Tenfold More Wicked (5 page)

“I'll bear that in mind.” She squirted a sheet of paper with a clear solution and touched it to the footprint. The outline seeped gently through the paper, its shape copied. “In any case, this belongs to a man. A narrow shoe, a fashionable gentleman's type.” She pointed to another smudge. “He's long-legged. So not our lovesick Mr. Brigham.”

“A party guest?”

“Mmm. We must get a list of names.” She walked to the window, frowning. “Smudges in the blood there, as if he strode back and forth. But no footprints back this way. So either he took a different exit, or . . .”

The front door slammed. Eliza groaned. “Ready or not.”

The drawing room door burst open, and in stalked Chief Inspector Reeve, four constables on his heels. “Right, you two. Out.”

Swiftly, Eliza backed towards the body before Lizzie could react. “I say, have the police not already attended? Captain Lafayette, you odious mischief-maker, you deceive me again. I'm terribly sorry . . . Oh!” She stumbled, swiping her skirt hem into the bloodstain. “Dear me. So clumsy.”

Quickly, Lafayette thrust a sheaf of Sir Dalziel's papers into her bag behind her back. “No need for alarm. We were just leaving.”

“Alarm unnecessary,” chirped Hipp, kicking up his feet. “Exit imminent.”

Furniture crashed in the hall. “Out of my way, you horrid monster-boy!” A flurry of black satin skirts swept in. Lady Fleet, presumably, surprisingly slim and pretty, trailing a dark veil over her elaborate blond chignon. She'd certainly laid hands on the appropriate mourning attire at a moment's notice.

Suddenly the idea of this fashionable young wife doing away her rich, elderly husband didn't seem so unlikely.

“You, sir!” Lady Fleet pointed dramatically at Lafayette. “Leave my house immediately. You and your preposterous accusations have hounded my poor husband to his grave. Dispatched in his own home by some vile scion of the criminal classes! Are you satisfied?”

Brava!
cheered Lizzie ironically, and Eliza resisted the urge to applaud. If Lady Fleet had held a fan, or a pair of gloves, she'd probably have slapped him with it.

Lafayette bowed gravely. “My condolences, my lady. Who would do such a terrible thing? And in a secret closet, too. Is no one safe?”

Lady Fleet's eyes gleamed, calculating. Then—a moment too late—she burst into tears. “My poor Dalziel! How I shall miss him.” She collapsed against Reeve in a paroxysm of weeping. Hippocrates squeaked, and scuttled for the hallway. Eliza could practically smell the onions the lady had rubbed into her eyes.

Reeve's ruddy face flushed even redder. Awkwardly, he patted Lady Fleet's hair and off-loaded her to a smirking constable. “We'll soon have it sorted, my lady. You have my word.”

He fired a sharp glance around. “Window smashed, room ransacked. Burglary gone wrong, I'd say. Shouldn't take long to flush out the villain. My lady, why don't you have a nice lie-down, and mend your nerves? You there, fellow,” he ordered, “fetch Lady Fleet some tea.”

“You're very kind,” Lady Fleet whispered, dabbing streaming eyes, and let the constable help her out.

“A command performance,” remarked Eliza, once the door had closed. “You're not actually buying into that?”

Reeve didn't turn. “Still here, missy?”

Lafayette tugged her arm, but she resisted. Like any murdered soul, Sir Dalziel deserved justice, not Reeve's self-serving pig-headedness. “This man's heart is ripped out and his face cut off. Elaborate for a burglar, wouldn't you say? And
how would a casual thief know about the hidden closet? Unless it's an inside job, in which case why—?”

“Yes, yes. Always complicating things, aren't you?” Reeve glared at her. “Never can solve a case the old-fashioned way. I swear, you're that upstart Griffin born again.”

We'll solve you the old-fashioned way, you pumped-up turkey,
whispered Lizzie darkly.
Come by the Holy Land late one night and I'll uncomplicate you with a knife in the guts.

Eliza gritted her teeth. “How sad. Have I left you no one convenient from whom to thrash a confession?”

“Remains to be seen, doesn't it?” Reeve grinned. “Perhaps your friend Razor Jack did it. You know, the lunatic killer
you
allowed to escape?”

She flushed. “Razor Jack is
not
my friend, and I didn't
allow
anything—”

“Protesting too much, are we?” Reeve rounded on Lafayette. “As for you, Royal Society, I'll tell you once more, and then I'll get unpleasant: Homicide's a police matter. Stay out of it.”

“As you wish, sir. I'm confident you have it fully in hand.” Firmly, Lafayette ushered a squirming Eliza into the hall, with Hipp scampering ahead.

“And stay away from the servants,” called Reeve, “or I'll nick you for obstructing my investigation.” The door slammed.

“Shouldn't dream of it, old boy.” Lafayette studied her as they treaded the long hall towards the front door. “Are you well, Doctor? Perhaps we should retire.”

“Why must that man be so obtuse?” she fumed. “He's no fool, yet he refuses to countenance the simplest police work,
let alone any attempt at science. You'd think he was put on this earth to infuriate me.”

“Jealousy makes idiots of us all,” murmured Lafayette.

“Reeve, jealous of me? That's absurd.”

He laughed, easy. “Allow me to polish your spectacles, Doctor. You're young, clever, educated, and pretty, with the world at your feet. He's backward, middle-aged, and unattractive, with two unmarried daughters and a demanding wife who wants to be Lady Police Commissioner someday. I'm only surprised he hasn't wrung your neck already.”

“What? Nonsense.” But she sniffed, discomfited. She'd never met Mrs. Reeve. Hadn't wondered whether one existed. As usual, Lafayette was dangerously well informed. But it made her speculate. Could the murder motive be jealousy? A rival slighted, a woman scorned . . .

By the door, the manic clockwork servant jerked like a pecking chicken. A saturnine fellow in livery—Lady Fleet's footman, presumably—stoically ignored it, glaring in poorly veiled disgust at the butler, who was bailed up in the archway by an eagerly springing Hippocrates. Perhaps the clockwork servant's problem was catching.

“Mr. Brigham, are you and this fellow here the only human servants?” asked Eliza.

Brigham bowed. “Plus Lady Fleet's maid and the cook, madam. The rest are clockworks.”

“Odd, isn't it, for a household to rely so heavily on machines?”

“Couldn't say, madam.” Brigham ignored Hipp, who scrabbled at his trouser leg.

Eliza hid a grin. “This party last night. Who attended?”

A twitch of besieged knee. “The usual. Sir Dalziel's students and, um, other friends. We finished around two, and I went to bed.”

“And his ‘um other friends' would be . . . ?”

Brigham handed Lafayette a scrap of paper. “Thought you'd want a list, sir.”

“Good man.” Lafayette scanned it rapidly. “A bright bunch, I see . . . Why do they all invite
her
. . . ? Cartwright, M.P., eh? Of the new Reform Bill? Who'd have thought Sir Dalziel would rub shoulders with a radical?”

“You'd be surprised, sir.”

“Would I?” Lafayette frowned at the list. “Zanotti. You don't mean Carmine Zanotti? His
Eve and the Serpent
is on show at the Academy.”

“Indeed,” murmured Eliza. “Who knew you were a fan of art?”

“I'm a fan of prodigious talent,” said Lafayette with a quick smile. “It so often goes with malfeasance. Your own, for instance.”

She ignored him. “You said no visitors after the party broke up?”

Brigham shrugged. “Didn't hear a bell.”

“Bell!” Hipp head-butted Brigham's knee and bounced off, falling in a heap. “Bell-bell-bell . . .”

“Sir Dalziel might have expected someone,” suggested Lafayette. “Then they wouldn't need to ring.”

A baffled blink. “But weren't it just a ruckus? I mean, was the villain not some vile burglar?”

Eliza smiled. “The police certainly think so. Certain you heard nothing?”

“No, I . . .” Brigham toed Hipp away. “Come to think of it, I did, but I didn't come up. I thought . . .”

“Yes?”

“I heard breaking glass.”

“The window? Why would you not come up?”

Stiffly, Brigham raised his bruised chin. “I thought it was Sir Dalziel throwing crystal. He was worse for drink. They'd been arguing politics. When he's in a temper, it's best not to be seen. He's not so patient.” The lad licked his reddened lip. “With the crystal.”

“Crystal,” agreed Hipp, making another attempt to climb Brigham's leg.

Old tyrant had it coming,
muttered Lizzie.
Bat his servants around as he pleased, did he? Arsehole.

“I see. Can you estimate the time you heard the glass break?”

“Ten minutes to four, give or take.”

Lafayette cocked one eyebrow. “So precise?”

“Checked my watch, sir. I sleep poorly, and I'd only just gone off when the noise woke me.”

“Keeps proper time, does it?”

“The best, sir. It's my job to wind the clocks, and keep the monsters in good repair.”

“Monsters?”

“The mechanical servants, madam.”

“I see . . . Oh, pet him, Mr. Brigham, he won't relent until you do.”

Cautiously, the butler offered his hand. Hipp bunted it, whirring happily. “A bit overstressed, aren't you, boy? Could use an overhaul.”

“He certainly could,” threatened Eliza, and Hipp whined, contrite. “Did you know about this secret closet?”

“Of course. Sir Dalziel kept personal things there. Letters and such.”

“And did his friends know?”

“I expect so. It weren't secret so much as private.”

Her nerves twanged. A person ought to be permitted to keep secrets. Now Sir Dalziel's were being exposed. “Any oddities in his behavior lately? Keeping strange company?”

“They're artists, madam. Behaving oddly's what they do.”

“So you've no idea who might extract his heart and carve a magical symbol into his chest?”

Brigham shook his head, pale.

“One last thing,” put in Lafayette. “How would you characterize Sir Dalziel's relationship with his lady wife?”

A blank look. “They were married.”

“Yes, but affectionate or at war? Devoted lovebirds or playing around on the side?”

“Not my place to judge the upper classes, sir. Different rules for them.”

“So I've heard. Supremely helpful as always, Charles. If ever you need a job, come and see me.” Lafayette flipped Brigham another, larger tip.

“Flirt,” whispered Eliza as they turned to leave.

“Is that an accusation, or an imperative?” Lafayette retrieved his hat from the scowling footman, whose elaborate livery involved breeches, lace-edged cuffs, and a braided coat, fresh from the previous century. The upper classes put their servants into such silly costumes. As if the class divide weren't clear enough. “What's your name, good man?”

“James, sir.” Eyes front, chin up. Poor at concealing his hostility in hope of a tip. Lady Fleet must be paying him too well. Buying his silence, perhaps?

“Any point in my questioning you, James, or will you just glare bayonets at me and deny everything about any black magic in this house?”

Coldly, James yanked open the door. “I was in the country, sir. I don't know anything.”

“Glad we've cleared that up.” From the doorstep, Lafayette shot him an icy challenge. “One thing more. You'd better hope nothing nasty happens to Mr. Brigham this morning. Or ever, come to think of it.”

“Sir?”

A bright, threatening Lafayette smile. “You've just made a new best friend. If I see any more bruises on his innocent little face? I'll come looking for you. Understand?”

O
UTSIDE, SUNLIGHT STRUGGLED THROUGH THE
gritty haze to bathe the grandiose houses of Grosvenor Square with their ornate plastering and grand brickwork. Their windows gleamed, dulled with greasy coal dust. Next door, a grim-faced maid in a drab apron scrubbed fruitlessly at her front steps. The coal-burning power station upriver had been blown up by home-grown republican outlaws a week ago—the demise at the Royal's hands of the relatively moderate Thistlewood Club had left the door open for a gang of dangerous radicals dubbed “the Incorruptibles,” led by a cunning rabble-rouser by the unlikely name of Nemo. Since the explosion, which had been heard all the way down at Rotherhithe, London had smothered under a dirty pall of fog that crawled into every crack and crevice. Half the electric lights in town still languished unpowered, and everything was constantly filthy.

Eliza tucked a struggling Hippocrates into her bag, and she and Captain Lafayette walked east towards New Bond Street, beneath a row of trees. Clammy fog-fingers curled under her skirts. “So gallant, sir,” she teased. “I'm practically
a-faint. Brigham will fall over himself to earn another smile from you. Would you really employ him?”

“I might.” Lafayette didn't offer his arm. Nothing so presumptuous. Just strolled at her side, hands tucked behind him. His scarlet-and-gold uniform glared like a bloodstain in the coarse light. “I feel sorry for the lad. I'm reminded unpleasantly of public school: always some witless oaf waiting to thrash your lights out.”

“That explains a lot.” She eyed his Royal Society badge. “A dish best served cold?”

“Never crossed my mind.”

An electric carriage thundered by, purple coils crackling in the damp. A pair of harnessed horses sidestepped and rolled crazed eyes. Crossing sweepers darted beneath speeding wheels to scrape up dung. Housekeepers and kitchen maids loomed from the fog, balancing baskets of vegetables and meats from the market.

“I say, watch out!” Eliza dodged a sprinting clockwork servant with a bundle over its skinny shoulder. It whirred self-importantly and hared off,
clank! clank!,
scattering shoppers in its wake. She dusted her skirts angrily. “Stupid thing. They can build them so much better than that. But that's what happens when you debase science with commercial concerns. Cheap materials and shoddy workmanship.”

“Stupid,” echoed Hipp dolefully inside her bag. “Cheap.”

A lady flounced by, a pet hedgehog on a chain tucked under her arm. Her decorative leather throat armor stretched from collarbone to chin, forcing her nose into the air at a comical angle.

Lizzie laughed, and Eliza snickered, too, earning a haughty glare. When Razor Jack had escaped from Bethlem, panic had ensued, spawning all manner of bizarre safeguards against that singular gentleman's favorite weapon. Naturally, the society set had turned the practical, if fanciful, armor into a fashion statement.

As if an expert like Razor Jack would be thwarted by a device so banal. If he wanted you dead, you perished. End of story.

Lafayette tipped his hat to the lady, who simpered, until she noticed his iron badge, whereupon she avoided eye contact.

Shivering, Eliza tugged her shawl tighter. “Burglary, indeed. Reeve will never solve this case. Your case, that is.”

“Reeve doesn't solve cases. He plays angles. Swift results, no questions asked. Not the sharpest tool in the box, but he's accomplished at giving people what they want.”

Her sense of justice bristled. “Who'd want the wrong man arrested for murder?”

“I say, did it rain crime scene physicians this morning? I must have missed the weather reports.”

“Excuse me?”

“Black magic, secret debauchery, Lady Fleet's reputation at stake? Do you imagine anyone cares who actually did it?”

“I care,” insisted Eliza. “Playing the angles, indeed. If this were my case—which it isn't, of course, what a shame I haven't time to assist further—I wouldn't let anyone's reputation pervert the path of justice.”

“Did I mention that's why I'm besotted with you?”

“Really? I imagined you bamboozled by my exotic beauty.”

“There's that. But mostly it's your fortune I'm after.”

“Consider me forewarned.” More from habit than interest, she fingered through the offerings on a book-seller's cart:
The Daily Telegraph, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management,
a luridly illustrated edition of Burton's famous
Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah
. A penny pamphlet entitled V
ARNEY THE
V
AMPYRE
! sported a leering black-caped imp ravishing a swooning maiden on a canopied bed.

Newspaper headlines promised violence and mayhem:

A
SSASSINATION
F
OILED

F
RENCH
A
RSONIST
A
RRESTED IN
C
OMMONS
L
OBBY

T
OXIC
F
OG
C
OULD
D
ELAY
G
REEN
P
ARK
S
KY
SHIP
L
AUNCH

P
ALACE
R
ISKS
L
AST-
M
INUTE
D
IPLOMATIC
O
VERTURES

“Massacre in Paris!” shouted the newsboy. “Blood in the Bois de Boulogne! Killer sorcerers run amok!”

Across the street, a pair of bulky brass-skeletoned automatons cataloged the crowd with glittering red eyes. Royal Society Enforcers, their white plaster faces impassive. Armed with twin pistols, electro-clockwork engines ticking indefatigably inside hollow chests.

Lizzie thrashed in Eliza's belly.
Dog-lickers! Turdbrains! Metal-dick freaks!

Lafayette looked at her oddly. “I'm sorry?”

Had she muttered that aloud? Mortified, Eliza fanned flushed cheeks. “Friends of yours?”

“Practically family,” he said cheerfully. “Morning, chaps. This horrid weather rusts the joints, eh?”

The machines ignored him, guarding a large cage that lumbered along,
clonk! clunk!,
on stodgy iron feet. An older lady twirled a sharp-tipped parasol in one iron prosthetic hand. Her steps jerked, out of kilter, twitching her silvery skirts. On her copper corsage gleamed a Royal Society badge.

Lafayette dipped a bow. “My lady.”

The lady nodded mechanically. Her face would have been beautiful, but part of it was missing. One glinting steel cheekbone lay exposed, scar-edged skin grafted with rivets. Her deep-set eyes glittered, one electric red, like an Enforcer's, the other a dead black.

Eliza shivered. “Congratulations,” she whispered after they'd passed, “you've certainly charmed
her
sense of humor away.”

“I flatter myself that there wasn't much to work with. Behold the Countess of Lovelace, my new observer. A formidable investigator with a jagged-toothed rat trap for a brain.”

Eliza resisted the need to turn and stare. That metalwork was both fabulous and gruesome. “Why the prosthetics? Was she injured?”

“The Royal's instrument-makers rebuilt her after some terrible
accident
.” An ironic emphasis. “Blew her own face off with a ballistic pistol, they say, like Robespierre himself.”

“A dangerous choice of comparison.”

“An apt one, given the frightful things they did with that unlucky fellow's remains. She's using herself as the model for the new breed of half-flesh Enforcers she's developing. With limited success, I might add, which isn't improving her temper. François tells me she's quite the curiosity of the town.”

Her mind whirred like Hipp's cogs in alarm. She'd heard tales of the Royal's artificial body experiments, mostly from
her gleefully gossiping pharmacist, Mr. Finch. All that chilly metal, grafted to living flesh and nerves, in an attempt to make the Enforcers stronger, quicker, more responsive to stimuli. But the flesh kept expiring from the shock of transplant before it could recover from its wounds.

Eliza could have taught them a thing or two. When she
changed,
any scratches or wounds healed. As if her body were remade afresh. An elixir like hers would solve Lady Lovelace's problems for good.

Just another reason to keep Lafayette at a distance.

“I'm told your brother's quite the war hero,” she covered hastily. “He'd do better not to repeat scurrilous tales.”

“And how would you know, having avoided every opportunity to meet him?”

“Nonsense. I've been—”

“—very busy, yes. I don't doubt it.” A tiny dog snarled at Lafayette, yapping. He arched an incredulous eyebrow, and it cringed away with a supplicating whine. “Scurrilous or otherwise: word is, Lady Lovelace went mad from unrequited love, and now she has a clockwork heart. Perhaps you've heard of the fellow. A certain Mr. Faraday, whom the Royal burned? They say it was she who betrayed him in the end. Isn't irony a killer?”

Henry Jekyll's colleague, in fact, executed for defying the Philosopher's notions of light and electricity. Eliza remembered him vaguely from her childhood, as a kind young man with an incorrigibly curious mind. Now she liked Lady Lovelace even less. “Does she . . .” Eliza lowered her voice, fearful. She trusted Lafayette enough to believe he'd never betray her on a whim. But to keep his own secret . . . “Does she know?”

A candid glance. “Relax. I've told her nothing about you.”

She flushed. “I meant about you. The wolf.”

“Oh.” A flash of bewildered smile, as if it surprised him she'd care. “Not that I'm aware. But I imagine the first I'll hear of it is when I wake up chained to a dungeon wall, with my blood dripping into a test tube and electrodes jammed into unfortunate crevices.”

“Doesn't that bother you?”

“Please.” Lafayette waved airily. “I proposed to you and walked out unscathed, didn't I? I can surely withstand Lady Lovelace's patented Glare of Epic Disapproval. Besides, her disdain for me is but a shabby façade. Secretly, she's all a-flutter.”

“You think that about everyone.”

“Deny it if you can.” He waited, grinning. “Didn't think so.”

“You're insufferable, do you know that?”

“And you're unreasonably enchanting, but I won't let it get between us.”

Pedestrians sidled past the Enforcers, gazes downcast, hoping to escape notice. No such luck for one boy who flitted through the crowd, pointy-nosed, a strange green cast to his hair, as if he'd had a dyeing accident. People claimed such odd folk had fairy ancestors. Probably a thief, too, fingers too light for his own good in purses and pockets.

An Enforcer grabbed the fey boy by his suspiciously long ears. He yelled, struggling, but no one dared stand up for him. The metal machines nodded solemnly and tossed him into their cage.

He landed on his face—
blam!
—and the lid banged shut. Lady Lovelace jabbed him with her parasol through the bars.
Zzap!
Electricity crackled, and the boy jerked and yowled. She nodded, satisfied, and cage and Enforcers stomped away.

Lafayette wriggled his shoulders. “Chilly around here, isn't it?”

Eliza's bones itched, deep inside where she couldn't scratch, and Lizzie's rage flushed her with ugly heat. “What exactly was that boy's crime? Looking too strange?”

“I'll ask him, if you like. No doubt she'll send me to pick his brains later.” He sighed. “You glare at me as if I'm already peeling his fingernails off. I shan't, you know.”

“Isn't that how the Royal extract confessions?”

Kill them god-rotted brass bastards and their iron-faced bitch queen,
whispered Lizzie gleefully in her ear.
Tear their faces off! Ha!

“If it pleased me to stoop to such atrocities, madam, I'd have stayed with my regiment in India. Or joined the Foreign Service. I hear they're having a fine bloodthirsty time in Paris these days. I say, are you well? Suddenly your face glows a peculiar shade of pink.”

Eliza clenched sweating fists, willing Lizzie not to betray her now, not while Lady Lovelace watched. A pair of waiting brass horses creaked mildewed joints, their rudimentary clockwork driver motionless in its seat. She wanted to leap up and throttle it. “So . . . about this guest list. Since when did you care one whit for art?”

Lafayette grinned. “Did you imagine we soldiers to be all carnage and no culture? Carmine Zanotti's
Eve and the Serpent
is the surprise sensation of the Summer Exhibition. I'll get us an invitation, if you like. We could see what kind of people Sir Dalziel's hangers-on are. Care for an evening out?”

Hell, yes,
whispered Lizzie,
don our fancy gown and go a-courting. 'Bout time he asked.

Eliza squirmed, cornered. “I couldn't possibly impose—”

“Oh, and in case you wondered,” added Lafayette, as if he'd said nothing of import, “Brigham telegraphed me just after seven. Got me out of bed, if you must know. Lady Fleet could have driven to town this morning after she learned of the murder.”

“She could have killed Sir Dalziel at ten to four, and returned to Hampstead in time to pretend she knew nothing about it, too. Presuming we believe your pet butler's story.”

“That clockwork idiot did confirm it. And Brigham seems artless enough.”

“Mmm. Hardly likely to lie for an employer who mistreated him.”

“Still, he could've killed Dalziel in anger. The old tyrant takes a hand to him once too often, he finally loses it, and
blam!
One dead baronet in a satisfying pool of gore. Always the quiet ones who pop.”

“The butler did it,” mused Eliza. “How cozy. But why the mutilations? And—unhappy infatuation aside—why call you, and not the police? Why stick around at all, in fact? Surely his best chance for a cover-up is police incompetence.”