The Devil's Workshop (13 page)

The boy nodded once, sharply, and marched away, joining the throngs of men headed for that nearby train. Day turned around and almost bumped into an elderly man, who was stopped outside the tea shop and was staring at him with a puzzled expression.

“I say,” the man said.

“Terribly sorry,” Day said.

“What are you doing?”

“Police,” Day said. “My name is Inspector Day. Nothing to worry about. Please go about your business, sir.”

“But I can’t go about my business.”

“You can’t?”

“You’re blocking the way. That’s my tea shop.”

Day smiled. “Ah, very good, sir. Then you have the opportunity to clear up a small mystery for me.”

“A mystery?”

“Do you have anyone working for you here? Small fellow named George Hampstead? A bit jumpy?”

“No.” The man pulled himself up to his full height. “I’ve never had anyone working here except me. Never a need. What’s going on here?”

“Well,” Day said, “it’s all a bit complicated. Do you have a few minutes to spare?”

T
he contractions were coming every few minutes, and Claire didn’t know what to do. She curled up under the coverlet and hugged her knees and closed her eyes and tried to imagine the tiny life inside her. One day that life would be a person. One day that life would be a policeman or a housewife, a mother or a father, a living breathing human being. But right now, that life wanted to come out.

Claire reached under the edge of the mattress and brought out her diary. She unsnapped the catch and opened it and looked over the last entry she had made. Nothing much. Nothing that made her proud. Just a jot about feeling lonely and having trouble getting the buttons right on Walter’s shirts. There ought to be something more there. What if she died in childbirth? It was
more than possible. Dr Kingsley told her not to think of such things, told her she was safe and healthy and that he would do his all for her. But he didn’t know. He’d never felt a contraction, he’d never given birth.

She turned a page and took her pencil and bit her lower lip. Another contraction hit and she grimaced, almost made a sound, but didn’t. At least there was that. She felt like pushing back against that pressure, but she was afraid of what might happen if she did.

Instead, she thought of her baby and what she could tell it. Her eyes closed, she felt the room moving, and she remembered skipping rope when she was a girl and hadn’t worried about dying. She thought about what it was like to be a child, and she hoped that she would be able to make her baby feel the way that she had when she was young. She opened her eyes and she wrote in her diary:

My skipping rope,

It passes over and it passes down.

My skipping rope,

She couldn’t think of anything that rhymed with
down
. She felt dizzy and unconnected, so she concentrated harder on the words. She crossed out the second line and wrote
It passes under and it passes up
. This posed the same problem.
Cup?
What did that have to do with skipping rope?
Pup?
Maybe the child was skipping rope with a dog? That seemed unlikely.

She tossed her diary aside and lay watching the ceiling swim around above her. There were more than enough nursery rhymes for children. She didn’t need to write her own.

Another contraction hit. She clenched her teeth and moved to her hand to her stomach. And then she felt something warm and wet moving under her bottom and up to the small of her back, and she pulled aside the blanket and there was liquid soaking into her fresh linens, a whole day’s work undone by her rebel body. Tears sprang to her eyes and she wiped them away.

Another contraction, this one the worst yet. Terrible pain, and why was it necessary to feel such pain when childbirth was such a common thing? She tensed up into a ball in the wet spot, but it wasn’t a spot, it was an ocean, and she clenched her hands into fists and thought about her horse, the little horse her father had given to her on the occasion of her thirteenth birthday, and she wondered if that horse was still galloping about somewhere on her parents’ land wondering why she didn’t visit it anymore. Why didn’t she take it apples and ride it anymore?

The pain passed, although she could still feel it, a faint drumbeat like her pulse somewhere far away. She sat up and looked down and there was blood in the bed, blood mixed with something clear and viscous, flecking the coverlet and soaking into her nightgown.

“Fiona!”

She licked her lips and concentrated on not panicking, except that everything felt wrong. Her body was somebody else’s body
and it didn’t fit her properly, hadn’t been hers to begin with. She gasped and closed her eyes; again there was a twinge low in her belly, a soft strum of muscle and grit, and she screamed as loud as she could.

“Fiona!”

J
ack stood patiently in the center of the parlor while Cinderhouse moved around him. The tailor had Jack try on the jacket first. Elizabeth sat quietly in his chair in the corner of the room, watching them alter one of his suits. The jacket’s shoulders were broader than Jack’s own shoulders, but not by much, and the slight difference helped with the sleeves. Jack’s arms had always been much longer than average and his enforced starvation hadn’t altered their length. Cinderhouse silently noted a few things, then had Jack try on the trousers. They were a bit long, but the tailor pinned up the hem of the left leg, made sure it broke properly against the top of Jack’s foot. He measured Jack’s waist, using a piece of the same twine they’d tied Elizabeth with, and had Jack take the suit off again.

Cinderhouse retired to the dining room table and began to sew,
while Jack rooted through the drawers in Elizabeth’s bedroom until he found a pair of underpants that fit him well enough if he bunched them up at the waist. He found a smoking jacket in the closet in the hall and put that on, too, and paced about the house, barefoot. He hovered over the bald man for a while, watching him work, but the tailor kept pricking himself, his hands shaking with fear, and so Jack wandered away. He didn’t want blood on his new suit. At least, not just yet.

He found half a stale loaf of bread in the kitchen cupboard, along with a cheese that wasn’t much more than rind. He ate them too quickly and was only halfway through the bread when he had to step out the back door and vomit it all back up. After that, he ate slowly, swallowed a little bit of water with each mouthful.

When he felt satisfied that he would hold the bread down, he went back to the parlor and stood in the shadows under the stairs and watched Elizabeth struggle with his bonds, unaware that he was being observed. Jack’s gaze settled on the mantel. Cinderhouse’s tongue was nailed to the forward edge. It had stopped dripping and was beginning to shrivel a bit around the edges. It had always fascinated Jack how long a person’s tongue was once it was out of the mouth, free to stretch itself out a bit.

Now he missed Cinderhouse’s chattering. Only a little. The bald
man still expressed himself with grunts and gestures, but of
course that was the most rudimentary and imprecise of languages.
Jack frowned and wondered if he ought to have punished
Cinderhouse in some other way. Left him with his words
so they could have a proper conversation.

Then he realized that what was really needed was a second tongue on the mantel. Two tongues might converse with each other. What
secrets would they tell? He left the shadows and went in search of his medical bag. It was still on the floor against the wall where he’d left it when they’d first entered the house. He opened it and rummaged through until he found a fine scalpel, still dotted here and there along its short sharp blade with Jack’s own blood. He went back to the parlor, and Elizabeth stopped struggling when he saw him. Jack smiled at him in what he hoped was a reassuring way and removed the gag from the homeowner’s mouth. Elizabeth started to say something, but Jack shushed him and went right to work.

When he had finished, he left the gag loose around Elizabeth’s neck so he wouldn’t choke to death on his own blood. Jack pounded a nail through Elizabeth’s tongue into the edge of the mantel. It made a fine companion piece to Cinderhouse’s tongue, although there were subtle differences between the two pieces of meat, not the least of which was that the bald man’s tongue was much more ragged at the far edge where it had been torn out. Absolutely fascinating to see the many variations the human body worked upon itself. God’s wonders were truly infinite.

Jack stepped back and wiped his fingers on the front of the smoking jacket. He hefted the hammer once or twice, tested its weight, and slashed at the air with it, letting it swing his arm around, wondering at the simple power of it. He saw Elizabeth out of the corner of his eye, still drooling blood down the front of his shirt, his eyes wide with pain and terror. Jack sighed and put the hammer down on the mantel top. He hadn’t intended to frighten the poor fellow. Hammers were not his style. Didn’t everyone know that by now? He patted Elizabeth on the shoulder and left the room.

He checked on Cinderhouse, who was still toiling away over the
suit at the dining room table, then took the stairs up to the bedroom once more. He closed the door and turned the lock and lay down on the bed. The ceiling was tin, painted white, with swirling decorative grooves that looped across its whole expanse. He followed the grooves with his eyes, making pictures in the patterns up there, until he fell asleep.

T
hey were waiting for the wagon from Scotland Yard, and Hammersmith was visibly chafing at the sense of wasted time. Day offered him his flask of brandy, but Hammersmith waved it away. Day took a long pull at the flask, recorked it, and stowed it in his jacket, on the other side from the Colt Navy so that their weight balanced and didn’t pull the jacket off-center.

“I hope the others have caught somebody, too,” Hammersmith said.

“How are you, Nevil?”

“What?”

“You asked after me earlier,” Day said. “What about you?”

“I’m fine.”

“I see.”

Day stared at the green tea shop where Adrian March stood guard over the prisoner. The air was better out here on the street, even if the sky remained suspiciously grey.

“I’ve got to find a new flatmate,” Hammersmith said.

“It’s been six months. More than that, hasn’t it?”

Hammersmith nodded, looked away at the sky, both of them waiting for it to open up and soak them. “His family came. Took his things. What things they wanted.”

Constable Colin Pringle had been off duty when he was murdered, helping his friend Hammersmith on a case he wasn’t even supposed to be working. Hammersmith hadn’t mentioned Pringle even once since then. Day was surprised to hear him speak of him now, but he stayed silent, afraid any sound he made might chase the sergeant back into whatever hole he’d been living in for seven months.

“Left me with his suits.”

Day looked down at the footpath and waited.

“Can you imagine me in a suit?”

Day smiled at him. “Maybe when you make inspector.”

“Never happen. I’d give them to you, but they wouldn’t fit. You’re bigger than he was.”

“So are you.”

“I suppose so. Where would I put them if some new chap moved in? He wouldn’t want a dead man’s clothing taking up all the space in his room.”

“You could donate them to the poor.”

“Would Colin like that, do you think? Would he be pleased to see his suits worn by shit-shovelers and knocker-uppers?”

“It might amuse him. But I didn’t know him as well as you did.”

There was a long companionable silence. Day looked up at the sky and Hammersmith looked down at the tops of his shoes.

“You shouldn’t worry, you know,” Hammersmith said.

“About what?”

“I was thinking about my father.”

“You’ve lost a lot in the past year.”

“I was thinking about him the way that I remember him, not the way that he was at the end of things. By then his body had failed and his mind had gone. He wasn’t the same man. But when I was younger . . .”

“I’m sure he was a good father.”

“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s a good father and what’s a perfectly average father, since I never had more than one to compare, you know? But what I remember best of all are the small things, not the big events, not the things you think you’ll remember, like a trip to the Crystal Palace.”

“But the small things?”

“Yes. When he would put his hand on my shoulder as we walked along. Or when he showed me how to tie my boots. He was patient with me.”

“Nevil, your boots are untied.”

“That’s what reminded me just now. I never quite got the knack of it.”

“Do you want another lesson?”

“Ha.” Hammersmith looked up and grinned at him. “But that’s what I mean. You’ll show your son. Or your daughter. You’ll show them how to tie their shoes. Or you’ll just take a walk with them and be quiet and let them talk. You’ll listen the way that you always do. And they’ll remember that one small moment, maybe, when they’re older. And that’s all they’ll need from you. Only that you were there.”

“If that’s really all it took, Nevil . . .”

“I think that it is.”

“Thank you, Sergeant.”

“I didn’t mean to offer you unasked-for advice. And it’s hardly my place . . .”

“Not at all,” Day said. “I’m glad that you did.”

“Good.”

Both men quietly watched the far corner of the street until the wagon came around it and rolled smoothly toward them. At last, the escapee would be taken off their hands and they could get back to the business of catching prisoners.

“And it’s good to know,” Day said, “that their uncle Nevil will be such a font of good advice.”

He clapped Hammersmith on the back and stepped out into the street and hailed the wagon driver.