Clockwork Killer (Steampunk Detectives: Book 1)

by Hall, Ian

  I took samples of the rope, and once back in the yard, packed it into an empty saddlebag.

  Alone for a second, I looked at the farmhouse. True to Francis’s words, perhaps by our initial warnings we’d prevented some crime here. If we hadn’t have cautioned these people that Johnny Reb finished his act with a slice of his sword, perhaps he never would have acted so swiftly.

  A very quiet Sarah handed out cups of coffee, and for a while we stood in silence. Sarah slipped to her husband, then cuddled close.

  There seemed little else to do, so after a short while, I took my leave, the others following in my wake. We rode for a while in silence.

  After we’d left the farm well behind us, we discussed the case for a while as we rode, then as we fell mute, Emily spoke. “Paul? Why didn’t you question Missus Andersen?”

  I shook my head. “She’d already clammed up.” I said. “I’m not certain we’d have gotten anything, and it wasn’t worth upsetting her more.”

  I looked across to see if my words had any import, but felt surprised at her smug expression.

  “Sometimes it proves beneficial to have a female detective.” She said, looking like the cat who had just licked the cream jug. Then I remembered she’d spent time alone with the young woman.

  “Out with it,” Francis said, sharing the grin.

  “Well, I just questioned the only woman to survive the killer, and I’ve got a new take on it.” I drifted my horse level, closer. “The guy never drugged her. She was just captured. He seemed to be strong too, she couldn’t fight him. She was, eh, sexually touched before he tied her up.”

  “Sexually touched?” I asked, puzzled.

  “Yes, those were the words Sarah used; she said almost as if he were checking her virginity.”

  “That might be important,” Francis said.

  I nodded. “We’ve talked about that before; he picks newlyweds because he doesn’t want to deal with virgins. Sorry.” It seemed silly to apologize for my remarks, but I’d been raised to be deferential to women, and here was I discussing such things with two female teenagers.

  “She also said he made a great deal about cleanliness.” Emily continued. “He asked her about her washing regimen. And when he left her alone on the bed, just before he started his ‘performance’, he popped into the kitchen to wash his hands. Sarah heard the water, and his hands were cold and wet when he returned.”

  I faced the front for a while, allowing my horse to find his own pace, content with my own thoughts. We’d learned more about our killer by this disturbed attempt than from any other. I found myself imagining Emily’s diagram in my head, now putting the new clues in the center, drawing the others around them. By the time we’d reached Jacksonville, evening had descended, and my head was swimming with new ideas.

  We gathered in the girl’s room, sitting on beds, knowing that Missus Ramsay stood in her kitchen making us a nice beef dinner; the smell permeated the whole building.

  “So are we now discounting the idea that he was a soldier?” Francis asked.

  I nodded. “It seems that he could hardly defend himself against the two chair legs.”

  Emily stirred. “Perhaps he’s just a bad soldier.”

  I gave a smirk that I knew I had to explain. “I’ve been to war, Emily. After four years, there’s few ‘bad’ soldiers left alive. Most soldiers, no matter how ‘bad’ can defend themselves against a charge. This one had both a false moustache and couldn’t raise his sword in his own defense. I think we’ve got to take ‘military man’ off the table for now.”

  Emily’s mind must have been seething like mine. “Sarah said he’d been very flowery with words, even when he, you know, checked her out.” She hung her head slightly, and gave Margaret a long look before continuing. “It was both the voice of a courtier, and that of a doctor. Both kind, yet somehow clinical. I think the medical part makes a come-back. She actually used the word ‘doctor’ to describe him.”

  Margaret opened her lips for the first time in ages. “It is difficult to take it all in.” she said, her head seemingly held up by her hands. “It is supposedly only my maidenhood that protects me from the attentions of such a man. Yet it is fairly common knowledge that by riding, we women lose that automatically.” I looked at the child before me. Nineteen years old, yet she forced herself to endure this, and wondered why. “What other reason does he chose married women?” She continued. I found I had nothing to offer. “Come on!” she got to her feet swiftly. “Why does he choose newly married women?”

  She strode from the room, with Emily close behind.

  “You have to get her home.” I said to Francis. “I’m concerned about her exposure to all this.”

  “We’re done here.” Francis nodded his head as he spoke. “He won’t strike here again. We’ll head for Chicago tomorrow; sister will be safe back at the farm.”

  By the time we ate dinner that night, Margaret seemed to be back to normal, and we sat with our heads close together above the table, talking in hushed tones. By bedtime, we’d decided to leave Jacksonville the next day, return Margaret to the orchard, and ride to Chicago.

  But as I walked downstairs that morning with my saddlebags all packed, Missus Ramsay met me in the foyer. “You have a visitor.” She indicated a man standing nervously by the check-in desk. He looked like a farmhand, but wore a colt by his side, untied, ready for action.

  “Yes?” I asked as I approached.

  “You the Pinkerton guy?” he asked. His accent sounded southern, maybe Carolinas.

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Boss wants a word.” He said, pushing himself off the desk. “Out on the ‘Double T’ ranch.”

  “Do you have any idea what it’s about?”

  “Boss don’t tell me everything.”

  I nodded, knowing we were all getting ready to leave. “Where’s the ranch?”

  “Kinda halfway between here and Springfield, maybe not halfway, maybe’s closer.”

  “Good, we’re heading out that way anyway.” I turned to see the ‘kids’ standing on the stairway behind me. “We’ll meet you out front in ten minutes.”

  The man nodded, dipped his hat to the girls, and walked out into the morning.

  The cowboy wasn’t the best of conversationalists, but I deduced his ‘boss’ to be the ‘Old Man Tanner’ that he mentioned at least twice, and who I considered to be at least one of the ‘T’s on the high metal sign we rode under.

  Old man Tanner looked like a well-heeled rancher in his fifties. His clothes were well-fitting, yet not presumptuous. He stood in the center of his considerable yard, well-armed men oozing out of the barns and outhouses to stand by his side as we neared him.

  He looked puzzled by the women. “Are you the fellow from Pinkertons?”

  “We are,” I dismounted, and handing the reins to Francis, walked to the man, and shook his hand firmly. “Paul Chapman, Senior Detective.” I had no idea why I suddenly gave myself the gravitas of the title, but it seemed to be suitable to impress the man.

  “Michael Tanner,” he replied, then with a flick of his hand he dismissed all the men that had gathered round. All left save one.

  “Danny, tell Mister Chapman what you told me last night.”

  Danny looked down at the dirt as he shuffled his feet, then looked up. “We had your young guy here last week, warning us about a man who chopped women.” He began, pointing to Francis behind me.

  “We had a theory he’d strike again.” I nodded.

  “Well, we had one of the hands do a moonlight flit on us, night before last.”

  Old man Tanner grimaced. “The night Sarah Andersen got attacked.”

  Again I nodded. “What was his name?”

  “Frederick Whiteman,” Danny said. “He came to work here every spring, regular as clockwork.”

  “He’s a seasonal worker?” I asked eagerly.

  “Like I said, every spring. He’s a damn good fencer, no one like him.”

  My head swum with question
s, and I retrieved my notebook from my saddlebag. “Tall?”

  “Nope, he’s about the same as me.” Danny replied. I glanced at the man up and down. “Five ten precisely.”

  But Francis had described Johnny Reb as tall, and this didn’t fit. “Hair?”

  “Bald as a coot.”

  I looked up from my writing, surprised. “He shaved his head?”

  “Not that I can remember, he just didn’t have any.”

  I fished in my saddlebag for one of the wanted posters, and unfolded it for the man to see.

  “That’s him.” Danny said with confidence. “Jus’ take away all the hair.” Old man Tanner looked at the poster and nodded, he looked mad enough to spit.

  “Age?”

  “Forty, forty one-ish.”

  I wrote feverishly, this was a gold mine of information. “Any idea where he came from? Home town?”

  “He told me, Dervish, Indiana, but there was always something funny about his accent. Never could place it really.”

  “Did you ever see him with a confederate uniform?”

  That took him by surprise. “No, sorry,”

  I turned to the three behind me, who all looked as excited as me. “Any other questions?”

  Francis nodded. “You said he was seasonal, ‘regular as clockwork’, you said. So where does he go from here?”

  “Ah,” Dennis grinned. “He always had a kind of aloofness about the men, we asked him about it once. He said he taught at an acting school over the summer.”

  “Where?” I asked immediately, but to my dismay Danny shook his head. “Anything else?”

  “He was a strong bugger,” Danny said, seemingly racking his mind for something else to give us. “You’ve got to have a fair bit of muscle to pull the wires tight on a fencepost.”

  As silence descended, I looked at my notes one last time; a veritable new gold-mine of information. “Thank you all,” I shook hands all round.

  As I turned to the horses, I was reminded of the oiled rope in my saddlebags. I turned suddenly.

  “Oil soaked rope?”

  Danny shook his head, not getting my point.

  “Does Frederick use oil-soaked rope for anything?” I tried again. “In fencing?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Danny got the revelation. “The wire. The barbed stuff and the straight. It comes tied and wrapped in linseed rope. Keeps the rope inside from rusting.”

  “Yes!” Francis cheered from above.

  I again shook Danny’s hand. “If you ever see this Frederick again, you better clamp him in irons, he’s a nasty piece of work. “Five women’s heads are not on their shoulders anymore, because of him.”

  “If he comes back here,” Old man Tanner began. “I’ll put a forty-five slug in his forehead.” He stomped away across the dusty yard without another word.

  “There are newlyweds on the farm, Paul.” Francis said behind me.

  Danny nodded soberly. “Old man’s only daughter, Patty.” He gave his boss one last look. “That’s the reason we sent for you today, on accounts maybe he had his eye on her. The boss is mad.”

  “Damn,” I said under my breath, mounting my horse. “Maybe we saved two lives this time.”

  I turned the head of my horse around, then another question dawned. Turning again, I quickly rode to Danny.

  “One last thing.”

  Yeah?” he looked up at me, shielding his eyes against the late morning sun.

  “Did he get paid?”

  Danny grinned. “Not a penny. Old man Tanner pays the seasonal men at the end of their contract.”

  So we’d hit him in more than one way.

  Wonderful.

  We Have a Name; Frederick Whiteman

  Francis Smalling, North of Jacksonville, Morgan County, Illinois

  April 11th 1867

  There seemed to be nothing to do on the journey back to the farm but talk about the new clues in the case.

  But as we rode, and chewed the whole case through, I watched Margaret with growing concern. Since her blow-up in the bedroom the evening before, I’d been cautious around her, but now, thankfully, this new information seemed to bring her out of the shell she’d so recently slipped into.

  So much was now known about the man. I mean, we even had a probable name; Frederick Whiteman. Okay, it might be a pseudonym, but we had something to call him by; no more ‘Johnny Reb’, which I’d never liked anyway.

  He repaired fences.

  He taught at an acting school over summer, and let’s face it, there weren’t many of those on the ground. That might account for all the over-acting, the costume, the false hair, just so much to consider.

  Frederick was bald. That might prove the biggest clue anywhere.

  And we had a possible home-town; Dervish, Indiana. Again, that might turn out false, but we definitely had to check it out.

  And we’d sorted out the oily-rope thing; he used it in his work, both the normal wire and barbed wire came wrapped in it, therefore he always had plenty of it.

  So many clues… we knew we had our man firmly in our sights.

  All we had to do was find him.

  As we rode north to the farm, I wished for a faster mode of transport. Having travelled on the speeding railroad, I wondered when Springfield would get its branch line, there had been talk for years, but now plans were afoot to drive a link from St Louis to Chicago, and that would most certainly pass through Springfield. Having recently put hundreds of miles on the back of my horse, my backside could hardly wait.

  Just for a fleeting second I shared Allan Pinkerton’s dream of a railroad system all across America.

  Emily and I stayed at the farm with Margaret for three days, when I finally saw her come back to some modicum of normality. Like our previous visit, Emily and I shared my old bedroom, while sister Margaret slept alone in her new room.

  With a terrible feeling of trepidation in my heart I visited Mamma in Springfield, but with no glint of recognition in her sad, empty eyes, I left the sanatorium feeling hopeless and drained.

  When we left the farm to head to Chicago, I never looked back. For some reason I knew that I’d be gone a while. The lingering image proved to be Margaret’s final embrace, and the whispered promise to write more often. An unspoken urgency lay in those words, and they haunted me for many miles.

  I huddled against a cold north wind whipping dust into my eyes.

  “A penny for them,” Emily’s muffled voice from behind her neckerchief broke my introspection, and I looked across at her, smiling despite my inner reticence in leaving my sister alone to deal with the farm. Just able to see her eyes through her slightly tinted goggles proved enough, I brightened instantly.

  “Oh, just the idea of leaving home again,” I mumbled. I tried my best to smile behind the thick triangle of cotton tied over my mouth and nose, but I think I failed.

  “You could stay.” Her eyes held my gaze for longer than they should.

  “And miss the final part? On, never,” I shook my head. “I’m not leaving the investigation now. I’ve worked too hard not to be in at the end. How about you?”

  “What do you mean?” Emily asked.

  “Well, you’ve got nothing personal in this. What are you going to do?”

  She swung her face slowly away from me. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll just settle for my clandestine life in Harvard. Wait for them to accept girls. Heck, maybe I’ll even start a campaign; lobby the governors.”

  I hoped she was joking, but to question her would have been leaving myself open to other questions which I did not consider myself able to answer. I mean, why did I want her to stay? And if I was in love with her, how would I know if she felt the same way?

  The single year between our ages seemed to separate us like a decade. I just felt so inadequate, so out of my depth. Emily always seemed to be just one step ahead of me, and sometimes it felt like a gulf between us.

  We again rode in silence for a while, making good headway to our next stop of Bloomington. To
my concern, clouds scudded in from the north, and tiny flakes of snow fell from their midst. I urged our horses on, seeking to reach town well before nightfall.

  For a while we pressed the horses to a faster canter, but before too long, the new aspects of the case were bandied between us, and all thought of awkwardness long gone. Back was the girl that I’d fallen in love with, her quick mind, her rapier wit, and her ability to jump from one fact to the other, linking them, squeezing forth all possible data.

  “Do you think he’ll still turn up at the acting school?” I asked. “I mean, he wasn’t paid by the ranch, so maybe he needs to get some money, and soon.”

  “There’s no reason not to assume he’s not went to the school.” She pointed all round. “This is a tremendously big country. Why would he think we’ve got all the facts? He’s probably forgotten that he once let the acting school thing slip out. I don’t think he’ll settle in the Jacksonville area next spring, but I get the feeling he’ll keep to the same pattern, it’s worked so far.”

  “So you don’t think the situation in Jacksonville will have upset him?”

  Emily shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

  Her words had struck a chord within me. There really was no reason why Frederick Whiteman would think we were so closely on his trail. And the idea that one dropped remark from a year ago would deflect him from going to the acting school did seem a little much to believe. “So Allan Pinkerton’s idea of a central depository of all criminal activity puts us in front of the criminals?”

  “It certainly doesn’t hinder us.”

  “You said ‘us’ there, Emily.” I chided with a smile. “Are you thinking of yourself as a detective these days?”

  She laughed, and I wanted to drown in the sound. “No more than you, Francis Smalling. You are not a detective. You are a scientist, and right now, you’re playing with the science of criminology. You’re just dabbling. Those journals in your saddlebags, those you’ve not read so far, they’re burning a hole in your psyche.”

  I immediately laughed her statement off, but her words lingered with me, finding truth as we rode. Once we’d brought the man to justice, how could I throw away my experiments and work on another case? I felt consumed by this one, yes, but I had my elder sister to avenge, I either had to put a bullet into his forehead or see him hang by the neck.