Gideon Smith and the Mask of the Ripper (22 page)

Rubicon harrumphed through his beard. “Yes, well, much of my work here is very secret, Mr. Bent. I daresay she thought she was doing the right thing. Poor girl.”

“Speaking of poor girls,” said Bent, “I spent the morning at the Old Bailey.” He topped up Rubicon’s glass. “Rowena Fanshawe is up on a murder charge.”

“Terrible business,” agreed the Professor. “Met the girl a few times myself on various escapades. Hard to imagine that she’d murder a fellow who’d done her no ill.”

“Hmm,” said Bent. “Odd thing is, though, they’re saying she might have had something to do with the burglary here. Charged her with it, in fact. Now, where could they have gotten that idea?”

Rubicon finished his drink and Bent refilled his glass, waving away the Professor’s halfhearted protestations. “Well, that is fascinating stuff. Old Lestrade at the Commercial Road station sent some fellow around here, German or Austrian, I think he said he was.”

“Miescher, was it?”

“That’s the one. You’ll probably have heard about all this deoxyribo-doo-dah.” He shook his head. “Amazing stuff.”

“I had heard,” said Bent. “Just remind me.…”

Rubicon took another long drink. “This Miescher fellow, he reckons we all have this … what did he call it … sort of a signature in our blood. He says from one drop of blood he can more or less match it with a sample taken from a living person.”

Bent narrowed his eyes. “More or less match it?”

“It’s not an exact science, the way he tells it,” said Rubicon, accepting another drink without protest. “But if he, say, had a drop of claret from one of us two, our blood signatures are so different that he’d be able to tell who the drop had come from.”

“Fascinating,” agreed Bent. “And there was blood here, then, which he matched up to Rowena’s?”

“Blood?” Rubicon laughed richly. “Oh, Mr. Bent, come and have a look at this.”

There was indeed a large, heart-shaped stain the color of wine in the center of the rug on the floor of what seemed to be a huge square laboratory. “I’d have had it cleaned, but the constabulary said to leave it for a bit. Strictly speaking I’m not supposed to come in here, much less bring anyone else. I think a constable was meant to come around and take the rug away today. Evidence and all that.”

But Bent’s attention had been diverted to the large upright cage with strong steel bars against the wood-paneled wall, its hinged door hanging loose and mangled. “Now what on earth is that for?”

“Shark cage,” said Rubicon brusquely. “They lower it down in the tropics so I can observe the predators. Now, we really shouldn’t be here.…”

Bent raised an eyebrow. “A shark cage? With the lock on the outside? Doesn’t seem very practical, Rubicon.”

Rubicon opened his mouth then closed it again. “It’s a foreign design,” he said lamely.

Bent allowed himself a smile and threw down the last of his whisky. “And did you tell Inspector Lestrade that what the burglars had nicked was a real, live effing dinosaur? About … ooh, what would it be, now? Three months old?”

Rubicon frowned, looked as though he was about to shout at Bent, then slumped. “No, I haven’t gotten around to telling them that yet. How did you know?”

“I was there, Rubicon. I was with Gideon Smith when he rescued you and Charles Darwin from that godforsaken rock in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. I saw those beasts, Rubicon. And I saw something else, as well.”

“Oh?”

“You, in the engine room of the ship we sailed off in, the
Lady Jane
. And you had an egg, Rubicon. Did you know that bloody monster swam all the way to California looking for its stolen baby and nearly had us for supper? And all the while you were playing surrogate daddy back here in London, raising a baby effing tyrannosaur. Did you sit on the bloody egg yourself?”

“Of course not,” mumbled Rubicon. “I used a heated incubator.”

“And how big is a three-month-old tyrannosaur, anyway?”

“Seven, perhaps eight feet tall.”

“Jesus effing Christ,” said Bent. “And that thing’s loose in London.”

Rubicon forced a humorless smile. “If it were loose we’d have heard about it by now, Mr. Bent. Someone has stolen Tiddles and has hidden him away for nefarious purposes we can only guess at.”

Bent stared at him, but not at the horrific possibilities of who had stolen an eight-foot Tyrannosaurus rex and what they planned to do with it. He said slowly, “You called it Tiddles?”

*   *   *

By rights, Bent should have told Lestrade about the dinosaur, but looking at him in the kitchen of Edward Gaunt’s house in Kennington, he really didn’t feel like adding to the inspector’s woes. Besides, if the coppers had failed to work out what was stolen from Professor Rubicon’s laboratories on Bishopsgate, then that was their problem. Bent wasn’t about to do their job for them, not when he had so much else on his plate.

Instead he said, “She didn’t do it, you know, George. Rowena. She didn’t break into Rubicon’s lab, and she didn’t kill Edward Gaunt.”

“That’ll be for the jury to decide,” sighed Lestrade.

There was a brisk knock at the door and the inspector said, “Who on earth is this, now? It’s busier than the Victoria ziggurat here today.”

Constable Ayres went off to answer the door, and Lestrade said, “For what it’s worth, Bent, and just between us, I find it hard to believe that someone of Rowena Fanshawe’s standing would be mixed up in such base criminality. But the prosecution would not have proceeded to trial if they did not believe there was a case to answer.”

“What do you know of this Miescher fellow and his new blood techniques, George?”

Lestrade stroked his mustache. “Hmm. The judge has ruled that admissible, then?”

“He’s considering it, going to decide tomorrow. What happened to good, old-fashioned, honest policing?”

“A very good question, Mr. Bent. Makes a good, old-fashioned, honest copper like myself wonder what his place is in this brave new world. To be quite honest, I don’t even know why they’ve bothered me with this, considering all this Jack the Ripper business is set to blow like a powder keg.”

Bent grinned. “Come around to my way of thinking, then, George?”

Lestrade nodded unhappily. “I thought this infernal Lizzie Strutter and her prostitutes’ strike would be the best thing to happen to the East End. I was wrong and you were right, Bent.” He lowered his voice. “Assaults of a sexual nature have doubled since Saturday. Trebled, even. And the populace is taking matters into its own hands. My officers found four men hanging from lampposts last night. Anyone who looks like an East Ender is being lynched, Bent.” He held up his hand, his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “We’re this far from anarchy in Whitechapel.”

Constable Ayres announced his return with a cough and said, “Sir? You won’t want to hear this, but it’s that Doctor Watson and his mental patient.…”

*   *   *

It was snowing again, and Doctor Watson stood under a wide, black umbrella, looking helplessly at Lestrade. “I am sorry, Inspector. My client was most insistent. At the Commercial Road station they said you were here.…”

“Wagging tongues at the station, George.” Bent chuckled. “They told me you were here as well.”

Lestrade put his head into his hands, and Bent watched the Great Detective with interest. A fruitcake, to be sure, but who was to say he hadn’t had some insight into something everyone else had missed? After all, they’d said Aloysius Bent was mad when he kept trying to tell everyone there was something strange about the way Annie Crook had died.

The Great Detective was dancing again, standing straight one moment then lunging forward, his knee bent, then shuffling his feet in a most precise manner. Bent frowned; the movements definitely put him in mind of something.

“It’s the footprints,” explained Doctor Watson apologetically. “He says he’s seen them at three Jack the Ripper crime scenes now. He’s mimicking the movements that must have made them, he says.”

Lestrade took a deep breath. “Doctor Watson. Please get him away from—”

Bent waved him down. “Hang on, George. There’s something awfully effing … get him to do it again, Watson.”

The Great Detective obliged, running through the almost graceful sequence, whispering to himself, “Pass … traverse … pivot … slope … pass … ha!”

“Eff!” yelled Bent as the Great Detective lunged forward on his final shout, his arm extended toward Bent’s throat, glaring down the length of his sleeve and over his hand that seemed to clutch an invisible rod, or stick, or …

“Oh, eff,” breathed Bent. “Of course.”

15

T
URNING
N
ASTY

She had gone to sleep Lottie the whore and awakened somewhere closer to Charlotte the lost girl, sitting bolt upright in the filthy blankets heaped upon the wooden bed frame. She had looked around wildly, the stench of the dark, cold room assaulting her senses, the scrabbling of vermin in the woodwork almost tearing a scream from her delicate mouth. The walls were bare, streaked with damp and mold and pocked with holes, and scurrying cockroaches climbed them with studied determination.

Where was she?

The sounds of life trickled through the shuttered window—which she noticed was fastened with a big iron padlock—though life she was unused to. The singsong voices of barrow boys, the shouts of flower girls, the raucous laughter of drunks. Thin daylight leaked through the slats of the shutters. What time was it? What day was it? There were seven other beds cheek-by-jowl in the tiny room, all of them neatly made, the blankets tucked in and turned down.

Lizzie Strutter likes to keep a tidy house,
she remembered someone saying before she slept. But if others had slept in this freezing dormitory with her, they had long gone. She was alone.

Almost.

Charlotte pulled the blanket to her throat with a gasp as she realized there was a man sitting on a chair the wrong way around, leaning on the high back and watching her. With a small but glinting knife he carved slices from a red apple and deposited them in his wide, black mouth.

Henry,
she remembered.
Henry Savage.
And with the recollection of his name the emerging presence of Charlotte Elmwood was chased away, and the carefully constructed facade of Lottie was ascendant.

“What are you doing there?” she said, trying to hide her fear behind effrontery. “Sitting there staring at me in my bed. You quite gave me a fit of the vapors.”

Henry Savage continued to stare at her and to eat his apple, slice by slice. Eventually he said, “Me and you got unfinished business, girl.”

She blanched as she remembered the night before, Henry pushing himself against her in the alley, grabbing at her skirts, planting his foul-smelling hot tongue in her mouth, scoring her pale flesh with his razor-sharp chin stubble.

Lottie pushed away the nausea that threatened to have her heaving her guts over the side of the bed. “You heard what Lizzie said she’d do to you,” she warned. “We’re having a strike, don’t you know?”

Henry licked the apple juice off his knife, keeping his eyes on her, then folded the blade into the handle and secreted it in his filthy jacket. “That we are, Lottie dear,” he said, standing up from the chair. She tried not to look away in horror as he brazenly rearranged the lump in the groin of his trousers, squatting slightly to ease it into a more comfortable position. He caught her looking and grinned. “And a strike means I’ve been saving up all my pennies. Got quite a lot in my pot now. And when this strike is over, which it will be soon…” He grabbed at his crotch. “This’ll be all yours, Lottie dear. And that’s a promise.”

*   *   *

“Sun over the yardarm, is it, Lizzie?” said Henry Savage, letting himself into the kitchen as though he owned the place.

Lizzie Strutter placed a protective, gnarled hand on the bottle of gin on the kitchen table. “We never see the sun on Walden Street, even in July, but it’s well past time for a drink,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “What you doing coming in that door anyway, Henry? Where’ve you been?”

“Been to check out your new guest,” he said, sitting at the table and wiping the back of his hand across his nose. “There a spot of that gin going begging, Lizzie?”

She moved the bottle out of his reach and pointed at him across the table with a chipped red forefinger nail. “If you’ve laid a finger on that girl, Henry Savage, my earlier threat still stands. Nobody touches Lottie.”

There was a tut from behind her. Rachel. Lizzie cast a look over her shoulder at where the girl was leaning on the sink, and raised an eyebrow. She knew the girls were curious about Lottie, knew they resented her for her smooth, unpocked skin and white teeth, her clean hair and her slim figure. Rachel more than most, perhaps; she’d always been Lizzie’s favorite and maybe thought she was about to be supplanted. Lizzie would always like Rachel; she felt responsible for that scar on her face. Well, she should. She was the one who’d given it to her, after the girl had tried to hold back some money in the early days. She hadn’t tried that again, and neither had anyone else. They were fast learners, Lizzie Strutter’s girls.

Besides, she had bigger plans for little Lottie. Last night when she’d brought her back to Walden Street, she’d had old Mrs. Weatherbottom give her an examination, see if she had anything nasty. She didn’t, but more than that, her maidenhood was intact.

The girl was a virgin.

Lizzie had no idea why a nice girl like that would be roaming around Whitechapel like a cat in heat, but to tell the truth she didn’t rightly care. Lottie was going to be Lizzie Strutter’s ticket to the big time. There were men who’d pay a whole lot of money to deflower a pretty little thing like that, and it wouldn’t be Henry Savage who was sticking his cock in her. As soon as this Jack the Ripper was caught and the strike was called off, Lizzie was going big-time. She was going up west.

No, it wouldn’t be Henry Savage who took her virginity, but there was more than one way to skin a cat, and more holes than the cunt. She said to Rachel, “Be a good girl and get me that jar of goose fat out of the pantry.”

When Rachel handed it to her Lizzie slid it halfway across the table toward Henry. He looked at it quizzically. “I’d rather have a shot of gin.”