The House at Baker Street (25 page)

‘I don’t doubt it,’ I said dryly, looking at the woman stood before me. She could be challenging, and unreachable, and yet somehow promising. It must be an irresistible
combination.

‘This man . . .’ Mary said.

‘No names,’ Lillian Rose said quickly, her hand dropping from her hip. ‘I won’t tell any names.’

‘Of course. He must have offered you a lot of money.’

‘Thousands,’ Miss Rose confirmed. ‘Enough to get out of here. Enough to keep my mouth shut.’

‘We just need a name,’ Mary coaxed. ‘Nothing else, just a . . .’

‘Are you mad?’ Miss Rose snapped, and her hand shot to the scarf at her throat. How odd, that a woman with barely enough to eat should wear a scarf like that. She pulled it and
twisted it as she spoke. ‘You saw what he did to the Whitechapel Lady. He cut her open and tore out her innards, and all she did was ask a few questions!’

‘Questions?’ I asked.

‘Questions,’ Miss Rose confirmed bitterly. ‘Just lately, just to the women on the street. About if they’d ever been paid for letters. Or helped a blackmailer. Barely
anything, really, and she ended up ripped!’

My stomach sank. I glanced at Mary, who looked as horrified as I felt. After we had left her, the Whitechapel Lady must have decided her sedentary life was no longer enough. She must have
decided to track down this man herself – and she ended up in a pool of blood.

‘We’re sorry . . .’ Mary stammered, but Miss Rose shouted her down.

‘Do you think she was the first, eh?’ she cried. ‘A death like that doesn’t just happen, he’s had practice. There were others, women who talked, women who fought
back. He’s swimming in blood, and no one’s ever done a damned thing to protect us!’

Mary suddenly gasped.

‘There were reports in the papers,’ Mary whispered, turning to me. ‘When I was researching the society ladies, there’d be reports of chambermaids and prostitutes and
governesses, some hanged, some poisoned, a lot with a cut throat or wrists. Most were considered suicides, one or two perhaps seen as murder. But, there were so many, so separate, all in different
places, most of them not even seen as suspicious. How do you link the death of a duchess in London to the suicide of a nursery maid in Glasgow? I only saw them because I was reading so many
newspapers. I never thought . . . I never realized it was connected.’

‘Of course not,’ Miss Rose continued, her voice shaking. ‘Why would you? We’re not the rich ones. We’re not ones he likes to break. We’re just the ones he
uses and then discards. What use does he have for us? Even the ones that got away!’ She ripped the scarf away from her neck.

A livid scar ran across her throat, raised and red.

‘He didn’t try very hard with me,’ Miss Rose said. ‘Just tried to cut my throat. Not for much, just for talking to a policeman I liked. He thought I was telling on him.
As if I dared! But I survived and came here, and I was making a life, and then he found me again. Just one job, he said. Get the letters and I’ll let you go. And I was leaving.’ Her
voice dropped to almost a whisper, and a tear ran down her face. ‘He told me last night I’d done enough, and he gave me the money, and he walked away. I had escaped. But now
you’re here, and he’ll know, and he’ll track me down, and he won’t be so careless this time.’

She looked up at me, her eyes full of tears, a hunted animal finally knowing it must lose.

‘I don’t want to die,’ she told me.

‘He won’t know . . .’ Mary started to say.

‘He’ll know!’ Miss Rose spat. ‘He knows everything!’

She tied the scarf back round her neck, then turned to the suitcase and snapped it shut. She reached out to the picture on the wall.

‘Almost,’ she whispered.

‘Go now,’ I said urgently. ‘We’re getting closer, he’ll be concentrating on us, he won’t have time for you.’ She turned to look at me. ‘Go to
King’s Cross and go to Scotland, right in the Highlands. I know a place, a private place.’ I took down the picture of the lake and on the back, with a scrap of pencil from Micky, I
wrote the address of someone my mother had known, long ago.

‘It’s not far enough,’ Miss Rose said.

‘Far enough for now,’ Mary said. ‘It’ll give us time to stop him.’

‘You?’ Miss Rose said, disbelieving. ‘You’re going to stop him?’

‘Of course,’ I said, straightening my back and clutching my handbag. I was, as Mr Holmes would have said, the very embodiment of British Empire.

Miss Rose almost smiled. ‘Maybe you will at that,’ she said, looking me up and down. ‘He’ll never see you coming.’

And with that Lillian Rose slipped out of the room and down the stairs.

I felt my solid spine give way, and I sat down heavily on the bed. Mary leaned against the wall.

‘A murderer too,’ she said slowly.

‘We knew that,’ I pointed out.

‘Not the scale of it. She’s right, though, to leave a scene behind like the Lady’s, you have to have done it a few times before.’

‘He’s not the Ripper, Mary,’ I insisted.

‘I didn’t think he was, not now,’ Mary replied. ‘I mean, all those murders she said he did – no one ever linked them together. He just killed them, slipped away,
and no one ever knew they were done by the same hand.’

‘Whereas the Ripper was killing as if he were holding up a great big sign shouting “Look at me! I’m a killer!”,’ I added. ‘No, not the same man, but perhaps .
. .’

‘Ladies,’ Irene interrupted, peering round the door. Truth to tell, I’d almost forgotten she was there. ‘Micky has spotted someone he says has been following
us.’

‘Who? What does he look like?’ Mary asked.

‘Don’t know who,’ Micky said, appearing beside Irene. ‘Not much to look at, really. Just ordinary. But too ordinary. Got a patch on ’is jacket arm, like
’e’s tried to clean something off. ’E’s been following us for a while. Weren’t sure at first, but ’e’s been stood outside this house, doing nothing, all
the while you’ve been ’ere.’

‘He didn’t follow Miss Rose? The lady who left here?’ I asked quickly.

‘Nah,’ Micky replied. ‘’E’s still out there.’

‘Right,’ I said firmly. In the last day I had been frightened, had run for my life, heard terrible stories and felt so helpless I could scream. Time for that to end.
‘I’ve had enough of this,’ I said, standing up.

‘Now what?’ Micky asked apprehensively.

‘That man’s been following me for days,’ I said to them. ‘Now we are going to follow him.’

The sky had darkened, covered in thick black clouds, making the day as dark as night, though it was only noon. The air felt heavy and thick and sharp, presaging a thunderstorm,
and all through Whitechapel people hurried indoors before the greasy rain fell. Micky pointed through a grimy window at the street below. There, lounging against a doorway, was a man, not tall, nor
short, not dark, nor fair, wearing a jacket with an odd stain on the elbow, his face shadowed by a crumpled soft hat. He straightened up, anticipating moving soon. There was no doubt he was waiting
for us.

‘There’s always another way out of these places,’ Irene said, and I did not have time then to wonder how she knew that. ‘Micky?’

‘Down ’ere,’ he said, and he led us through a door in the house that seemed to be nothing more than a crack in the wall. Once, it would have been a servant’s hidden
entrance, but now it led us down through the wall of the building, thick with rats and stench. Beyond the walls I could hear people’s voices and moans. Micky did not take us all the way down,
but stopped at another door. This led into a room, large and empty, though scattered with belongings. Micky did not hesitate but walked across the room and threw open the window.

It opened onto a flat roof. Irene led the way, then helped me out, hampered as I was by my skirts. Mary climbed after me, not needing help. We scurried across the roof and down an iron ladder
into the street below. Down an alleyway, through another, and quickly nipping across the street, we found ourselves behind the Ordinary Man.

This was the point where Irene and Micky tried to persuade us to go home. Mary refused vehemently, in a hissing whisper so the Ordinary Man could not hear us. Micky turned to me, then said to
Irene he’d seen that look on my face before and no way was he going to try to stop me.

‘Fair enough,’ Irene agreed. ‘Look, he’s going in.’

We peered round the corner. The Ordinary Man must have realized we were taking too long to come out, and had gone into the house to check on us. A moment later we heard him shout, and saw the
curtain to Miss Rose’s room twitch.

It began to rain. Just a few large drops at first, then thunder smashed across the sky, and the rain fell in earnest. It was falling as if there were no end to it, as if it planned to spend its
forty days’ and forty nights’ allowance in that one afternoon, in great huge rods of rain that hurt when they hit you, and smashed on the pavements and dashed though any gaps in the
houses. The rain was filthy, grey with the dirt of London, grimy with the soot of the smoke it fell through. It was a rain to send even the rats scurrying for cover, but it was perfect for us. It
emptied the streets, so no one was left but us and the Ordinary Man, and it was so heavy it concealed us and forced him to keep his head down.

He took a long and winding journey. He seemed to wander aimlessly, though Mary guessed that he was taking a deliberately convoluted route to flush out followers – but
both Irene and Micky were skilled at this game. Mary and I hung back, out of his sight most of the time, whilst Irene and Micky worked as a pair, alternating between following him and coming back
to guide us. Micky was good at this, as were all the Baker Street Irregulars, but so was Irene, subtly changing her appearance and the way she walked, so he could never tell if it was the same
woman who was behind him.

‘Quite a skill she has,’ Mary observed once, dryly. ‘So useful for an opera singer from New Jersey.’ She and I had exchanged significant glances.

An opera singer from New Jersey – yet I had never detected the trace of an American accent in her voice. Well, maybe she had lost it – but America was such a convenient place to
begin again, to wipe out one’s past and emerge shining and new. Where had she actually grown up? Where had she learnt to follow a man so she would never be caught? Where had she met
locksmiths and thieves? What had she done in her past that she could be blackmailed about? When had she learnt the skills to wander the streets of London dressed as a boy, and to do it so
successfully that she fooled even Mr Holmes?

I know he had tried to dig into her past. He had books of cuttings, labelled ‘her work’, ‘possibly her work’ and ‘maybe her work’. He had found nothing solid
though, only rumours and speculations. Nothing about her seemed real; just the fancy of a moment. All he knew of her that was tangible was the sovereign of hers that he kept on his watch chain that
she had given him when he had witnessed her wedding, and a photograph he kept in a drawer. And there was one other note about her: he had once said she had a face to die for, yet he seemed unmoved
by that. But he had remembered hearing her sing at a concert, once, long ago, and her voice, and only her voice that night, had moved him to tears. Mr Holmes could always be touched by music where
beauty failed. And now here was the American songbird in front of me, using skills no music teacher had ever taught her.

We must have seen every corner of Whitechapel that dark afternoon. Mary and I walked on, keeping the Ordinary Man at the very edge of our vision, sometimes letting him slip
away altogether, knowing that Micky and Irene had a closer eye on him, and would come back to point us in the right way. The clouds thickened until the streets were black as night, and the rain
hammered down incessantly.The whole scene had an unworldly look, like one of the engravings of hell seen in some old book that had terrified me as a child.

Once Mary pulled me back into an alley, against the wall, and motioned me to be silent. I thought perhaps our quarry had spotted us and was heading back our way, but a moment
later I saw why we had hidden. As I peered out of the alleyway entrance, Mr Holmes and John ran past us.

I drew back, but they had not seen us. They had some quest of their own to pursue.

‘You have your revolver, Watson?’ Mr Holmes called.

‘Always do!’ John called back.

‘Good. He shall not escape us this time!’ Mr Holmes answered, as they disappeared into the dark and the rain.

‘What do you suppose that was all about?’ Mary asked, once she was sure they were gone.

‘I have no idea,’ I said, watching the street they had run down. I had not listened at the vent so frequently, and didn’t know what Mr Holmes was currently working on. ‘I
don’t suppose we’ll ever know.’

We couldn’t ask them, not without admitting we’d seen them. How odd that we should all be in Whitechapel on this day, hunting down villains, entirely separate from one another.

‘Oh, John will tell us one day,’ Mary said lightly. ‘And then I’ll tell him what we were doing here.’

The clocks were striking four in the afternoon, and the skies had clouded over. In the narrow streets of Whitechapel this made the day seem as if it was almost twilight. Micky
scurried back to us and said, ‘’E’s home. Miss Irene says we’ve found ’is lair. We’ve been hanging around outside for ages and ’e hasn’t come out
yet.’