City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (45 page)

He described Emma and Leanna to the
girl and she said, yes, they’d been there.  No more than minutes before.  She
glanced around for confirmation, but all the men who had been seated nearby seemed
to have scattered too. 

Trevor felt like pounding the bar in
frustration.  The girl said they had entered with a man called Georgy but had
left alone.  She was sure of this.  She nodded emphatically as she spoke.  

Trevor could only hope the fact
they’d left alone meant the funds had exchanged hands and this Georgy was done
with his game.  Most of the bobbies were congregated along Merchant Street, so
if the women were seeking transport, as they almost certainly were, someone
would undoubtedly intercept them. 

Trevor turned to go.  He was almost
to the door when the girl called after him.

“Oh, Sir, one other thing. They’re
headed to the waterfront.”     

7:59  PM

Leanna had long since given up on consoling
Emma.  Instead she linked arms with the girl, concentrating on keeping her
upright and mobile, and trying to take note of the sign posts they passed.  She
didn’t know what the man at the bar considered a five-minute walk but they had
been on the streets for nearly twenty, with no waterfront in sight.  This was a
disaster.  No one could blame Emma, who had been in a stupor for days.  It was
Leanna who should have seen the truth.   That the man at the bar had been a bad
man too, possibly in consort with Georgy, equally intent on misleading them.  Leanna
shuddered at the sight of the mean houses with rags stuffed in the shattered windowpanes,
at the pinched, yellow look the women all wore beneath their garish makeup, at the
mingled smell of sweat, urine, and wet wool which seemed to steam from everyone
they passed, choking her and occasionally making bile rise up in her throat.

Yet Mary Kelly had lived in these
streets and John and Trevor walked them every day.  Even Aunt Gerry, and those
society matrons Leanna sometimes dismissed as foolish, came to Whitechapel
regularly to dispense food and clothing.  Why was she the only one too cowardly
to look into the face of need, the one who was made literally sick by the stink
of poverty?

“We’ve got to keep moving,” she said,
tugging at Emma, who had paused on a corner.  The street lamps were a comfort
as they passed below them at certain intervals, not only because they allowed
her to read the signposts, but also the faces of the people.   It was like
walking between waves of darkness and light.  As the girls would leave the glow
of one lamp, Emma seemed to strain forward to the next, but Leanna was in the
pattern of looking back at the light behind them as a way of marking time and
distance.

Just after they had passed the
seventh street corner, she glanced behind her and saw a faint shadow moving
under the street light they had just passed.  Leanna continued to look back, but
did not tell Emma.  There had been men pressed all around them earlier, too
many to note, but now the crowd had thinned out and each figure took on a
different sort of significance. 

“Emma, I’m not sure we’re going the
right direction.  We’ve been walking for nearly twenty minutes, so if the man
in the bar was right, we should have been at the dock a long time ago.  I think
we’ve gotten ourselves turned.  We should ask someone.” 

“No,” Emma said.  “Not anyone here. 
They know who we are.”

Leanna looked over her shoulder.  
The shadowy figure was still there… but then again, there was a shadowy figure
coming towards her from the other direction as well, and two more passing on
the opposite side of the street.  The fog reduced everyone to the same
amorphous grey shape, she thought, trying to push her panic down.  Perhaps the fact
that the mist seemed to be getting thicker did indeed mean they were close to
the water.  Besides, the Ripper had taken his victims to dark alleys and rooms
with doors that locked.  He had never attacked a woman early in the evening on
a major street, no matter how badly lit it might be, and while she and Emma might
be lost and vulnerable, at least there were two of them.  “What do you mean
they know who we are?  Georgy knew your name but he –“

Emma shook her head.  “The costumes
aren’t working,” she said.  “The people in the bar knew we were rich, or at
least that you were, and if we speak to anyone, even to ask directions, our
voices will just confirm what our clothes suggest.  We don’t belong here.”   

“All right,” Leanna said hollowly.  “Keep
your hood pulled tight.  Perhaps our safety depends on our ability to blend
in.”

8:08   PM

Tom paused to read a street sign and
realized, to his utter frustration, that he had traveled in a circle.  John and
the woman must have taken a side street.   He turned back, retracing his
steps.  Up to Hadley, back to Toddle, and then, without warning, Tom heard a sound. 
It was muffled and hard to pinpoint in location, but the nature of the noise
was irrefutable.  A woman was screaming.

His breath was coming in ragged gasps
and Tom was forced to stop for a minute, to lean against a wall.  There.  The
sound again.  Muffled but persistent.  A long low wail and Tom went in search
of the source, praying that whoever was making it had the courage and the faith
to keep calling.

8:12 PM

Alcohol made the world very clear.

Cecil knew that not everyone would
agree with this theory.   Conventional wisdom, of course, would have declared
that the seven beers he had gulped out of nerves at the Pony Pub might have
impaired his ability to judge what was going on around him.  But Cecil knew
better.  From the first time he had partaken – breaking into his father’s liquor
cabinet at the age of twelve – Cecil had understood that alcohol was a type of
religion, capable of guiding a man to insights he would never obtain with his
workaday mind.  There are levels of reality, he’d thought, as he’d heard his
sister sign her death warrant with a well-spoken phrase, as he felt the butcher
Micha drag a calloused finger across his neck in a mimic of the Ripper’s
blade.  As he watched that smug, barrel-chested detective lean over the bar and
ask Lucy if she’d seen the girls from Mayfair.

There are levels of reality,
beginning with the simple shiny world of sensation where people like Georgy and
Lucy and Micha dwelt, where coins might strike the palm or they might not,
where there was sometimes the solace of food or sex or a warm place to sleep,
but more likely hunger, loneliness, and chill.  The pains and pleasures of animals
– hardly enough to engage a man like himself.  And then there is the level of
thought, wherein lay the good detective and Cecil’s worthy siblings and the
people who waltzed and plotted at the Wentworth balls.  The people who live within
this stratum believe it to be the highest. 

Only a select few have experienced
the next realm, that abstract band of infinite possibility that hums above the
surface of everyday life.  Cecil knew he needed alcohol to take him there, just
as priests require Jesus to take them to God, and there is no shame in such dependence
on an intermediary.   He sat at the bar with his empty mugs spread out around
him, watching colors grow brighter and edges grow sharper, and after the
detective left the Pony Pub, Cecil had risen shakily to his feet.   His sister
had been sent to the water.  The brute Micha had been sent after her and the
detective after him and somewhere in this grand parade was the man whose soft
voice had sent Leanna to the waterfront, a man Cecil understood to be a fellow
acolyte, a student of the fringes.  He had left the pub too, sometime after
Micha and before the detective, but Cecil was not sure why.

He threw money on the bar.  He did
not count the amount.  Money always became inconsequential when he was in this particular
state of grace.   Counting money was nothing more than an attempt to measure
the immeasurable.  The coins he tossed were meant to pay for him and Georgy and
Micha and anyone else within earshot of the tinkling sound, because Cecil would
be a rich man by sunrise, surely so.   He could not say why he felt this sudden
urge to enter the streets.  Leanna was doomed whether he stayed or whether he
left, but Cecil felt compelled to follow her, propelled perhaps by the alcohol
or perhaps by adrenaline, the last chemical throb of his fear. 

Or maybe it was just by a betting
man’s desire to see the game played out.   Neddy used to laugh at him about
it.  They would go to the tracks and lay their bets and even if Cecil had a
willing girl on one arm and a bottle of champagne in the other, he still could not
resist rising whenever he heard the sound of a starting trumpet.  Neddy
couldn’t understand why Cecil stood at the railing.  He always said that the horses
would either run or they would not.  The winners were determined by the gods,
Neddy would call after him, they were chosen long before a lad like you was even
born. 

Cecil knew Neddy was right, but he
had stood watching every race he’d ever bet on, and now, as the clock of a
faraway church struck the quarter-hour, he cast coins across a counter and
turned toward the street.

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

8:12 PM

She has come early to the alley.   She
turns toward him slowly, and he thinks, somewhat irrelevantly, that her bulk
actually gives her a sort of strange elegance, since it makes it impossible for
her to do anything quickly.   Her face registers surprise that he is alone and
then anger, most probably at an anger at herself for ever believing that he was
bringing her a client, ever thinking he would wish to erase his debt with the
promise of fresh business.   

This is what happens when you strike
a bargain with the man who calls himself Jack the Ripper.  He stands before you
in a dark alley with a gun.  A cheap gun, purchased just this morning from an
ironmonger, clumsy and unsteady in his hand.  

But at this range, it will do.

8:12 PM

The woman’s voice had come from a
room in the back of a boarding house.  Tom looked both directions, hoping against
hope to see one of the bobbies Trevor had promised would be patrolling the area,
but once again there was no one in sight, nor were there lights in any of the
other windows of the house.  Tom stood in the alleyway and debated what to do
next.  Stillness had settled, making him wonder if his nerves were getting the
better of him and he’d imagined the whole thing.   Then a fresh scream pierced
the silence and, without thought, Tom was back in motion, ducking around the
corner of the house and straining on tiptoe to see inside.

One look was enough to tell the
story.  John’s back was to Tom, but it was unmistakably him, bending over a
woman, wrenching apart her bare legs while she struggled and screamed.  Tom
flung himself against the wooden door of the hovel, and fairly bounced off,
landing back in the yard with a thud and a scream of his own.  He rolled over
in the grass, bent double in pain and frustration and then the door jerked
open, revealing the angry form of John Harrowman, shouting “What the hell is
going on here?”

It occurred to Tom that he should
have done a better job of thinking things out.  John was upright and armed, he
was flat and defenseless.  He made a sound which was intended as a roar of
outrage but came out more like the beginning of a sob.

John peered into the dark yard and frowned. 
“Is it Tom Bainbridge?  Why on earth are you here?” He didn’t sound like a
maniac, merely confused, and then the woman Tom had seen him with earlier
appeared at the door, fully dressed and apparently fine except for the worry
that creased her brow. 

“Doctor?” she said.  “I think she’s
fainted.”

“Probably for the best,” John said,
turning back into the room.   He shot one final glance at Tom.  “You say you
want to be a doctor, do you?  Very well, I could use a hand.  Have you ever
seen a breech birth?”

8:16  PM

As they got nearer the lights of the
waterfront, Leanna’s spirits lifted a bit.  Emma had slowed to the point where
she was virtually dragging her, but at least they appeared to have lost the
figure in the lamplight.  

“We have to keep moving, Emma,” she
said.  “We can rest when we get home to Mayfair.  And let’s cross to the others
side of the street for a while.”

“I’m exhausted.  I need to stop and
get something to eat.”

“Something to eat?  Are you mad?  We
aren’t returning from the theatre with Trevor.  Come on, see the lights?   We
have to be close to the waterfront and we’ll find a cab there.”

“We passed a pub just back,” Emma
said.  “I must rest, just for a moment.”

“We can’t,” Leanna said, turning back
to give the girl a tug.  It was at that moment that she saw the man.

The man or was it simply a man?  Was
it the same one who had followed them earlier?  This one seemed taller, thinner
than the first, with a long-loped gait.  No, not the same man.  The first one
had been heavier and he had stayed on the opposite side of the street, but this
man was right behind them, and growing closer with each step.