by Alex Grecian
But he recognized a building across the street. It was a warehouse department store, specializing in tartan weaves. A big restaurant jutted from the side of the store, the street-facing wall a single huge piece of bowed glass. Fenn’s mother had taken him and his sisters there for tea one day more than a year ago. It had been a treat, a rare day out, and Fenn remembered the window, remembered the wonder of it: a single pane of glass so big and yet somehow curved. Food had been served on fine china, the platters pearly and nearly translucent, nothing like the dishes used at home. The tiny cakes they ate were fresh and moist and sweeter than anything Fenn had tasted in his life. That day they had walked to the store and walked home after tea, burdened with heavy shopping bags filled with sundries for the house.
Fenn was in his own neighborhood. Close to his real house.
The store was closed this early in the morning, but Fenn could see a shopkeeper moving around behind that magical window, readying the place for today’s business. A donkey carrying sacks of brick dust trotted past Fenn. The dust would sell for a penny a quart and be used to clean knives and ironwork. A peddler trudged beside the donkey, leading it to the first stop on his daily rounds, and he didn’t even glance in Fenn’s direction.
Down at the other end of the street, a newsie was shouting out the morning’s scandal while waving the latest tabloid over his head. “Cop killer at large!” the boy said, his voice much deeper and louder than seemed possible for his size. He couldn’t be very much older than Fenn. “Is the Ripper back?” the boy shouted at nobody in particular.
Fenn took a moment to orient himself and then crossed the street, away from the other boy and his frightening speculation. Fenn picked up his pace as he passed more little shops and houses that he recognized. Ahead, he knew, was his own house, maybe three or four blocks away.
“Here now, what’s this, then?”
Fenn stopped, his heart in his throat. He turned just as a meaty hand grasped his shoulder. A constable with a bushy orange mustache glared down at him from under his high blue hat.
“This’s a respectable neighborhood, little man.”
“Sir.”
Fenn could barely breathe.
“Where’s yer master?”
“I don’t have a master. My parents are waiting for me.”
“Ye look like a sweep’s boy to me.”
“No, sir.”
“Don’t talk back, boy.”
“No, sir. Sir, I need help. Somebody’s after me. He’s gonna hurt me.”
The policeman drew back and released Fenn’s shoulder.
“Don’t be playin’ games with me now, son.”
“No games, sir.”
“What’re you sayin’?”
“There’s a man and he took me to his house and he tied me up and I think he’s gonna hurt me if he finds me again.”
The policeman stared down at Fenn for a long moment. Then he reared back his head and laughed. It was a deep booming roar of a laugh that made Fenn’s chest bone vibrate. Finally, the policeman wiped his eyes and settled his hat low on his forehead.
“Aw, get along home with ye, then,” he said.
“But, sir, I need help. Please.”
“I’m bein’ patient with ye, boy, but don’t test me. Ye’ll be gettin’ somewhere fast, either yer home or the workhouse, ye make up your mind right quick about it.”
The policeman raised his hand as if to hit Fenn, and the boy backed away a step. He ducked, but the blow didn’t come.
“If I see ye about when I come round this way next, it’s the workhouse fer ye, and that’s a promise, boy,” the constable said. He turned and ambled away, returning to his neighborhood patrol.
Fenn blinked back tears and sighed. Behind him was a high wooden fence, painted green long ago, faded and peeling and nearly grey in the half-light. He clambered up it and dropped to the other side, out of sight of the street, and of the policeman, should he turn back around. Fenn hunched his shoulders and trotted alongside the fence, headed again in the direction of his parents’ home. It didn’t matter whether the policeman believed him, Fenn’s father would believe and would protect him from the bald man. And when the bald man was caught and put in prison, the unhelpful policeman would be sorry and maybe even apologize to Fenn.
Birds began to chirp in the treetops that lined the street and a dark hansom chugged past Fenn, unseen on the other side of the fence. Rainwater slished off the wheels and heavy beads ran like dew off a monstrous black beetle’s back. The cab rolled past and turned the corner.
Fenn cut through an opening in the fence and sprinted to the end of the block. He was on his own street. The solid block of brownstones lined the street ahead, queued up in a row that led right to Fenn’s front door. He could see the windows on the ground floor, twinkling with gaslight. His mother was awake and no doubt cooking breakfast for Fenn’s father and sisters. A door opened at the far end of the block and Harriet Smith stepped out on her stoop. She was far away, but he could see her yellow pigtails. Another door opened and another child, young Robert Harrison, emerged onto the street. Fenn hated Robert Harrison, but he had never been so glad to see anyone in his life. Robert and Harriet waved to each other and ran into the street, already picking up a game they’d clearly left off the previous evening. It was still too dark out. They didn’t see Fenn and he was afraid to call out, afraid the policeman might still be nearby.
He untied the bits of pajama shirt on his feet and left them in the road. He could run faster barefoot and he didn’t care about the pain anymore.
He ran past the first house on the corner, joined to the next but more squat, a dwarf beside a stone giant. To his right, the black hansom cab sat idle, the horse sniffing the morning air, the coachman hidden in a blanket of shadow. The cab looked familiar and Fenn slowed as he drew near. The hansom’s windows were covered by dark curtains and Fenn saw one of them move.
Realization dawned and Fenn swallowed hard. He had to pass that cab to get to his door. He decided to put everything he had left into one mad dash down the street. He was too close now to do anything else.
26
T he bald man sat in a hansom cab on Cheyne Walk watching the passive expanse of brick and iron, an entire block’s worth of one building divided up into multiple homes. The patter of rain eased and the sky began to turn a pale shade of pink. Children emerged from their townhouses and resumed the previous evening’s play without benefit of grass or trees. They raced here and there, shrieking and whooping, making ingenious use of hoops, balls, and sticks.
The bald man had sat in this same spot many times before, watching the children. He liked to single out the most beautiful or charming of them and concentrate on him. Or her. Today a pretty blond girl, thin and graceful and calm, directed a playmate in his effort to keep a metal barrel hoop rolling along. Ordinarily, the bald man wouldn’t have been able to tear his eyes away from her and her fetching pigtails, but this morning he was there for a different reason. He had already selected his ward and had lost him. Now he was waiting for Fenn, certain that he would return here to his first home, the home he’d had before the bald man had rescued him from this perfect ordinariness.
The coachman was well paid and had proven trustworthy on past expeditions. The bald man didn’t worry about him, but didn’t care to engage him in conversation. They had a long silent wait ahead of them. The boy had surely been walking half the night, but the bald man had traveled faster and was certain he’d got there first.
He thought about his shop and he wondered whether he had remembered to lock the front door after putting up the BE BACK SOON sign in the window. It would gnaw at him, he knew, if he didn’t return to check on it. But this was not the time. Once he’d found the boy, it would be a quick stop on their way home.
He needed to find the boy before he could do anything else.
There was always the possibility that Fenn had gone to the police, but the bald man doubted it. He felt sure that the boy was already beginning t
o love him, to think of him as his new father, and what son would dare to sic the police on his own father?
The bald man smiled to himself. When he caught Fenn again, he would be well within his rights to be angry. No one would think less of him for beating the boy. After all, he’d caused his father a long night of worry. But their little family of two was going through a difficult time, and so he would show mercy. Oh, there would be changes at home, that was certain, but the bald man could turn the other cheek this time and the boy would see how much his new father truly loved him.
He was snapped out of his reverie by the sight of Fenn himself, bedraggled and dirty and bare-chested, still in his pajama trousers, staggering up the hill at the far end of the street. There was no mistaking him. The bald man was so filled with relief and fatherly love that, for only a moment, he was unable to move.
The bald man was sure the boy saw the cab, and he must have suspected who was inside, but he kept coming anyway, tried to run right past. The bald man smiled. Fenn wasn’t making much of an effort to get away. The poor boy was clearly exhausted and running to his new father.
The bald man stepped out of the cab just long enough to scoop his son up, all in one motion, and lay him on the empty seat; then he clambered back in, sat across from the weeping child, and pounded twice on the cab’s ceiling.
He looked back as the cab moved down the street and saw that the children were still playing their pointless games. No one had noticed anything.
He smiled, thrilled by his own cleverness and courage. And by his extraordinary good luck.
He passed a note up to the coachman. They would need to stop at his shop so the bald man could check the locks. And then he would take the entire rest of the day off work.
Clearly he needed to spend more time with his son.
27
I promised you another penny, didn’t I?” Day said.
He held the coin up so that it caught the light. The dancing man reached out for it, but then drew his hand back.
“I know you,” he said. “You were in my dream last night.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Day said.
“I’ll dance for you.”
“No need. Take the penny. Get yourself a loaf of bread.”
Day tossed the penny in the dancing man’s direction and walked quickly away, past the upturned milk crate and in through the back door of the Yard. Behind him, he heard the coin clink against the stone sidewalk.
Inside, Michael Blacker was already hard at work, along with two other detectives, Tiffany and Wiggins, who were at their own desks across the room. Neither of them looked up as Day entered. The piles of paper on Day’s desk had grown. Day could barely see Blacker on the other side of it, his legs crossed, a foot-high sheaf of notes in his lap.
“I thought I might beat you here this morning,” Day said.
Blacker grinned at him. He put down the notes he was reading and wiped his eyes.
“No chance of that, old man,” he said. “I never left.”
“You’ve been here all night?”
“Hasn’t been so long since you went home. Anyway, I’ve nothing to go home to. Not like you.”
“Well, I should have stayed. Had I known-”
“Better one of us should be fresh. There’s a joke in here somewhere about it being a bright new day or some such. Too tired to find it myself, so if you could work it out on your own, I’d be grateful.”
Day stared at the piles of paper that covered every inch of the workspace. Yesterday morning his desk had been pristine.
“Where did all this come from?” he said.
“I’ve been rounding up our colleagues as they arrive and commandeering their notes.”
“You? But I was going to-”
“And you should. By all means. Not stepping on your toes at all, old man. But we’re all so in and out, I was afraid we might miss a chance to talk to some of them if I didn’t seize these bulls by the horns, as it were.”
“And have you found anything?”
“Oh!”
“What is it?”
“I can’t believe it slipped my mind to tell you. First thing as you came in I wanted to tell you, but I let it go right by me.”
“Yes?”
Blacker beckoned and Day leaned over the desk, resting his hands on the papers there.
“He’s struck again,” Blacker said.
“What? Not another detective.”
“No, none of us this time. But another man with a beard was found dead last night. We only received word a few minutes ago.”
“A man with a beard?”
Day straightened back up, annoyed.
“Men with beards are killed every bloody day, Blacker. This is London, for God’s sake.”
“Well, that’s true enough. You’re beginning to sound like an old hand at this.”
“I’m sorry, but I thought you were going to tell me that we were being stalked and picked off, one by one.”
“The body that was found-”
“Yes?”
“His beard was trimmed and his throat was cut.”
“Just like Robinson.”
“Exactly like Robinson. Except that this bloke was found with his head in a toilet, not in a bathtub. But otherwise it’s the same, through and through.”
“Has Kingsley had a chance to look at it yet?”
“I rather doubt it. Sir Edward’s assigned this new murder to Waverly Brown, but I believe we can wrest it from his grip with very little effort. Little effort, right? Not bad. I haven’t lost my wits entirely.”
“I’m not convinced this means what you hope it does,” Day said.
“What do you mean? What do I hope?”
“If anything, this murder done up in exactly the same fashion as Robinson’s says to me that we have two completely different murderers. This one continues to kill, doing in bearded men right and left, while the man we’re after did the one killing. It’s something to do with Little specifically, not with any beard.”
“But surely you can’t ignore the bizarre features of the three murders when looked at together.”
“Little’s beard wasn’t shaved.”
“But Little didn’t have a beard for the killer to shave in the first place.”
“Exactly.”
“If he’d had a beard, it would have been shaved.”
“If he’d had a beard? It doesn’t matter what would have happened if he’d had a beard. He didn’t have a beard. There’s no beard and it’s not a clue that there’s no beard since there never was a beard.”
“Listen, we’re both tired. You’re getting upset.”
“I’m not upset. I’m simply…”
Day sat down. He picked up a pile of papers from atop another pile of papers and tossed it back down.
“I’m at sixes and sevens. I feel as though I’ve missed out on a great deal of activity and conjecture because I went home.”
Blacker sighed. “I owe you an apology.”
“No, not at all.”
“But I do. Perhaps I should have waited for your arrival before launching inquiries within the ranks here.”
“No, you were right to set things in motion. I’m struggling to find a foothold here, and you’re already firmly established. I suppose there’s a touch of envy in me this morning. That’s all it is.”
“No need for envy. You’re off balance. Let me tell you a secret: That feeling never goes away. We’re in the dark here, utterly hated by the people we’re trying to help and blindly seeking things we’ll absolutely never find. It’s a miserable experience that I wouldn’t wish on my most intimate enemy.”
“Then why are you here?”
“Because it’s the only game in town, old man. This is the best and only way to feel you’ve got the inside track. Because what you’ll eventually come to realize is that everyone out there is groping around in the dark, too, but in here we know it. Gives us a leg up.”
He winked at Day, and after a long mo
ment, Day laughed.
28
I was outnumbered.”
“’Course you was. Otherwise you could’ve handled Big Pete, eh?”
“Well, he was rather fierce.”
“Fierce. That’s Big Pete.”
“Thank you for stepping in when you did.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“Pete seemed to calm down as soon as you spoke up. I’m curious, why did he let us leave so easily?”
“Don’t fret about it.”
“He seemed a bit frightened, really.”
“I have a reputation, is all.”
“A reputation?”
“I’ve been known to do a bit of violence in my day.”
“Oh.”
“Best if you don’t know much about that, being as you’re a bluebottle.”
“Why help me at all?”
“Don’t know, really. Strikes me you might be a different sort than the bluebottles I run up against. You coulda pinched me at that posh house yesterday, but you didn’t. You cared about that chavy more’n you cared about lookin’ the big man and impressin’ me. S’pose that meant somethin’ to me.”
“I see.”
“I’ll let you go on about your business, now you’re not gettin’ yerself killed.”
“Wait. Are you looking for the chimney sweep? The one who left that boy?”
“I put out the word I’m lookin’ fer ’im. Somebody’ll point ’im out soon enough.”
“Don’t approach him yet. I want to be there.”
“Stay out of trouble, bluebottle. And getcher nose fixed up or it’ll heal crooked like mine.”
“Did you hear me?”
“No worries. I’ll find you again when our friend shows hisself.”
29
Walter Day took a deep breath and knocked on the door. He glanced to his left where Michael Blacker shifted from foot to foot. Neither spoke.
