by Alex Grecian
“My baby . . .”
“She’ll be fine here with me,” he said. “Don’t you worry about her. You’ve got quite enough to do right now.”
“Who are you? I don’t know your name.”
“My special friends call me Jack. And I think we’re going to be very special friends indeed.”
“Please tell me what’s happening,” she said again.
“You’re having another baby. Twins.”
“No. That’s not possible. I already had my baby.”
“Softly now. Stop your worries. Jack is here.”
“Jack?”
“You have given me so many lovely gifts today. A poem to treasure for always and secrets still to read. And you have given me the best thing of all. A party and guests to celebrate with. I have never had a special birthday friend, and now I have two. Isn’t that marvelous? We shall be close, your babies and I, and I think we shall have a party every year on this day.”
“Nnnggg!” Claire bore down. She couldn’t stop what was happening, couldn’t listen anymore to the strange doctor. She couldn’t make sense of his words, and so she let him disappear back into the darkness that fuzzed the edges of her vision.
“Yes,” said the shadow on the wall. “By all means, let us welcome our final guest.”
64
Fiona had stopped banging on the pantry door quite some time ago. She’d heard a struggle happening in the kitchen, just outside her door, then the strange doctor had wandered through. There had come the sound of yet another struggle from somewhere else in the house, but nothing since. Everything was quiet except for an occasional creaking floorboard upstairs.
She felt around on the shelves in the pantry and eventually found a pair of tea candles. She lit them and used the light to look for something to help her get the door open, but there was nothing she thought might be useful.
She turned around, sat down facing the door, and resigned herself to a long wait. At least, she thought, she wouldn’t starve to death in the pantry. She folded her hands in her lap and was surprised to feel the shape of a small box in her apron pocket. She drew it out and blinked at it.
The package that had come in the post for Inspector Day. The giant key. In all the excitement she had forgotten to rewrap it.
She opened the box again and took out the key. It was worth a shot. She stood and went to the door and, already grimacing in anticipation of disappointment, she tried to put it in the lock. Of course it was much too large to fit, and she let out a big sigh. She hadn’t even realized she was holding her breath.
She looked the key over, not because it was particularly interesting, but it was something to do, a new thing to look at. There was a hole in the end of the key and she put her eye to it, but in the flickering candlelight she couldn’t see down the barrel. It had a small curved protuberance near the intricately looped handle. She held the key this way and that and frowned at it. It actually looked a bit like a pistol. She pointed it at the lock on the pantry door and said “bang” under her breath and pulled on the little trigger-thing below the handle.
The explosion was deafening in the confines of the small room, and the key flipped up and back and hit her in the chin. She dropped it to the floor and screamed.
• • •
HAMMERSMITH HEARD AN EXPLOSION somewhere in the house and he struggled to open his eyes. Light streamed over him from somewhere nearby and the backs of his eyelids were red. His chest hurt more than anything had ever hurt before.
“Shh.” The voice was unfamiliar, deep and gentle. “Lie still. It’s not your time to change yet. That stupid buzzing fly. He’s missed your heart completely. But he has nicked one of your lungs.”
“Can’t . . .”
“I know. You can barely breathe, much less talk. So be quiet and let me finish this. A mutual friend would not like you to leave him just yet.”
Hammersmith felt something piercing him, pulling on him. Whoever was talking to him was also sewing his wound. No, sewing something beyond his wound, something inside him.
“Don’t . . .”
Hammersmith’s mouth was forced open and salty fingers clamped onto his tongue. “I said to be quiet.” This time the voice was stern and there was something dry beneath it, like metal. “Hush now, or I’ll take this from you. It’s been a very long day and I’m in no mood.”
Hammersmith tried to breathe in, tried to maneuver himself upright, but the effort was too much for him to bear, and he felt the world recede.
“That’s better,” the voice said.
Hammersmith passed out again.
• • •
THE PANTRY WAS FULL of smoke. Fiona coughed and waved her hand in front of her face. Then she noticed the door. The entire doorknob plate hung loose, the knob was on the floor, and a crack of light showed between the jamb and the door. She grabbed up the tiny gun and pushed against the door and ran out into the kitchen.
The floor was a swamp of blood and gore, and Constable Rupert Winthrop was directly in front of the pantry, part of the way under the table. Fiona gasped and put her hand up to her mouth. She felt her gorge rise and swallowed hard against it, forcing it back down. She had seen many corpses while assisting her father, but never the body of someone she knew. Always before she had approached bodies as artistic things, tragic forms to capture in charcoal. This one had a name. This one had been sweet and stupid and caring.
When she had recovered, she pulled up the end of her apron and wiped her mouth. She did not look at the mutilated body of poor Rupert Winthrop again. She went to the kitchen door and out, the key gun held straight out from her body, her finger on the mini-trigger.
Far down the hall, just inside the entryway, someone knelt over the body of a man. She raised her strange pistol.
“Get away from him!”
The man kneeling over the body on the floor stood and picked up a black bag and walked to the door. He didn’t turn toward her when he spoke.
“There is still time,” he said. “You may save him yet, if you want to.”
“Stop!” Fiona pulled the trigger, but nothing happened. She pulled it again. Click. She realized too late that the gun was too small to hold more than a single bullet, and she had used that bullet to escape the pantry.
The man with the black bag was already out the door. When he reached Regent’s Park Road, he turned and passed out of sight. Fiona dropped the jailer’s gun at her feet and ran down the hall. She slowed and looked in through the parlor door as she passed that room. What she saw would come back to her in her dreams for the rest of her life, but she looked away and kept moving. Her father was stretched out at the bottom of the stairs. A few feet away from him, blocking the open front door, Sergeant Nevil Hammersmith lay in a pool of blood. He looked dead.
She checked on her father first. His pulse was strong and he was breathing evenly, but she couldn’t wake him. She left him there and went to Hammersmith, knelt down beside him. His pulse was faint, but regular. His shirt was torn open and a wound in his chest leaked a steady trickle of blood, down under his left armpit and into the spreading pool beneath him. A spool of red thread and a card of needles that she recognized from Claire’s sewing basket rested on the floor next to Hammersmith’s body, and she knew what the stranger had meant when he told her that she could save him.
One of the needles was already threaded, as if she had interrupted the stranger in his work. She picked it up and burst into tears. She recovered quickly and wiped her eyes on her sleeve and began to sew the man she loved back together.
65
Inspector Michael Blacker was the first through the door, and Inspector James Tiffany was right behind him. Both of them had their revolvers out, at the ready. The front door stood open and there was a girl passed out across the threshold, cradling Sergeant Hammersmith’s head in her lap. Hammersmith was covered in blood. Blacker recognized the girl as Dr Kingsley’s daughter. She helped sometimes, sketching out crime scenes. He couldn’t remember her name. B
eyond Hammersmith’s outstretched feet, they could see Dr Kingsley himself, lying with one foot on the bottom step of the staircase. His chest was moving gently up and down.
“Good Lord,” Tiffany said.
“What do you suppose happened here?”
“As long as nothing else happens . . .”
They stepped carefully past the girl and Hammersmith, both of the inspectors alert for any sound in the house. Blacker checked on Kingsley and his daughter, then moved them into more comfortable positions. Tiffany bent over Hammersmith and felt for a pulse.
“He’s alive,” he said. “Do you believe that?”
Blacker shook his head. “I really don’t,” he said. Hammersmith’s shirt was torn open and his chest was a railroad switchyard of red and black stitches.
Constable Jones followed them through the door. Inspector Day was behind them, but he was barely upright. Sir Edward had sent him to hospital, but Day had ignored his orders. Neither Blacker nor Tiffany could blame him. They had only asked that he stay well back until they could look through his house to make sure it was safe.
Day stopped and bent unsteadily over Fiona, filled with guilt and shame and fear for the girl. What had she seen?
Tiffany waved Jones past them down the hall to the kitchen. Blacker started up the stairs, but turned and hurried back down when he heard Jones gagging. He and Tiffany came up behind Jones and looked into the parlor.
The man on the floor was spread-eagle, a horizontal Vitruvian Man. He was bald and naked, and his torso had been cut straight up the middle, the flaps of skin and slabs of muscle folded to either side. His rib cage was broken, the bones pointed up at the ceiling. His major internal organs had been removed, but were still attached, their veins and arteries spun like fishing line to various points around the body. The intestines had also been removed and had been spooled out to the farthest corner of the room, then arranged along the baseboards like an elaborate red and grey glistening picture frame, made to show off the artistry of the killer. The bald man’s hands had been cut off and lay several inches away from the stumps of his wrists, as if they had flown off his arms in surprise. The same had been done to his feet. His eyes had been removed and laid on his cheeks, each of them looking away in a different direction. His genitals were entirely missing. Neither Blacker nor Tiffany nor any of the policemen or coroners who followed them would find those particular anatomical items.
His clothes were neatly folded on a nearby chair.
Three or four fat houseflies lazily circled the body, darting away and then back after bumping into the big window at the front of the house.
Tiffany left the house and went to the street, where he vomited. He spat and wiped his mouth, then instructed the watching carriage driver to send for more wagons and for as many doctors as could be found. Meanwhile, Constable Jones walked away from Cinderhouse to the kitchen, and so had the dubious honor of having discovered both of the corpses in Day’s house. Jones had come up at the Yard with Rupert Winthrop, and the sight of the body caused him to lose himself. Tiffany found him sitting at the kitchen table, softly crying and squeezing a damp coverlet.
Blacker accompanied Day up the stairs. They went as quickly as Day could manage. Halfway up, they could hear an odd mewling sound, and Blacker left Day there on the staircase. He ran ahead, while Day called out his wife’s name.
He was relieved beyond words to hear her answer him.
By the time Day got to their bedroom, Blacker was already coming back out. Blacker nodded at him and went to check the other rooms on that floor.
Day stood in the doorway and held on to the wall. Claire smiled at him from the bed. She looked sleepy, but relaxed. In her arms, she held two tiny babies.
“Walter,” she said, “would you like to come say hello to your daughters?”
Day smiled and let go of the wall. He took a step forward.
And fainted.
66
Jack stopped outside and knelt by the curb. He took Griffin’s blue chalk from his pocket and drew a large zero on the footpath. Above it, he drew an arrow pointing toward the house. He stood and put the chalk back in his pocket and went to the door, pulled the bell.
He had been busy in the two days since saving Sergeant Hammersmith’s life. He had a lot of time to make up. When the housekeeper came to the door, he handed her Inspector Day’s card, lifted from the occasional table in Day’s hall, and was ushered into a reception room. He sat in a chair next to the door so that he wouldn’t be immediately noticed by anyone entering the room, and he waited. There was a large portrait above the fireplace of a jowly man with thinning hair. Jack stared at the portrait and folded his hands in his lap and felt utterly at peace.
Some fifteen minutes later, a man was preceded into the room by his voice: “So, Day, you’ve decided to join us, have you?”
A stout man stopped just inside the door and looked around, confused. He didn’t see Jack until it was too late. Jack rose and stepped into the doorway and grabbed the man about the throat from behind. With his free hand, he closed the reception room door, pushing it gently until the latch clicked.
The stout man resembled the jowly man above the fire. Jack wondered how they were related.
“Dr Martin Bickford-Buckley?”
“I’m Dr Bickford-Buckley. Who are you?” His voice was strangled and hoarse.
Jack let go of the man’s throat and allowed him to turn. As soon as the doctor saw him, he gasped.
“It’s you,” he said.
“You weren’t expecting me?”
“How did you . . .”
“I thought I’d take the time to return your bag,” Jack said. He held up the black medical bag with the initials MBB stamped into the side. “And now that I have, perhaps there is a thing or two we might discuss.”
“I’ll discuss nothing with you.”
There was a knock at the door.
Jack whispered, “If you say a word that I don’t like, I’ll kill her, too. You have a last opportunity to be a noble man. Do you understand?”
Bickford-Buckley nodded, and Jack opened the door. The housekeeper entered with a silver tray. She set it on the table, curtsied, and left again without ever looking up at them. Jack closed the door behind her and latched it.
He smiled at the doctor. “How do you take your tea?”
“You’ve come to kill me. I regret nothing, so get on with it.”
“Gladly. But first, I hope you’ll give me the names of our mutual Karstphanomen friends. Not too soon, mind you. I have some sharp clinky metal things here I’d like to show you. Tell me, have you ever heard the phrase ‘divine retribution’?”
“Oh, good Lord!”
“Yes. That’s exactly right. I’m glad you understand.”
Jack barely caught the man again before he screamed, and after that he ensured that Dr Bickford-Buckley made no loud noises during their long visit. He didn’t want to disturb the housekeeper. She seemed like a nice lady.
He left a gift for her on the mantel before he let himself out.
67
Dr Kingsley had made special arrangements at University College Hospital, and a large sitting room had been refashioned into a private convalescence ward for two special patients. Day and Hammersmith lay side by side in clean white beds while nurses bustled about and patients in the nearby public wards cried out. Most of the time, the two policemen slept. When they were awake, they rarely spoke. Day’s legs were heavily wrapped in layers of gauze, and he was sedated for the first two days and nights of his stay. Hammersmith required more attention. One of his lungs was perforated, but the wound had been sewn shut in time to save his life. Dr Kingsley inspected the stitches and declared them to be adequate. It was clearly the work of an amateur, but a talented amateur, and there was no reason to submit Hammersmith to the trauma of reopening that wound. His chest posed a different problem. Fiona had kept him from bleeding to death, but her stitchwork was clumsy. Kingsley had removed the stitches from his che
st and sewn him back up. He informed both Hammersmith and Fiona that there would be significant scarring, but that he had every reason to expect a full recovery. This did not comfort Hammersmith, who felt he should not have allowed himself to be stabbed in the first place.
Cinderhouse’s body had been put back together and examined. In addition to the missing genitals, Kingsley was unable to find the left kidney or the tongue. Mr Michael, owner of the house on Phoenix Street, eventually verified that one of the tongues found on his chimneypiece had come from Cinderhouse’s mouth, but there was no way to determine which one, and so both tongues were cremated along with the tailor’s remains.
The same day that Cinderhouse was burned and discarded, Claire Day finally visited the hospital. She pushed a pram that had been modified to fit two babies. A young nurse cooed over the infants and led Claire to the private room where Day had been awakened and dressed for the occasion. He lay atop his starched white sheets and smiled at Claire when she entered. She ran to him and they hugged, carefully, and she showered his lips and eyes and forehead with kisses.
“I’ve been so worried,” she said. “Dr Kingsley wouldn’t let me come.”
They whispered to each other, careful not to wake Hammersmith, whose ravaged chest rose and fell rhythmically, miraculously.
“How are you?”
“How am I? How are you? Walter, you almost died.”
“Nonsense. A rough day on the job, that’s all.”
“You didn’t really get a chance to see the girls.”
She went to the pram and wheeled it to the bed. Day looked down at his daughters, who slept curled up around each other like kittens.
“They’re lovely,” he said. “Did it . . . I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you.”
