor was constantly encouraging them to consider things from a different angle. In private he considered them antiquated, arrogant, and slow.

  And that was on a good day.

  The final two chairs at the table were occupied by women: their hostess, socialite Geraldine Bainbridge and Emma Kelly, who was Geraldine’s paid companion and sister to the Ripper’s last known victim. Emma’s original position on the team was as a translator, since her father had been a schoolteacher and Emma was fluent in three languages. But as fate would have it, she had also proven fluent in the language of crime scenes. The girl was about the same age as Tom and Davy and hardly looked like anyone’s notion of a detective. Petite and pale, with red hair and blue eyes which confirmed the Irish roots her surname implied, Emma had illustrated her worth beyond question during their week in Paris. Her standing in the group was rising, although probably not quickly enough to suit her.

  Finally, Geraldine. Trevor supposed it was stretching the truth to consider the elderly heiress part of the team at all, but Geraldine had managed to somehow insinuate herself into the heart of the action. Part of it was that they met at Geraldine’s house, so her presence at this table each Tuesday was a given. They could scarcely shoo her from her own parlor when the games began.

  And then there was also the fact that Geraldine had, in her own words, “great piles of money” and she never hesitated to offer financial support to organizations which interested her, no matter how far-fetched or unsuitably liberal her social set might deem these causes to be. Luckily for Trevor, her present interest appeared to be the elevation of the forensics unit in the eyes of Scotland Yard. It was likewise beyond dispute that Geraldine’s vast social network and instinctive ear for gossip had proven valuable in the past and likely would again. Gerry seemed to know everyone in London and half the souls on the continent as well, and detection, Trevor was beginning to understand, was often as dependent upon whom one knew as it was on what one knew. Besides, beneath Gerry’s garishly colored gowns and feather-plumed hats, existed the cunning of a jackal and the heart of a lion. Although she had left her seventieth birthday behind her some years back and her waistline announced her fondness for pastries and creams, Gerry was in many ways the most formidable of them all.

  They were a bizarre group in every measurable way, as Trevor was quick to concede. Around this table sat male and female, young and old, Jew and Catholic, aristocrat and working class, professional detective and amateur sleuth. But he would not have traded their collective talents for those of any unit at the Yard.

  The Tuesday Night Murder Games had started out as a lark. They would all meet at Geraldine’s house where her butler and cook, a hulking but tenderhearted man named Gage, would prepare an invariably delightful meal which they washed down with vast quantities of wines from Geraldine’s cellar. After dinner, Trevor would present them with a puzzle. Generally there would be a simulated crime scene with actual physical clues which Trevor had painstakingly reproduced from the files of real cases. Blood splatter, footprints, weapon identification, the lingering traces of poison, fingerprints…. through the last six months their merry little band had tested and discussed them all.

  Tonight, however, the challenge at hand was of a different kind. After Gage had carted away the remains of their capons, cheese soufflés, and carrot soup and the carafe of claret was nearly empty, they had all settled back in their chairs and waited for Trevor to begin. But when he had announced their subject du jour to be criminal profiling, quizzical frowns had gone up all around.

  “The idea is just this,” Trevor explained. “It is quite possible that evidence left behind at a crime scene can tell us not merely physical information about the perpetrator, but things about his character as well. There are two forms of profiling - psychological and geographic. The first will shed light on the personality of the particular criminal we seek and the second will give us clues as to the circumstances of his life. How well he is educated, for example, whether he lives alone or is married, little habituated behaviors such as what he eats for breakfast or the route he takes to work.”

  The frowns remained.

  “As a tool, profiling helps in several ways,” Rayley added, so smoothly that Trevor wondered if he had sneaked a peek at Trevor’s notes in anticipation of the meeting. “In an individual case, yes, just as Trevor says, it might give us additional information about the specific criminal we are seeking. But the psychologists who are pursuing this particular avenue of forensics also speculate that if they interview multiple men who have all committed the same type of crimes they will find similarities in their personalities or the early events of their lives. Thus the use of the word ‘profile.’ If we know what sort of man is most likely to commit what sort of crime, this information can help us focus our search at the beginning of an investigation.”

  “But who needs such – and I use the word
loosely - science when you have common sense?” Tom asked drily, leaning back in his seat and crossing his legs. With his well-tailored jacket and artfully-mussed blond hair he looked the perfect prototype of what he was – the indulged youngest son from a family of means. “Let’s see,” he added, “what sort of man is most likely to steal something? Might it be a poor man?”

  “Rich men steal too,” Emma said, even more drily. “Perhaps they don’t pocket an apple from the greengrocer on the corner but they might embezzle from their employer or finagle an inheritance at the expense of a sibling. We all have known people who have remained honest even in the face of the most appalling need and others who have felt entitled to more even while they sat in the lap of luxury. The difference isn’t measureable in a person’s level of wealth. It has to be psychological.”

  “Well stated, Emma. And some of you will remember that we employed a version of this technique with the Ripper,” Trevor said, “although our approach was less detailed and specific than what the latest papers on profiling have suggested. We concluded he was educated, that he had medical training, and that he was able to function well enough in society that no one would deem him a threat.”

  There was the same small painful beat that there always seemed to be whenever the Ripper was mentioned, but Emma remained motionless and after a split second, Trevor continued. “If we had interviewed a dozen men who had also assaulted women, especially men who targeted prostitutes, we might have been able to draw our portrait with more detail.”