Lost and Gone Forever (10 page)

Walter Day did not turn around and look at her, but she knew
him. Oh, she knew him! And he was alive. And he was taking tea at Plumm’s with Jack the Ripper.

Claire Day felt the room rush at her from all directions, and she fell unconscious at the feet of a mannequin.

•   •   •

A
MBROSE HAD MOVED ON,
humiliated by the angry governess, but he turned back when he heard a loud thump. Her companions were gathering round her, so it took Ambrose a minute to realize that the beautiful woman had fallen. Several people had already noticed, and a commotion was in its beginning stages. Shopgirls were coming from every corner of the store now, and an officious-looking manager-type with a waxed mustache popped his head up over a partition across the main floor, craning his neck to see what was going on. Ambrose hurried and got to the beautiful woman right away. He bent over her, pushing the nasty nanny away. He heard the nanny squawk, but he didn’t care. He was in love. He patted the beautiful woman’s cheeks. Gently. And her eyelids fluttered.

“Danger,” she said.

“Yes, missus?”

She raised one tremulous arm and pointed above them. She pointed at the gallery, at the killer, who was smiling down at them. She knew about the killer the same as Ambrose did. They had something in common. The guv, sitting up there with his back to them, started to rise at the sound from below, but the killer pushed the guv back down, physically turned his head so that he wouldn’t see what was below him. Ambrose wanted to call out, wanted to shout at the guv, tell him to get away. But the beautiful woman grabbed his arm.

“Walter,” she said.

“Ambrose, mum,” he said. “My name’s Ambrose.”

“He’s up there,” she said. “Save him.” She tried to point again, but failed and fell unconscious once more.

It didn’t matter. He understood. This beautiful woman had seen Ambrose’s employer and she loved him as Ambrose did. She somehow understood the danger the guv was in. And Ambrose knew that he had to save his employer if he wanted this woman, this angel, to ever look at him again. If she had fallen for the guv, then Ambrose might have to give her up, but he still wanted to win her favor.

He let the awful governess take his place at the beautiful woman’s side and he rose and hurried away. He picked up his pace and elbowed his way through the other shoppers that had gathered round, through the gaggles of shopgirls and the officious managers like green-headed mallards, went to the spiral staircase, and took the steps two at a time to the top.

W
e have to move on,” Jack said.

“Wait,” Day said. “I didn’t come here to be manipulated by you.”

“Yes, you did.” Jack took Day’s arm and almost bodily lifted him from his chair. Day looked to his left and right, embarrassed, wondering if anyone saw, but no one reacted. At this time of the late morning, people were not quite ready for their lunch and had long ago finished their breakfasts. There were only two other occupied tables, and the old ladies at both of them were rising now, approaching the railing, curious about some sort of row that had broken out below them.

He glanced over the railing and saw that a blond woman had collapsed. He opened his mouth to call her name, but then closed it and looked away. He didn’t know her. She was a stranger to him.

“Tut tut,” Jack said. “It won’t do if you and I are seen together at the moment you’re discovered.” He leaned in closer. “We’ll have to get this done another way. Work first, play later.” And he ushered Day up and away, past a phalanx of workmen in canvas trousers who
were wrestling with sheets of glass bigger than they were, along the queue of tables, to the back of the floor, where there was a long hallway lined with heavy oak doors.

“What do you mean? What do you mean when you say ‘discovered’?” But Day allowed himself to be led. If Jack was concentrating on him, he wasn’t killing anyone else, he wasn’t exploring the other floors and finding the urchin in the storeroom. He wasn’t hurting the unconscious woman with blond hair. If Day could keep Jack distracted, then Jack would continue to be Day’s own private monster.

“Never you mind. Come in here.” Jack opened a door and led Day into a quiet office, really nothing but a small room with a desk and two chairs. A typewriter and a telephone sat atop the desk, next to a blotter arranged with a pen, a letter opener, a small stack of plain envelopes, and an inkwell.

Jack was breathing hard and he moved round to the other side of the desk. He sat with a grunt and winced. “I shouldn’t have exerted myself quite so much,” he said. “Listen, do you trust me?”

“No, of course I don’t trust you,” Day said. “You’re horrible and you’ll most likely kill me once I stop providing you with amusement.”

Jack leaned forward in his chair. Day could smell his breath, all copper and rot. Jack moved from the waist, his shoulders straight up and down, as if he were one of those wind-up automatons that swiveled back and forth, performing some simple task over and over. In this case the task was murder. Back and forth, again and again, until Jack’s rusted gears wound down.

“I could never kill you, Walter Day,” Jack said.
(That name again.)
“You’re my mirror image, the flip side of my spinning coin.”

“You’re not the other side of my coin,” Day said.

“No, I’m the edge of it. And I circle round and round and never stop, so don’t think that I will.” Had he read Day’s thoughts about
the declining automaton? Day almost believed that he had, that he could. Nothing seemed impossible where Jack was concerned.

“Whose office is this?”

“You know, I don’t remember his name,” Jack said. “I call him Kitten because he makes a lovely soft animal noise when I hurt him. Like a pleading cat. I’d have you in sometime so you could hear it for yourself, but I don’t know how much longer poor Kitten can hold out.”

Day shuddered.

“I went to your house,” Jack said. “Except it’s not your house anymore, is it? And I’m not talking about that new place your wife’s moved to. That was never your home. You’ve never even seen it. No, I went to the house with the blue door, the one where we had so many adventures. I knew you weren’t there, but I’ve missed you lately and I wanted to bask in the air that you’d walked through so many times.”

“I don’t know the place you’re talking about.”

“If you ever go back, you’ll have a surprise waiting for you. I left something there.”

“Left something?”

“It wasn’t easy, either. Cost me more than a little.”

“What do you want?”

“Ah, yes, to business, then.” Jack picked up the letter opener from the desk. He poked the tip of his finger with the dull blade and frowned. “Not as useful as one might wish,” he said under his breath, as if he were talking to himself, not to Day. “Anyway, let’s be done with all this silliness. I’m a patient man, I really am, but you’ve drawn it all out to the point that it’s no longer much fun, I’m afraid.”

“I’ve drawn what out? You talk in riddles, in maths I don’t understand. If you want to take me back there, back to that cell, you can try, but I won’t go quietly and I’m no longer afraid of you.”

“Ah. That draper woman, the one with the little shop in the gardens, she’s influenced you, hasn’t she? Turned you against me.”

“You leave her out of this.”

“That’s just it, you see,” Jack said. “I didn’t include her in the first place. You did. I let you go free and you should have gone home, should have returned to your employment, but you didn’t. And you didn’t return to me, either. I would have taken you back in, cared for you as I always have. But instead of coming back to me, or doing anything at all useful, you took up with this slattern—”

“Don’t say that,” Day said. He felt his face getting warm. “Don’t you dare say that about her.”

“Oh, it wasn’t meant to be an insult. She’s quite my type. Yes, my type indeed. You’ve good taste in female flesh, Walter Day.” He closed his eyes and seemed to gather himself, his shoulders hunching and his fists clenching, unclenching. Then he opened his eyes and smiled. “But regardless of how you’d describe her, you brought her into this, and so I should leave it to you to get her out of it.”

“Get her out of what? I don’t know what you mean.”

Jack sighed and waved his hand at a cabinet on the opposite wall. “I wonder if you wouldn’t help me out and fetch some gauze from the top drawer there.”

Day opened a door in the top of the cabinet and Jack snapped at him. “The drawer, I said. It’s in the drawer. You never listen to me!”

Startled, Day slammed the door shut and slid open the drawer, found a roll of gauze, and tossed it over the desk to Jack.

“Thank you. The scissors, too, if you’d be so kind.”

Day found a pair of surgical scissors and laid them on the desk, slid them across. He wondered if Jack planned to use them on him, to stab him to death.

“Now sit,” Jack said. “Let’s pretend we’re adults discussing something of importance.”

Day stepped forward as if in a dream, everything moving in half- time, his limbs heavy, and he was reminded of his underwater dream. Jack was like some unceasing, irresistible tide. Day sat and laid his cane across his lap.

Jack smiled. He pulled off his jacket, leaning forward to tug on the sleeves, then unbuttoned his waistcoat and removed it. The front of his white shirt was soaked in blood. He untucked it and pulled it up, revealing a nasty gash under his ribs on the right side of his torso. “I’m afraid they may have nicked my liver,” Jack said. He smiled again and winked at Day, then unspooled some of the gauze and began wrapping it round himself.

“What happened?”

“Those Karstphanomen are getting tricky. They laid an ambush for me. But don’t worry, I took care of them.”

“You killed them?”

“Four of them. They’re waiting for you. Oh, but I’ve ruined the surprise.”

“I don’t think I care for any more surprises.”

“Walter Day, I must admit something. There is something about you, some stolid . . . justiceness. Is that a word? You look exactly like justice. You need only a scale and a blindfold. And perhaps a surgical alteration or two. You are Lustitia, the symbol of fair play. Lust. Lustitia. We want what we see and we take it, the basis for all our modern ideas of justice. Might makes right? It was always so, and I may be misappropriating the words of our cousin in the colonies. But it doesn’t matter.”

“I don’t understand anything you say,” Day said.

“Of course, your intelligence is not what attracted me to you. It’s, as I say, your solidity. You are a marble slab of sheer goodness.”

“Please just . . . Will you tell me . . . What about Esther?”

“Yes. Esther. She is disposable, I’m afraid.”

“No!” Day stood quickly and the chair fell back, smacking against the floor.

Jack scowled at him and held a finger to his lips. He tucked the loose end of his bandage under itself, then rose and went to the door and looked out, up and down the hall, shut it softly, and returned. “Pick up your chair, Walter Day. And lower your walking stick. What do you plan to do? You can’t hurt me and you don’t want to. Let’s not pretend to be other than what we are. And let’s not bring passion into this. Lust and passion are not the same things at all.”

Day shook his head, but picked up the chair. He sat down and waited, but he kept his fist gripped tight on his cane. He might get one chance to swing, and he didn’t want to waste it.

Jack crossed behind him and went to the cabinet. He found a clean white shirt and took his seat across from Day. “You have much to learn, and we’ve only begun our journey.” He pulled the shirt on, and Day noticed again how strangely he moved. Jack was clearly in a great deal of pain. “I think perhaps you didn’t have a strong father figure in your life. Was Arthur Day too busy valeting to teach you about the world? Or have I asked you that before? I get confused.”

“You keep bringing other people into our discussion.” Day fixed Jack with what he hoped was a steely glare. “Leave Arthur . . . you leave my father out of it. Leave Esther and everyone else I know out of it. It’s you and me.”

“It has ever been thus. But you miss the larger point. I genuinely don’t care about anyone else, but you do, and that makes you vulnerable. So I am going to have to harm Esther Paxton to get my point
across to you. I ask you, is that fair to her? Is that justice, Walter Day?” Day started to rise again from his chair, but Jack waved him back. “Be calm.”

“I told you. This doesn’t involve her.” Day could barely speak.

“It didn’t, but now it does. And that’s your fault.” Jack looked down at the blotter. “I’m still so . . . All you had to do was go home, live your life, and go back to work. Why didn’t you do that?”

“Is it too late?”

Jack raised his fist and brought it down in an arc that would have ended with the blotter, but he pulled his arm up at the last minute and opened his hand and laid it atop the other and took a deep, shuddering breath. Then he smiled again, but it was not a real smile at all; it was nothing Day had ever seen on another human being’s face. “I unlocked your door. I left your clothes where you would find them at the end of the hall—”

“I never saw them. I was out in the cold, naked, with nothing. You left me with nothing.”

“I gave you everything, even money. Certainly enough to hire a cab to take you anywhere you might have wished. It was all right there, great detective, and you walked past it.”

“I never saw any of that,” Day said. “I never saw it.”

“I asked so little of you. Only the smallest favor in return for months of my hospitality.”

“Why? Why did you let me go?”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “I think you’ve deliberately forgotten. And you’ve somehow made yourself unable to see things around you. Even today, you didn’t seem to recognize your own . . . Well, Walter Day, you are turning backflips to avoid going home.”

“I’ll go home now.”

“And where is that? Where is your home? Tell me.”

Day said nothing.

“You see? You are determined to forget,” Jack said. “Perhaps your forgetting begets a deeper strength than I knew you had. Your ability to trick yourself and to build a new life indicates a bottomless capacity for rightness within you. As I say, one coin, two men, you, me. I learn from you, you learn from me, and we both benefit, don’t we? But enough. Here.” Jack turned the telephone around, swiveling it on its post so that the receiver hung nearer to Day. “Ask for Scotland Yard.”

“Scotland Yard?”

“Ask for the commissioner, and when he accepts the call, tell him where you are. Ask him to send someone for you. Have him send that ass Tiffany. Or Blacker, or even Wiggins. It doesn’t matter. If you value Esther Paxton’s life, do it.”

Day picked up the telephone receiver and held it to his ear. When the switchboard responded, he was able to choke out the words Jack had told him to say.

“Tell them who you are,” Jack said.

They waited in silence in that anonymous office, Day and Jack, and the space seemed to Day to grow smaller and more uncomfortable as each minute passed. He could hear the operator and other voices in the background like distant birds, other women connecting other calls, and he wondered what those people had to say to each other, what might be important to them, whether there were other lives depending on other calls. When Sir Edward Bradford’s voice finally came on the line, Day couldn’t remember what he was supposed to say.

“Hello,” he said.

“Walter? Is this Walter Day on the line?”

“Please,” Day said, “help me.”

Sir Edward continued to talk, but Day could no longer hear him. He looked up and into Jack’s eyes, and the room seemed to spin round him. He dropped the receiver and fell sideways off his chair, dragging the telephone with him. As darkness crept in from the edges of his vision, he heard Jack say (kindly, as if talking about a particularly troublesome but much-loved child), “Oh, Walter Day. What am I to do with you?”