A Christmas Odyssey

by Anne Perry

  Henry patted him on the shoulder. “Your turn,” he said cheerfully. “I think we had better fortify ourselves with as good a meal as we can find first. It’s going to be a long night.”

  As it turned out it was two long nights and many wasted attempts before they found the right place—a small, very discreet club where an excellent champagne flowed and both men and women made their availability startlingly plain. There seemed to be endless doors to side rooms, curtains, laughter, farther doors beyond with locks. People wore all kinds of costumes. Some were colorful, even picturesque, borrowed from history or imagination. Others were merely obscene. In some cases it was easy to be deceived as to whether the wearer was male or female. Some appeared to have bosoms and yet also wore large and very suggestive codpieces.

  Almost every distortion of appetite was catered to. Two or even three men together was illegal, but commonplace enough here. A near-naked hermaphrodite, clearly possessing rudimentary organs of both sexes, turned even Squeaky’s stomach.

  A slim, pale boy offered himself for sexual asphyxiation, and Henry averted his eyes, his face white. Squeaky wondered how long it would be before someone lost control and the boy ended up dead.

  “Would you fancy something to eat, gentlemen?” another young man asked. “What’s your pleasure, sirs? Oysters to spark the appetite a little? Champagne? Chocolate, perhaps? Soft, dark chocolate to lick off a woman’s body?” He giggled. “Or a man’s if you prefer? Got a nice young boy that nature was generous to …”

  For once Henry was lost for a reply.

  Crow shook his head.

  “We’ll find our own!” Squeaky snapped, surprised to hear how hoarse his voice was. “Don’t worry—we’ll pay.”

  The man swiveled on his heel and went off in a pettish temper.

  Squeaky looked at Henry’s too-evident distress.

  “Take that look off your face!” he hissed, digging his elbow sharply into Henry’s ribs. “Yer look like you just bit into a rotten egg.”

  “I feel like it,” Henry said, gasping and coughing. “What in God’s name has happened to these people?”

  “How the hell do I know? Look, I never dealt in this kind of thing!” He was indignant now. Did Henry really think this was commonplace to him? “What kind of a …”

  Henry shook his head. “The question was rhetorical.”

  “What?” Squeaky was hurt.

  “A question that does not expect an answer,” Henry explained. “I don’t really imagine that you know, any more than I do, what creates this out of people who must once have been … normal.”

  “Oh.” Squeaky was relieved. A heavy, stifling weight had been lifted from him.

  He was straightening his jacket and beginning to look around him when he saw her. She was standing almost ten feet away from them, leaning slightly backward against one of the pillars that held up the ceiling. It was not her laughter that had caught his attention, or any movement of the man facing her, it was the extraordinary grace of her body. Her face was lifted to look at the man, her profile delicate, her long white throat smoothly curved. Her hair was jet-black and her lips artificially red. She was the only person in the noisy, hysterical room who was absolutely motionless. And yet her very stillness was more alive than any action of the rest of them. It was Sadie. It had to be. Which meant Rosa was dead—or Niccolo.

  “Crow!” he hissed urgently. “Crow!”

  Henry looked at him, then turned to Crow, touching him on the arm.

  Crow swung around, then froze. His eyes widened.

  “Go on,” Henry urged. “Now.”

  “But she’s …” Crow protested.

  “We’ve got no time to waste,” Henry told him. “Do it now, or I’ll have to.”

  Crow hesitated.

  Squeaky moved behind him and gave him a hard shove in the middle of his back.

  Crow shot forward with a yelp and stopped a yard short of Sadie.

  She looked at him, smiling with amusement. “That’s original—even inventive.” She looked him up and down, quite openly appraising him.

  The young man she had been speaking to snatched Crow’s arm hot-temperedly and said something almost unintelligible to Squeaky, who was watching.

  Henry was clearly anxious. He started to intervene.

  “No!” Squeaky said sharply. “Leave him!”

  Crow gave the young man a dazzling smile, all white teeth and wide-open eyes. Then he kicked him very hard in one shin. The young man howled with anger and surprise. Crow seized Sadie and marched her away to a moderately empty space hard up against the wall.

  Henry and Squeaky followed almost on her heels.

  “They’re my friends,” Crow explained simply. “We need to talk to you,” he added.

  “You’re Sadie?”

  She nodded.

  Sadie was amused. Crow was unusual-looking—not unattractive, just eccentric. Perhaps that appealed to Sadie more than the typical spoiled and demanding sort of young man who frequented such places. Also, he was sober and did not have the faded, rather pasty look of so many of the other inhabitants of the night world of the West End.

  Sadie raised her elegant eyebrows. “Really? About what?”

  “About Lucien Wentworth,” Henry replied.

  Sadie’s smile froze.

  Squeaky moved around to stand closer to her to block her retreat. At this particular moment the dim lighting of the room was an advantage; even the crowding helped. They could hear from the distance cries and moans of all sorts, raw farmyard emotions under the gaudy paint of sophistication.

  “He’s … dead,” she said, her voice faltering.

  “No, he isn’t, any more than you are,” Squeaky snapped. “It was Niccolo or Rosa who was murdered, and you know that. Maybe both. Lot of blood on the ground. Who was it, Sadie, and why?”

  She kept her face toward Henry, as if he were the one most likely to believe her lies. “I don’t know. I didn’t kill anyone.”

  “You may not have held the knife,” Henry agreed. “But you sharpened it, and gave it to someone. Who? And why?”

  She swallowed. The pallor of her skin was almost ghostly in the subterranean light. Her eyes were brilliant, very wide, with black lashes. There was a feline grace to the way she held her body. Her beauty was strangely disturbing, but there was something ephemeral about it.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” she said angrily. “If somebody’s dead, it’s nothing to do with me.”

  “That’s a clumsy lie,” Henry told her. “You don’t survive here not knowing who’s been murdered, and why. If it was Niccolo, then you’ve lost a lover. If it was Rosa, then it could be you next.”

  She stared at him with venom naked in her eyes. “You bastard!” she said between clenched teeth. “You touch me and I’ll make you pay for it in ways you can’t even imagine. You’ll wish someone would put a knife to your throat—quickly!”

  “Is that what it was?” Henry asked, his expression barely changing. “Revenge? Discipline for taking something that belonged to you, perhaps?”

  She looked harder at his face, and saw in it something she did not recognize. Perhaps it stirred in her a memory of some better time.

  “I didn’t kill anyone,” she said, still between her teeth, but more slowly, as if she was now afraid.

  “But you know who did, because you led them to it, didn’t you?”

  She shook her head and made short, jerky movements of denial with her hands.

  “I couldn’t help it! I have to do what he tells me, or … or he won’t give me any more cocaine, and I’ll die.” Something in her hectic eyes brought back to Squeaky’s memory the first brothel he had ever been in. He had been almost six, taken there by his mother, told to start work on cleaning up behind the customers, sweeping, washing, always being polite to people. “They put the bread on your plate,” she had told him. “Don’t you ever forget that, boy.”

  There had been a young girl there then, for her first time.
He could recall the smell of sweat and blood and fear, no matter how hard he tried to forget it. And he had tried. He had filled his mind with a thousand other things: his own pleasures in women, some of whom he had even liked, victories won over men he hated, good food, good wine, warmth, the touch of silk. But he could still smell that fear sometimes, alone in the middle of the night.

  “Then you’ll lead us to him now,” Henry said to Sadie, his voice breaking the spell in Squeaky’s head and forcing him back to the present.

  “He won’t help you. Leave him alone.”

  Crow moved slightly. Squeaky saw the distress in his face, which was composed of embarrassment, revulsion, and an anger within himself that he could do nothing to control.

  “I don’t believe it’s got anything to do with Shadwell,” Crow said deliberately. “You killed Rosa and Niccolo. I don’t know how. Maybe you killed Niccolo first. You could have held him in your arms, and put a knife in his back, then cut his throat. You lured Rosa there, and when she was stunned at what she saw, you used the knife again. Perhaps she bent over Niccolo’s body, maybe weeping. It wouldn’t be hard for you to come at her from behind. One single slice from one ear—”

  “I didn’t!” Sadie cried, lunging forward as if to scratch at his face, everything in her changing from the pleading to the attack.

  Squeaky grabbed her, pinning her arms to her sides. She struggled, and she had the strength of desperation. He kicked her hard and her legs collapsed under her, pitching her forward.

  Henry was startled and profoundly disconcerted. He bent forward to help her up. “I think you had better take me to Shadwell,” he said clearly. “See what he has to say about it.”

  She surrendered with startling suddenness, as if all her strength had bled away.

  Squeaky knew better than to trust her this time. He stood well back, watching, ready to move quickly if she changed her mind.

  “I’ll take you,” she said, and turned and led them out of the hall, then along one passage after another, and down several flights of steps. It was damp and bitingly cold. The air smelled stale, and there was something on the walls that could have been mold.

  Then Sadie seemed to change her mind. Almost doubling back on herself, she climbed a long, narrow flight of stairs upward.

  “Where the devil are we going?” Squeaky demanded as they came outside into the night and followed her across a lantern-lit, freezing yard. The wind groaned in the eaves of the high buildings crowding around the small space. There were icicles hanging from broken gutters, and a rat scrabbled its way, burrowing among the discarded refuse for food.

  Sadie avoided a wide door that looked as if it might have led to a tavern, and instead went to a narrow, poky opening between one stone wall and another. She turned sideways to get through the opening, and for a moment Squeaky was afraid she had escaped them.

  He pushed his way through ahead of Henry and Crow. He felt in his pocket for his knife in case he should need it as soon as he emerged.

  But there was only Sadie waiting for him. As soon as she saw him she started to walk away, knowing he would follow her. He looked at the pale gleam of her skin above her dress and wondered how she didn’t perish with the cold. Then an uglier thought occurred to him: Perhaps, in all senses that mattered, she was in a way dead already. He had seen a despair in her eyes that made that easy to believe.

  Were they fools to follow her into this deeper hell than the wild self-indulgence they had already seen? How could he persuade Henry Rathbone not to go with her, when they seemed so close to finding Shadwell, and perhaps enough of the truth to convince Lucien to come back into the warm, breathing world and pay whatever it would cost him to go home again?

  Squeaky was disgusted with himself that he liked Henry so much. What use was liking someone? It only ever got you into trouble. And if he imagined that they would like him in return, then he was stupider than the most idiotic drunkard in the halls and taverns they had just left. When this was over, Henry Rathbone would go back to his safe, clean house on Primrose Hill, and Squeaky would go back to keeping the books for Hester in the clinic on Portpool Lane. It would be surprising if they ever met again. Squeaky would have sacrificed his own internal comfort for nothing at all.

  At the far end of the alley Sadie led them into another open patch where there was a narrow, scarred door. She pulled a key from around her neck and opened the lock, closing it behind them again when they were inside.

  Here a wider stair led down into a labyrinth. They heard laughter, the drip and gurgle of water, and voices that echoed along the tunnels through which she walked as surely as if the way were marked before her.

  Squeaky tried at first to keep track of where they were going—left or right, up or down—but after a quarter of an hour he knew he was lost. He was not even sure how far below the surface they were. He began to feel steadily worse about the whole thing. What had happened to the sense that usually warned him of danger? Except that he knew perfectly well what had happened to it: He had let it slip away from him because he was a fool, wanting to be liked.

  He caught up with Sadie and grasped her arm.

  She stopped abruptly.

  “Where are we?” he demanded. “You’ve taken us round in circles! Where’s Shadwell, then?” He held her hard, deliberately pinching the flesh of her arm.

  She did not pull away, as if she barely felt it. “Not far,” she answered. “I’ll show you where he is, then I’ll …”

  There was the noise of a door slamming not far from them, and then soft laughter.

  Squeaky froze. He swore vehemently under his breath, then looked across at Crow a yard away from him. Even in the half-light he could see the fear in his face. Beyond him, Henry was little more than a shadow.

  Sadie turned to Crow. “He knows we’re here,” she whispered. “I thought I would trick him coming this way, but he still knows. We’ve got to get out. Come back another time.”

  “What does he do down here?” Squeaky demanded.

  “We’re not that far down,” Sadie replied. She was shivering. “Tell me where you want to go and I’ll take you there. You can come back for Shadwell any time.” She took the key off the chain around her neck and passed it to him. Her sea-blue eyes were almost luminous in the gleam. “Where do you want to get out?”

  Crow named an alley. It was quarter of a mile from the room where they had left Lucien and Bessie, but a tortuous and half-hidden route.

  Sadie nodded. “Follow me.” There was urgency in her voice now, and an edge of fear that had not been there before. “It isn’t very far.”

  They obeyed. Squeaky glanced at Crow and knew that he would be trying to remember it as well.

  She had not lied to them. It was perhaps twenty minutes later when they stood outside in the alley. The wind had dropped, and the fog was thick, so that it lay in a blanket over the roofs and trailed long, white fingers of blindness in the streets.

  They parted from Sadie, and she was lost to their sight within moments. Crow crept forward, leading the way. He knew it well enough, even in this sightless condition.

  Lucien and Bessie were waiting for them. Lucien was sitting up now and had a little color in his face.

  “D’yer find ’im?” Bessie asked eagerly. She sat on the floor close to Lucien. There were several pieces of bread on an old newspaper, and the stove was still just alight. She gave them each a portion of bread, taking the smallest for herself. There was cheese also, but she gave all of it to Lucien. Squeaky wondered how many women she had seen do that for those they cared for, saying nothing of it, pretending they had already eaten their share.

  “We know where he is,” Henry told her.

  Squeaky was less sure, but he chose not to argue.

  Henry recounted to Lucien their finding of Sadie, and her story that she had had no part in killing either Rosa or Niccolo.

  Squeaky watched Lucien’s face, judging whether he knew all this: if it were lies, or the truth.

  “O
h, just tell my father you couldn’t find me,” Lucien said to Henry. “For the person he wants you to find, that’s true enough. You won’t be lying.”

  “Yes ’e would,” Bessie spoke suddenly. “ ’Cause you’re lyin’.” She looked at Henry. “Did ’is Pa say as ’e ’ad ter be a certain kind o’ person, or did ’e just say ’is son?”

  “He just said his son,” Henry replied. He looked again at Lucien. “I did not imagine it would be easy for you. You do not simply walk away from people such as these. And before you leave, you have to prove that you did not kill Niccolo, or Rosa. You have to prove it to the people who cared for them, and you have to prove it to us. If you don’t, it is going to haunt you for the rest of your life, quite possibly in the very unpleasant form of someone coming after you. Surely you are not foolish enough to imagine that going back to your home would put you beyond their reach?”

  “No,” Lucien agreed. “There is no such place of safety. There is always somebody who can be bought, whether for simple money, or from hunger of one sort or another—or out of fear.”

  Bessie was looking at him, chewing her lower lip, waiting to see what he would do.

  “They don’t know where you are,” Squeaky put in. “We’ll go and find him tomorrow.”

  Lucien hitched himself up on his elbow.

  “Not you,” Squeaky told him sharply. “You’re not well enough. You’ll just get in the way.”

  “But …”

  “You’ll stay here with Bessie. We haven’t got time to be looking out for you. Do as you’re told, unless you want me to set that wound of yours back a few days?”

  Lucien met his eyes steadily for several seconds, then lowered his gaze and lay back again.

  Bessie kept looking at Squeaky, trying to work out in her mind what he meant, and if he would really have hurt Lucien again. Squeaky turned away. He did not want to know what answer she reached.

  A few hours later Henry, Crow, and Squeaky set out again, this time to find Shadwell without Sadie’s help—or presence to warn him. Bessie and Lucien were both asleep, and they did not disturb them. There was really no need.