1888
Page 4
Another officer walked in and sat down heavily at the desk beside her. He had a young face, his cheeks flushed, and his hair mussed like he had just woken up. From the smell of his tatty, old Victorian clothes, he’d been sleeping rough.
‘Baxter,’ greeted the cocky one opposite, giving up on his pretence of working. ‘When have you been?’
‘Sherlock sent me to the lodging house. You ever had to try sleeping standing up?’
The other officer grimaced. ‘Against the rope?’
Baxter nodded.
‘Why would they do that?’ interrupted Maddox.
Baxter pulled off the threadbare coat and fingerless gloves. ‘Because they could pack more in. For two pennies you get to have a roof over your head, better than being out on the street.’
‘Did you see Mary?’
Baxter sighed. ‘She wasn’t in a good way.’
* * *
‘Baxter!’ barked Sabien through the open door as Avery left.
The officer snapped to attention and hurried towards the inspector’s office.
‘Maddox you may as well hear this too,’ Sabien added.
She rose slowly, not giving Sabien the benefit of looking too keen to jump at his command. Picking up her notebook she sauntered over to his office, knowing full well that the men were staring at her backside all the way to the door.
Sabien looked flustered, whatever the discussion had been with his boss it obviously hadn’t gone well.
‘Close the door,’ he said sullenly, his face like thunder.
* * *
‘We’ve had another confirmed murder, same MO as Nichols,’ he began, once Baxter had shut the door. ‘The chief inspector has been advised by the Copernicans to consider this a serial investigation.’
Baxter sucked air in through his teeth.
‘Who was the second victim?’ asked Maddox.
Sabien opened the file on his desk. ‘Annie Chapman.’
There were grainy, sepia-toned photos in the folder, pictures of a woman’s brutalised body. ‘Protocol requires us to take certain measures in the case of a serial,’ he added.
Maddox nodded, she knew the rules as well as anyone. A Copernican team would be assigned to the investigation, which meant everything would slow down, bureaucracy and red-tape would hamper their every step. The consequence of stopping the killer would have to be considered and calculated to the nth degree. She could see why Sabien would be so annoyed.
‘That’s not all,’ he growled. ‘Avery is asking for a volunteer. Someone to go in undercover.’
Baxter groaned. ‘I’ve only just got back!’
‘And I look forward to reading your report, but it’s not you he wants to go in.’
Maddox’s eyes widened. ‘Do I get to play a tart?’
Sabien shook his head. ‘No, you’re not ready. I told him we’ll do it my way, or not at all.’
‘I could do it,’ Maddox insisted. ‘Baxter can keep an eye on me.’
‘Not on my watch. It’s too dangerous.’
He pushed the report over towards her. ‘Prepare the mission brief, we’re going in within the next two hours — together.’
14
Annie
[29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. Date: September 8, 1888]
Annie Chapman’s body was discovered just before six in the morning. She was found lying in the back yard of a lodging house. Unlike Nichols, Annie’s legs were drawn up with her feet planted on the cobblestones. Her swollen tongue protruded slightly through her teeth which Sabien considered to be a potential sign of asphyxiation.
Just as with Mary, there was a jagged incision that ran around her throat, severing all of the major blood vessels. She’d also been disembowelled — although this time the killer had thrown her intestines over her shoulders.
He noticed there was no blood trail, indicating she had been killed where she lay. There were no obvious signs of a struggle either, which he assumed was because the assailant had knocked her out and then gone to work on her prostrate body with a manic surgical ferocity.
Sabien checked his tachyon. There were less than five minutes before one of the residents, a porter named John Davis, would find her. His eye was drawn to a series of blood stains on the wooden paling, consistent with a head wound, but without examining the body closely he couldn’t be sure that a blow to the head had not been the cause of death.
His eyes scoured the rest of the yard. It was empty except for the outhouse and the coal bunker. It was a dreary place to die, but a perfect place for a murder.
Lying on the floor beside her were two pills and a torn piece of an envelope. Taking off one of his gloves, Sabien knelt down beside her and used the light from his tachyon.
He recognised the crest of the Sussex Regiment on the paper and its short history unfurled as he touched it. The envelope had come from her lodging house, and she had taken it to hold her medicine.
There was nothing that he could use to trace the killer, without using her body. He placed his hand on her dress, careful to avoid the blood stains, and closed his eyes.
* * *
When he was a teenager, Sabien discovered he had a talent for ‘reading’ things. It had started with his father, or rather the presents that his father would bring home for his mother. Small mementos, mostly jewellery, that would be casually dropped on to the breakfast table when he came home from the night shift. He was a taxi driver in Ulster during the Troubles of the 1970s. While other kids were worrying about the British Army and the UDF, Sabien was trying to come to terms with the idea that his father might be a serial killer.
The trinkets that his father brought home had terrible histories. At first, he thought they were visions sent to him by God. His mother was a very religious woman, and their house was a shrine to the Virgin Mary and a whole host of angels. There was hardly an inch of his home that was not watched over by Christ or one of the saints. He had even been named after one of them; Michael, the leader of Heaven’s army. Although he preferred the other title, the Angel of Death, because the visions he saw when he touched the gifts were of women dying at the hands of his father.
It was a terrible burden, that for a while he believed was a fault in himself, that his own wicked thoughts were conjuring these horrible dreams. He began to wear gloves in the house, which his mother ignored, but drove his father to distraction. The man had a temper, one that worsened with drink and only seemed to dissipate after he brought home another treasure.
The drinking worsened, until Sabien noticed bruises on his mother’s arms. She began to make excuses about walking into furniture or gateposts, but when Sabien took off his gloves and touched her yellowing cheek he felt the blow of his father’s fist as if he had been hit himself.
It took him another year before he finally gathered the courage to do something about it.
Behind their house was a forest, an ancient one, full of hoary old oaks and twisted yews. As a child he had spent many long hours climbing amongst their branches. Then later, as a way to escape the visions, he would wander among them, ‘reading’ their long and complex chronologies. He soon realised that he could move into the past using their histories, hundreds of years slipped away in a heart beat and with it the torment of his normal life.
Once he found he could travel back in time, Sabien began to wonder if he could change the past and save all those women from the wrath of his father.
The first time he learned that there were others like him was the day he shot his dad. It was in a clearing in the woods, four years before the murders had started.
The Protectorate officer stood and watched him, no judgement, no attempt to stop the execution. When it was done, he offered Sabien a job and so began his career in the temporal justice department.
* * *
As he wove back through Annie’s recent past, he found she had met someone. He couldn’t see who, it was dark, but he could hear voices. Half-spoken words, fragments of a conversation, but nothing he could use. The
murderer was clever enough not to leave any trace of himself, but it was clearly the same M.O.
It could only be a man, the savagery was too brutal, too misogynistic to have been a woman. This was a beast, one who walked among them like any other, but who was obviously quite insane.
15
Devolution
[Royal Society, London. Date: 1870]
The lecture theatre was less than half full. The gathering of respected men of science and natural philosophy were talking among themselves, many discussing the pamphlet they had been given at the door entitled: ‘The Theory of Devolution.’
Darwin had turned down the invitation, which was unsurprising, he was too ill to travel these days, but they had exchanged a few letters in which the old man had agreed in principal with some of the principles of Huxley’s theory.
The title of the lecture had been intended to be somewhat provocative; the theory of evolution was still a widely debated subject and many academics and philosophers had criticised his friend’s theory, especially those who saw it as a direct contradiction to the Bible.
Nevertheless, Huxley knew he had to speak out, and ever since his famous debate with Bishop Wilberforce at Oxford ten years previously, he had made it his life’s work to promote the theory of natural selection.
The crowd fell silent as he took to the podium.
‘Gentleman, I would like to begin this lecture today with the words of my good friend John Tyndall. “To Nature nothing can be added; from Nature nothing can be taken away; the sum of her energies is constant, and the utmost man can do in the pursuit of physical truth, or in the applications of physical knowledge, is to shift the constituents of the never-varying total”.’
He took a sip of water and watched their faces as the meaning of the words sank in.
‘It is my intention today to demonstrate through the study of comparative anatomy that birds are a direct descendant of small carnivorous dinosaurs.’
There was a wave of mutterings and a certain amount of head shaking, but no one got up to leave, which Huxley took as a good sign.
* * *
After the lecture had finished, and as he collected his notes together, a middle-aged man approached him.
‘A fine presentation,’ the stranger began, handing Huxley a card which read.
Mr. Henry Knox, FRCP, FRS, RCS.
Huxley didn’t recognise the name but shook the man’s hand all the same. ‘Thank you, sir. I take it the subject wasn’t too controversial for your tastes?’
The man smiled, his moustache curling at the edges. ‘No indeed not. I would say it didn’t go far enough. My own work has found several similarities in the limbic structures of the brain between man and ancient forms of reptile. I would be happy to share my findings.’
Huxley had heard of the work of the French anatomist, Paul Broca, on the study of the brain. He had published a work On the Phenomenon of Hybridity, in the same year as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, and while agreeing with some of the basic tenets of the theory, refused to accept it completely.
‘So, are you a follower of Monsieur Broca?’ he enquired.
The question seemed to disturb Mr Knox, who flinched at the sound of the man’s name. ‘No sir, the man is a charlatan, a genetic reductionist who believes that human behaviour is somehow linked to their physiology! You and I share higher ambitions, to learn how we have evolved from our ancestors by studying our anatomy.’ He tapped his finger against his temple. ‘I believe the secrets of our ancient past are stored within our genetic inheritance, we simply require the appropriate tools to decipher them.’
With that he bowed and left.
Huxley put the card in his waistcoat pocket and went to join his colleagues who were anxious to know who the stranger was.
* * *
As Knox left the building he was joined by an old woman and a younger man.
‘Well?’ demanded the woman in a strong Russian accent.
‘He compared me to Broca, the man’s a fool,’ said Knox, shaking his head.
‘Then you must continue the work alone,’ she said, staring into his eyes. ‘It is your destiny.’
16
Scotland Yard
[Scotland Yard, London. Date: September 20, 1888]
The office of Chief Inspector Swanson was on the third floor of Whitehall Place. The original home of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, was a grand town house, nothing like the modern building Maddox had left behind. It was swarming with officers when they arrived. They could have entered the Chief Inspector’s office through a direct portal, but Sabien insisted that they use the front entrance just like the linears. He explained to her that it helped him to stay in the temporal context. ‘Linears’ was the name the Order used for those who experienced time in the normal way, one second after the other.
The desk sergeant seemed to recognise Sabien, but took his time looking over Maddox. She stood awkwardly, in a dark purple velvet dress that accentuated her waist and pushed her breasts up and out. Pevensy had taken a great deal of pleasure in dressing her like a high-class hooker. The corset alone had taken twenty minutes to get into and she was finding it hard to breathe.
‘The chief inspector is rather busy,’ the sergeant said gruffly, looking down at his enormous log book. ‘You may have to wait some time.’
Maddox could see the tendons in Sabien’s neck tense beneath his stiff collar.
‘We’re expected.’
‘There’s no note in the log.’ The old man tapped the book. ‘I’ll have to send someone up.’
There was a telephone hanging on the wall behind him.
‘Can’t you call him?’ asked Maddox.
The sergeant glared at her as if she’d just cursed his mother. ‘That is the new electromagnetic telephone, madam, and is only to be used in emergencies.’
Sabien ignored her, which meant she was in trouble. She had forgotten the context, the idea of picking up a phone and speaking to someone was still very new in these times. Queen Victoria had only tried using one herself in 1878. Most people sent notes, usually via messengers and she could see two boys standing idly by the door for just such a reason.
There was something in Sabien’s hand. Maddox saw the flash of silver and realised it was a coin.
‘Something for the Christmas fund,’ he said, dropping it into a tin jar on the desk.
‘Most appreciated,’ said the sergeant with a smile. ‘PC Johnson, be so kind as to take Inspector Sabien and his friend up to Chief Inspector Swanson.’
‘Did you just bribe a police officer?’ Maddox whispered to Sabien as they followed the constable up the staircase.
‘The sergeant spends his spare time working at an orphanage, it’s charity, not bribery.’
* * *
Three flights of stairs in a heavy dress and a corset that restricted her breathing made her realise how important the suffrage movement was by the time they reached Swanson’s office.
Johnson left them at the door and walked away. He smiled at Maddox as he left. It was a boyish, innocent look that had none of the lechery that she was used to back at the office.
Sabien knocked once and opened the door.
Swanson was standing by the window, smoking a pipe. The room smelt of cedar oil and the rich aroma of tobacco. It was an oak-panelled room with a gilt-framed painting of Queen Victoria hanging on one wall. There were piles of documents on his desk, and more stacked on every available surface around the room.
‘Inspector Sabien,’ he said with a look of surprise.
Sabien waited until she had closed the door.
‘Have the Copernicans arrived?’
Swanson nodded. ‘They’ve been here since Tuesday,’ he said, waving his pipe towards a set of double doors.
Sabien picked up one of the reports. ‘They’re convinced it’s a serial. I’ll be leading the investigation from now on. How many men have you got at your disposal?’
‘Linear officers? A hundred or so.’
Swanson sighed. ‘We’re interviewing every butcher and slaughter man as we speak. The Copernicans have already produced two thousand potential lines of enquiry.’
Maddox opened the door to an empty room, a long mahogany table stretched down the centre with an ornate gaslight candelabra hanging above it.
Swanson smiled, closed the door and turned the key in the opposite direction. This time when he pushed the doors apart the room was full of men and women in dark blue robes using archaic looking accounting machines and plotting temporal flows out on enormous blackboards that were spread out around the room.
One of them got up from his work and came towards them.
‘Professor Eddington,’ Sabien greeted the man with a small bow.
‘Inspector.’
Eddington was a tall, thin man with a sour, pinched face. Maddox had never met the grandmaster of the statistical guild, but his reputation preceded him. This was the man whose job it was to ensure the future of the continuum, one of the members of the High Council and it was his theories that were used to predict the best outcome for the future of mankind.
‘How long before the next attack?’ asked Sabien.
The professor put his hands behind his back. It made he look like a priest or a funeral director whilst the expression on his face was impassive. ‘There is an eighty-four point three per cent probability of another murder within the next eight to ten days.’