Garrett Investigates (4 page)

Cuan touched the brim of his hat and wondered if he dared to kiss her. She was too old for him, and an adventuress, and rumor would have it that her lips were not innocent of men’s kisses—and that one of those men was the son of the woman he had just obliquely maligned.

He looked away. “It’s been forty years since Spring-Heeled Jack was last in London. Forty years exactly?”

“Near enough,” she answered. “When last he appeared, he terrorized women from ’37 to 1840 and was never captured. He was described as thin, tall, clad in white oilcloth and a flowing cape, with a pointed beard and pop-eyes. His claws were made of iron, and were freezing cold to the touch. He scampered over rooftops and leaped hedgerows and walls with mighty bounds. This time he seems more violent, however—then he only murdered a few of his victims. The rest were groped, clawed, or interfered with—but again, in the intervening years he’s learned to use a knife, and that seems to increase his lethality.”

When she spoke, she was as cold-blooded as any copper. Cuan felt as if he should withdraw, find it unseemly. Bitner no doubt would. Instead, it made him easier with her.

When she spoke so, she was just a colleague.

She continued, “He vanished after something very like this—the Crown’s Own blanketed the city, interrupting his every attack. Eventually, he must have given up, his purpose—whatever it might have been—thwarted.”

“So what gave him the idea for the knife, if he only used claws before?”

She shook her head. “It would be natural to blame this on a copy-cat.”

“But you don’t think it is?” He leaned forward on his seat to push aside the curtains and peer out the window. Nothing lay beyond except the city, the press of its streets, and the gloaming. A woman in a ragged dress caught his eye and swung her hips. Cuan bit his lip on a sigh. Even if she knew someone was hunting her, there wasn’t much she could do if she were going to earn a few pennies for her liquor and her bed.

Here at the edge of Whitechapel, theirs was the only carriage in sight. Not even hansom cabs found commerce here.

“I tested the scrapings,” Garrett said. “They weren’t from anything human.”

Cuan let the curtain fall. “Did you say ‘interfered with’?”

“Raped,” she amended dryly.

“No sign of that this time. He’s taking the direct route.”

It fell like a stone into still water between them, Cuan struck dumb while his mind ticked over the implications. Garrett stared back. “DS,” she said, finally, “I do believe you’re right. Do you wish me to inform your supervisor as well as my own?”

“DI Bitner? Yes, if you know what’s going on.”

She reached up to rap on the carriage roof. “I think we can manage that.” She handed Cuan the amulet before leaning out the window to confer briefly with the coachman. By the time she sat down again, Cuan had finished lighting the lantern that would allow them to see each other though the last light faded from the sky. “I think he’s using the—the life force, the generative force—of his female victims to stay manifested in London. I think he needs that anchor, or he falls back into whatever hell he came from. And the Queen’s reign is his gateway. Then, she was young, new to the throne. Now she’s recently widowed. A woman in transition. He connects himself to the Queen’s life-giving energy the same way you sorted the sand from the glass.”

“Because all women share a symbolic continuity,” Cuan said. “Just like all bits of quartz.”

Garrett nodded. “Just like all men.”

Cuan glanced down at the amulet, expecting only more lazy spinning, and had to look back twice to confirm what his eyes registered.

The needle of light pointed west, shivering like a bird dog on point.

He held it up. Garrett, after only a wide-eyed glance, lunged for the window to call out to the coachman again.

***

The coach lurched heavily through packed streets, jostling and slewing so Cuan was obliged to wedge himself in the same corner he’d slept in and cling for dear life to the vertical rail beside the door.

“St. Giles,” Garrett said, as the needle’s course plunged them along the roads that still described the path of London’s ancient walls. “We couldn’t have guessed much more wrong than Whitechapel.”

Cuan gritted his teeth, grateful for missed meals, and held on until the carriage shook to a halt a mere three miles but nearly half an hour later.

“We’re not the first,” Garrett said, pushing the curtain aside. She swung the door open as she stood and kicked the stairs down. One hand extended to whoever waited below, the other burdened with her carpet bag, she descended without regard for the railing. Cuan followed at slightly less breakneck speeds, though still in haste.

As he fell into step beside her, she spoke without looking at him. “I’ve made up my mind to write you a letter of recommendation to Oxford.”

He would have stammered thanks, but she silenced him with a wave. Full dark had fallen while they raced the breadth of the city proper, and the coal-oil stinking yellow fog rolled in. Despite streetlamps and carriage lanterns, everything had acquired an air of indistinctness, or unreality.

However the transfer of information had taken place, five carriages clustered at the base of the pillar marking the intersection called the Seven Dials. Fifteen or twenty men milled among them, the bright edge of human chatter dulled by the fog. Along the perimeter of the lamplight loomed the vague-edged silhouettes of helmeted and uniformed officers, some clutching their truncheons like children clutch poppets.

As Cuan found his footing, DI Bitner detached himself from the crowd and stumped over. That didn’t surprise Cuan, but he was a little taken aback to realize that the overcoated shape striding along in Bitner’s wake was Detective Superintendent Mattingly, second-in-command of CID. He hastened forward, intending to smooth over the introductions, but Garrett was already warmly greeting Mattingly.

The Detective Superintendent seemed less enthusiastic, but he wasn’t giving her the brush-off, a friendliness which Cuan perceived to be the source of Bitner’s frown.

“What have we got?” Garrett asked as Cuan drew up. Across the square, fog swirled around the pumping legs of Commander Lain, his silhouette unmistakable as he hurried to join them.

Mattingly cast a searing look over his shoulder at the rookery as Lain inserted himself into the circle. “The Met have the rookery surrounded,” he said, nodding to the truncheon-wielding crew. “They’re not letting anyone pass.”

“With all due respect, sir,” Cuan said, “he’s already in there. And if we’re talking about a jumping devil, well, a lot of peelers aren’t going to slow him down a bit.”

Mattingly harrumphed through his moustache. “St. Giles is a warren, DS. We don’t have enough men to maintain a perimeter if we go in after him.”

“We can go in,” Lain offered, gesturing to another carriage now drawing up, the arms of the Crown’s own emblazoned in gold on the black, glossy door.

Cuan winced, but he hadn’t the rank to say what needed saying. Bitner, too, was swelling full of unpronounced arguments. Fortunately, Mattingly interceded.

“Do you want to imagine the carnage we’d get if we sent a dozen stiff-limbed elderly sorcerers on a room by room search of
that
?”

Lain bridled, but Mattingly rolled right over him.

“Even a wizard can be bashed over the head, sir, and they would be. No, thank you, Commander Lain. It would be a far superior use of your resources if your men would consent to be stationed among the bobbies. A stasis-wanding is our best chance to capture this sprite.”

“I think I know what he’s after,” Garrett said. Every set of eyes swiveled, and she colored. “It’s…indelicate.”

Lain tilted his head. “We are all scientists here, DCI.”

“A feminine principle,” she said. “Before, he raped for it, and when we kept him from his prey for long enough, he was forced to return to whatever Hell he came from. Now, he simply eviscerates. DS Coen gave me the idea—”

“Did he now?” Bitner interrupted, raking Cuan with a peculiar look.

Mattingly said, “That gives us a potential strategy for starving him out. But it doesn’t answer the question of which terrier can drag this particular badger from his sett.”

Cuan felt Garrett drawing herself up. “Send us,” she said, pointing from Bitner to Cuan. “The three of us, and a couple of bobbies, if there’s one or two who will volunteer. These two gentlemen have revolvers, I imagine, and I’ll have my wand. They can protect me quite effectively—and it won’t be a house to house search. We have the amulets, thanks to DS Coen. And I am hardly elderly and stiff-limbed.”

“I’m not sending a woman into danger,” Mattingly said, with a glance for support at Lain.

Garrett took a step forward. Her pointing finger made an arc, taking in the bobbies and their lanterns, the hellish silhouettes their lights cast on the fog. “There’s a woman in there now, Detective Superintendent, who—if she has not already been molested and horribly killed—is already in grave peril. You’re not sending me into danger, sir. I’m going to get my sister out.”

The sweep of her neck, the lift of her chin, were magnificent. Cuan held his breath, thinking of Mattingly’s fond disdain, the dismissive comments of investigators. From across the circle, Bitner caught his gaze, one eyebrow rising.

Lain spread his hands. “I know better than to come between DCI Garrett and anything she might have set her will on.”

Mattingly shook is head. “Bitner? Coen?”

“We’ll do it,” Cuan said, as Bitner’s mouth was opening.

It might be insubordination, but—whatever he’d been about to say—once the words were out of Cuan’s mouth, Bitner rocked back on his heels and folded his arms. Superior officer or not, he’d back his partner up.

“We’ll do it,” Bitner agreed, more slowly. He turned to Garrett. “The plan is to flush him out onto the Crown’s Own? Do you think he’ll run when confronted?”

She looked as if she’d like to bite her lip, but was too much a lady. Instead, a shiver spread through her delicate cheek. “He did before.”

***

The alleys stank of feces and rotting trash. No light filtered in from outside—the gaps between buildings had long been bridged with shoddy construction that sifted filth on their hats—and Cuan tried not to think too hard on what the beams of their lanterns illuminated through the crawling smog. Any heap of rags might be a filthy vagrant, a rotting corpse, or just a stinking heap of garbage. Cuan would be as glad to get through the night without having to determine which was which.

Few folk were abroad. Cuan would wager that word had spread of the peelers surrounding St. Giles and everybody who had shelter was taking it. So they moved like ghosts through the fog, unopposed but not unremarked. Cuan felt as if he could sense the hostile gazes blistering his skin from every angle. If he could not see the people, he could hear them, the scrape of iron on stone within the ratty dwelling-places, the screams of more miserable babies than could be counted.

Garrett had the amulet. Her footsteps clicking at his heels, she called directions at each intersection. Behind her, Cuan heard the scrape of Bitner’s boot, his ragged breathing. Two bobbies—Burns and Jamison—brought up the rear, big doughty men clutching their truncheons.

Cuan’s palm sweated into the grip of his revolver. He was obliged to pause at each corner, flatten himself against whatever passed for a wall—some no more than flimsy barriers of planking and bits of crate, the interstices wedged with rags—and peer ahead into the gloom, alert to ambush.

Nevertheless, the knowledge that somewhere ahead a woman could be in peril of her life kept him moving faster than caution would dictate. “We must be getting close,” Garrett said. “The amulet is brightening.”

As if her words had been permission, the ambient sound of too many people living pent too closely in tiny rooms and corridors was rent by a woman’s cry. With a glance over his shoulder, Cuan broke into a run.

It could be a trap, of course, and it could be that he was charging headlong to the devil. But he told himself he wouldn’t
be
himself if he could listen to a shriek like that and take no action. The pounding footsteps of the others echoed around him, telling him he was not alone. Garrett kept up quite handily, the silver tip of her wand flashing in the lanternlight as she drew up alongside. And Bitner, long-legged and slight, swung wide to charge past them, drawing ahead.

Cuan watched the jiggling beam of his lantern and drove harder, hopping rubbish piles and sliding in drifts of refuse. One of the bobbies blew his whistle, sharp and shrill, a sound that set Cuan’s teeth to vibrating in his skull. They broke out into a courtyard ringed in squalid shanties, loomed over by soot-blackened brick. The darkness shattered and broke around blades of light, the erratic sweep of lanterns nauseating in trembling hands. Bitner had drawn up a little before them, squinting the length of his extended arm. The beam of the lantern in his left hand illuminated a lumpish black shape Cuan at first mistook for a shanty draped in ragged black oilcloth.

He could hear the woman whimpering, the sort of tiny mewing sounds made by someone too terrified or hurt to get a breath. He stepped forward, flanked by the bigger of the two bobbies, meaning to join Bitner in forming a wall between Garrett and the source of the sound.

Then the thing stretched, and rose, the draperies flaring with its movement, and Bitner saw it unveiled from within the flapping cloak—a bone-white figure as spindly as if lashed together out of broom handles, its eyes bugging out of a face like a Pulcinella mask. One skeletal hand was still knotted in the hair of a woman who sprawled before him; the other folded stiffly around the hilt of a hunting knife.

Spring-Heeled Jack.

The woman’s dress was ripped from collar to navel. Shiny darkness spotted the edges of the gash, but the bright steel of her corset busk glinted between ragged edges of cloth, and it sharpened hope in his breast. The wounds might be superficial.

“Throw it down!” Bitner demanded, his voice ringing with authority. “Throw down the knife!”