She felt like a girl of sixteen again, embarking upon her first love affair. She was not old, by any means, widowed and childless at twenty-five, but she had known marriage and men before.
“Reynard,” she said, taking a step closer to him, her pale fingers tracing the buttons of his shirt. “Would you do something for me?”
“If it is within my power,” the youth replied, meeting her gaze for the first time, causing her heart to skip a beat. She could have drowned in those chestnut eyes of his.
“Oh, I am sure it is,” she said and, standing on tiptoe, raised her mouth to his, and planted a kiss on his trembling lips. But the kiss was not returned.
She took a step back. “I’m sorry, I went too far. I am too bold.”
“No, lady, you are not,” he said then, suddenly more assured in his tone and his movements than she had ever known him.
Taking a step towards her, so that there was not a hair’s breadth between them, he took her in his arms and –
THE SPLINTERING CRASH tore Josephine away from the romantic world in which she had lost herself in an instant. She dropped the book with a startled cry, and spun around on the stool in front of the dressing table. She saw the man plummet from the shattered roof light and onto her bed, accompanied by a rain of splintered wood and shattered glass.
She jumped from her seat, sending it tumbling to the floor, and covered herself up as best she could with the negligee she was wearing.
The man on the bed wasn’t moving. Was he dead or just stunned? And what had he been doing up on the roof of Madame Marguerite’s Boarding House?
She took in the man’s torn and scorched suit, the stubble, the waxy pallor of his cheeks and the eye-patch, but underneath all that she could also make out his patrician features and the fine bone structure of his face. He might look like a vagabond and a wastrel on the surface, but such exquisite bone structure spoke of a nobler heritage.
Josephine caught her breath as her heart skipped a beat. This was just like The Garden of Love; not so much the part where the handsome stranger had fallen from the roof and landed on her bed, but other than that...
He was like the hero, Count Christos, in The Gilded Lily; the dispossessed noble who had to masquerade as a lowly ostler until he could prove his identity and reclaim his one true love from the unscrupulous cousin who had denied him his birthright.
Her imagination awhirl with possibilities, Josephine warily approached the bed.
She cleared her throat. “Are you alright?”
The man gave no response; he continued to lie where he had landed, seemingly stunned.
She took another step closer. “Um, I said, are you alright?”
The man suddenly jerked upright, his one eye flicking open, and Josephine screamed again.
ULYSSES BLINKED SEVERAL times rapidly, his blurred vision slowly coming into focus. His body ached, the uncomfortable throbbing of the gunshot wound joined now by nagging pains in his back and belly. His breath came in short, ragged gasps.
Something had shocked him into sudden alertness. Flopping back onto the pile of blankets and quilts beneath him, he craned his head to see where he was, steadily taking in the details of the room.
There was a dressing table with an ornate oval mirror above it, although the gold-paint was flaking from the cracked wood, and the chamber was bedecked with a variety of dusty drapes and chiffon veils. They might once have been splendid and luxurious but now they were nothing but a tattered testament to better times. The room looked more like a tart’s boudoir than the bedchamber of a royal courtesan.
But the bed itself – even in spite of the glass fragments and splinters sticking into his back – felt as comfortable as clouds. And at that moment all Ulysses really wanted to do was give in to the oblivion of exhaustion and pain that was threatening to overwhelm him.
He shifted and tried to sit up. Pain lanced through his back, but all he could manage was a feeble cry. A frozen numbness was steadily spreading from the wound in his shoulder that brought with it a blissful, morphine-like release.
He blinked tears of pain from his eye and caught sight of the girl for the first time. She was pretty, in an uncomplicated kind of way, her dyed red hair fashioned into extravagant ringlets, and she was wearing much too much make-up for Ulysses’ liking.
His vision began to swim again.
“Help me!” he gasped.
The girl looked at him in bewilderment. He had made his plea for assistance in English.
Focusing his mind once more he tried again, this time in French. “Please, help me.”
And then he could fight it no longer, the room fading into premature darkness as unconsciousness took him.
JOSEPHINE GAVE A sharp intake of breath. The handsome stranger had – in the moments before he blacked out – asked her for help. Her heart fluttered inside her chest.
It was so romantic. A handsome stranger falling into her bedchamber and asking her for help, no doubt having just fought some noble duel –
– on the roof.
Josephine peered again at the broken window, but there was no sign of anyone else up there; at least not as far as she could tell. She had no idea what was going on other than that the last thing this dishevelled hero had done, before blacking out in pain, was to beg her for her help. And at that moment Josephine determined that she would do all that she could for him.
The door to her bedchamber flew open and Madame Marguerite stormed into the room, followed by Oscar, her burly son.
Where the owner of the boarding house was short and stocky, her son was tall and muscular – not unlike how Josephine imagined the gardener Reynard from The Garden of Love looked.
“What is it, child?” Madame Marguerite gasped, clearly out of breath after having to drag herself upstairs from the parlour on the ground floor. “We heard a crash and you screaming, and I knew you weren’t with a customer, so I grabbed Oscar and we came as fast as we could!”
It was then that Madame Marguerite’s eyes fell upon the unconscious man lying on the bed for the first time.
“Saints preserve us! What’s going on here?” She turned to the girl. “Are you entertaining customers behind my back?”
“Hardly!”
“Then what’s he doing here?”
“He came in through the window.”
The madame peered up at the broken roof light. “Well, that’s going to have to come out of your wages, for a start.”
Josephine turned on the madame, her mouth open wide in an ‘O’ of indignant outrage.
“Is he dead? Oscar, check if he’s still breathing.”
Oscar did as he was told, putting two fingers to the man’s neck and watching for the slight rise and fall of his chest.
“He’s alive, alright. But his pulse is weak. He’s not in a good way.”
“So what’s he doing here?”
“I don’t know,” Josephine admitted. “He didn’t say.”
“He spoke to you?”
“He looked at me and said ‘Help me,’” Josephine replied, a dreamy look in her eyes.
Madame Marguerite stared at Josephine, utterly flabbergasted.
“He asked you to help him?”
“I think he’s English.”
“And what’s that got to do with anything? He still came in through the roof and besides, he looks a mess!”
“But we have to help him.”
“We have to help him, do we?” Madame Marguerite grunted like a disgruntled sow. “Well answer me this, my girl. Why? Because of some foolish romantic notion you’ve got stuck in your head? Has he got any money? Have you checked his pockets?”
Josephine’s face had become a florid crimson. “No, of course not!”
“Well, then, you haven’t thought this through, have you? He looks like he’s in a bad way; if he stays here we’ll have to send for Doctor Cossard, and he doesn’t make house calls out of the goodness of his heart, as you well know.”
Josephine’s cheeks blushed beyond crimson to
beetroot. She knew of Doctor Cossard from bitter personal experience. Many of the Madame Marguerite’s girls did. It was Doctor Cossard they went to see when they were – how did Madame Marguerite put it? When they were ‘inconvenienced.’
And then a thought flashed through her mind.
“He might have money. He might be loaded, for all we know. His family might pay us handsomely if we were to nurse him back to health and return him to them.” An expression of desperate hope lit up her face.
“What kind of a family must he belong to, to end up falling through the roof of your bedchamber looking like that?”
The middle-aged dowager took a step nearer the bed and inspected the prone figure. The unconscious man was breathing deeply as if fast asleep.
“But he has a trustworthy face, I’ll give you that; except for the eye-patch. I suppose he might even be considered handsome, under the dirt and the stubble.”
“So you’ll help him?”
“I thought he asked you to help him.”
“But you’ll call Doctor Cossard?”
The older woman turned to her son, who was waiting, respectfully silent, at the edge of the room. “Oscar, go and get Doctor Cossard.”
“Oh, thank you, Madame Marguerite!” Josephine exclaimed, catching the woman up in her arms and squeezing her tight. “Thank you!”
“Steady on, girl!” the madame gasped, pushing herself clear of the girl’s enthusiastic embrace. “His bill’s going to have to come out of your earnings. And you’ll probably have to work double shifts for a week to earn enough, too.”
“I don’t care,” Josephine said, although the monetary consequences of her actions making her somewhat more subdued.
But in her heart, she was still ready to believe that he was some forgotten hero and that it was her destiny to aid him in his hour of need, that he might complete his gallant mission. And knowing that was enough.
CHAPTER FOUR
Detective Dupin Investigates
THEY SAID THAT when the telephone rings at two in the morning it’s never good news. Well, in Auguste Dupin’s experience, a call that interrupted lunch at the Escargot didn’t bode well for the rest of the day either.
The police-cab eased its way past the throng of curious onlookers that had gathered in the Rue Morgue like vultures around a dead zebra. There were so many of them that great-coated constables had been employed simply to hold the crowds back rather than carry out any actual police work. In Magna Britannia, and in its capital Londinium Maximum in particular, Dupin knew that the Metropolitan Police Force was bolstered by a veritable army of automaton robo-Bobbies. But in France they preferred to do things the old way. The robot revolution was yet to take hold within the City of Light; one revolution in France had been enough.
Detective Inspector Dupin had barely managed to open the cab door before a keen detective sergeant was at his side, his trench coat flapping about his legs like the wings of a flustered bat.
“So,” Dupin said, interrupting the eager youth before the sergeant opened his mouth to speak, “there’s been a murder in the Rue Morgue.”
“Er, yes, sir.”
“How ironic.”
“Sir?” The sergeant clearly didn’t see the irony himself.
“Doesn’t matter,” Dupin said with a dismissive wave of his hand.
The entrance to the crumbling tenement, and the immediate section of street in front of it, was still in the process of being taped off and secured. The door into the building was wide open, the police having previously kicked it off its hinges.
The two men passed through into the murky gloom beyond.
“Nice place,” Dupin muttered. He paused at the bottom of a flight of stairs. “Up there, is it?” He craned his head, taking in the full height of the stairwell.
“Yes, sir. At the top.”
“Now there’s a surprise.”
“Sir?”
His withering sarcasm was obviously wasted on the sergeant.
Taking a deep breath and putting a hand to the banister, with a “Here goes, then,” Dupin set off up the stairs.
He had been like the sergeant once, full of youthful optimism. But twenty years on the streets had knocked any such idiot eagerness out of him. He wasn’t so old that he was ready to be pensioned off, but he understood now that the fight against crime was a war of attrition that slowly but surely wore you down. Every victory, no matter how small, was to be savoured like a bitter glass of absinthe while you could still appreciate what had been achieved.
Generally, policing was all about maintaining a balance – the status quo. There were villains in all strata of society but it paid to know which were on your side, show due respect to those that were your betters, and do all you could to eradicate the nutjobs, the psychopaths and the nonces along the way.
The murder of a poet, or musician, or whatever the constable who had disturbed his meal had said the victim was, fell firmly within the purview of the latter type of crime. It was an anomaly.
A rabid killer had struck in the Rue Morgue, without sense or reason, and had to be captured and eradicated, put down like the rabid dog he – or she – was before killing again. There was no sign of theft, and from his initial impression of the man’s address, Dupin thought it unlikely he had possessed anything worth stealing.
So, first impressions were that the dead man hadn’t been the victim of a robbery gone wrong, and from what Dupin’s subordinates had discovered so far it seemed unlikely that this had been a family feud or a lover’s spat. And then there was the fact that there were two bodies – after a fashion.
“How long ago was it that Sergeant Lecoq and his men failed to apprehend the suspect?”
“An hour, sir.”
Dupin set off up the next flight of stairs. “And Sergeant Lecoq ran all the way up here, did he?”
“I don’t believe he ran, sir,” the detective sergeant said. “He certainly wasn’t the first on the scene.”
“Who was then?”
“Er...” The sergeant hesitated, checking his notepad as they continued to climb. “Constables Bâcler and Cochon.”
“Lucky them.”
Dupin said nothing more, saving his breath for the final flight. Reaching the top at last, the detective paused in the doorway of the dead man’s attic room as he caught his breath.
Although the room’s single dormer window was open, the air was still thick with the coppery tang of blood and the abattoir stink of organs that should never have been exposed to the air.
No matter how many murders he might have investigated over the course of the last twenty years, no matter how many mutilated corpses he had stumbled across in that time, Dupin had never become entirely inured to the brutality of one human being taking of the life of another.
Dupin sniffed. There was another familiar, acrid smell hanging in the corrupted air of the garret; the smell of burning.
The body was lying face down on the floor next to a filthy, unmade bed. A pool of dark, half-congealed blood covered the rough floorboards surrounding the pallid corpse, but despite the blood obscuring much of the floor beside the bed, the perfectly circular burn mark was clearly visible.
The dead man’s garb matched the less than salubrious surroundings Dupin found himself in. He looked like so many of the other artist types who populated this part of town, surviving on little more than hopes and dreams and absinthe.
Dupin acknowledged the crimson footprints and the bloody smears beyond the pooling circle with a grunt of annoyance. Clearly, for those first on the scene and keen to apprehend their murder suspect, preservation of the crime scene had not been uppermost in their minds.
The fact that there was a bloodless corpse in the middle of the room was troubling enough. The inexplicable burning was something else altogether.
And then there was the scatter of bones at the edge of the charcoal-black circle. There wasn’t a scrap of flesh on them. In fact, they looked like they had been boiled clean.
Even without Doctor Cadavre and his forensics team having finished running over the crime scene, it was already quite clear in Dupin’s mind what must have happened here.
The man’s feet were the vital clue in untangling the order of events. The soles of the dead man’s shoes had crisped, as if under a burst of intense heat. So, the man had died first, the burning had occurred after he was dead – or at least dying – and the bones had turned up last of all.
“Apart from uniforms’ footprints being all over the place, this is how the body was when Sergeant Lecoq and his men arrived on the scene,” Dupin said.
“That’s right, sir,” the detective sergeant confirmed.
“And nothing’s been moved?”
“No, sir,” said one of the constables present in the room.
Dupin took in the bones again, the body, the blood, the burn marks, the bed. Then he eyes strayed to the square of light coming in through the dormer window, and the rickety desk standing beneath it.
“And these papers were all over the floor like this when you arrived, too, were they?” Dupin asked, addressing the constable.
“Yes, sir, although I wasn’t the first here, of course.”
“So you’re not Bâcler or – Cochon? You weren’t one of those who gave pursuit?”
“No, sir,” the constable said. Seeing the look forming on the detective inspector’s face, and feeling quite happy about passing the buck to his colleagues, he nodded towards a lanky constable standing on the other side of the room.
The shamed gendarme raised a hand in wary acknowledge. “I’m Bâcler, sir.”
The man’s uniform was in disarray and drying sweat had stuck his hair to his forehead.
“Was this” – Dupin took in the spill of papers with a wave of his hand – “like this when you got here?”
Bâcler looked at the fallen papers nervously. “No. Not quite bad as that.”
“How do you mean ‘not quite as bad’?”
The constable swallowed nervously. “Some of the papers were on the desk.”
Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01) Page 5
