The Diabolical Miss Hyde (11 page)

Behind her—yes, there—Mr. Todd chuckled.

Eliza whirled, jittery. But Todd just stared at Lafayette, enthralled. “Oh, I say,” he whispered. “Hello, shadow.”

She swallowed. “I, er . . . I don't smell anything, Captain. What brings you here?”

Lafayette was still wrinkling his nose. “Whoever is this odd crimson fellow?”

Eliza smiled, dazed. Introductions in a lunatic asylum. This day just kept getting stranger. “Allow me, gentlemen. Captain Remy Lafayette of the Royal Society, may I present Mr. William Sinclair, student of surgery, and Mr. Malachi Todd, er . . . lunatic.”

“Razor Jack.” Lafayette studied him, hostile. “Fascinating. I thought you'd be taller.”

Mildly, Todd met his stare. “A Royal Society lackey. Disappointing. I'd hoped you'd be smarter. Eliza, can we do without the lapdog?”

Lafayette bristled. “Nice shackles. Do they hurt?”

“Nice sword. Perhaps I'll try it out on your face. Do you think
that'd
hurt?”

Hastily, Will edged between them, lifting his hands in peace. “If you please, Captain, step away with your weapon.”

“Why? He looks harmless enough to me.” Lafayette didn't budge. Didn't shift his gaze.

Todd grinned like a hungry eel. “That's what they all thought.”

“For heaven's sake, gentlemen,” interrupted Eliza, “the miasma of male pride is choking me. Shall we draw pistols at dawn?” Firmly, she took Lafayette's elbow. “Come along, Captain. Thank you, Will, I'll see you on Tuesday morning at the Crystal Palace. Good day, Mr. Todd.” And she hustled Lafayette up the corridor and away.

“Do visit me again, Eliza,” Todd called after her, his voice fading into the distance. “When you find another. And give Harley Griffin my regards.”

Eliza clutched her box of bottles tightly as she and Lafayette strode through the ladies' ward. Miss Lucy hissed at them, baring her chiseled teeth, greedy eyes tracking the impeccably dressed captain. “You smell
goood,
animal.”

Lafayette cocked that single eyebrow. “Lovely office you keep. Such charming staff.”

“Yes, well. Look to your virtue, Captain. They don't meet many dashing young officers in here.”

“Lucky me,” he commented dryly. “Do
you
meet many dashing young officers, Doctor?”

“Lately?” She smiled sweetly. “None.”

“You wound me, madam.”

“Really? How quaint. I imagine you as barely bruised.”

A grin. “But you do imagine me.”

“Don't push your luck.”

“When I decide to push, Doctor, luck will not come into it.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Whatever was that madman raving about, ‘shadow'? And another what?”

“I haven't the faintest notion,” said Eliza shortly, sidestepping the palsied old woman, who was still making determined circuits of the ward. “That's what ‘madman' means. And mind your manners around him, if you please. Dignity is all he has.”

“Weren't you the one who put him away? Didn't know you and he were friends.”

She flushed. “We are
not
friends. I simply have no wish to make Will's job any harder than it already is. Rudeness upsets Mr. Todd, and when Mr. Todd gets upset, people get hurt.”

“Fair enough. I apologize. The fellow back-combed my fur, I confess.”

She waved at Annie the pig girl and smiled. “A descriptive turn of phrase. He has that effect on most people.”

“But not on you.” A sidelong blue glance.

“He's not my patient. I'm really not interested one way or the other.” The warder unlocked the gate, and Eliza halted on the landing, gray skirts swirling. “Can you see yourself out from here? I have rounds to complete.”

“Then complete them later.” Lafayette was already tugging her down the stairs. “Come along, Dr. Jekyll. No time to lose. Consider your services retained by the Royal.”

Evil visions of the Tower's dank electrified cells flitted through her mind, the rats, the rusted instruments of torture. Was he dragging her off to interrogate her? The box of Finch's alchemical tinctures under her arm suddenly loomed like a murder weapon, incriminating. Not to mention the two sniggering black flasks in her bag. God help her.

She tried to shake him off, bottles rattling, but his grip wouldn't shift. She stumbled over her skirts. “Whatever for? I assure you, I've done nothing—”

“Not for that. At least, not yet.” Lafayette grinned, and it lit his eyes with disarming excitement. “It's another murder scene, Doctor. I think you'll find it familiar.”

T
HE TALL FAUX-SANDSTONE COLUMNS OF THE EGYPTIAN
Hall in Piccadilly swallowed the doorway in deep shadow. Twin pedestaled colossi of ancient queens in Egyptian headdress loomed above. Eliza stared up at them as Lafayette handed her from the carriage, Hippocrates jumping down at her side. The place looked like a tomb. “Another theater?”

“Just so. Come along.” Lafayette ushered her down the muddy side street, his hand at the small of her back. Behind the Hall lay a bare stone courtyard, surrounded by a wooden fence and overlooked by a pair of large black-painted windows.

Policemen milled about in their blue brass-buttoned coats, protecting the familiar screen of bedsheets from a thickening crowd. Scruffy boys, a pinch-faced governess or lady's maid in a drab black dress, a haughty old lady wearing elbow-length gloves and veils who looked down her nose when Eliza and Lafayette shouldered through with murmured apologies.

Lizzie scowled.
Everyone loves a murder, eh? Villains in the night, tragic heroines splattered in gore. Better than an opera. Bloody vultures.

On cue, Eliza spied Mr. Temple, the penny-pamphlet writer, lurking in a corner with his sketch pad out. She signaled to a policeman, secretly gleeful. “Constable, kindly escort this gentleman in the lime-green waistcoat from the scene. I believe he's contaminating the evidence.”

“Oi!” Temple fought, but a grin played over his face, and he called over his shoulder as two uniformed men dragged him away. “This is an outrage, madam! I'm merely doing my job!”

“So am I, Mr. Temple. Good day.”

She and Lafayette stepped around the barrier. Inspector Griffin motioned them over. A dead woman lay at his feet, a sprawl of blueberry skirts stained with blood. Young, pretty, tangled black hair stark against her death-white skin. Like Miss Pavlova, this woman had no feet.

And no hands.

Todd's words echoed uneasily in Eliza's mind.
I should be all astonishment . . .

Her stomach rippled, sick. Every murder victim made her sad, angry, a little helpless. Much good her science did them now. All that remained to them was justice, and even that proved sadly elusive in a world where monsters walked free.

Aye, never mind,
whispered Lizzie darkly.
Just another dead girl. And girls can be replaced, can't they? Can always get another wife. Another daughter to eat your food and spend your money, another housemaid to scrub and haul, another whore to make you feel good . . .

“Still here, Griffin?” asked Lafayette breezily. “Outside your division, isn't it? Hadn't you better stick to Haymarket, where the crooks all tremble at the very twirl of your mustaches?”

“Lafayette, how nice to see you again.” Griffin didn't bother to look up from his notebook. “This is still my case. The Commissioner insisted, I'm afraid. Sorry to disappoint you.”

“Don't be, Inspector. You're so very good at it.”

“Honestly, Captain, have you no male friends?” Firmly, Eliza pushed him aside. She, for one, was pleased to find Griffin at the scene, and not one of his rude colleagues.

She surveyed the body, pulling her optical from its bag and affixing it to her head in readiness. “Do we know her name, Inspector?”

“Miss Ophelia Maskelyne,” said Griffin. “Known hereabouts as ‘The Mysterious Disappearing Ophelia.'”

Memory flashed, an oil painting of a beautiful drowning girl, her flaxen hair swirling in dark water . . . She shook herself. This was no time to let Mr. Todd and his sly allusions muddle her mind.

Any more than he's done already, missy . . .

“She's a stage magician, playing at the Egyptian,” added Griffin. “It's a family outfit. They're quite well known.”

“A magic show?” Eliza glanced at Lafayette.

The captain shrugged. “I've seen their act. Garish but entertaining. They have the Royal's stamp of approval.”

“And how does one earn such a precious jewel, pray?”

“By proving there's no magic in it, of course. You show the investigators the secret of every trick. Get it duplicated by our committee of experimenters. They document it, sign it off. It's quite simple.”

“Wonderful,” Griffin muttered. “You chaps take the fun out of everything.”

“Fun is permitted. Just not dangerous superstition.”

“Excellent. I'll remember that, next time the Royal burn some poor fellow in St. Paul's churchyard for speaking his mind.”

“There's free thinking, Inspector, and then there's treason. Not the same thing.”

“Really? My mistake.”

“Truce, please,” cut in Eliza. “Shall we help poor Miss Maskelyne tell her tale?” She bent closer to the body, careful not to disturb the pooling blood, and pulled on her white gloves. “Her face is bruised,” she pointed out. “A black eye. Also her throat. When was her body discovered?”

“Time,” demanded Hippocrates importantly. “Information please.”

“Hush, Hipp, just record, please. Inspector?”

“Not until around midday. Possibly missing since late yesterday,” added Griffin. He nodded towards a pale, dark-eyed fellow with dramatic elbow-length black hair and a bowler hat. “That's the brother, Lysander Maskelyne. Apparently she pleaded illness last evening and didn't go onstage.”

“And no one thought to look for her since? Not a close family, are they?”

“Or simply late risers. These theater types do tend to over-indulge.”

“A generalization, surely.”

“Surely,” agreed Griffin. “But the banal explanation is usually the truth. We need not seek criminal conspiracies under every rock.” He shot a sharp glare at Lafayette. “Need we?”

Eliza stifled a smile. “The most likely explanation is the one requiring the simplest causes. The Occam's razor of crime. How illuminating.”

Hippocrates ground his cogs. “Logical,” he trumpeted happily. “Conclusion computes.”

“Naught but weary experience, I'm afraid,” said Griffin. “Besides, they say William of Occam was secretly an alchemist. How disreputable of him.”

“Some say the Philosopher was an alchemist, too, in his day,” reminded Eliza archly. “Just not a very successful one. Fools, obviously, I should say. What an outlandish notion.”

Dramatically, Lafayette slapped his palms over his ears. “Tra-la-la. Sorry, what was that? I say, you vile rebels, carry on pretending I'm not here, long as you like.” He wandered away across the yard, sniffing the air and humming to himself.

Griffin glanced after him, perplexed. “I'd swear that fellow's an idiot, but . . .”

“But,” agreed Eliza. “I know exactly what you mean. Shall we carry on?”

She tilted her optical, ready to inspect the victim . . . but a chill threaded her bones.

A love letter scribbled in blood.
What if Mr. Todd was right? What did it mean?

It means he's a friggin' lunatic,
whispered Lizzie.
He just wants your attention. Forget him.

A gulp of laughter threatened to escape Eliza's lips. Forget him? Todd was her recurring nightmare. The evil dream that never ended. The stain that never, ever washed out.

But avoiding the evidence didn't make a problem go away.

Briskly, she bent to inspect the woman's sliced legs through a magnifying lens. “Similar angle of slice relative to cut,” she reported. “Same rolled edge of flesh and burr on the rim of the bone. And the forearms . . . yes. I would venture the same
or similar instruments as our ballerina's murderer. And . . .” She swabbed the corpse's lips and added her golden solution from the dropper. The swab flooded bright green. “The same drug, whatever it is. We may indeed have a pattern. Or at the very least, an admiring imitator.”

“The Chopper,” indeed. Perhaps the bloodthirsty Mr. Temple would get his wish.

Your budding artist isn't angry or vengeful,
whispered Mr. Todd in her ear.
He's hopelessly in love . . .

But why would Todd help her? She'd stolen his freedom, locked him in a dark prison of madness and pain. Spoiled his art forever. He'd every reason to wish her ill.

Every reason, except . . .

Eliza chewed her lip, strange excitement tingling in her heart. What she had here was a multiple murderer. Killing women—surely, though two victims did not yet a
modus operandi
make—with meticulous, mathematical care. Evidence aplenty. Secret trails of tiny clues to unravel. A feast for a determined forensic investigator with unorthodox methods and no fear. These women would have justice. She'd make sure of it . . .

But she glimpsed Captain Lafayette of the Royal, resplendent in red, pottering about on the yard's edge, and shivered. A feast, but also a deadly trap.

A punctilious killer. A suspicious Royal investigator. A cunning lunatic. Each with the power to ruin her.

She didn't know whether to feel triumphant or terrified.

“Wonderful,” remarked Griffin dryly. “Ten yards from the rear of a crowded venue, our hero manages once again to amputate
limbs without arousing attention and to spirit himself away unnoticed. Hurrah! I do so enjoy a resourceful maniac—”

“Inspector, Doctor.” Sergeant Porter strode up and tipped his hat to her. He was a gruff London man, all business, his graying mustaches bristling. “We've found the hands, sir.”