The Jekyll Revelation

by Robert Masello

  TOPANGA CANYON—CALIFORNIA

  Present Day

  Rafe hadn’t really wanted to delay their departure from the canyon, but despite her protestations, he could tell that Heidi’s ankle wasn’t completely healed. By the time he’d caught up to her fleeing from the meth lab, she was favoring one leg, and trying to disguise it. She needed a rest, and maybe, he’d reasoned, it would be better to travel after dark; if Axel and Roy had decided to come after them, they might have given up by now.

  Now he was regretting it.

  Heidi was still moving slowly, and the canyon was so dark that their flashlights hardly made a dent. More than once, he wondered if he’d be able to track down the jeep at all. The night air was cool and the sky cloudy, but he didn’t relish the thought of sleeping out in the canyon. He’d already returned Heidi from a training mission in terrible shape once; he didn’t want anything else to go wrong on this one.

  Enough already had.

  What was he going to do about the meth lab? It was his duty—absolutely—to report it to the proper authorities, but by the time they acted on the news, the evidence would be gone and all activity there ceased. Axel would make sure of that. What’s more, Rafe’s number would be up, if it wasn’t already, with the Spiritz. The Land Management office would have an excuse, too, to cut off his funding and transfer him, for his own safety, to some godforsaken spot where he would never know what had happened to Diego and Frida.

  “How much farther is it?” Heidi asked, trying not to sound as weary as he knew she was.

  “Not much.”

  “You know where we’re going, right?”

  “I’ll try to forget you asked me that.”

  “Sorry.”

  Not that she didn’t have a point. “Maybe we should rest for a minute or two,” he said, slinging his backpack to the ground. He’d put this kid through an awful lot, and he felt terrible about it. He’d have offered to give their boss a special commendation of her performance, but he was afraid that, coming from him, it would only backfire.

  From the way she slumped down on the spot, he could tell she was at the end of her endurance. They squatted down on the hard ground, and instantly they were enveloped by the darkness and the silence. It was always that way—the moment you stopped hearing your own breathing and the rattle of your gear and the crunching of your boots, it seemed as if all of life was suspended. But then, after a minute or two, the sounds of the canyon came to you, as if on a frequency you had not been tuned to. He heard the distant call of night birds, the light breeze blowing through the chaparral, the chirping of crickets.

  “Have you still got those muffins?” Heidi asked.

  “You sure?”

  “Why?”

  “No reason,” he said, not wanting to prejudice her. He dug the homemade muffins out of his backpack, handed one to her—it felt like a Nerf ball—and waited. Seconds later, he heard her cough and sputter.

  “What is this made of?”

  He hoped not pot. “All natural ingredients.”

  “I guess I like unnatural ingredients.”

  “You’ll get some soon.”

  She started to say something else, but Rafe’s attention was suddenly riveted to a sound somewhere off in the nearby brush. It could have been nothing—just the wind in the dry boughs—but he kept listening.

  “Do you think we might have passed the jeep already?”

  It came again—a footfall of some kind. Human or animal, he wasn’t sure. He remembered the wolf tracks he had seen.

  “I think we parked over that way.”

  A twig snapped, and even Heidi heard that. She stopped talking.

  In the dark, Rafe reached out to grab her hand and urge her to her feet. She needed no more encouragement than that. Still holding her hand, he made for some trees and once they were there, picked up their pace.

  Ominously, he had the sense that someone, or something, was keeping pace right along with them. He unsnapped his holster.

  “Rafe,” Heidi whispered, but he just shushed her and kept on.

  He trained his flashlight beam close to the ground as they walked, just enough to keep them from tripping over something, but not enough to provide much of a beacon to their whereabouts. When they hit the next summit and he saw, with a huge sigh of relief, the windshield of the jeep, he said softly, “There it is. Come on.”

  After tossing their backpacks into the rear, he turned the ignition, and while backing up to turn around, surveyed the area for any sign of a predator.

  “Were we being followed?”

  “Maybe,” he admitted.

  “Are we now?”

  “Make sure your seat belt’s fastened.”

  Much as he would have liked to gun the engine, the terrain was too rough and uneven to do that. He proceeded at no more than five or ten miles per hour, steering between trees and rocks and trying to pick up the trail they’d forged on the way in. The jeep was balky, and the headlights penetrated only so far.

  “What are you going to do about those guys and that lab?” she asked.

  “Leave that to me,” he said, working hard not to lose his focus. “I’ll take care of it through the right channels.”

  “The Land Management office?”

  “Just forget you ever saw it,” he said, “and don’t tell anyone.” He glanced over at her. “Promise me that.”

  “I promise,” she said, and he had the sense that she was glad to be relieved of that responsibility.

  On the first downhill slope, the jeep was okay, but on the next one the motor kept stuttering and he had to pump the brakes more than once to slow it down.

  “Everything okay?” Heidi asked.

  “Fine,” he said, though he knew they were not. The jeep was a relic when he’d been assigned it, but up until that night it had been pretty reliable. Maybe it had taken more of a hit than he thought when he’d barreled it through that chain on the day Heidi had been bitten by the snake. He’d have to get it checked out once he was back.

  But even that was starting to look uncertain. He knew there was at least one more hillside to traverse before getting anywhere near the canyon road. He gripped the wheel with one hand and the gearshift with the other, and used both feet for the pedals. What was wrong with the damn thing, and why did it have to happen now?

  It was only as he started to descend the last ridge that he felt the car going out of control. When he hit the brakes, he got nothing, and when he stamped his foot down even harder, the jeep simply screeched.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Just hold on tight,” he said, pulling the emergency brake.

  The car juddered, as if hit by an electric shock, then continued to gather speed.

  There were trees up ahead, and he was barely able to steer the car around them, the branches scraping the hood.

  “Rafe!”

  What else could he tell her to do? He whipped the wheel to the right, jouncing over a rocky ledge and slamming down on all four tires at once.

  If it weren’t for the seat belts, they’d have been ejected altogether.

  Heidi screamed.

  The car kept hurtling down the hillside, as Rafe looked everywhere for some flat ground or a place he might even bring it to rest without crashing. But there was nothing but a downhill slope of dry soil and tumbling rocks and scrubby plants, nothing to slow them down enough, much less provide a safe landing.

  Except perhaps for one thing.

  But where was it?

  In the dark, and at the headlong pace they were traveling, he had only seconds to decide if it was to his left or right, and he could not afford to be wrong.

  The wheel flew out of his hands from a hard jounce, the undercarriage of the car bumping over a fallen log, and once he’d grabbed it again, he pulled it hard to the right, then the left, slaloming down the hill in an attempt to cut the speed even by a little, before finally breaking into some clear ground and seeing, at its bottom, his only hope.

  Holdi
ng the jeep as steady as he could, he shouted “Keep your head down” and—in the dim glow of the headlights, one of which was already smashed—aimed straight for his target. The tires couldn’t hold onto anything anymore, and the car skidded down the hillside like a kid on a slide, before soaring off a low rise in the ground and, momentarily airborne, sailing out and over the mirrored black surface of the lake below.

  9 September, 1888

  Can it be that a week has passed—and the monster has struck again?

  I can hardly believe it, nor can much of London. The city is in shock.

  As before, the victim is a poor unfortunate, driven, by drink and bad luck, to sell herself on the street. Annie Chapman. Her name has now been conjoined forever with that of Polly Nichols. The penny press and magazines have whipped the public into a frenzy of fear and speculation. Who can the murderer be? While the “Times” and the “Daily Telegraph” have remained fairly judicious in their accounts, the illustrated papers—which have proliferated, like much of the press, ever since the abolition of the newspaper tax—have added grim pictorial elements and a good deal of reporting of a more dubious nature. The “Star” has led the way, dubbing the killer Leather Apron. And on what evidence? A slipper maker, who wore a leather apron as a part of his workwear, has reputedly extorted prostitutes in the vicinity with a sharpened knife. A man whose ‘face was of a marked Hebrew type’, this phantom has never been named or otherwise identified, and if what I know of human nature is true, it is just another calumny on that foreign and much-maligned race.

  ‘I doubt the man even exists,’ Henley has opined. ‘They’re just out to sell newspapers.’

  Still, even his own “National Observer” has been unable to remain immune to the current panic. ‘I’ll be damned if I’ll rely upon the scraps thrown to us by the official Metropolitan Police reports, however,’ Henley said, insisting that he would inspect the scene of the latest crime himself. ‘Perhaps you’d like to join me, and see what those of us who have to write about the real world must contend with,’ he said.

  Fanny, upon hearing the suggestion, reacted with dismay. ‘Louis has enough horrors heaped upon his plate by his Brownies. He hardly needs more.’

  Indeed, I had already seen, in the “Pall Mall Gazette” of all places, a connection made between the savagery in Whitechapel and the terrors—‘precisely contemporaneous’, as the paper tellingly suggested—enacted nightly upon the Lyceum stage. And Oscar Wilde, never one to miss an opportunity to inject himself into a controversy, has wondered in print ‘if this is not yet another instance of Life imitating Art?’

  It’s a wonder the killer has not been saddled with the sobriquet of Hyde.

  On the pretence of lunching with Symonds at his club, I left the house under Woggin’s watchful eye, and embarked with Henley on a visit to the East End—an odyssey in itself. As anyone familiar with the city knows, there is the London of Buckingham Palace and Belgrave Square, of leafy green parks with burbling fountains and broad colonnades, of immaculate town houses with well-scrubbed steps and flowered window boxes . . . and then there is the boiling stew of Whitechapel. Even in broad daylight, as our cab made its way towards the murder site, the thoroughfares grew darker and more crooked, the throngs upon the pavements more desperate and despairing, the air itself more foetid and grey. Every stoop was cluttered with children in rags, every kerbside heaped with refuse, every shop window barred, and every pub—of which there were an inordinate number—teeming with idle and ill-tempered men. Our coach had to stop once to allow a fight that had begun inside a tavern to finish in the street. The victor, having clobbered his opponent into submission with what appeared to be a barrel stave, raised his arms in triumph and was carried on the shoulders of his supporters back into the bar.

  ‘Achilles celebrating his triumph over Hector,’ Henley said, as the cab resumed its journey. At the corner of Hanbury Street, we disembarked, and Henley, after glancing at the address of a packing case store, said, ‘Number twenty-nine must be that way.’

  Under any circumstances, we are a pair that draws more than a passing glance—Henley with his thick red beard, and stumping along on his crutch, me looming over him with stooped shoulders and black hair hanging to the collar of my shirt. But today, the street crowded with those who had come to gawk, we drew even more attention than usual. Plainly, we were interlopers, and the local inhabitants were trying to make out what we could be—detectives, social crusaders, sensationalist journalists? We fit no obvious category. A constable stationed outside the door of the boarding house put up a hand to block our entrance and barked, ‘Move along! Nothing to see here! Move along!’

  ‘Press!’ Henley retorted, brandishing a card that identified him as the editor of the “Observer.”

  ‘Haven’t you lot seen enough already?’

  ‘This lot hasn’t seen it at all,’ Henley said, using his crutch as a sort of cudgel to brush past him, ‘and I don’t plan on coming here again.’

  I followed him into the dim, narrow hallway, past a couple of open doors—in one, an old woman was crocheting intently (piecework, no doubt); in another, a sickly young man was sitting on the edge of a cot with his hands dangling between his knees—and then down two steps into a desolate back court fenced on all sides with boards. A man in a brown suit and matching bowler hat was crouching, examining something on the uneven paving stones. He turned, annoyed, at the sound of our entry.

  ‘Who let you in?’

  Henley again produced his card and handed it to him. The man read it, then glanced at the both of us, and said, ‘I should have recognized you.’

  ‘We’ve met?’ Henley said.

  ‘At that play.’

  As the only play I had seen of late was the one based on my own book, I knew he must be referring to “Jekyll and Hyde,” and that was when he fell into place for me.

  ‘You were accompanying the prime minister,’ I said.

  ‘Inspector Frederick Abberline, Scotland Yard,’ he said, though he made no motion to shake hands.

  ‘And what were you inspecting just now?’ Henley said.

  Abberline, whose pinched face was bracketed by woolly mutton chops, did a poor job of concealing his disdain. ‘How exactly may I help you gentlemen?’

  ‘By giving us the facts.’

  ‘Haven’t you been reading the morning papers?’

  ‘I never trust what I read in the press,’ Henley said. ‘I prefer to get it straight from the horse’s mouth. And you, my good man, appear to be the horse.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Whatever you can tell me. This is the spot where the murder took place, is it not?’

  ‘You’re standing on it.’

  We both stepped back, as if we had been standing on a grave. In a way, of course, we were.

  ‘She brought her customer into that hallway—the door is never locked,’ Abberline went on, ‘and then out here, to conduct their business, as it were.’

  An awful spot, I reflected, looking around, to have conducted anything at all, much less to have ended one’s life.

  ‘He must have taken her by the throat and pressed her up against this fence,’ he said, gesturing at what I could now see were smears of blood, ‘and slashed, from left to right, with a blade long enough to have nearly severed her spine.’

  Henley had taken a pad and pencil from the pocket of his vest and was scribbling notes. ‘Yes—and then?’ he said, looking up.

  Perhaps flattered by the attention to his words—a phenomenon I have observed myself in those whose views and opinions I have solicited—Abberline cleared his throat and continued. ‘The neighbour, on the other side of the fence, was using the outhouse, around quarter past five, when he thought he heard a woman say one word, “no”, and a bit later, the sound of something, or someone, falling softly against the fence.’

  ‘Did he see anything?’ Henley asked.

  ‘No. It was still dark out, and the fence is just high enough to have concealed
what must have happened next.’

  ‘Which was?’

  ‘The murderer had silenced her already, but it was then that he went to work on the dead body. She was discovered here, maybe an hour later, by another of the tenants at number twenty-nine—the young man on the first floor.’

  I thought of the wan fellow on the cot.

  ‘She was lying on her back, with her legs bent wide at the knee and her left arm thrown across her breast. She’d been sliced open, and her intestines had been ripped out and thrown back over her shoulders. Her entire abdomen had been eviscerated—he’d made brutal work of that—but he’d left her purse, with a few small things like a comb, a scrap of muslin, and a torn envelope with some pills, arranged rather neatly near her feet. Took her jewellery, though.’

  ‘She wore jewellery?’ I could not help but ask.

  ‘If you can call it that. A few small brass rings that her friends swear she always wore.’ Abberline shrugged. ‘It’s possible she pawned them. We’re looking into that.’

  To be so destitute as to pawn a couple of brass rings—what could she have conceivably received for them, a farthing or two?—was a glimpse into the abyss.

  Henley, glancing up at the many windows of the tenement behind us and the buildings that were crammed all around it, said, ‘And apart from the neighbour who heard her fall, no one saw or heard a thing? He must have made hasty work of it.’

  Abberline sighed and said, ‘That’s for the doctor to determine.’

  ‘Dr Llewellyn?’ I asked, remembering the name Fanny had read to me from the paper, the one who had done the autopsy on Polly Nichols.

  ‘We have our own expert, Dr George Bagster Phillips. At the Whitechapel workhouse mortuary.’ He lifted his watch from the pocket of his vest and said, ‘In fact, you have made me late for my appointment there.’

  ‘Well, let’s not be any later than we must,’ Henley said, putting a full stop to his last note and ramming the pad back into his pocket. ‘Lead on.’

  Abberline was nonplussed.

  ‘Well, you don’t think you’re getting off this easy, do you?’ Henley said.