by Roz Southey
I went back to the inn next to the mercer’s house and found the landlord enjoying new prosperity, serving the workmen who were digging up every part of the mercer’s shopsite with enormous enthusiasm. They were apparently getting paid by the day and were determined to make the job last as long as possible.
The landlord had seen no one hanging around but one of the workman had. ‘Very nice she was too,’ he said grinning. ‘Tall lady, in a cloak and hood. Stood watching for an age. I thought she might like to come back home with me but she declined.’ He said the last word with an elaborately cultured accent, in gentle mockery.
‘Fair-haired?’ I asked.
‘Dark,’ he said regretfully. ‘But a handsome figure for all that.’
A dark-haired woman in a hood and cloak. There was something I’d heard, or seen, but I couldn’t quite remember what. Half-distracted by the fugitive memory, I asked, ‘Did she say anything?’
‘Have you found anything?’ He mimicked her voice again, giving his fellow workmen the chance for a hearty laugh.
‘And you said?’
‘I said, ‘It’s more than my job’s worth to tell you what we’ve found in here.’
‘Buried treasure,’ someone called from the back of the crowd of workmen.
‘Spanish doubloons!’
‘Nay,’ said the workman. ‘It were the Holy Grail!’
I walked to the end of the street along the alley behind the inn and back along to the other side of the site, still mulling over that annoying half-memory. Here the snow still lay more thickly, almost undisturbed. Beyond the site, I found the place where Alice Gregson had tempted me into the other world and stood contemplating the snow. Why should she have betrayed her ability to step through? It seemed ridiculously foolish.
Only one explanation occurred to me: it had been a test to see if I had that ability too, and to what extent.
Behind me, the workmen laughed and joked over their digging. How could Alice have known there was even a possibility I could step through?
Now I remembered what had been eluding me! Sunday. In Gregson’s shop with Balfour, looking for a hint as to why Alice Gregson should have killed her entire family. I’d seen someone on the bridge while I was trying to fix the broken shutter, and found myself briefly in that other world, facing a cloaked and hooded woman who’d hurried away from me. A dark-haired woman. Like the woman the workman had seen.
She’d known I could step through. Had she passed that information on to Alice?
I’d suspected Alice had an accomplice, but had been looking for a man. What if it had been a woman?
Twenty-Nine
They love nothing better than love, which is a delight for someone of my tastes.
[Letter from Louis de Glabre to his friend Philippe
Froidevaux, 22 January 1737]
And as if I’d conjured her up out of the air, Alice Gregson was watching me. She leant against the wall of the alley, her cloak pulled tight against the cold; I glimpsed demure white petticoats beneath. She was toying with improbably golden curls hung with ribbons, and gave me a coy look. ‘Mr Patterson? I’m charmed to meet you again, sir.’ She bobbed a little curtsey, mockingly. ‘I’ve been watching and thought you might appreciate a little conversation.’
‘And in our own world too,’ I said. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being captured?’
She grinned. ‘There’s no holding me, Mr Patterson.’ She gave me a flirtatious look. ‘If I was captured, I could simply walk out of my prison cell into that other world.’
That was, I had to admit, a problem.
‘You gave me a test to see whether I could step through too,’ I said. ‘The first time we met, you tempted me to follow you into that other world.’
She giggled. ‘Alice said you might be dangerous. I was just seeing if she was right.’
‘Alice?’ I echoed blankly, not comprehending.
She opened her eyes wide, innocently. ‘But surely you know about her, Mr Patterson – you saw her outside the shop on the bridge in the other world. She was just out for a walk and there you were!’ Her impish grin widened. ‘Why, Mr Patterson, don’t say you hadn’t guessed.’
Dear God, there were two Alices? Almost everyone has a counterpart in the other world, and sometimes, as in Hugh’s case, those counterparts are not identical to us. There was no reason the Alice of our own world should not be fair-haired and slight, and the Alice of the other world, taller and darker. But how had they met?
She was watching me with a demure smile. ‘You have guessed! So delightful, isn’t it? To meet one’s own self in another world? Have you ever met yourself, Mr Patterson?’
I had, briefly, and had run away almost at once. And in all my visits to the other world, I had carefully avoided him, and tried my best to do nothing to damage his reputation. And Alice Gregson had plainly danced straight into conversation with her counterpart and apparently found a kindred soul.
Two of them trying to run rings round us! Which had sent me the notes? More importantly, which had done the murders? Both? Or neither?
‘You’re not very alike,’ I said, to gain time to absorb this shock.
‘We’re not in the least alike!’ she said gaily. She leant forward to confide. ‘She’d be horrified if she knew I was here!’
That was interesting. Were they not acting entirely in unison? ‘So why are you?’
‘I thought I might persuade you to forget about us.’ She danced forward, took hold of my coat, stood very close, looking up at me winningly from under her eyelashes.
‘Forget about four murdered people?’
‘Oh, who cares about them!’ She ran her finger over my chest. ‘You’ve no notion how irritating my father could be!’
‘And that was reason enough to kill him, was it?’
‘You should have met Alice’s father,’ she said. ‘He was even nastier than mine!’
‘And did she kill him?’
‘She didn’t get the chance.’ She sighed. ‘He fell under a cart!’
‘Very disobliging of him,’ I said. The shock was turning to anger. ‘So which of you killed your family?’
That wheedling look again; her eyes were remarkably blue and sparkling. ‘We didn’t do it.’ She smoothed her fingers across my shoulder. Her scent was thick and heavy; the curls on the top of her head tickled my chin. ‘Didn’t you get our notes?’
‘Indeed I did. Very melodramatic.’
She giggled. ‘I went to a play in London where they used that trick. True Lovers’ Tales! Alice said it was too ridiculous for words, but I thought it would tease you.’
Tease was not the word I would have used; I felt an unexpected pang of sympathy with the absent other Alice. ‘What happened last Saturday night?’
She stared at me a moment, then sighed. ‘You really aren’t going to forget about this, are you?’
‘No.’
‘But it’s so silly!’ She looked up at me, blue eyes brimming with tears. ‘Please,’ she said brokenly.
She was very pretty, and had all the fashionable winning ways of a society Miss, but I encounter such wiles every day when my female pupils want to persuade me they really have practised. They have no effect on me any more. And especially not when I am so angry I can hardly speak. How dared she believe she could pass all this off with a few pouts and pretty glances! How dared she think me such a fool as to fall for a such tricks!
‘And was your mother irritating too?’ I snapped. ‘And your sister?’
‘Sarah was going to be married,’ she said viciously, all hint of tears gone. ‘And I was going to be stuck at home, cleaning and cooking and serving in that foul shop.’
‘And Ned?’
She stared at me blankly. ‘Who?’
‘The apprentice.’
She wrinkled up her nose. ‘He was horrible.’
‘He didn’t respond to your overtures, I suppose?’
Obviously an accurate guess; she flung herself away from me sulkily. The voices o
f the workmen carried in the thin cold air; a dog barked. I worked to keep control of my anger. I had to learn all I could, think of some way to outwit her, to counteract her ability to step through.
‘I met someone in London,’ Alice said, gesturing grandiloquently. ‘Someone beautiful. We fell in love. We wanted to marry. We could have married – I’m of full age, I didn’t need my father’s permission.’ She didn’t seem of full age; she seemed like a particularly capricious miss in her teens.
‘But we’d no money.’ She pouted. ‘I had my allowance of course, but that was ridiculously small and he had nothing at all. And then my uncle died and I had to come back here.’
‘So you thought your father might have some money.’
‘He did – lots and lots of it!’ She danced back to me, fluttered her eyelashes. ‘I did try to persuade him to give me some, you know, but he wouldn’t let me have a penny.’
I knew that to be a lie, according to Mrs Cunningham’s first-hand account. ‘So you decided to take it anyway. And did you honestly intend to ride to Scotland with this young man of yours? Does he have a name, by the way?’
‘Richard,’ she said dreamily. ‘He’s so handsome!’ Another coy look. ‘We were almost married anyway. In Scotland, we would have been – all you have to do to be married there is to live together as man and wife.’
I was hazy on Scotch wedding customs, having myself done the traditional thing and married in church. I wasn’t going to argue with her, or show her how shocked I was at what she’d just admitted. I wanted her to stay and tell me the rest of the tale about Richard.
‘He’s a naval officer,’ she said dreamily. ‘He looks so dashing in his uniform!’
‘A naval officer,’ I said, heavily. Kane was a sailor – he could easily have posed as an officer.
Alice giggled. ‘I’m not silly, you know. I know he wants the money more than he wants me. But that’s all right. I want my freedom and I don’t care how I get it. I don’t have to share the money, do I?’
So the trip to Scotland would never have taken place. ‘But you’d share it with the other Alice?’
She nodded. ‘It was his idea, you know,’ she said. ‘Robbing the house, I mean. He’s done this sort of thing before.’
‘In Kent?’
A huge smile transformed her face. She looked childlike, mischievous. ‘You found that out? So you are as clever as Alice said. He robbed dozens of houses.’
‘Did you also know he’d killed some of the people he robbed?’
‘I read the papers,’ she said. I remembered the cuttings I’d found in her trunk; I reminded myself to look at those more closely. ‘But he don’t know I know. He thinks I believe every word he told me. He said he inherited lots of money but had to spend most of it since he’d left the navy. He says he was injured in battle.’ She smiled fondly. ‘He has such a nice little limp.’
God, but he’d tried every trick on her, and it looked as if she’d believed none of them. ‘So you came north,’ I said, going back to the essential part of the story. ‘You were to look around the house and find out where the money was.’
‘It was foreign money,’ she complained. ‘Richard wouldn’t believe me, so I took him a coin to show him. And he was excited – he said they were really valuable!’
‘So on the night you got the key and let him into the house . . .’
She nodded, wandering about the alley, pressing a toe of her fashionable shoe into the remains of the snow under the wall. ‘He went down into the cellar for the box of coins, because it was really heavy and I couldn’t lift it. I waited for him in the shop. That idiot boy was snoring – I was scared he was going to wake up. Then Richard came back up from the cellar and he was angry.’
‘About what?’
She shrugged and gave me an innocent look. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Found out about the other money box, did he?’ I suggested. ‘The one you’d already taken?’
She pouted. ‘There wasn’t much in it.’
‘Yes, there was. If there wasn’t much, you wouldn’t have had to take the entire box – you could just have slipped the coins into your pocket.’
She giggled, not at all disconcerted by being found out. ‘There was fifty-two pounds!’
That had been almost a year’s income for me before I was married. Gregson had been bluffing when he said he kept no money in the house.
Alice was watching me closely; when she saw me looking at her, she dropped her eyes. But I’d seen the calculating expression there.
‘He went wild!’ She waved her hands to try and convey how angry this Richard had been. ‘He started killing people and I had to flee for my life!’
‘He went wild – with a heavy box of coins in his hands?’
‘He put them down!’ she said indignantly.
‘Where?’
Now she was annoyed. ‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. I was running to escape having a knife in my back!’
‘So you ran upstairs?’
‘And flung myself out of the window!’ She pranced across the alley, waving her hands dramatically. ‘I slid down into the river, on to the ice and the mud, and scrambled out on to the Key. Then I ran and ran and ran until I was certain no one was following me!’
She hadn’t done that very well – after all, she hadn’t noticed me.
I contemplated her in silence for a moment. Some of this was probably true, as far as it went; there was too much detail to be entirely imaginary. But at the point when Richard came up from the cellar, it became much too vague. And that rope of sheets had been prepared in advance, not on impulse under a murderous threat. She was manipulating me, telling me just enough of the truth to convince, while hoping I wouldn’t notice the inconsistencies. But she wasn’t a good liar.
‘Why did he kill everyone?’ I asked.
She looked surprised I should ask. ‘He was angry. Furious!’
‘At you, not them.’
‘He has a dreadful temper,’ she protested. ‘In London, I saw him nearly throttle a man who tried to rob him!’
Attacking a man who’s just tried to rob you might be considered self-defence. Not in the least like killing four innocent, sleeping people because you’ve just argued with someone else entirely. Alice was hiding a great deal and I wanted to know all of it.
‘What’s Richard’s surname?’
But I had asked one question too many. For a moment I thought she wasn’t going to answer at all. She kicked at the snow, bit her lip. ‘Alice says we mustn’t tell you about him. Not until we’ve got what we want.’
‘Which is?’
She started to sound shrill. ‘I want my inheritance. Father had lots of money, and stocks and shares, and property – he owned several cottages in the country, and a forge too. I want my share.’
‘You’ll have to prove your innocence first,’ I pointed out. Which was going to be rather difficult; even if this Richard had indeed done the actual killings, Alice would be in court beside him as an accomplice. Not that I intended to point that out right now. ‘Give me Richard’s real name, and tell me where he is.’
‘Not until you give me the money!’ she said furiously. ‘Then I’ll tell you who he is.’ She pulled her cloak more tightly round her. The freezing cold seemed suddenly to intensify, became almost unendurable.
I realized what was happening, jumped forward, tried to grab her arm. Darkness swept over me. Then daylight flooded in again, and Alice Gregson was running away from me across frosty cobbles. I started after her . . .
Something hot and musty and rough came down over my head, stifling me. I couldn’t see, could hardly hear, and the stink of the thing over my head made me sneeze. I felt a push in my back, staggered into a wall, and slid to the ground. Somewhere close, a horse snorted.
A moment of panic as I grappled with the unyielding folds of the material. Then I disentangled myself, breathed in fresh cold air with relief.
I was in a stables. A grey horse was looking at me o
ver a low partition, blowing out clouds of breath in the cold air. And the material was a horse blanket.
It didn’t take a great deal of effort to guess who’d thrown the blanket over my head. I scrambled up, ran out to the street. No one in sight.
I’d lost them.
Thirty
It is perfectly true that England is full of shops and tradesmen, and – much though it pains me to admit it – they are far more enterprising than our own.
[Letter from Louis de Glabre to his friend Philippe
Froidevaux, 22 January 1737]
I went back to my own world, cursing my inability to lay hands on Alice. She was a mere flighty girl but she tricked me every time!
As the alley behind the site formed around me again, I calmed down, started to think more rationally. I believed some of what Alice said. I believed in the existence of Richard, although I was certain that wasn’t his true name; the letter he’d sent to Alice had been signed with something like a T or an F. I believed he’d been a sailor and I felt a niggling suspicion of Joseph Kane; there was no evidence against him, yet . . .
But I wanted to know what Alice hadn’t told me. Why had Richard run amok? Where did he get the knife? Why was the apprentice the last one killed? What had Alice been planning when she made that rope of sheets, in advance of the robbery?
What part, if any, had the other Alice played? Which of the three of them had killed the family? I believed Kane was capable of killing. But four people? In their sleep? No one had yet explained to me why that was necessary.
And, crucially, why was Alice telling me all this – and why now?
Snow drifted down. The workmen were still laughing at their work; the light seemed much the same as it had before. Had I lost any time in stepping from one world to the other? I ducked into the tavern next door to the site and looked at the big clock standing in one corner; not much more than an hour had passed.
