City of Darkness (City of Mystery) (33 page)

After a moment of reflection, Cecil
added Leanna’s most recent letter to his pocket as well.  He checked his pocket
watch and noted that, with the carriage gone and the family reduced to foot
travel, he didn’t want to be late for his meeting with Solmes at the track.  The
ponies waited for no man.

4:35 PM

Hearing the front bell ring, Leanna
went to the door and opened it.  “John,” she gasped, almost stumbling forward
as she wrapped her arms around his neck.   “It’s awful.”  Her eyes were red and
swollen with weeping.

“There, darling,” said John, reaching
toward her.  “I had no idea you would still be so upset, but I had to return,
had to.  Couldn’t bear the way I left you.  I want to explain myself.”

“You have to go to Emma.”

“Emma?  What’s wrong with Emma?”

“You don’t know?  You haven’t seen
the papers?”

“Leanna, whatever do you mean?”

“The Ripper -”

“Yes, I read that.  Another victim, a
girl I knew myself, a former patient.  But what does that have to do with
Emma?”

“Mary Kelly was her sister.”

John rocked back on his heels.  “Dear
God, it can’t be.”

Leanna wiped her eyes and sat down on
a footstool.  “None of us, not even Aunt Gerry, knew she had a sister. 
Evidently she couldn’t bring herself to admit…”  Leanna straightened her
shoulders.  “But she must have loved her, John.   This girl was all the family
Emma had in this world and she’s distraught.”

“Take me to her,” John said quietly,
his shock evaporating and his doctor’s manner returning.  “I was on my way to
do rounds, so I have my bag.”

Leanna led John up the flights of
stairs to the third floor, where, in the hall, Geraldine and Gage were pleading
with little success for Emma to open the door.  Gerry too had been weeping, and
Gage was making ineffectual jabs at the bolt with a butter knife.

“Oh, John, can you do something?”
wailed Geraldine who suddenly looked every one of her seventy years.  “The poor
girl is in pieces.”

Nudging Gage aside, John rapped
lightly on the door.  “Emma, this is John Harrowman.  I just want to talk to
you, dear.  Please.”  The response was thundering silence.  Leanna bit her lip.

John glanced at Gerry.  “Is there
another key?”

“Oh, I’ve taken leave of my senses,”
Gerry muttered.  “Extra keys, of course.  Gage, go to my room.  On my dresser
there is a jewelry box.  In the bottom drawer there are some spare keys.  Bring
all of them.”

Gage hurried as fast as his feeble
body could carry him and soon returned with about half a dozen keys in his hand. 
John tried them in sequence and with the fourth the lock sprang free. 
Geraldine started to rush in, but John stopped her at the door.

“Leave me alone with her.  I know
about these matters,” he said in a tone that made the others freeze in their
tracks.  He shut the door behind him and removed his hat and cape, draping them
both over a chair and walking to the bed, where Emma lay sobbing.  He sat down
beside her and gently put his arms around her and let her cry, holding her in silence
until she seemed to calm.  He helped her lie back upon the bed, and stood gazing
down at her face, so bloated with tears that he would not have recognized her
had he passed her on the street.  She looked back at him trustingly. 

“Emma, I’m going to give you
something to help you rest.  I know you’ve been through a lot, but you must be
strong.  Losing someone dear is a terrible thing, I know for I’ve lost loved
ones.  But I knew your sister, Emma.  She was intelligent and strong as well as
beautiful. You can be proud of her.”

Emma considered this in silence, but
at least the dreadful wracking sobs had left her.  John pulled the sheets and
blankets up, then went to the door and asked Gage to collect his black satchel
from the entry.  Leanna and Gerry looked at him beseechingly, but he shook his
head.

“No visitors yet.”

John returned to the bed and held
Emma’s hand until Gage came in with the bag.  He filled a syringe with morphine
and injected it into Emma’s arm. 

“I want you to sleep now, Emma,” said
John, brushing her forehead with his hand, knowing that within minutes she
would have no choice in the matter.  “You’re among friends here.”  He waited at
her side for a few more minutes until her chest began to rise and fall with the
deep, profound breaths of a drugged sleep.

John found Geraldine and Leanna
downstairs in the parlor, sitting as still as two stone statues.  “She’ll rest,”
he said.  “And when she wakes she’ll seem a bit confused.  Just give her some
hot soup and tea and keep her relaxed.  I’ll stop in again to check on her.”

“And I’m going to send a message to
Cambridge,” he went on, when there was no response to his directions.  “Under
the circumstances, perhaps Tom could stay a fortnight or so until things are
better.”

“I want Tom,” Leanna wailed, like a
child.

“Of course you do, darling, and you
shall have him,” John said.

“You’ve been an invaluable help
already and we’re not so rattled as we seem.”  Geraldine attempted to sit up
straighter, to reassure him with a smile.  “If I’d known Emma had a sister, I
would have…”

“Spare yourself, Geraldine, for there
was nothing any of us could have done for Mary Kelly,” John said.  “Now that I
stop and think of it, she was very much like Emma.  Always seemed out of place,
if you know what I mean.”  He looked from Geraldine to Leanna. “I have my
patients,” he said helplessly.

“Of course,” Gerry said.  “Tess told
me you were up all of last night with her daughter.  Twins, I take it.  She’s
over the moon.”

John nodded.  “A long labor and
Margory is quite depleted.  I was headed there when I got your note.  But she’s
young and will recover and yes, Tess is now the proud grandmother of two fine boys.”

“Birth and death,” Geraldine said quietly,
patting Leanna’s hand.  “They keep flinging themselves at us, do they not?”

4: 46 PM

“We’ve got a new suspect, Sirs,” Davy
said, shaking the rain off his coat and hanging it on a post in the corner. 

“Just what we need,” Trevor said
blearily.  He and Abrams had spent most of the day in the mortuary with Doctor
Phillips, attempting to reassemble the pieces of Mary Kelly’s body and
determine precisely what had been done to her, how, and in what order.

“But I think this one is rather likely,”
Davy said. “I got the notion that the five week gap between killings might
indicate our man was a sailor, who’d been at sea for the month of October, so I
spent the morning at the docks getting duty rosters…”

“Clever,” Abrams said, with a little
surprise.

“But that wasn’t what led me, Sir, it
was later.  I went back by the Kelly house and first of all I see Mad Maudy
just standing in the street.  Watching a man who was paying her absolutely no
mind, who was standing on his tiptoes looking right through the window.  The
coppers weren’t stopping him because he was dressed as a gentleman, not acting
guilty, you know, but as if he had every right to be there.  And I thought yes,
that’s just how he does it, by seeming so prosperous and respectable that no
one questions his movements.  And he had a bag with him too, the right size for
a medical bag, so I followed him.”  Davy stopped to take a deep breath and Abrams
slid a cup of water toward him, which he eagerly drank.  Funny how one could be
soaked to the skin and still thirsty, he thought.

“Go on, man,” Trevor said, and if
they had not all been so preoccupied they might have noted this was the first
time Trevor had addressed Davy as “man” and not “boy.”

Followed him across town to Brixton,”
Davy continued, wiping his mouth with his sleeve.  “Asked a passing cabbie
whose house it was and he said a doctor, John Harrowman.”

“Harrowman?”  Abrams said.  “I’ve
heard the name.  Fancies himself a white knight of the slums, always raising
monies for a clinic.  Goes everywhere on his missions, even the Jewish part of
town.”

“I haven’t just heard of him, I know
him,” Trevor said with a sigh.  “Nice try, Mabrey, but he isn’t our man.”

“Hear me out, Sir,” Davy said, for
once not backing down from Trevor’s tendency to make broad declarations.  “He
left the house in Brixton, called another cab, and took it to Kingsly Street.”

But Trevor was still shaking his
head.  “Harrowman is a friend of the lady of the house, Geraldine Bainbridge,”
he said.  “In fact, that’s where I met him.”  He proceeded with the whole
story, his exhaustion making him careless and inclined toward more detail than
he might otherwise be, while Abrams and Davy sat without questions.  He described
the dinner party, the chess game, the canceled outing to the play, and although
he did not specifically mention the part Leanna had played in all these events,
her crucial role in the drama escaped neither of his listeners. 

When Trevor finished, Abrams and Davy
exchanged a long glance, in which it was mutually agreed that the news might be
better accepted if it came from Abrams.

“Welles,” Abrams said in a slow
deliberate voice.  “I’m afraid you’ve made rather a classic mistake.  We are
all of us aware of our tendency to suspect people we don’t like.  Someone makes
us angry, shows disrespect, or perhaps something in their appearance or speech
reminds us of a former foe.  And thus in a manner that we do not directly
acknowledge to ourselves, this disliked person can rise higher in our minds as
a suspect.  We know this impulse is wrong, of course, and as men of the law we
fight against it.”

“Of course we do,” Trevor said. 
“What’s your point?”

“Only that the opposite impulse can
be just as deadly.  You have found yourself in competition with John Harrowman
for the attentions of a young lady.  Apart from this, you bear the man no ill
will.  You might even admire him, feel a kinship.  Because he’s like you in a
way, is he not?  Struggling to be taken seriously in his work, struggling to
bring change to an antiquated system.”  Abrams took off his spectacles, blew on
the lenses.  “We’ve all known men like Harrowman, men who have all the traits
women find irresistible - from his cultured voice to his height to his passion
for justice.  Hell, when you got to the part about his perfectly groomed
mustache, even I began to hate him a little.”

“In school we called them
lady-slayers,” Davy piped up.

“Quite,” said Abrams.  He put his
glasses back on and looked sympathetically at Trevor.  “So you sit faced
opposite a paragon who will mostly likely win the battle for the Bainbridge
girl’s heart.  You know it.  He knows it.  Here is where it gets tricky.  He
will have the girl you want, so you dislike him.  But you know you should not
suspect him merely because you dislike him, so you do the exact opposite.  You
exonerate him because you dislike him.  You have bent over backwards so far in
your attempts to be fair to a rival that you have managed fall quite forward, to
blind yourself to the obvious.  That this John Harrowman is a composite of
everything we’ve been looking for.  Tall, mustached, well-dressed, medical
knowledge, access to the East End, someone the women there know and trust.”

“I assure, you he isn’t – “

“You said you played chess with him. 
Is he by any chance left-handed?”

Trevor shut his eyes.  “He seems to
use both hands with equal ease.  But I think –“

“Think what?” Abrams snapped, now at
the end of his patience. “That because you met a man at a dinner party in a
fashionable part of town, this means he isn’t capable of murder?  By God, Welles,
if any man on the force ventured such a theory, you’d call for his head on a
platter and rightfully so.  You’ve got to the face the fact that this man is
not only a suspect, but is in a house full of ladies this very moment, ladies
you claim as friends.”

“I can’t imagine –“

“That he would attack respectable
women in broad daylight?”  Abrams sat back in his chair and exhaled.  “Nor can
I.  He’s probably a true split of character, capable of waltzing one type of
woman across the floor of a ballroom and slicing open another an hour later.  So
Dr. Jekyll is undoubtedly the one taking tea in Mayfair this afternoon.  But we
can’t know where Mr. Hyde might venture later, can we?”

“Yes, Sirs, we do,” Davy said.  “I
took the liberty.  Know it isn’t my place, Sirs, but I grabbed a couple of
coppers off the corner of Kingsley.  Told one of them to keep a watch on the
Bainbridge house and the other to follow Harrowman when he left.  Didn’t want
to presume, but –“

“Good man,” Abrams said quietly. 
“You’ve earned your pay today, Davy, haven’t you?”

“Should we bring him in, Sir?  Ask
for his alibi?”

“Let me handle that,” Abrams said. 
“I suspect we’ll gain more by having him followed.”

Trevor opened his eyes.  He felt
sick, disoriented, as in boyhood when he had tumbled off a sled or fallen from
a tree.  Abrams was right. Of course he was.  There were so many logical
reasons to have interrogated John Harrowman and he had somehow failed to see
them.  And now the very man he’d been too stupid to suspect was at this moment with
Leanna, Emma, and Gerry.   It had been hard to hear Abrams berating him for his
blindness but that was nothing compared to the shame he felt now, looking into
Davy Mabrey’s face.