City of Silence (City of Mystery) (2 page)

Alix
had now closed her book and pushed to her feet.  She was slowly walking up the
lawn in the direction where her grandmother waited and Victoria beckoned to the
girl to approach.

“We
shall go to St. Petersburg,” she told her.

A
wave of pure joy washed across the Alix’s face, lighting her large grey-blue
eyes and instantly transforming her from pretty to beautiful.  So complete was
the girl’s delight that for a moment she failed to notice the killing pronoun.  Then
she blinked and said “We?”

“Yes,”
said the Queen.  “I too desire the chance to visit our Ella.”

Alix
continued to slowly blink, two emotions in clear conflict on her face as she
fought to reconcile the welcome news that she would finally see Nicky again
with the far less welcome news that she would be accompanied on this romantic
journey by the greatest bloodhound in all of Europe.

“Write
Ella and tell her we shall arrive by ship,” the Queen said, before adding, with
an indulgent smile, “and perhaps you should write anyone else you think might
wish to know this news as well.”

“Granny,”
Alix whispered.  “Dearest Granny.”  She bent to kiss the Queen’s cheek, which
was slack with the years and crusted with a heavy dusting of violet powder. 
“I’ll sign it ‘Alexandra,’” she added, pulling back with a mischievous tilt of
the head.  “He always calls me by my Russian name, you know.”  And then she sprinted
up the lawn toward the palace like a gleeful young fawn.

Victoria
waited a minute to make sure the girl was out of earshot before signaling to
one of her guards, a man standing unobtrusively to the side. 

“Send
an order to Scotland Yard,” she said.  “We wish an audience with a detective
there.  Trevor Welles.”  The man nodded and disappeared up the same hill, as
swiftly although perhaps not as enthusiastically as Alix.

Victoria
did not particularly care for travel, but it seemed there was little else to be
done.  If Alix must go to Russia, then the Queen must go with her - but
Victoria had no intention of sailing through the Baltic unprotected.   Nor to
take up residence in that ghastly city of St. Petersburg where it seemed that
the Russians served up murders at approximately the same intervals that the
British served tea.  Trevor was a discreet and practical man.  He would come
with them.  He knew his duty.

The
Queen sat back in her chair with a sigh and closed her eyes.  Alexandra
indeed.  

They
would certainly see about that.

Chapter
Two

London – Geraldine
Bainbridge’s Home in Mayfair

11:22 PM

“I’m
not entirely sure what the term ‘criminal profiling’ even means,” Emma said,
spooning the last bite of pear tart into her mouth.

“No
one is entirely sure,” Trevor said with a rueful laugh.  “But I’ve been assured
that the technique will play a pivotal role in the future of forensics.”  He
had finished his own pear tart a full half hour earlier and now found Emma’s
slow savoring of the dessert to be a type of torment - partly because Trevor
Welles liked confections, but largely because Trevor liked the girl.  The
combination of Emma’s mouth, the spoon, and the rounded golden arc of the pears
had proven so visually distracting that Trevor was having trouble concentrating
on this latest meeting of the Tuesday Night Murder Games Club.  Which was a
definite problem, considering that he was the one in charge.

Despite
the name, the group did not always manage to meet on a Tuesday, and the choice
of the word “games” was intended ironically, at least in light of the appalling
particulars surrounding much of their work.  But the club did always congregate
around this particular table, a long walnut affair in the fashionable home of
Trevor’s friend and patron, Geraldine Bainbridge.  

Geraldine’s
endless supply of good food and wine was only one of the advantages of taking
their games outside the confines of Scotland Yard.  While three members of the
club were police officers and official members of the Yard’s fledgling
forensics team, the other three were not.  There was Trevor himself, then
Rayley Abrams, also a detective and recently returned from a sabbatical spent
studying with the Parisian police.  The trip had been both an unofficial
admission that the French were ahead of the British in terms of forensics and
was also intended as a bit of a consolation price; the previous November, it
had been Trevor, not Rayley, who had been named Chief Detective in the case of
Jack the Ripper. Trevor’s rise and Rayley’s fall had been painfully arbitrary.
The Ripper had at one point ranted against the Jews and Rayley was Jewish, a
coincidence which had made their superiors uneasy.  Ergo, Trevor had been
awarded the plum post and Rayley had been packed off to Paris, where he had
managed to get himself involved in a case which ultimately proved as complex as
that of the Ripper.

At
least in Paris they had gotten their man.  Armand Delacroix had been convicted
and executed with a sort of emotionless efficiency one rarely associated with
the French.  But Rayley had nearly lost both his life and his sanity in the
course of the investigation, and he still bore evidence of the strain.  His
hands revealed the slightest of tremors as he adjusted his spectacles and
looked down at the papers in his lap.  Initially Trevor had wondered if having
two full detectives on the forensics team would lead to conflict or an unclear
chain of command, but now Trevor was beginning to think his worries had flowed
in the wrong direction.  Rayley had been uncharacteristically deferential and
unsure of himself since his return, proving that the events in Paris had shaken
him to the very core.

The
third official member of the team was bobby Davy Mabrey, who had also first
come to Trevor’s attention during the Ripper case.  It had been Davy’s great
misfortune - or fortune, depending upon how one looked at it –to discover both
bodies on the night of the infamous double murders.   But there wasn’t much of
an art to merely finding bodies, especially when they happened to be lying in the
middle of the street.  What had truly impressed Trevor had been Davy’s ability,
even when surrounded by a hysterical East End mob, to keep the crime scene
pristine.  Only a handful of Scotland Yard detectives and inspectors truly
grasped the significance of forensics, so discovering a bobby with a natural
instinct to preserve physical evidence had been a great gift.  Trevor had
immediately made Davy his assistant and the lad had been at his side ever
since.  Davy had further solidified Trevor’s estimation with his ability to
draw remarkable levels of detail from witnesses and victims alike.  That class
of Londoners who might have been intimidated by the likes of Trevor and Rayley
had no problem telling their tales to a working class bobby, who stood no
higher than a schoolboy and whose wide eyes and rosy cheeks made him appear far
younger than his twenty-one years.

“Shall
we open another bottle of wine?” Tom asked.

“Of
course,” said Trevor, wryly noting that the corkscrew had already been in Tom’s
hand when he paused to ask.

If
Scotland Yard provided half of the members of the Tuesday Night Club, then this
elegant home in Mayfair provided the other half.  The unofficial members of the
team included Geraldine’s grand-nephew Tom, who was within a year of finishing
his medical training.  This fact always made Trevor wince a bit, since Tom had
likewise been within a year of finishing on the day they’d met, and Trevor knew
he was largely to blame for this extended hiatus.  Trevor’s ultimate hope was
that Tom would join them on a permanent basis as the forensic unit’s designated
coroner, but even acting in his present volunteer capacity took so much of
Tom’s time that it was uncertain when, if ever, he would return to the ivied walls
of Cambridge.  The truth of the matter was that they needed him.  Tom was
energetic and practical and free thinking, while the brotherhood of coroners at
the Yard suffered from many of the same limitations as the officers.  They
seemed to find only what they expected to find.  In public Trevor was
constantly encouraging them to consider things from a different angle.   In
private he considered them antiquated, arrogant, and slow.

And
that was on a good day.

The
final two chairs at the table were occupied by women: their hostess, socialite Geraldine
Bainbridge and Emma Kelly, who was Geraldine’s paid companion and sister to the
Ripper’s last known victim.  Emma’s original position on the team was as a
translator, since her father had been a schoolteacher and Emma was fluent in
three languages.   But as fate would have it, she had also proven fluent in the
language of crime scenes.  The girl was about the same age as Tom and Davy and
hardly looked like anyone’s notion of a detective.  Petite and pale, with red
hair and blue eyes which confirmed the Irish roots her surname implied, Emma
had illustrated her worth beyond question during their week in Paris.  Her
standing in the group was rising, although probably not quickly enough to suit
her. 

Finally,
Geraldine.  Trevor supposed it was stretching the truth to consider the elderly
heiress part of the team at all, but Geraldine had managed to somehow insinuate
herself into the heart of the action.  Part of it was that they met at
Geraldine’s house, so her presence at this table each Tuesday was a given. 
They could scarcely shoo her from her own parlor when the games began.

And
then there was also the fact that Geraldine had, in her own words, “great piles
of money” and she never hesitated to offer financial support to organizations
which interested her, no matter how far-fetched or unsuitably liberal her
social set might deem these causes to be.  Luckily for Trevor, her present
interest appeared to be the elevation of the forensics unit in the eyes of
Scotland Yard.  It was likewise beyond dispute that Geraldine’s vast social
network and instinctive ear for gossip had proven valuable in the past and
likely would again.  Gerry seemed to know everyone in London and half the souls
on the continent as well, and detection, Trevor was beginning to understand,
was often as dependent upon whom one knew as it was on what one knew.  Besides,
beneath Gerry’s garishly colored gowns and feather-plumed hats, existed the
cunning of a jackal and the heart of a lion.  Although she had left her
seventieth birthday behind her some years back and her waistline announced her
fondness for pastries and creams, Gerry was in many ways the most formidable of
them all.

They
were a bizarre group in every measurable way, as Trevor was quick to concede. 
Around this table sat male and female, young and old, Jew and Catholic,
aristocrat and working class, professional detective and amateur sleuth.  But
he would not have traded their collective talents for those of any unit at the
Yard.

The
Tuesday Night Murder Games had started out as a lark.  They would all meet at
Geraldine’s house where her butler and cook, a hulking but tenderhearted man
named Gage, would prepare an invariably delightful meal which they washed down
with vast quantities of wines from Geraldine’s cellar.  After dinner, Trevor
would present them with a puzzle.  Generally there would be a simulated crime
scene with actual physical clues which Trevor had painstakingly reproduced from
the files of real cases.   Blood splatter, footprints, weapon identification,
the lingering traces of poison, fingerprints…. through the last six months
their merry little band had tested and discussed them all.        

Tonight,
however, the challenge at hand was of a different kind.   After Gage had carted
away the remains of their capons, cheese soufflés, and carrot soup and the
carafe of claret was nearly empty, they had all settled back in their chairs
and waited for Trevor to begin.  But when he had announced their subject du
jour to be criminal profiling, quizzical frowns had gone up all around.

“The
idea is just this,” Trevor explained.  “It is quite possible that evidence left
behind at a crime scene can tell us not merely physical information about the
perpetrator, but things about his character as well.  There are two forms of
profiling - psychological and geographic.  The first will shed light on the
personality of the particular criminal we seek and the second will give us
clues as to the circumstances of his life.  How well he is educated, for
example, whether he lives alone or is married, little habituated behaviors such
as what he eats for breakfast or the route he takes to work.”

The
frowns remained.

“As
a tool, profiling helps in several ways,” Rayley added, so smoothly that Trevor
wondered if he had sneaked a peek at Trevor’s notes in anticipation of the
meeting.  “In an individual case, yes, just as Trevor says, it might give us
additional information about the specific criminal we are seeking.  But the
psychologists who are pursuing this particular avenue of forensics also
speculate that if they interview multiple men who have all committed the same
type of crimes they will find similarities in their personalities or the early
events of their lives.  Thus the use of the word ‘profile.’   If we know what
sort of man is most likely to commit what sort of crime, this information can
help us focus our search at the beginning of an investigation.”

“But
who needs such – and I use the word loosely - science when you have common
sense?”  Tom asked drily, leaning back in his seat and crossing his legs.  With
his well-tailored jacket and artfully-mussed blond hair he looked the perfect
prototype of what he was – the indulged youngest son from a family of means. 
“Let’s see,” he added, “what sort of man is most likely to steal something? 
Might it be a poor man?”

“Rich
men steal too,” Emma said, even more drily.  “Perhaps they don’t pocket an
apple from the greengrocer on the corner but they might embezzle from their
employer or finagle an inheritance at the expense of a sibling.  We all have
known people who have remained honest even in the face of the most appalling
need and others who have felt entitled to more even while they sat in the lap
of luxury.  The difference isn’t measureable in a person’s level of wealth.  It
has to be psychological.”

“Well
stated, Emma.  And some of you will remember that we employed a version of this
technique with the Ripper,” Trevor said, “although our approach was less
detailed and specific than what the latest papers on profiling have
suggested.   We concluded he was educated, that he had medical training, and
that he was able to function well enough in society that no one would deem him
a threat.” 

There
was the same small painful beat that there always seemed to be whenever the
Ripper was mentioned, but Emma remained motionless and after a split second,
Trevor continued.  “If we had interviewed a dozen men who had also assaulted
women, especially men who targeted prostitutes, we might have been able to draw
our portrait with more detail.”  

“I
must say I find that the most fascinating part of the whole business,” said
Rayley.  “Not the crime scene work, but the notion that certain character types
are more likely to commit certain crimes.”

“I
hate to eternally play the devil’s advocate…” Tom said.

“Oh
go ahead,” said Emma. “You’re so good at it.”

Tom
ignored her and continued.   “Has it occurred to any of these criminal
psychologists that men who’ve been jailed for heinous crimes hardly make most
reliable of interview subjects?  They lie. Change their stories.  The Ripper
bragged about his exploits and I would imagine many criminals do.  You know, build
themselves up to seem more ferocious and dangerous than they actually are.”

“They
could prevaricate their way through one round of questioning perhaps,” Rayley
conceded.  “But repeated interviews, which were conducted by skilled
psychologists?   And if they were under hypnosis…”

“Ah,”
Tom said.  “So Dr. Freud has found his way to Scotland Yard at last.”