City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (44 page)

Although his lost afternoon in some
nameless bar had put him a little off his alcohol, Tom ordered a beer.  He
figured that drinking, or at least pretending to drink, was the best way to fit
in with the swarm of regulars in the Prince of Wales.   But the beer had
scarcely arrived when Tom saw John Harrowman pass in the street.  He was arm in
arm with a woman and they were walking so fast as to be almost running. 

Tom limped to the door of the pub and
stared after the pair.  Looked up and down the street but, damn it all, there
wasn’t a copper in sight.  After a second or two of internal debate, Tom
stepped out to follow John and the woman.

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

7:35 PM

They had walked with Georgy for over
an hour, making several stops, only to end up here, in the last place on earth
they should be.   Leanna knew she had been foolish to ever leave the Three
Sisters, but Emma had been so determined that Leanna was forced to choose
between going deeper into this ridiculous scheme or leaving Emma on her own. 
This was the last stop, the man had promised, and he’d left them in a little
bar called the Pony Pub, where they sat waiting for him to return with Mary’s
baby.

No.  Not exactly.  Emma may have been
waiting for a man to return with a baby, but Leanna knew better.  This entire
evening had not only been a dangerous and fruitless quest for a child who’d
never existed, but it might also be the event that snapped Emma’s sanity.   It
broke Leanna’s heart to see her sitting there so calmly at their table,
smiling, humming a little, stroking the lock of golden hair.  Emma had not
noticed that they were being pulled into the fringes of the East End.  She had
not noticed the dozens of bobbies they had passed on the way here or how the
men’s eyes had slid past them without interest, just two more raggedy women in
the night.  Leanna was not entirely afraid, not yet.  The streets were well lit
and full of people and she had no doubt they would find their way back to
Mayfair.  What she feared is what Emma would do when it finally dawned on her
that Georgy was not coming back.

Leanna’s mind was churning with
possibilities.  The thing that made no sense was that Georgy had not yet
demanded their money.  A hundred pounds was a fortune to anyone in this
neighborhood, incentive enough to drive them to any level of depravity, and yet
Georgy had escorted them into the Pony Pub, helped them find seats, and left. 
The pounds were still in a blue silk pouch Leanna had tied beneath her skirt
and it had slapped her thigh with every step she had taken, from Mayfair to
Hanover to Petticoat to hell.  They had fallen into some sort of plan, that was
clear enough, but if the scheme hadn’t been about money, what was the motive? 

It was her fault entirely, Leanna
thought, as she sat rubbing her temples vigorously.  She should never have
come, never have let Emma come, and then she’d compounded her folly by sending
notes to John, Tom, and Trevor, telling them they would be at Hanover Street
when they were in fact here, wherever here was, in this dingy little bar with
its sticky tables and smoky air.  She thought of the three letters she had
written, tossing them to the winds of fate, hoping that at least one would find
its mark, and had a brief vision of Tom, Trevor, and John all converging on the
Three Sisters only to learn she and Emma were gone.  It’s a tale of missed
letters and messages gone awry, she thought.  Rather like Romeo and Juliet. 

And we all know how well that ended.

“Emma,” she said gently.  “He’s been
gone for quite some time.”

Emma nodded.

“We must go back to Gerry’s house,
you see that, don’t you, darling?”

“Not without Sarah,” Emma said.  “He’ll
bring her in a moment.”

“No.  No, I don’t think so.”

Emma looked at her with confusion bordering
on anger, as if Leanna was the one who had duped her.  “Leave if you must,” she
said. “But I will wait here for Sarah.”

“I don’t believe that Sarah exists. 
You know this too, Emma, I can see it in your face.”

“He’s gone to get her now.”

“I think he’s simply gone.  He was a
very bad man, darling, a very mean one.  He lied.”

They sat for a moment and then Emma
made a slow half-nod, her lips slightly parted.  She might not want to know the
truth, but on some deep level, she still did.

“What do we do now?” she asked.

“We find a cab,” Leanna said with
relief.  “And we go home.”

7:40 PM

Cecil had noticed, of course, when
Emma and Leanna had entered the pub and the sight of his little sister, here in
the flesh, had unnerved him.  He pulled his scarf over his mouth and sank in
his chair, but Leanna seemed oblivious to her surroundings.  For the last
twenty minutes, ever since Georgy had run out the door – practically skipping,
the fool – she had been solely preoccupied with watching Emma’s face.

So when Leanna suddenly stood, Cecil
jumped.  She walked right towards him, and Cecil twisted in his seat, his heart
thumping.  She was no further than an arm’s length away as she leaned across
the bar and said to the half-wit girl behind it “Excuse me, miss?”

The politeness of the address confused
Lucy.  She stared at Leanna but did not answer.

“Do you know where we might secure a
cab and driver?”

“A cab and driver?”  Lucy seemed as
surprised as if Leanna had requested a coterie of elephants.  Cabs for hire did
not visit Whitechapel.  They stopped at the fountain near the mouth of Merchant
Street and from there anyone seeking to transact business in this district must
make the rest of his way on foot, a fact well-known to the West End gentlemen
who visited on a regular basis.  The fact would have been known to Leanna too, if
she’d paid any attention on her way in, Cecil thought, but his sister did not
seem to have fully grasped the reality of her present situation.  She seemed to
think her shabby clothes, gathered from God knows what improbable source,
provided an effective disguise, while the truth was that everything about her –
the posture, the accent, the clear skin and even white teeth – revealed her to
be an outsider.   Whores who try to put on airs give themselves away with a
thousand small mistakes, Cecil knew this.  But before this moment he had never
understood that it worked the same in reverse, that it was just as easy to lose
one’s balance stooping as it was while climbing.  A woman like Leanna could not
help but be a lady, even here among the trash of the Pony Pub.

“Yes, a Hansom cab,” Leanna repeated. 
“Or perhaps a carriage.  Any form of transport.  Is there a lad who can summon
one?”

My God, Cecil thought, she’s so
utterly out of her element that she doesn’t even realize that she’s out of her
element.  I didn’t have to pawn mother’s brooch to be free of her.   If I’d
left the girl to her own devices she probably would have managed to fall into
the Thames and drown. 

“There are always cabs for hire at
the waterfront, Miss.”

The lie was outrageous.  If no sane
cabbie would venture into Whitechapel, he would be even less willing to go down
to the waterfront, the worst part of the worst part of town, where the sailors
spilled from their ships fueled with pent-up desperation, ready to erupt at the
slightest provocation.  Only the oldest, ugliest, and most hopeless of women
walked the waterfront.  The crime rate there made the rest of the East End look
like Eden.

But the tone of voice had been what
Leanna was accustomed to – low, measured, and polite.  She turned toward the
man at the end of the bar with a radiant smile of gratitude.

“Not such a bad walk either, Miss.  Lighted
streets, enough people, a straight five minute path down to the docks.  Isn’t
that so, Lucy?”

“A straight path,” Lucy parroted.  She
was obviously trained to agree with anything he said, and Cecil wondered if the
bruises up and down the girl’s arms were put there courtesy of this well-dressed,
soft-spoken man.  In a room full of idiots, Cecil reflected, Lucy was queen. 
She had been sniveling that she was afraid of the Ripper all evening, with
short pauses to agree to provide an alibi for every thug in Christendom, and it
did not seem to have occurred to her there might be any contradiction in these
two activities. 

But the man had been clever to draw
Lucy into the conversation, because the corroboration of a woman seemed to
sweep away whatever doubts Leanna may have had.  She smiled again, turned and
made her way back to table where Emma was weeping.

“Smart to send to docks,” Micha
said.  Like Cecil, he had observed the exchange in a shrouded silence, but the
minute Leanna moved out of earshot he had stood up.  “Dead end, yes?”

Quite right, Cecil thought.  A dock
is the ultimate dead end street.  In the black-specked mirror behind the wall
he could see Leanna pulling Emma to her feet and the two of them making their
way out the door.  The girls would not only be in the most dangerous part of
town, but cornered.   Micha laughed and pulled on his coat, pausing behind
Cecil to make a single slashing motion with his hand, drawing his imaginary
knife around Cecil’s throat in a gesture that eerily mimicked that morning when
they had all been collected around the family breakfast table, reading their
newspapers.   Tom had made just such a motion on Leanna, slipping behind her, his
arm around her waist, brandishing his finger as a weapon and they had all sat in
the comfort of their sunny breakfast room and laughed.  

How long ago had that been?  No more
than a few weeks, but it seemed to Cecil as if these events had occurred in
another lifetime.   He gazed into the cracked mirror behind the bar and watched
as Micha stepped into the streets and turned in the direction of the docks.

7:48  PM

Tom was not making good time on his
wounded ankle and had nearly lost track of John twice.  The figure of the man
and the woman had faded almost to grayness within the fog and the two of them
kept turning.   This was the nature of the streets around the waterfront – they
grew more winding, less linear or predictable, and what seemed to be a busy thoroughfare
sometimes trickled down to an alley.  It  was as if the entire neighborhood had
been cruelly designed to deceive outsiders, as circular and interwoven as a
spider’s web.

A woman brushed against him.  Later
he would realize it was an attempt to catch his attention, to draw him into an
alley or a bed, to initiate a transaction that would end with his money in her
pocket, his seed between her legs.  But at the time, he instinctively stepped
aside to allow her passage, murmuring an apology as if he had been the one who’d
jostled her.  It all took no more than a few seconds, but when Tom looked back
up John was out of sight.

7:48 PM

The girl had been polite, as ladies
always pretend to be, but something in her voice has brought it all back.  The
memory of his fall from grace, the beginning of the long slow descent of his
life.  She had asked for a cab.  She had tossed her head.  He could imagine her
on that bright lawn, looking down at his hands, seeing the blood there and
asking – in that cool, superior voice - “What have you done?”

The ladies.  How they lift you up and
how they set you down.

He shakes his head, tries to clear
the jumble of memories, to concentrate.  The whores, yes, of course the whores
must be punished, but their crimes are miniscule compared to the ones who
called themselves ladies, the ones who looked down their small white noses, the
ones who could fully see you no matter how cleverly you hid, the ones who knew
at a glance all the bad things you had done.  Mary Kelly, walking with her
books.  Everyone said she was kind, all those fools sobbing over her at the
pub, but once he had spoken to her in the street and she had literally drawn
back from him, as if she too could see the blood on his sleeve.  Like Katrina
with her yapping dogs, like this girl who had stood at the bar of a broken down
pub and calmly requested transport.  They could see the truth about him, every
one.  Whenever they came near he heard the old question.  
Whathaveyoudone,whathaveyoudone, whathaveyoudone. 

He checks his pocket watch.  He has told
the beast to meet him at half past eight, and he wishes to arrive first.  To
have the chance to prepare himself, to prepare the space.   

He slips off his barstool and heads
towards the door.  He has not bothered to pay for his beer.  But then again, he
never does.

7:50 PM

No more than a minute later, Trevor
Welles was entering the Pony Pub and approaching the barmaid.   He knew this
place and he even knew this girl.  He had spoken with her several times since
the night of the double murders, eventually revealing himself as a detective. She
seemed to remember, for she greeted him with enthusiasm.   Some people liked to
be interviewed by the authorities, Trevor had noticed.  It was a strange thing,
for having the police come to your door in most neighborhoods was social
disaster.  But in the East End, it seemed to give one a certain status among
her peers.