Tarnished (11 page)

She’d been here when I delivered my first Menagerie bounty, and I suspected she would stay long after I departed.

She straightened, her flushed cheeks fading as she took a deep breath. “I heard you’d come by the other night,” she said, “but I didn’t see you.”

I winced. “I left rather quickly.”

She nodded, braids sliding over her shoulders, and I waited. My friend was working up to something. As I took in the chill, I watched her hands work through the plaits. Then, looking once over her shoulder, she blurted, “There’s been a murder.”

It’s impossible not to blanch at a statement like that. “What?”

“It’s Annie.”

I drew a mental blank. “Annie?”

Her long-fingered fists clenched in front of her. “Someone killed our Annie. That bastard killed her, he did, and I’m going to make him pay.”

The only other murder I’d heard about was the prostitute in the East End. I frowned. “Do you know who Leather Apron is?”

Zylphia shook her head so hard, her braids fell over her shoulders like oiled snakes. “No, but he’s like as not what killed Annie,” she said, and I covered my face as my confusion only grew. “Bad enough the first was.”

“Stop,” I said through my fingers. “Wait. Let’s go over this again, Zylla. There’s been a murder, entirely different from the one in the papers?”

“Yes.”

A cold wind swirled around us, and I shivered, suddenly all too aware of the dark pressing down from all sides. The lit path was only a few steps away, but I didn’t walk toward it.

“You remember Annie?” Zylphia pressed. “Red-haired bit of a thing, had the youthful look about her. The men what like the innocent faces liked that one.”

And suddenly, I remembered. Shorter even than me, with freckled skin and a laugh reminiscent of a child’s. I dropped my hands. “No,” I breathed. She’d been sweeter than treacle and bawdy enough to keep me in stitches of laughter the few times I’d talked with her. “Zylla, I’m so sorry.”

Zylphia nodded, once. “We aren’t to talk about it.”

“Why?”

She shrugged, her bare shoulders graceful and smooth. “But that bastard what killed her, he took her apart like she was a doll. We was wondering . . .” She trailed off.

“Wondering?”

She tucked her fingers under her chin, frowning down at me. “You’re a collector. Did you hear of a price on Annie?”

I thought back to the wall of bounties; parchments and scrawling littering the surface. I made it a point to read as many as I could. I needed to be paid, after all, and some were easier to earn the coin than others. “No,” I said slowly. “I saw nothing of the sort. And you know it’s a dead man walking what puts a price on Menagerie employees.”

Zylphia’s face crumpled.

It was more than I could stand. “How can I help?” I demanded.

She took in a shuddering breath. “Annie wasn’t our first,” she admitted, and my eyebrows climbed as I stared at her. She hurried to add, “There’s been three other girls, all murdered by the same bastard what did Annie. Three sweets and one common dove. That one, her name was Mary.”

“How do you know it was the same killer?”

Her mouth set. “He’s a ripper, that one. He took bits.”

“Bits?”

“Bits of them,” she clarified. “Liver and such. You don’t forget a mark like that.” Her white teeth flashed, all the more startling a grimace for her tea-dark skin. “We wasn’t to say anything at all.”

“By whose order?” I demanded, only half listening now.

She didn’t answer. She didn’t have to. That rotten, serpent-tongued two-faced thief. Not only had Hawke stolen my bounty, he’d gone and kept
this
from me, too.

Her gaze searched my face earnestly. Very slowly, she caught my hands and tucked them together, palm to palm. So surprised was I that she’d touched me, I could only stare as she said softly, “He’s killed enough of us. We’re scared, and we want him brought to justice.”

I blinked. “I don’t suppose you mean a magistrate.”

“
Our
justice,” Zylphia explained grimly, but said nothing else. She didn’t have to. I opted not to ask. There were some things I needed to do with as clean a conscience as I could.

“What do you need from me?” I asked, frowning. “What can I do?”

Zylphia squeezed my fingers, then let me go, once more stepping out of reach. “We—that is,” she amended, “the girls and I, we want to hire you to collect the ripper.”

My stomach flipped.

“We can offer coin, but not enough,” she continued hastily. As if by giving me time to think, I’d say no. “So we’ve gathered what we could together, and we can make up the difference with a ball of opium Preshea was given from one of hers.”

I want it.
It was the only thought that filled my head as Zylphia’s offer registered. “What size?” I asked.

She held up thumb and forefinger, creating a circle big enough that I’d be set for at least a season.

But even as my greedy body yearned for it, I knew it didn’t matter. There was such hope in my friend’s eyes. Such fear.

And I’d already decided, even before offer of payment.

I nodded. “You and your girls have yourselves a collector,” I said, but it seemed too sparkling, too brisk to my own ears.

This wouldn’t be easy.

But for Zylphia, for the girls she befriended, for the simple fact that I wanted to see Micajah Hawke’s smug expression fade as I dropped the murdering bastard at his lying feet, I said yes.

Let that teach the man to keep secrets from me.

Z
ylphia had precious little information. The sweets had been lured or stolen from the Menagerie grounds and found elsewhere in Limehouse. The first victim, the doxy called Mary I’d read about in the paper a month ago, had been found near her own rented rooms in the East End. Four murders over the course of four weeks.

Five victims, actually, if I could count the latest in the paper. All brutal. All done by the same man? God, I hoped so . . . To think there might be two horrifically unhinged killers stalking London below gave me chills.

But I knew one thing: I wasn’t looking for an immigrant, and possibly I could release any of the more prominent gangs from my scrutiny. Say what you will about the criminals and the Chinese, none of them were stupid. Laying a finger on a sweet was tantamount to signing over your life, and I didn’t know of a single Chinese man or gang leader who’d give the Karakash Veil reason to come calling.

How in God’s name had the other murders gone unreported? The same papers that wrote about Leather Apron’s latest surely wouldn’t have passed up the chance to print something about mangled Menagerie sweets.

Unless the Karakash Veil had quashed it so thoroughly that no one else knew. That might have explained Hawke’s recalcitrance at my presence. I was an outsider, and not even a paying customer, at that.

That meant Zylla had taken a major risk in hiring me. I’d have to tread carefully, lest I get my friend in trouble with an employer not especially well known for mercy.

The first thing I needed to do was get a lead. The problem was, I had nothing to go on.

Of course, I rarely had more to go on than a name and a motive. Sleuthing, I’d long since learned, came in different forms. The first was careful, cautious study. Evidence. Trailing folk and putting the clues together.

It didn’t often come to fruition, and sadly, clues could so easily be manufactured. I should know, I’d done it enough times myself in the course of my youthful mischief.

The other, much more common method, was pure dumb luck.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had to go fishing for leads. I knew just where to do it; there were all manner of establishments where tongues wagged and gossip flowed as easily as drink, opium, or both.

I took a direct route, one that led me through populated streets. Some were more active than others, even at night. As I walked, I scanned the faces of prostitutes and street rats alike. Many were filthy beyond repair. Some deformed. My eyes skated away from a young girl as she passed, head down and feet trudging through the muck.

The raw, open lesion eating at half her face stayed with me. They called it phossy jaw, a common ailment that plagued the girls what worked in the match factories. That girl could expect either surgical removal of her jaw, or death.

It was a hard life, anyway. Being poor only made it worse.

I rubbed the back of my neck as I walked, unhappily aware that my respirator and goggles were drawing more attention than I necessarily wanted. I braced myself for confrontation, but none came. Odds are, I was an uncertain mystery in the lamplight. Diminutive, sure, but there was an adage about small folk on the streets. More often than not, they fought the hardest. Would shiv you as soon as fight fair.

I wouldn’t do either. But no one needed to know that. Still, the back of my neck prickled uncomfortably as I walked.

Finding no one I thought would be useful, I sidestepped into an alley I knew as one of the many paths that led to the Brick Street Bakery—an alliterative name for one of the many territories claimed by a gang by the same name—and surprised a boy preparing to urinate on a wall.

“Bugger!” he squeaked as I clapped a hand into his collar. Fierce brown eyes lifted to stare at my goggles and mask, fighter’s eyes, for all he was certainly younger than Levi. He thrashed in my grip, hands and feet hammering. “Lemme go!”

I shook him hard enough to rattle his teeth. “Be still, you little rat.”

“I’ll take yer eyes out!”

“Do,” I shot back, warding away his blows simply by holding him at arm’s length. “I’ll laugh to hear your pleading when Ishmael Communion comes a-calling.”

He froze. All at once, the fight drained from his eyes, his body, and he hung limp as a starved puppy in my grasp. “You know Communion?”

“We’re friends, he and I.” I narrowed my eyes at him, for all he couldn’t see them through the lenses. “If I set you on your feet, you won’t run?”

I watched the notion sneak into his face, easily read despite the entire city’s worth of dirt covering it. “Won’t,” he lied.

Poor blighter. I knew his language, and I used it now. “There’s a shilling in it if you don’t,” I said, and watched his eyes widen. “And another if you deliver a message for me.”

“Wot, really?”

“Really.” I set him down, let him go and stepped back.

His little body tensed, taut as a bowstring as his instinct fought with greed. All but vibrating in place, he flipped me a look under stringy, unkempt hair and held out a dirty palm.

I delved into my pocket and produced a grimy shilling. I’d long since learned to dirty up my coin when I spent it below the drift. I held it between two fingers, where he could see it. “Good lad,” I said, and tucked another beside it. “Where is Communion?”

“Somewhere,” the lad chirped. “Can’t tell.” He tapped his nose. “Bakers only.”

He didn’t mean the sort who made bread. I frowned at him. “You’re a Brick Street Baker?”

“Uh-uh,” he replied. “Not yet. But I’ll be soon.”

So young, too. I refrained from the lecture welling behind my teeth—in the background of my thoughts, Fanny’s voice was filling my head—and focused on the matter at hand. “Tell Communion to meet me at the corner of Emmett and Park. In one hour.”

He watched the shillings as I held them just over his head. “Aye!”

“What is the message?” I knew this lesson well, too.

“Meetcha at th’ corner of Park ’n’ Emmett. One hour,” he repeated dutifully.

“Good lad.” I flipped him both coins with a flick of my fingers. He caught them deftly, one in each quick hand, turned and fled down the alley. I watched him almost vanish into the dark, pause, turn and look at me.

“Hey,” he called. “Woss yer name?”

I smiled. “Tell him that it’s collector business,” I replied. “He’ll know.”

He stared at me for a moment. Finally, just loud enough that the alley fed the sound to me, he sneered. “Nutter.”

Then he ran.

My smile widened as I left the alley. This time, I bypassed the busy street entirely. I took my time, knowing it’d take the rat at least half as long to locate Communion, and threaded my way through side alleys and inner lanes.

This time, I didn’t feel quite so scrutinized. Was I overworried? I thought so. I’d never agreed to collect a murderer before, even alive. And it’s not as if it were an official bounty posted, so there was no reason for me to worry about other collectors jumping on my back in the dark.

Of course, anyone else looking for a collector might luck out on my trail, but certainly no one would be dumb enough to try.

Unless it were the mysterious assailant outside the druggist’s shop.

As the thought occurred to me, I damned my stupidity to perdition and melded back into the shadows. Of course, the chances of being located twice by the same man were slim at best, especially if he were just a footpad looking for coin, but I didn’t need to risk it. I still felt overly anxious.

I hurried to my chosen destination and remained as hidden as I could.