End of the Century (32 page)

Miss Bonaventure leaned in close to Blank. She'd had the chance to talk with the constable who'd first arrived on the scene, in response to Dickson's urgent call for help. According to the constable, Miss Bonaventure said, in a voice pitched so low only Blank was close enough to hear, the victim had been dead some little while before Dickson supposedly found her.

Dickson shared rooms with two of the other employees, temporarily he assured Blank and Miss Bonaventure, and when these employees arrived at the studio, they were able to corroborate parts of Dickson's story, namely, that he had left their rooms shortly after dawn, making enough noise to wake them in the process.

“Did you notice anything in his hands,” Miss Bonaventure asked, “this man you encountered at the door? Any sort of tool or weapon?”

Dickson shook his head and said that he'd taken careful note of the man's hands as a matter of course. He'd seen that they were both empty. He'd had nothing under his arm or across his back, come to that. The man might well have secreted something in his pockets, but Dickson was reluctant to guess, not having seen anything to suggest it.

“Thank you,” Blank said, taking Miss Bonaventure's arm and backing away from Dickson. “I think we have the information we need.”

Dickson, seeing his audience slipping away, but with a good head of steam built up, continuing his harangue, simply shifting targets, and without missing a beat turned to one of the laborers standing nearby and started castigating him for the poor quality of the painted set at the opposite side of the studio.

Counting themselves lucky to have extricated themselves from Dickson, Blank and Miss Bonaventure walked out of the studio into the London morning.

Based on the evidence at hand, the woman would have been murdered sometime shortly after Dickson had woken but long before he'd have been able to reach the studio, eliminating him as a suspect. The natural assumption was that the hairless, chalky-skinned man whom Dickson had glimpsed fleeing the scene was the Jubilee Killer, but Blank wasn't so sure.

“Remember,” he said, as he and Miss Bonaventure made their way to New Scotland Yard, “that the constable thought the woman had been dead for some time when Dickson discovered her. But if that is the case, why would the killer have lingered so long beside the body?”

Miss Bonaventure nodded. “And, as Dickson reports, he saw no weapon or cutting implement in the man's hand, and the constable who arrived on the scene saw no indication of one having been left behind.”

“True.” Blank narrowed his eyes, thoughtfully. “Well, perhaps something can be learned from viewing the poor woman's remains.”

Unfortunately, as it happened, all that was learned from their viewing was that seeing so much blood in recent days had not inured them to the sight of more, and that Miss Villers appeared to have been dispatched with the same implement used on the three women and Mr. Brade before her. Unlike the three women, though, Miss Villers had not been decapitated or had her limbs severed, and unlike Mr. Brade she had not died with her back to her attacker. She had sustained grievous wounds on her torso and her upper legs, and had lost several fingers on her left hand, perhaps when raising it to ward off a blow. The cuts were clean and straight, as all the others had been,
the cutting implement seeming to have passed unimpeded through skin, muscle, and bone.

In death, it was easy to see that Miss Villers had been a handsome woman in life, if perhaps with coarser features than society would deem aesthetic. Her clothes were well tailored if not fashionable, and beneath her skirts she had worn well-cobbled walking boots. In all, Miss Villers appeared to be a respectable unmarried woman of the middle classes, free from disease or other impairment. The postmortem had been conducted by Dr. Thomas Bond, and when he studied it, Blank for the first time felt no inclination to throttle the man. Bond's summary of the woman's condition at death and the nature of her wounds were essentially in line with his own thinking.

Blank and Miss Bonaventure thanked the constable who had, on Melville's orders, shown them to the body, and then went to visit the flat which the police had found registered in her name. It was a stolidly middle-class residence in Islington, not far from the Agricultural Hall, off Theberton Street.

Miss Villers had been in the early years of her third decade, the daughter of a trader, and had been fairly well set up by her family. Despite the respectable address, though, and the relative good quality of the furnishings, Miss Viller's flat was fairly small, one might even say cozy, with something of a threadbare feel to it. Aside from a wardrobe and dresser, a sideboard, bed, and nightstand, there was little in the room to indicate it was even inhabited. And aside from a framed print over the mantle, nothing to suggest the character of the woman who had lived there.

Blank stepped close to the print and read aloud, “‘
For I'm to be Queen o' the May, Mother, I'm to be Queen o' the May.
'”

“What's that?” Miss Bonaventure asked, setting a handheld looking glass back on the dresser and coming to stand beside him.

“It's from Tennyson,” Blank said. “One of his
Idylls of the King
, if I'm not mistaken.”

It was a photographic print, depicting a woman holding a wreath of flowers in one hand, her head tilted slightly to one side. She had a broad-brimmed hat on, pushed back, looking almost like a halo, and was wearing a white dress, with her long wavy hair falling past her shoulders. Written beneath the print was the inscription Blank had recited.

“If that's Miss Villers's work,” Blank went on, “then she was quite talented, indeed.”

“She may well have been,” Miss Bonaventure said, “but you'll need to look elsewhere for evidence of it.” She pointed a finger at the photograph. “This one is by another dead woman, actually. Julia Margaret Cameron.”

Blank glanced at her, and then looked back to the photograph, appraisingly.

Miss Bonaventure drifted off and went to the sideboard along the wall. There was unopened mail lying in a heap, all of recent vintage.

“Here,” she said, opening the first and holding the contents aloft for Blank to see. “A cheque, made payable to Miss Cecilia Villers, and drawn on an account with the name ‘LRT.'”

“Long Range Transportation?” Blank ventured.

“Little Red Train?” Miss Bonaventure countered.

“Less Redemptive Taxidermy?” Blank chuckled slightly, and came to take the cheque from her hands. “What else is there?”

“Just a letter,” she said, holding it up. “From a W.B. Taylor, addressed to Miss Cecilia Villers.” She read aloud.

Dearest Miss Villers,

I am in receipt of the photographs you've sent, those which depict an early passage from “The Raid on the Unworld.” I can hardly express my first responses in words, which seemed instead a tumult of emotions. Coupled with Mr. B's scenery and costumes, I think your photographs have precisely captured the feeling I had hoped to evoke, the frisson I felt when first reading Lady P's account. I can't tell you how grateful you've made this country boy by taking on the project, and I know that I speak for Lord A and the rest of the league when I say that we're proud to have you on the team.

(When next we meet, I have some notes for you about how you might approach the next stage of the project, which I'll refrain from outlining here, for fear of sullying these well-wishes with criticism.)

 

Sincerely,
W.B. Taylor

 

“League?” Blank raised an eyebrow. He glanced at the cheque, and then at the framed print on the wall. “LRT?”

Miss Bonaventure caught his meaning, and gave a slight smile. “League of the Round Table, perhaps?”

“The same which counted the late Xenophon Brade among its members?”

“Could he be the letter's ‘Mr. B,' perhaps?” Miss Bonaventure asked.

“I think,” Blank said, putting his bowler hat back on his head, “a visit to this ‘W.B. Taylor' might be in order.”

Blank and Miss Bonaventure found themselves a short while later standing before the return address listed on the envelope for W.B. Taylor, which was revealed to be a modest residence in Paddington. Ringing the bell, they were greeted at the door by Taylor himself.

If Blank had formed an impression of the man based on hearing a few lines of correspondence read aloud, his impression had struck far of the mark. The man who stood before them, towering some inches above himself and Miss Bonaventure, looked like he'd just stepped from the pages of a penny dreadful about the wild American west. Broad-shouldered, with large, long-fingered hands, he had a long drooping mustache and a small pointed beard on his chin, his hair worn brushing the collar of his starched white shirt. Judging by the gray which shot through his hair, and the wrinkles which ran from the corners of his eyes, which made him look as if he were perpetually squinting in the sun's glare, he looked to be about fifty years of age, though in evident excellent health. He wore a brocade waistcoat over his shirtsleeves, a string tie was knotted at his neck, and on his feet were western-style boots.

“Mr. Taylor?” Blank began.

“Look,” barked the man in the doorway in a brusque American accent, “if you've come on Cody's say-so, you can go hang, and to thunder with Cody!”

Blank smiled. “You're American.”

“Hell, no!” Taylor snapped. “I'm from Texas.”

Blank took his hat from his head and held it over his chest with both
hands. “I believe there may be some misunderstanding, Mr. Taylor. I'm afraid we don't know any Cody.”

“We're here to question you in connection with the deaths of Mr. Xenophon Brade and Miss Cecilia Villers,” Miss Bonaventure put in, with less tact than Blank might have liked.

“Cecila?” Taylor said, blinking. “Dead? I…I didn't know.”

“Killed by the same hand,” Miss Bonaventure explained, “or so it would appear.”

Either the man was a better actor than any Blank had previously seen, or he legitimately had not known about the death of Miss Villers. It was hardly surprising if he didn't, since the murder had only been discovered a few short hours before.

Taylor stood in the door, blinking in the bright June afternoon sun, seemingly adrift.

“May we come in?” Blank asked, gently.

Taylor nodded absently, and stepped aside to usher them in. “Sure, sure,” he said, his eyes unfocused.

The rooms beyond the door were small but crowded with memories. If Miss Villers's flat had betrayed little about the woman who had lived there, Taylor's rooms spoke volumes. On the floor was a Mexican blanket spread out as a rug, and on the wall a pair of crossed cavalry sabers and a long-barreled rifle. On a hat rack near the door hung a ten-gallon hat and a gun belt, weighed down by a LeMat revolver. Tacked up on the wall, unframed, was a poster advertising Buffalo Bill's Wild West Exhibition, with the name “LITTLE BILL TAYLOR” emblazoned on the top and the legend “THE KNIGHT OF THE TEXAS PLAINS” at the bottom, and at its center a photo of a slightly younger W.B. Taylor surrounded by engraved scenes depicting him trick riding, shooting glass balls out of the air with a Spencer repeating rifle, demonstrating quick draws with a revolver, and so on.

Blank scanned the spines of the books on the crowded shelves while Miss Bonaventure sat down on the settee, her legs crossed. Spread on the table was a copy of an American paper, which on closer examination proved to be the April 19th edition of the
Dallas Morning News
. The front page carried a
banner headline about a skirmish between a Turkish battery and a Grecian steamer, but it was a headline on page 5 that caught Miss Bonaventure's eye.

“‘
The Great Aerial Wanderer
,'” she read aloud.

Blank stepped behind her and read over her shoulder.

The story concerned an airship which had apparently been reported in recent editions of the paper, which had landed at the Texan towns of Greenville and Stephenville and subsequently been seen to explode in midair. The article in question consisted primarily of the testimony of a Mr. C.L. McIlhany, who claimed to have seen an airship himself. Mr. McIlhany concluded his statement with the following observation. “
And say, what you reckon is going to happen when dynamiters get to riding in airships and dropping bombs down on folks and cities? Is the world ready for airships?
”