City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (21 page)

“I could give you something to help
you sleep,” John said quietly, staring at the board.

At that moment the door opened and
Emma entered, carrying three brandies on a tray.  The men fell silent as they
each took a glass from Emma and thanked her.

“Will you be back next weekend,
Tom?”  John asked casually.  Trevor had taken his other bishop.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” Tom said.
“I’m dreadfully behind at school, all these problems with the settling of my
grandfather’s estate.”  He caught himself just in time, remembering how Leanna
had pleaded with him to let neither Trevor nor John know of her inheritance. “I
have two missed papers to present, but if you think I should -”

“No, nonsense.  Your priority is your
studies,” Trevor said sharply, with a glance at Emma.

But her personal safety was the last
worry on Emma’s mind.  The thought of Tom leaving tomorrow felt like a knife to
the heart.  This was no sort of life for her, she thought, hanging on from
visit to visit for the pleasure of just watching him, feeding him, perhaps
exchanging a few friendly words with him.  And with each departure the ache
grew stronger until the weekdays were becoming nearly unbearable. 

Stop it, she thought to herself.  He
comes and he goes and if you haven’t figured that out by now, you are a proper dunce. 
All this moaning is more like the thoughts of a wronged romantic heroine.  More
like Leanna.  Aloud she said, a bit saucily, “May the ladies venture back into
this smoke-filled den?  You’ve banished us for nearly an hour.”

“Banished you?” Tom protested.  “I
could have sworn you had banished us.  Yes indeed, the ladies must all come
back in, I’m bored to death of this masculine conversation.”

 “We’ve been in the doldrums without
you,” John laughed.  “Checkmate,” he added, glancing at Trevor as he pushed
himself back from the table.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

October 4  

3:20 AM

After their largely uneventful rounds
had been completed, Trevor and Davy had stopped off at the Pony Pub, the place
Micha Barasik had claimed to be the night of the double murders.  Trevor’s
choice of a place to drink was not accidental.   Barasik’s alibi had been
confirmed earlier in the day, so the giant had been released, but something
about the situation still niggled at Trevor’s mind.  He had offered to buy Davy
a beer, but the young officer had, quite sensibly, opted instead to go home for
a few hours sleep.

“Not likely much will happen on a
Tuesday anyway, Sir,” he’d said.  “The Ripper strikes on weekends, doesn’t he,
Sir?  If we rule Martha Tabram out, the other four were on a Friday or
Saturday. Maybe a working man, turns in early through the week but cats around
on the weekend.”

“Quite right, Davy,” Trevor had said,
ashamed he hadn’t thought of that himself.  “Get some rest and I’ll see you at
the Yard tomorrow.”

The boy had a profound gift for the
obvious, Trevor reflected, idly wondering if the barmaid sliding him his pint
was the same girl who had provided an alibi for Micha.  That bit about the
murders occurring on weekends was so basic that everyone else on the case had
somehow managed to miss it.   For the hundredth time in the last two days
Trevor blessed he series of coincidences that had brought Davy Mabrey to his
attention. 

Eatwell had said he could take more
men and Trevor had initially been tempted to do so.  But perhaps, he reflected
as he gazed at the exhausted girl struggling to lift a tray laden with glasses,
it was better if just he and Davy did the interrogations and let the other men
handle the patrols.  It was hard for him to remember, in the dawning light of
this new day, what he had hoped to accomplish by walking the streets of
Whitechapel.  There were plenty of bobbies to do that, nearly twice the number
assigned to an area on a typical Tuesday night.  Davy had not questioned his
judgment directly, but he was right.  They needed to spend their time following
up leads, not mindlessly roaming the serpentine streets of the East End. 
Perhaps on the weekend, but not through the week.

Trevor drained his pint in three long
gulps and looked around.  Despite the fact it was nearly four in the morning,
there were still a surprising number of people clustered around the Pony Pub. 
It’s not just me, Trevor thought.  No one in London can sleep.  We have become
a city of insomniacs.  The barmaid turned an inquiring face and he nodded. 
Yes, another.  Why not?

“I wish you would listen,” the girl
said, sliding a beer toward Trevor, but talking to a man several seats down the
bar.  “We should go to my sister’s house, that’s what I think.  London’s not a
fit place for the decent, but she said she’d take us in…”

“Excuse me,” Trevor said.  “Miss –“

“Name’s Lucy,” the girl said, turning
her attention promptly back to Trevor.

“Pleased to meet you.  I was going to
ask about a man named Micha –“

“Oh yes, Micha, right as rain,” the
girl said.  “A copper bloke came in asking if he could be the Ripper, can you
picture?  But I told him he’d been here the whole night.  His usual charming
gentleman of a self, right as rain.”  She laughed, showing a row of teeth that
were surprisingly white and even considering this was the East End, and Trevor
found himself laughing back.  Perhaps it was his disheveled appearance or
perhaps the fact he was drinking at four in the morning, but for some reason
the girl taken him as a friend of the brute.

“Not likely to forget a face like
that, are you?” Trevor asked and the girl shook her head vigorously, glancing down
the bar as she did so.   Trevor couldn’t see the man sitting at the end, but he
was likely the jealous sort from the nervous little titters that erupted from
the girl whenever she looked in his direction.  He had undoubtedly seduced Lucy
at some point and didn’t like it when she showed another man attention.  We’re
all of us beasts in a way, Trevor thought.   The man at the end of the bar probably
had  her easy enough, cares for her not a whit, and even without looking him in
the face I’d bet the crown jewels he hasn’t the slightest notion of taking this
poor little simpleton to her sister.     

“Not likely to forget that ugly
devil” the girl agreed with a giggle.  “He pays for it, or he has it not at
all, that’s our Micha.”

She had picked up English phrases and
diction well enough, but but her accent, especially on certain words like “ugly,”
revealed that she was Polish.  Like Micha, and probably half of the people in
the Pony Pub.  The bar catered to the squadrons of people escaping Eastern
Europe for what they imagined to be a more humane and civilized life in London
and the tightness of these communities was one reason that Trevor conducted his
interviews with skepticism.  The Poles vouched for the Poles, the Jews for the
Jews, the sailors for the sailors, and, farther to the west, the Royals vouched
for the Royals.  Trevor had often argued that the natural human impulse to
protect your own kind rendered most alibis useless, but the Yard continued to put
a great deal of faith in them, still behaved as if investigating even the most
heinous crimes was a gentleman’s game.  Yes, guv, I’d slit a woman’s throat ear
to ear but I certainly wouldn’t lie about it. 

The girl continued to chatter as she
wiped the bar, saying that she was frightened, which was undoubtedly true. 
Saying she wanted to go to her sister, who was in Jersey, somewhere rural and
green and safe, at least to this girl’s mind.  Half the men in this bar have
mustaches, Trevor drily noted, and most of them dark hair.  The physical
descriptions provided by the witnesses, he was rapidly beginning to see, were
as pointless as alibis.  The witnesses were giving him impressions, not true
descriptions, and impressions were as individual as breasts…

God.  Where had that come from? 

Trevor pulled himself upright, took
another swig of his beer.  How long had it been?   Weeks coming up on months, months
coming up on more like a year? 

He found himself envying the man who
sat at the end of the bar, a man who had clearly taken advantage of a lonely,
frightened girl who  he had no intention of marrying, no intention of saving. 
The rules of Mayfair didn’t apply in this part of town.  Of course the
impressions of the people he and Davy had interviewed were just that,
impressions.  The poverty and the filth of the East End acted as drugs, transporting
the citizens of Whitechapel into a sort of collective stupor.  A sense of
timelessness, drunkenness, women walking aimlessly back and forth in search of
something that did not exist in this mean part of the city, men who worked and
ate and slept at odd hours.  The people here owned no watches.  They read no
papers, kept no appointments, accepted no invitations to dine.   If you stopped
the average person in the street and asked the wretch the date or the month would
they even be able to answer?  Would there be any reason why they should?  And yet
these are the people, Trevor thought, draining his second beer, whose
recollections are the foundation of our case.

Trevor shut his eyes.  The stories
buzzed around him.  Was the bar usually this crowded on a Tuesday?  But no, it
was Wednesday now, wasn’t it?  Tuesday had slid into Wednesday just as Tuesday
always does, and Trevor listened to Lucy chattering on.  A pretty girl, a
normal girl, a girl who had committed no greater sin than believing the man who
bedded her, a girl who with a single stroke of bad luck might find herself on
the streets someday, as desperate as Dark Annie.  Trevor let the alcohol settle
over him like a blanket and listened to their voices.  Not just the girl and
her useless lover, but the man in the back, roaring that it must be Victoria’s
grandson.   “’e’s sick in the ‘ead, you, know?  Why they only let ‘im out at
night, so ‘e won’t be seen in public.”

“I think ‘e’s that doctor from
Russia,” said another.  ”The Jew.  Said in the papers these women were cut on
like in surgery.  Clean cuts and all.”

“You know ‘e’s had some dealings with
Old Maudy,”  a female voice ventured.  “Maybe they’re working together.  She ‘ates
all of us.  Wears men’s clothing, too.”

Trevor pulled out his journal and
made another note on Maud Minford.   He kept hearing her name, but he hadn’t
visited her yet.  John had seemed so certain she couldn’t have the skills to do
the deed, yet everyone had been unanimous in their condemnation of her
cruelty.  He closed his journal and replaced it in his breast pocket. 

“Evening, Sir.”  A young girl –
fifteen?  sixteen? – slid onto the stool beside him.  “Or should I say
morning?”

“Morning it is,” he said.  “Don’t you
have some place you should be?  Someone who’s expecting you home?”

“No, Sir” she said, with a simplicity
that reminded him, oddly, of Davy.  “Nowhere to be.  No one at home.  And you,
Sir?”

“Nowhere to be” Trevor confirmed,
draining the last of his beer.  “And no one waiting for me either.  So you
guessed right, Love.” It had been ten months, four days, and twenty hours. 
Afterwards, perhaps he would be able to sleep.

CHAPTER TWENTY

October 5, 1888

9:14  AM

Rain was peppering in sharp, hard drops
as Trevor and Davy stepped from the coach on Atlantic Street.  The two men
pulled their collars up about them and held their hats tightly with one hand as
they ran to a nearby canopy for shelter.  Davy had written down directions
they’d gotten from a witness the night before and he fumbled for the note in
his pocket.   Just the mention of Mad Maudy had put fear in the girl’s face,
even though Trevor had assured her that she was not in trouble.

“Start at the Bullwick Tavern and
walk two minutes toward the water, where you’ll find an alley.  Follow it back
to the water and then go a little further.  There’ll be a wooden shack with a
chimney.” Davy read.

“Follow it to the water and then go
farther?  It sounds as if her house is floating down the bloody Thames itself,”
Trevor said, but if the girl had been a mite uncooperative, her directions were
as good as gold.  Within minutes Davy and Trevor found themselves at the end of
the aptly-named Atlantic Street, a broken down thoroughfare which abutted the
waterfront and reeked of rotten fish.  The two men held their scarves over their
noses as they walked toward the river and a lone crude building with smoke
escaping from its chimney.  Hard to imagine a young debutante picking her way through
the muck to such a hovel, no matter how desperate she might be.  Trevor
approached the front door and knocked soundly.

“Go away, ‘tis too early in the day!”
a rough voice exploded from inside.

“Are you Maud Minford?  I wish to
speak with you,” Trevor shouted, for the wind along the channel was fierce.

“You know me, do I know thee?”

“I’m detective Trevor Welles of
Scotland Yard.  May I have a few minutes with you?”

“Scotland Yard, is that what you
say?  What do you want with ole’ Maudy?”

“Only to ask you some questions, Miss
Minford.”

Trevor and Davy took a step back as
they heard a latch unlock and the door slowly widened to reveal a single
squinting eye.