City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (26 page)

“If a Jekyll were to really become a
Hyde,” Emma continued, “I would imagine it would be a slower transformation,
perhaps over the course of a lifetime.  A series of disappointments builds up,
a series of disillusionments or humiliations….”

“No, no, the harder a man tried to
suppress this dark side, the more suddenly it is bound to erupt,” Leanna said,
equally persistent in her view.   She snapped her fingers.  “Like so.  Wouldn’t
you say, Trevor?”

“Possibly,” he said mildly, thinking
of all the prostitutes he had interviewed in the last weeks.  They had, to a
woman, claimed that the gentlemen who patronized them were the roughest
customers, demanding unnatural acts and often with a yen for brutality.  “Give
me a Limey o’er a Lord any day,” one girl had claimed, “For the boys who been at
sea just want a quick ‘un, while it’s the gentry that tells ye get to on all fours
and howl.” 

“The trouble is, Mr. Stevenson came very
close to saying all humans have this dark side,” Emma said, “and I can’t agree
with that.  The play was all but asserting that everyone in the audience was a
potential Mr. Hyde.”

“Or potential Ripper,” Trevor added
quietly.

“Oh, Trevor, I am sorry,” Leanna
said. “Here you try desperately to get one evening away from work and what do
we do but take you to a play which professes to analyze the criminal mind.”

“Don’t apologize.   I found it fascinating,
and you know I’ve believed from the start that the Ripper was a gentleman. 
We’ve explored a hundred avenues and they all lead back to that.”

“You’re no closer to a solution?”
Emma asked.

“No,” Trevor sighed.  “We run in
hundreds of poor souls, each more crazed than the last.  They all have the
proximity and perhaps the temperament, but I know in my heart that none of them
is our man.  The real Ripper is a person who can walk any street of London
without calling attention to himself.  What makes him frightening is precisely
the fact that he blends in so well.”

“So you see, the play was quite
right,” Leanna said firmly.  “We, all of us, have this darkness inside which
struggles to get out and if it does not get out at first, it becomes even more
twisted and horrid…”

“I must disagree,” Emma said.  “My
mother, for example, was the most gentle soul.  I believe she was gentle within
as well as without.  You can’t take an evening’s entertainment at the theater
as any universal truth.  It’s more…”  Emma suddenly stopped herself, surprised
at her own words, for she never spoke of her mother or any of her family. 
Fortunately, Leanna and Trevor were too intent upon the discussion to notice
her discomfiture.  “The play is more of an analysis of the criminal mind than
the normal one,” she finished lamely, glancing at Trevor.

“But healthy people remain healthy precisely
because they’ve found a way to get it out,” Leanna went on.  “Through music or sporting
or letters to the editor like Aunt Gerry writes or through drinking …”

Trevor felt a twinge of discomfort as
well.  The girl was perceptive for her years.  He had stopped patrolling the
streets on foot but had still been going to the East End nearly every night,
for reasons that had nothing to do with research.  It was as if the night he’d
taken up with the young prostitute at the Pony Pub had opened some sort of floodgate.

“…or sex,” Leanna went on.

At this, both Emma and Trevor erupted
in a wild gale of laughter, Trevor’s being so explosive that his cummerbund finally
gave way to its fate and collapsed in his lap like a deflated balloon. 
Sweeping it aside in the darkness, he said, “I say, Leanna, you get more like
Geraldine every day.”

“Thank you,” Leanna said archly.

“You’re quite right to thank me, for
that’s the greatest tribute I’m capable of bestowing.  And I do agree with
you.  We must find a way to get it out.”

“What is this ‘it’ that we all must
get out?” Emma asked, wiping tears from her eyes with one of her enormous
plumes, “Are we speaking of evil?  The hidden self?  The evil hidden self? 
And, pray tell, why must we get it out?  We’ll have streets full of Rippers.”

“There are times” said Leanna, slightly
miffed by the giggles, “when I don’t think either of you take me seriously at
all.  The ‘it’ is our darker nature, the animal part of our psyche, and if we
manage to find a way to vent these emotions - however that may be, and I’m not
saying I know -  we do not become Rippers.  That’s quite my whole point. 
Trevor knows what I mean.”

“She means that when a gentleman
blows, he blows harder than anyone,” Trevor said, still chuckling.  “And I have
the corpses to back up her theories.  Unfortunately, my superiors are loath to
admit she could be right.  Now, if only Robert Louis Stevenson was a member of
Scotland Yard…”

“But truly, what news of the
investigation?” Emma asked.  “No deaths and no new suspects doesn’t mean no
news.  You’ve been holding out on us.”

“I agree,” Leanna said.  “And the
only reason we associate with you at all is for news of the Ripper case.  So
come, Detective Welles.  Spill your grisly secrets.”

Normally Trevor would have been
tempted to tell them of the events of two days ago, but he, Phillips, Davy, and
Lusk had decided not to publicize the arrival of a human kidney.  Almost
certainly a human kidney that had once resided inside the body of Catherine
Eddowes.   Public panic appeared to be abating, but news like this would stir
it up fresh.  Nor, he suspected, would the girls enjoy details of his visit to
Mad Maudy.  His new pursuit seemed the safest topic for discussion. 

“I spent the day in my forensics
lab,” Trevor said.  “Which sounds terribly important, but which is actually a
mortuary table that Doctor Phillips has been kind enough to turn over to my
use.  I’ll spare you ladies of the details of my experiments, all of which failed.  
But apparently the French police have come up with a method whereby they pour
wax into a wound and the resulting imprint tells them what kind of weapon was
used. Not just something vague like ‘a knife with a five-inch blade,’ but they
come away with a complete impression of the murder weapon.  Which would be a marvelous
thing to know, because Phillips makes statements such as ‘like a surgeon’s
scalpel,’ which is just enough information to drive a detective mad.  Was it a
scalpel or not?   Is the man a surgeon or isn’t he?  But the French must be
using a certain kind of wax because I was practicing on a leg of mutton and it
wasn’t working at all.  Not that women are mutton,” he hastily added, but
Leanna and Emma were hardly offended.

“It seems you would need to study the
methodology first hand,” Emma said.  “Reading something like that from a paper
–“

“I know,” Trevor sighed.  “Not to
mention it had probably been badly translated from the original French.”

“Perhaps I could – “

“My grandfather did something similar,”
Leanna said abruptly, cutting Emma off and twisting completely toward Trevor in
her seat.  “He was interested in identifying animals by the bite marks they
made and he used….it wasn’t clay but I don’t think it was wax either. 
Something that he heated and poured, I do remember that much.”

“Really?” Trevor said, surprised. 
“What was he hoping to learn?”

“I’m not entirely sure.  Maybe Tom
could tell you.  But I know that he gathered the method from a local
taxidermist.”

“A taxidermist?”  Trevor sat back,
mulling this over. 

“Well it fits, does it not?  They’re
always reconstructing animals, even in cases where parts are missing.  If they
can concoct an entire jaw from a fossilized bite mark, couldn’t you reconstruct
a knife blade from the imprint of a wound?”

“Possibly.  That’s certainly the
idea.  But the problem seems to be finding material subtle enough to fill the
wound but strong enough to be extricated without breaking or crumbling.   I
need to figure what this material is, precisely what temperature is most
conductive to a clean imprint, and I need to do it quickly.”

“There haven’t been any killings for
a while,” Emma pointed out.

“No, there haven’t.”

“So, perhaps your Jack has stopped.”

“I rather doubt it.  We’re still
getting the letters.”

“But if he stops,” Emma went on,
“that is a victory, in a way.  It means you’ve frightened him off and forced
him to move on to a new location.”

“It’s a victory in the sense there
are no more dead bodies,” Trevor conceded, gazing out into the nimbus of a
streetlight.  He had often told Davy he did not care who captured the Ripper or
how he was caught, but did he really mean it?  “However, having the Ripper
simply move along would not be a victory for justice.”

“But justice is sometimes an
impossible goal, is it not?” Emma persisted.  “An absence of injustice may the
best you can hope for.”

“Quite right,” Trevor admitted, for
she was.

“I don’t understand that line of
thinking at all,” Leanna said.  “Trevor wants a resolution, not a mere ending. 
He wants to hold the Ripper in the palm of his hand, to know he’s the one who
has stopped him.”

“I’m sure that’s what he wants,” Emma
said.  “But what Trevor wants and what ends up occurring may not be the same
thing.” 

“Oh Emma, for once just stop and hear
yourself,” Leanna said, twisting her gloves in agitation.  “I don’t know why
you always must be so, so, always so very….”

“Realistic?” Emma said.  Her voice
was so level that it translated into the deepest level of sarcasm.  The
carriage was going through a darkened part of the street and for a moment
Trevor could see neither woman’s face. 

“Pragmatic,” Leanna finally said.  “Trevor
would never be satisfied with knowing that he’d merely moved the Ripper on,
that this killer was out there in the night wreaking his havoc in another
district or another country. That wouldn’t be enough, Trevor, would it?  Tell
her.”

Trevor looked from Emma’s shadowy
form to that of Leanna, and then back again.  He could hear both women
breathing, waiting, and he sat between them in the silence.  He no longer knew
what was enough.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

October 28, 1888

10:40 AM

“Blast it,” a voice roared from the
doorsill and Trevor looked up from his reports in surprise.  Eatwell, his face
flushed, was waving a letter in his general direction.

“Just came,” he sputtered.  “You’d
better go home and dress.”

“What is it?” Trevor asked, as Davy
also rose to his feet.

“An epistle from Her Majesty, Queen
Victoria,” Eatwell said, flinching with each word.  “She wishes an audience
with the chief detective of the Ripper case at Buckingham Palace, one this
afternoon.”

“Blimey,” Davy exploded, as Trevor
gazed down at the letter.

“Yes, ‘blimey’ sums it up,” said
Eatwell.  “I’ve served the Yard for thirty-five years and I’ve no more than
glimpsed Her Majesty through the window of her coach.  But our grand Detective
Welles is summoned for a private audience.”

“Yes Sir,” Trevor said, stomach
churning, for he had no more than glimpsed the Queen from a carriage window
himself.

“What a job this is,” Davy said,
nearly in rapture.  “From Mad Maudy to the Queen.”

11:50 AM

Leanna rechecked the window for the
tenth time and nervously pressed her gown with her hands.  This, she was sure,
would be a meeting of great significance.  She had seen John Harrowman on four
different social occasions and each time he had been attentive company.  But
each time they had also been surrounded by a swarm of people and the morning he
had taken her out in his carriage, a day which seemed eons ago now, remained
the only time he had touched her.

Leanna didn’t know what to make of
him.  In some ways his attitudes were like that of a suitor, but in other ways
he remained maddeningly formal and correct, once even deliberately avoiding a
chance to bid her goodbye on the private side porch in favor of a more public
exit via the front entrance.  His words were right, but they seemed to be
spoken in the wrong tone of voice, as if John were an unskilled actor in a
parish play, sure of his lines but unable to convey the emotions behind them. 
All her novels were no help, for they generally had heroes who spoke gruffly to
the heroine but whose eyes betrayed an inner fire, not a man like John who told
her she was lovely but who always seemed to be looking past her, into the next
room.

Today, however, was going to be
special.  Leanna’s fevered plans and a few strokes of luck had seen to that. 
Knowing John generally started his rounds in early afternoon, she had invited
him for lunch beforehand, carefully choosing a day when she knew Aunt Gerry
would be distributing blankets at the veteran’s home.  Emma had been the tough
one.  Things had been terse and uncomfortable between them since the night
they’d gone to the theater.  Leanna could kick herself for turning Trevor’s rare
chance to recreate into an awkward evening, but she had the sense that there
was some greater debate going on between Emma and herself, a dialogue that had
little to do with Jekyll, Hyde, or even the Ripper.  Emma seemed determined to
teach her something, but Leanna was tired of learning lessons.  If her future
was going to be any different from the narrow world society had prescribed for
her, it was time to take matters into her own lands.