Bloodline

by Jill Jones

  Three days later, Victoria prepared to accompany Jonathan and a team of special agents and local law enforcement officers to Trey’s townhouse in Georgetown, where they were to undertake a careful search of his belongings, looking for answers to explain the inexplicable. Her external injuries were healing quickly, and she had almost regained her voice, but inside, she was still painfully in shock over all that had come to light since that horrible night when Trey had tried to kill her.

  After Trey’s death, Marilyn Delaney had become hysterical and had confessed the whole story to the police of what had happened the night Meghan was murdered. She said her son had come home, covered with blood, ranting hysterically. He broke down and told her what he had done. She gave him a tranquilizer to calm him down. Then she threw him in the shower, took his clothes and burned them, and the next day put him in the hands of a psychotherapist.

  Always able to intimidate Trey, she’d told him he must never let anyone know the truth, that the scandal would be their ruin, and that he would go to the gas chamber for what he’d done. Her threats, and her domineering manner, were sufficient to keep his mouth shut. Eventually, a few weeks after the murder, he was institutionalized for nearly a year. The family covered the truth by saying that he’d gone out west to “find himself.”

  But the deceit had not stopped there. Victoria had learned that the Delaneys had both known what had happened and had taken steps to cover it up. Marilyn Delaney, in fact, confessed that she had paid off the officer investigating the case to ‘lose’ certain evidence, including the crime scene photos and case notes.

  Marilyn and James were both in jail now, as was Grizzell, but that offered Victoria little comfort. At times, she wished she would awaken to find it was all a bad dream. She wished that the murderer had in fact been Matthew Ferguson. It would be so much easier to accept. In his suicide note, Ferguson had written he felt “responsible” for Meghan’s death, but he hadn’t said he’d actually killed her. It must have been the guilt and pressure of keeping that terrible secret to himself that caused him in the end to take his own life. In some respects, Victoria felt sorry for him, for he, too, was a victim of that crime.

  The one happy outcome of the whole affair, other than the reconciliation with her parents, was that Jonathan was by her side, and he’d promised never to leave her again. They’d told her parents of their plans to be married, and she’d been delightfully surprised that even Barbara had welcomed him openly. He was a guest in their home, although they hadn’t gone so far as to put him in the room where Victoria had spent a few days recuperating.

  That was okay. There was time enough for that later, when she was fully recovered. For now, she wanted some answers to the tragedy that had befallen them all.

  Mainly, she wanted to know, what had made Trey become a killer?

  Trey’s first murder had been a crime of passion, although he had mutilated Meghan in the same style as Jack the Ripper. Then seven years had gone by, during which to her knowledge, he had refrained from killing. He’d babbled something there at the end about it being “divine intervention” that’s he’d gone to the symposium, which apparently had triggered him to kill again, but she had no clue what he’d meant about having received the story from “the master’s own hand.”

  When she entered Trey’s townhouse with the other agents, she shivered, remembering coming here just a few nights ago, totally trusting, not knowing the deadly secrets this place held. “I’d like to take his bedroom,” she told Mosier as the team began to divide the responsibilities of the search. “If there is anything that will give us some answers, it’ll likely be among his personal belongings.”

  She and Jonathan started at opposite ends of the room, Jonathan in the closet, Victoria at the exquisite antique desk of which Trey had been so proud. The mahogany of the wood gleamed in the morning sunlight. He’d claimed it had been in the family for generations, handed down from his mother’s British ancestors. It was late Victorian, and Victoria wondered if it might once have belonged to the man Jonathan had told her he believed to have actually been Jack the Ripper, or at least part of that persona, J.K. Stephen.

  She opened the top drawer. Inside lay a battered tome, covered in faded green cloth. “What’s this?” She lifted it gingerly from the drawer and laid it on the desktop, running her fingers over the cover. Something niggled at the back of her mind, and she had the sudden feeling that she had seen this book before. But she could not recall when or where.

  Victoria opened the book. Inscribed on the flyleaf was a name and a date: “J.K. Stephen. 1876.”

  “Jonathan! Look at this!”

  Jonathan peered at it over her shoulder. “It looks like a diary.”

  “It is a diary,” she said, turning the pages carefully but with growing excitement. “Listen to this.” She read aloud:

  Eton, Twentieth September, 1876—Visit from the Devil today.

  Oh, James, James, the Devil thou art,

  Sneaking up from behind, stabbing my heart,

  Oh, James, James, James Fitzjames,

  How James Fitzjames doth shame.

  Father had not the decency to limit his tirade against me to the privacy of my rooms, but burst upon me with full force within view of Wilson and the others. He demanded I work harder, said I was a disgrace to the Stephen family. I laughed in his face, but my innards wretched in shame. Even now, though the shame has subsided, I am consumed with rage. If I had a dagger, I would thrust it through his cold, hard heart.

  Victoria shuddered involuntarily. She’d seen James Winston Delaney II, Trey’s father, do this very sort of thing to his son. If J.K. Stephen, the author of this diary, had suffered such degradations, and if that abuse had led to murderous impulses, it was easy to see how Trey would relate to the feelings recorded here. She wondered what else the book would reveal about the killer’s background, his mind and motivation, and how much of it would mirror Trey Delaney’s own torment.

  She looked up at Jonathan, who had laid his hands gently on her shoulders. “If you are correct that J.K. Stephen was involved in the old Ripper murders, this could be the diary you have been hoping would turn up.”

  “But how on earth did it come into the hands of Trey Delaney?”

  “You told me about that family tree that Janeece Fairchild was researching. Didn’t you say that the name Delaney was on it?”

  “At the very bottom. It showed that a daughter of the Swansons, Marilyn, married an American, James Winston Delaney II, in the late 1950s.”

  “Marilyn Delaney.” In her dislike for Trey’s mother, Victoria had always considered the woman’s British accent to be artificial and affected. But it had been real. Victoria had never asked her mother about Marilyn’s background. Now, she didn’t have to.

  “I’ve seen this book somewhere before,” she murmured, stretching her memory, reaching into the nether reaches of her mind. She closed her eyes, concentrating, and she saw three children in an attic. Playing dress up. Saw one of them open a large trunk, searching for more old clothes with which to costume themselves. Saw a boy reach in and bring out…a fancy walking cane. Victoria realized with a start it was the same walking cane Trey had used the night he’d tried to murder her. It was in the custody of the police now. An ingenious device, sheathing the long, deadly knife the old Ripper had used to kill at least five women in Whitechapel more than a century ago. That Trey had used to kill her sister and eight other women in recent weeks in cities across America. That he had nearly used to kill her.

  She searched her memory for more and saw the boy take a pipe from the trunk. The pipe! It now lay in the next room, where Trey had placed it as they left for the birthday party. She squinted her closed eyes, looking further. She saw the boy strut across the large space with the air of a gentleman, swaggering with the cane and pretending to puff on the pipe. She heard the two girls giggle. Then suddenly, she saw the book in the boy’s hands.

  And the memory faded. “He found this in the Delaney’s attic,”
she said quietly, opening her eyes again, “when he was just a kid. We were playing up there one rainy day, and we came across this big old chest with tons of old clothes in it. We had a lark, dressing up in things that were probably priceless in terms of historical value. But we didn’t know that. I couldn’t have been more than thirteen, which means Trey and Meghan were around eight or nine.”

  Jonathan picked the book up and turned the pages to the dates of each of the Ripper murders, and the gruesome story unfolded as he read. Interspersed among the personal narrative, which revealed the wrenching tale of forbidden love and the psychological decline of the author, were detailed descriptions of each murder, how they were executed, what mistakes had been made and what he had learned from them. A virtual how-to murder manual.

  “Unbelievable,” he said. He shook his head when he got to the last inscription, a poem. “Listen to this.”

  “I have no time to tell you how

  I came to be a killer

  But you should know, as time will show,

  That I’m society’s pillar.”*

  Jonathan let out a low whistle and handed the book back to Victoria. “If this proves to be authentic, it is the written record left by the man who was responsible for those old murders,” he said quietly, massaging her shoulders. “Unfortunately, it must have served as a textbook for the man who committed the recent ones.”

  “He’s had this book all along,” Victoria mused. “He’s been studying it. He called it the work of the ‘master.’ When he killed Meghan, he copied the style of the old Ripper, but it was a crime with a different motivation than his recent killings. The recent spree was surely triggered by the Ripper symposium. And I asked him to go.” Grief and regret washed through her.

  After a few moments, Victoria rose, thinking to take the book to the agent who was charged with securing any evidence they found in Trey’s home, when something fell from between the pages and drifted to the floor. She knelt and picked up a delicate ring of what appeared to be a thin braid of hair.

  “What on earth?” she asked, holding it up for Jonathan to inspect.

  “You know what that looks like?” he said as she laid it in the palm of his hand. “A mourning bracelet. During Victorian times, lovers used to braid strands of their hair which they exchanged as tokens of their affection. You don’t suppose this was a gift to J.K. from the Prince?”

  Victoria brought out a large magnifying glass from her purse and began to examine the hair. Jonathan laughed. “Do you always carry that thing around?”

  “Comes in handy sometimes, like now. A little trick I learned from Sherlock. Jonathan, I think you’re in luck here. These hairs appear to have been pulled from the head, not clipped. There are root follicles.”

  “Which means they carry genetic information.”

  They looked at each other, stunned by the possibility of what the braid of hair might reveal. Then they each let out what sounded like a native war whoop and gave one another a high-five before celebrating their find with a kiss that left her breathless.

  Mike Mosier came into the room on the run. “What’s wrong?”

  Victoria opened her eyes but didn’t withdraw from their heated embrace. With a wave of her hand, she let Mike know nothing was wrong.

  Nothing at all.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Three weeks later, Jonathan and Victoria were in his office at Scotland Yard, clearing his personal belongings from his desk and shelves. She had resigned from the FBI, albeit reluctantly, and he from Scotland Yard, after together they’d made the decision to open their own private criminal investigative agency in Virginia.

  Upon returning to London, they had tried to wrap up the hit-and-run before Jonathan submitted his resignation, but Lord Chastain had seemingly disappeared from the face of the earth. On a visit to Lady Chastain, they’d learned that her husband had transferred most of their funds to an account in the Grand Caymans, and none of them expected him to surface again in England. Lady Chastain, in a bid to set her finances in better order, had surprised them by offering for sale the items she had earlier routed to Jonathan through Roger Hammersmith—the missing police records concerning the original Ripper murders. In addition, she had a hat she’d claimed had belonged to the Duke of Clarence, Prince Eddy, that together with the police records would prove beyond a doubt he was Jack the Ripper. The items apparently had been in Lord Chastain’s family for generations, handed down for safekeeping from an ancestor who was in Queen Victoria’s secret service. It was he, she claimed, who removed the evidence from Scotland Yard at the Queen’s own direction to protect her grandson from becoming implicated in the murders. “Alistair has this crazy notion that he, too, is in the Queen’s secret service,” she’d said with a bitter laugh, “but that’s just so much jolly rot.”

  Giving her a substantial sum for the lot, Jonathan and Victoria had then had Erik Hensen in the forensic lab check out the hat. He’d discovered several strands of hair, one of which still retained the follicle, and he’d come up with a DNA match with the hair from the mourning bracelet. There was no doubt that Prince Eddy was involved in the original Whitechapel murders. He had lost his hat during the double event, as recorded by J.K. Stephen in his diary.

  The evidence was incontrovertible—together, J.K. Stephen and Prince Albert Victor Edward had become the Whitechapel murderer known as Jack the Ripper.

  As they packed books and mementos of Jonathan’s career at the Yard, he and Victoria discussed how best to present the truth about Jack the Ripper to the world. Jonathan had shared his find with the Commissioner, who had shown a keen interest in the various items of evidence in the Ripper case that had been unearthed during the past few weeks. He had insisted that Jonathan put everything under lock and key in the Crime Museum.

  “We’ve just recovered all this,” he’d said. “We wouldn’t want it to get into the wrong hands again.”

  They both jumped at the sound of a brisk knock on the door. A woman handed Jonathan an interoffice memo. “You’re to take action on this right away,” she said, then turned and walked briskly away down the corridor.

  “What part of ‘I quit’ don’t these people understand?” Victoria asked with a smile.

  “I’m not taking on another thing,” Jonathan assured her. But he was curious as to what he’d been sent. He read the official summons aloud to her:

  “The Queen requests your appearance at two o’clock pm today in the private conference room of Specialist Operations. Please bring with you all items which have recently come into your possession concerning the Whitechapel murders of 1888, as it is of the greatest interest to Her Royal Majesty.”

  “The Queen?” Victoria looked astounded, but not as astounded as he felt.

  Jonathan glanced at his watch, then down at his rather rumpled suit. He didn’t have time to go home and change. “I’ve never met the Queen before,” he said. “Wish I looked a little fresher.”

  Victoria came over to him and straightened his tie. “It’s one-thirty now. Just go to the men’s room, splash a little water on your face, comb your hair, you’ll look fine.” She tweaked his cheek. “If all else fails, grin at her. She’ll go for the dimple. I did.”

  A two o’clock, Jonathan and Victoria, laden with the items they’d been requested to bring along, entered the conference room of the division of Scotland Yard that was its most secret. Specialist Operations was charged with crimes of a most serious nature, such as international and organized crime. They provided protection duties to the royals and other political VIPs. Forensic science was under their direction. And then there was something called the “Special Branch.” Even Jonathan did not know what went on in that division.

  He’d expected the Assistant Commissioner in charge of this division to be present, but he was not. Neither was the Queen. Instead, two burly strangers greeted them, and once they were inside the room, one of them moved to stand between them and the door.

  “You can deposit the items over there,”
the other man said, indicating the far end of the conference table. Jonathan was alarmed to see a paper shredder perched there.

  He didn’t deposit any items anywhere. “Where’s the Assistant Commissioner?”

  “He had to step out for a while.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Friends of the Queen,” one of them said with a cynical grin.

  The door opened, and a tall, thin man in a dark suit entered. Jonathan heard Victoria’s involuntary intake of breath. He turned to the man, who gave him a cold smile.

  “Good afternoon, Inspector Blake,” said Alistair Huntley-Ames. “Ms. Thomas. The Queen thanks you for coming. Did you bring the materials she requested?”

  “What the hell is going on here?” Jonathan stepped slightly in front of Victoria, acutely aware of the truly strange circumstances in which they found themselves and suddenly concerned for their safety.

  Lord Chastain laughed and threw his hat on a chair. “Relax, Blake. No need to get in a dither. All we want is what you have in your hands.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Jonathan clutched the old police files possessively.

  “My wife made a little mistake in giving you those,” he said, nodding toward the envelopes in Jonathan’s hands. “She asked me to apologize. You see, she wants them back.”

  Jonathan knew better and hoped Elizabeth hadn’t suffered when her husband had learned that she’d turned the historical documents over to him. “I don’t believe you. Besides, they don’t belong to her,” he said, scowling. “Or to you.”

  “You’re quite right,” Huntley-Ames replied mildly, removing his gloves. “They belong to the Queen. They did then, and they do now.”

  “They belong to the people of Britain,” Victoria snapped. “To the world.”

  He regarded her with cold, gray eyes. “The matters revealed in those archives are considered a risk to national security. As a member of the Queen’s secret service, I demand that you turn them over at once or stand accused of treason.”