End of the Century (24 page)

Feet numb in his marching boots, blowing on his fingers to keep them warm, Galaad found it impossible to say how much time had passed, but it seemed to him that it must have been an hour or more since they had begun snaking their way through the city streets. Llongborth was relatively small, at least compared to Caer Llundain, and perhaps not even as large as Glevum, but the only landmark Galaad could discern was Geraint's hall, and as it appeared again and again in his field of vision, first on one side and then the other, now ahead of them and now behind, he realized that their course must have twisted and turned back on itself several times, moving around the city in a spiral pattern, like the shape of a nautilus.

No longer entirely silent, the captains has begun once more to give voice to their discontent, at least in some small measure, grumbling now and again, complaining of fatigue, the dark, and the cold, and even in Gwrol's case his thirst for more of the grape.

Finally Artor came to a halt, and it seemed that he was on the verge of announcing a retreat indoors, when something moved in the corner of Galaad's field of vision. A flash of white that for an instant Galaad was sure presaged the onset of another vision. But his nostrils were filled only with the
sharp tang of the freezing night air, not the customary scent of flowers, and the white flash was too quick, too localized.

Galaad turned his head, and there, at the end of a long street, he saw it.

Bathed in the light of the moon, stark white against the dark street and buildings, it was the figure of a man. It stood some considerable distance away, at the city's edge, and so Galaad was hard pressed to discern any details, but from this vantage the figure seemed to be male, hairless, and dressed in some dark fabric whose color appeared simply black in the low light but might have been any hue. Only his neck and head were bare, and these were shocking white, but for the eyes that weakly reflected back the light of the moon, glinting red.

“A-Artor,” Galaad stammered, keeping his voice low.

The High King looked, and followed Galaad's gaze.

“Well, I will be damned,” Pryder cursed beneath his breath.

Artor's sword was already in his fist, and in a sudden chorus of metal on leather the other captains all drew their own blades.

As if in answer, the spectral figure at the far end of the street reached to one side and drew a blade of his own. Or seemed to do so, at least, though when he straightened, it initially appeared that his hand was empty. Then he turned, but fractionally, and a sword appeared in his hand, as if by magic, its blade seeming to glow faintly red in the moonlight.

From the near distance, Galaad heard a sound like wild geese in flight, and from behind the spectral figure there appeared fleeting white shapes, coursing across the cold ground.

His red sword in hand, the Huntsman advanced on the seven, the voice of his wrath baying at his heels.

BY THE TIME
B
LANK AND
M
ISS
B
ONAVENTURE
had climbed back up from the Ghost Fox's underground audience chamber, made their way back through the sickly sweet corridors of the opium den, and were out into the Limehouse streets, it was already near time for luncheon. They agreed it was high time for a bite to eat and set about finding a suitable locale.

They settled on a public house in the shadow of St. Mary-le-Bow off Cheapside. The fare was rough but filling, and given the relatively early hour they had a few tables to themselves. Miss Bonaventure had picked up some penny papers on their way west from Limehouse, and once they'd finished with eating, she spread them across the tabletop, sipping at a cup of tea from time to time while Blank nursed a pint of bitter, his manner withdrawn.

Miss Bonaventure had ventured to ask Blank about his history with the mistress of Chinese crime, but after a few tentative attempts to draw him out, it had become clear that he was not yet in a mood to discuss the matter. Instead, she busied herself with her customary scour of the day's news, leaving Blank alone with his thoughts.

“You were right about the soldiers,” Miss Bonaventure said at length, the silence evidently proving too much for her. “It says here that there are some fifty thousand troops in London for the procession, the largest military force ever assembled in the city.”

Blank hummed absently in assent and nodded. Miss Bonaventure shrugged, returning to her papers.

A short while later, the silence was broken again. “Oh, dear,” Miss Bonaventure said, eyes widening. “Well,
that's
not likely to help matters much, is it?”

When Blank failed to respond, Miss Bonaventure sighed dramatically, and shook the papers in her hands, making a loud rustling noise, like one would make to scare off a flock of birds.

“Blank? Hello? I know that you're enjoying your sulk and pout in there, but I think that
this
might be of some interest.”

Blinking, as though just coming out of a nap, Blank looked up at Miss Bonaventure. “Yes?”

She shook her head good-naturedly. “You're hopeless.” Then she slid the paper across the table to him. There, above the fold, was the banner headline:

JUBILEE KILLER STRIKES.
POLICE MAINTAIN SECRECY ON THREE PRIOR VICTIMS
.

“You're right,” he said, ruefully. “I imagine that's not likely to help matters at
all
.”

The article recounted that a police constable had discovered the body of a man lying in the thoroughfare at the junction of Abingdon and Great College streets, practically in the shadow of Parliament itself. The man had been respectably dressed and in apparent good health at the time of death, leaving aside the fact that he appeared to have been cut nearly in half and effectively disemboweled. The postmortem had indicated that he had been cut across the small of the back while fleeing from his attacker, the blow neatly slicing through the spine and muscles of the lower back. Internal pressures had forced internal organs and viscera out through the gaping wound, and if having his spinal column severed had not killed the victim in short order, he would have died quickly from loss of blood.

The body had been discovered two nights previous, apparently some short time after the murder had occurred, and an inquest held the following night, while Blank and Miss Bonaventure had scoured Whitechapel for any clue as to the identities of the three unknown victims of the series killer. The victim had been identified as one Xenophon Brade, twenty-seven years of age. As the victim had no living relations the coroner could locate, his body had been identified by his neighbors.

Several of the penny papers, it transpired, carried reports and transcriptions of the inquest, but only one suggested any connection to the decapitated body that had washed ashore in Pimlico two weeks before. A reporter with
Lloyd's Weekly
, who had reported on the earlier inquest, noted a correspondence between the manner in which the decapitated woman's wounds were said to be clean shears, showing no indication of hacking or chopping, and the way in which Xenophon Brade's fatal wound appeared to be a single cut that drove straight through flesh, muscle, and bone. With some persistence, he had wormed from a particularly garrulous constable the information that there had been two other decapitated and limbless bodies found, which New Scotland Yard had kept secret.

So, while the authorities had not yet begun to suspect that the murder of Xenophon Brade was anything but mundane homicide, though a particularly brutal one taking place so close to the corridors of power, the
Lloyd's Weekly
reporter had laid out a skein of supposition that connected the dead man with the three previous victims, and given the hypothesized series murderer a name: The Jubilee Killer.

Though fatigued, having slept not at all in nearly thirty-six hours, Sandford Blank and Miss Bonaventure hadn't the inclination to sleep, the news having presented to them a new piece for the puzzle that had harried them these last days. The first order of business was to contact the authorities and arrange for a viewing of the body of Xenophon Brade to add the evidence of their own senses to the testimony recorded in the inquest's transcriptions. They thought to find a telephone and ring New Scotland Yard but were hard pressed to find an establishment on the wire, and instead of spending the
time of sending a telegraph across town, resorted to the expedient of simply hauling their bodies the distance and presenting themselves in person.

So it was that, in early afternoon, they arrived at New Scotland Yard to find that they had come too late. The body of the late Mr. Brade, having already been examined, had been sent off to the mortician. Worse, when contacted, the mortuary informed Blank and Miss Bonaventure that the departed, lacking any living relatives, had written a last will and testament, and was now being interred in accordance with his recorded wishes.

The mortician had already sent Brade's remains by hearse to the Necropolis terminus just outside Waterloo Station, to be borne by rail to Brookwood Cemetery.

“Come along, Miss Bonaventure!” Blank said, racing from the mortuary. “We might still catch it!”

It was a mad dash through the streets, into a cab and across Westminster Bridge. By the time the pair reached the terminus, in the shadow of Waterloo Station, smoke already curled from the stacks of the Necropolis line's engine, preparing at any moment to steam out of the station.

Blank vaulted from the cab, rushing across the pavement towards the station, hopped a rail, and grabbed the stationmaster on the platform by the lapels.

“You must stop that train,” Blank said, thrumming.

“On whose say-so?” the stationmaster demanded, flustered.

Blank stuck a featureless white calling card under the man's nose and hummed. “On mine,” he said simply, jaw set.

The stationmaster concurred, immediately, and blew the whistle that hung on a lanyard around his neck. “Stop the train!” he called out, waving his arms to catch the conductor's eye. “Stop the train!”

As Miss Bonaventure leisurely strolled up the platform, Blank straightened his coat and shot his cuffs. “That was an unanticipated touch of melodrama, Blank,” she said with a smile. “Couldn't we simply have ridden on the next train down to Brookwood if we missed this one?”

Blank made a disagreeable face and shook his head in distaste. “Oh, no, my dear. I never go to the suburbs if I can help it.”

They found the body of the late Xenophon Brade in a simple unvarnished wooden casket. A label at the casket's head indicated that the body was bound for the Noncomformist section of the Brookwood Cemetery rather than the more fashionable Anglican areas. That suggested something of the character of the man inside, whose background they would investigate after viewing his remains.

Also suggestive was the fact that the dead man rode to his reward in the second-class section. Just as on the trains of living passengers that departed from nearby Waterloo with clockwork regularity, on the Necropolis line there were provisions for first-, second-, and third-class travel, not only for the dead but for their mourners as well. No one, it seemed, accompanied the body of Brade to his final rest, his bank having followed the instructions in his last will and testament and paid for the travel and final accommodations. Here was a man who, on the face of it, had gathered few associations in life and who now joined a select company in death—the victims of the newly christened Jubilee Killer. But it occurred to Blank that Brade might well have had other acquaintances and friends who had elected not to appear beside him at the time of his interment. This was another matter to investigate.

The conductor, who had escorted the pair to the second-class compartment, raised an objection when Blank asked Miss Bonaventure to open the casket, but the judicious application of some subvocal harmonics and suggestive words had been sufficient to quiet the conductor's complaints. Blank had not even been forced to draw one of his calling cards from his pocket.

So it was, then, that in short order the lid to the plain wooden box had been pried away and the body within lay revealed. Lying on his back, he might just have been slumbering, his arms crossed over his chest, his eyes heavy lidded, but for the fact that his skin was lifeless and gray. The dead man had an unruly shag of hair atop a long, high-cheekboned face. His nose was patrician and his fingers at the ends of his long hands were thin and delicate. To all appearances he had been dressed in the same clothes in which he had died following the postmortem, there being new vents and cuts scissored into the fabric of his jacket, shirt, and trousers, then hastily restitched by the mortician while preparing him for the grave.

The body exposed, there remained the gruesome task of rolling it over to
expose the wound on the dead man's back. Miss Bonaventure, wiping the palms of her hands on the fabric of her skirt, dusty from the exertion of prizing the coffin lid open, shook her head, resolute. “Don't look at me,” she said, holding up her hands, protectively. “You want to see his back,
you
turn him over.”