Then he was alone again on the pavement, turning over in his mind everything the Spaldergate staff had learned about Mr. Benny Catlin's disappearance. Foul play was now the major fear consuming everyone at Spaldergate. Catlin's abandoned luggage, the corpse in Catlin's hotel room, and the wounded Time Tours carriage driver had led police constables straight to Spaldergate House, asking about the body at the Picadilly Hotel and a second grisly corpse found outside the Royal Opera. The police, comparing witness descriptions, had concluded that the Picadilly Hotel shooting and the Opera House shooting had been committed by the same desperate individual.
The Time Tours driver injured at the Piccadilly Hotel had, thank God, arrived at the gatehouse unconscious but still alive, driven by one of the gatehouse's footmen dispatched to fetch him back. Catlin's luggage had been impounded, but the footman had managed to secure Catlin's bloodstained gloves from the room before police could arrive, giving the Spaldergate staff at least some chance of tracing Catlin with bloodhounds. Weak from shock and blood loss, the wounded driver had barely been alive by the time he'd been rushed downstairs to surgery.
A massive police manhunt was now on for the missing Mr. Catlin and for anyone who might have been involved in the fatal shootings. Marshall Gilbert, gatehousekeeper, was faced with the worst crisis of his career, trying to assist the police while keeping the secrets of Spaldergate House very much under wraps.
Malcolm dreaded the coming night's work and the lack of sleep this search would mean. At least—and he consoled himself with the prospect—he wouldn't be searching alone. For good or ill, Margo would be assisting him. He needed her close, tired and soul-sore as he was from weeks spent plunged into the misery of the East End, preparing for the coming horror.
When two hansom cabs traveling close behind one another pulled up and halted at the corner of Bow and Hart, Malcolm pocketed his watch and moved rapidly forward to greet the occupants alighting on the pavement. "Ah, Stoddard, very good, I've been awaiting your arrival. Miss Smith, I'm so dreadfully sorry about this trouble, I do wish you had reconsidered coming along this evening. Madame Feroz, frightfully decent of you to accompany her, I know the demands upon your time are keen. And this must be Mr. Shannon?"
The man who had jumped to the pavement behind Spaldergate's stable master, hanging slightly back as Malcolm greeted Margo and Shahdi Feroz in turn, was a temporal native, a stringy, tough old Irishman in an ill-cut suit. He was assisting another passenger to alight, a striking young woman in very plain garments. The girl's skirt was worn but had been made of good quality cloth when new, and her coat, also faded, was neat and clean. Her hair was a glorious copper in the gaslight, her face sprinkled with far too many freckles for her to be considered a beauty by Victorian standards. But she had a memorable face and a quiet air of utter and unshakable self-confidence. She'd wrapped one hand around the leash of a magnificent Alsatian or—had Malcolm been in America—a beautiful black-and-tan German Shepherd dog with bright, intelligent eyes.
The grizzled Irishman, who was doubtless far stronger than his slight frame suggested, shook Malcolm's hand. "That's me, sir, Auley Shannon. This is me granddaughter, Maeve Shannon, Alfie's ‘er dog, trained ‘im she did, ‘er own self, won't find a better tracker in London."
"Malcolm Moore," he smiled in return, offering his hand. "My pleasure, Mr. Shannon, Miss Shannon."
The inquiry agents whom Stoddard had been sent to fetch shook Malcolm's hand firmly. Miss Shannon kept her dog on a short leash, even though the animal was immaculately behaved, sitting on his haunches and watching the humans with keen eyes, tongue lolling slightly in the damp air.
Malcolm turned to Spaldergate's stable master. "Stoddard, you have the gloves that were found when poor Mr. Catlin disappeared from his hotel?"
"I do, sir." He produced a small cloth bag, inside which nestled a gentleman's pair of kid gloves. Relatively fresh blood stains indicated that they had, in fact, been on Catlin's person when the shootout at the Piccadilly Hotel had occurred and Catlin had rendered life-saving first aid, just as the wounded driver had described via telephone before losing consciousness.
Malcolm nodded briskly. "Very good. Shall we give the dog the scent, then? I'm anxious to begin. Poor Miss Smith," and he bowed to Margo before returning his attention to the Shannons, "is understandably distraught over her fiancé's absence and who can blame the dear child?"
Margo was doing a very creditable job, in fact, of imitating someone in deep distress, shredding her own gloves with jerking, nervous movements and summoning tears through God-alone knew what agency. "Please, can't you find him?" Margo gasped out, voice shaking, one hand clutching at Mr. Shannon's ill-fitting jacket sleeve.
His granddaughter spoke, not unkindly. "Now, then, get ‘old of yourself, miss, wailin' and suchlike won't do ‘im a bit o' good an' you're like t'give yourself a fit of brain fever."
"Maeve," her grandfather said sharply, "the lady ‘as a right to be upset, so you just give Alfie the scent an' mind your tongue! Or I'll give yer me German across yer Hampsteads, so I will."
"You an' what army, I'm wonderin'?" she shot right back, not cowed in the slightest by her grandfather's uplifted hand. "Give Alfie a sniff o' them gloves, now," she instructed Stoddard briskly.
"Where were the chap last spotted?" the elder Shannon wanted to know as the dog thrust an eager nose into the gloves held out to him.
Malcolm nodded toward the opera house across the road. "There, between the Opera and the Floral Hall. The doorman caught a glimpse of him engaged in what he described as a desperate fight with another man and ran to fetch the constables he'd just seen pass by. This other man was evidently shot dead and abandoned by Mr. Catlin in his terror to escape. Probably one of those desperate, criminal youths in one of those wretched, notorious Nichol gangs. Their depredations have all London in an uproar. God help us, what are we coming to when young boys no older than fourteen or fifteen roam the streets as armed thugs and break into homes, stealing property and dishonoring women—" he lifted his hat apologetically to the ladies "—and attacking a man in front of the Floral Hall, for God's sake? The last time anyone saw Mr. Catlin, he was down Bow Street that way, just past the Floral Hall, fighting for his life."
"Let's cross, then," Maeve Shannon said briskly, "an' we'll give Alfie the scent off them gloves again when we've got right up to where ‘e were at the time."
They dodged carriages and ghostly, looming shapes of horses across the road, carriage lamps and horses' eyes gleaming in the raw night. Clouds of white vapour streamed from the horses' distended nostrils, then they were across and the copper-haired girl held the gloves to her dog's nose again while her grandfather tapped one impatient foot. The shepherd sniffed intently, then at a command from his trainer began casting along the pavement. A sharp whine reached them, then Alfie strained out into the road, following the scent. The dog paused at a dark stain on the cobbles, which, when the elder Shannon crouched down and tested it, proved to be blood.
Margo let out an astonishing sound and clutched at Malcolm's arm. "Oh, God, poor Benjamin..."
"There, there," Mr. Shannon soothed, wiping his sticky hand on a kerchief, "it's most like the blagger wot attacked ‘im, ‘oo bled on these ‘ere cobbles. Police took ‘is body away to the morgue, so it's not like as to be Mr. Catlin's blood. Not to fret, Miss, we'll find ‘im."
Miss Shannon said, "Alfie, seek!" and the dog bounded across the road and headed down a drizzle-shrouded walk which passed beneath the graceful colonnaded facade of the Royal Opera House. The dog led the way at a brisk walk. Malcolm and Philip Stoddard, escorting Margo and Shahdi Feroz solicitously, hastened after them. The darkened glass panes of the Floral Hall loomed up from the damp night. The high, domed roof of the magnificent glasshouse glinted distantly in the gaslights from the street, its high, curved panes visible in snatches between drifting eddies of low-blown cloud.
The eager Alsatian, nose casting along the pavement as the dog traced a scent mingled with thou
sands of other traces where gentlemen, ladies, horses, dogs, carters, and Lord knew what all else had passed this way today, drew them eagerly to Russell Street, where Alfie cast sharp left and headed rapidly away from Covent Garden. They moved down toward the massive Drury Theater, which took up the better part of the entire city block between Catherine Street and Drury Lane. The drizzling fog swirled and drifted across the heavy stone portico along the front, with its statue at the top dimly lit by gaslight from hanging lamps that blazed along the entrance. Malcolm worried about the scent in weather like this. If the drizzle turned to serious rain, which rumbled and threatened again overhead, no dog born could follow the scent. The deluge would wash it straight into the nearest storm sewer. Which, upon reflection, might be why the dog was able to follow Catlin's trail so easily—most of the competing scents had been washed away, by the night's earlier rainstorm.
God alone knew, they needed a piece of luck, just now.
More carriages rattled past in the darkness, carrying merry parties of well-to-do middle class theater goers to the Drury's bright-lit entrance. Voices and laughter reached across the busy thoroughfare as London prepared for yet another evening of sparkling gaiety. The straining shepherd, however, ignored Catherine Street altogether and guided the way down Russell Street along the huge theater's left-hand side, where a portico of Ionic columns loomed like a forest of stone trees in the darkness. Malcolm felt his hopes rise at the dog's sharp eagerness and ability to discern Catlin's trail. Good idea, Margo, he approved silently, grateful to her for thinking of a bloodhound when the rest of them had been struck stupid with shock.
Their footsteps echoed eerily off tall buildings when the dog led them straight down Drury Lane. The fact that Benny Catlin had come this way suggested to Malcolm he had been forced away by someone with a weapon. The Royal Opera House, Drury Lane Theater, and the Covent Garden district stood squarely in a well-to-do, middle-class neighborhood, eclipsed in finery only by the wealthiest of the upper-class districts to the west. But once into Drury Lane itself, wealth and even comfort dropped away entirely. As the eager shepherd drew them down the length of that famous street, poverty's raw bones began to show. These were the houses and shops of London's hard-working poor, where some managed to eke out moderate comfort while others descended steeply into want and hunger.
Piles of wooden crates stood on the pavements outside lower-class shops, where wagons had made daytime deliveries. The deeper they pressed into the recesses of Drury Lane, which dwindled gradually in width as well as respectability, the meaner and shabbier grew the houses and the residents walking the pavements. Pubs spilled piano music and alcoholic fumes into the streets, where roughly clad working men and women gathered in knots to talk and laugh harshly and stare with bristling suspicion at the well-dressed ladies and frock-coated gentleman passing in the company of a liveried servant, with an older man and younger woman of their own class controlling a leashed dog.
Malcolm made mental note of where the pubs lay, to locate potential witnesses for later questioning, and pressed his arm surreptitiously against the lump of his concealed pistol, making certain of it. Margo, he knew, also carried a pistol in her pocket, as did Philip Stoddard. He wished he'd thought to ask Shahdi Feroz whether or not she was armed, but this was neither the time nor the place to remedy that lack. Preternaturally aware of the shabby men and women watching them from shadows and from the lighted doorways of mean houses and rough pubs, Malcolm followed the eager dog and his mistress, listening to the click of their footfalls on the pavement and the scrape and scratch of the dog's claws.
Whatever Benny Catlin's motive, whether flight from trouble or the threat of deadly force taking him deeper into danger, it had carried him the length of Drury Lane. The dog paused briefly and sniffed again at a dark spot on the pavement. This time, Mr. Shannon was not able to explain away the spots of blood so glibly. Margo clutched at Malcolm, weeping and gulping back evident terror. Malcolm watched Shannon wipe blood from his hand again, knowing, this time, it must be Benny Catlin's blood, and was able to console himself only with the fact that not enough had been spilled here to prove immediately fatal. But untended, with wounds of unknown severity... and perhaps in the grip of footpads who would kill him when they had obtained what they'd forced him here for...
Grimly, Malcolm signalled to continue the hunt. Even Shahdi Feroz's eyes had taken on a strained, hopeless look. The Ripper scholar clearly knew Catlin's odds as well as Malcom did.
They reached the final, narrow stretches of Drury Lane where Wych Street snaked off to the left, along a route that would eventually be demolished to create Aldwych. That upscale urban renewal was destined to gobble up an entire twenty-eight acres of this mean district. They kept to the right, avoiding the narrow trap of Wych Street, but even this route was a dangerous one. The buildings closed in, ill-lit along this echoing, drizzle-shrouded stretch, and still the Alsatian shepherd strained eagerly forward, nose to the pavement. When they emerged at last into the famous Strand, another juxtaposition of wealth in the midst of slums, their first sight was St. Mary le Strand church, which stood as an island in the middle of the broad street.
Philip Stoddard muttered, "What the devil was after him, to send him walking down this way in the middle of the night?"
Malcolm glanced sharply at the stable master and nodded warningly toward the Shannons, then said, "I fear Miss Smith is greatly distressed."
Margo was emitting little sounds of horror as she took in their surroundings. She had transferred her act to the Ripper scholar and clung to Shahdi Feroz' arm as though to a lifeline, tottering at the end of her strength and wits. "Where can he be?" Margo was murmuring over and over. "Oh, God, what's happened to him? This is a terrible place, dreadful..."
Auley Shannon glanced over his shoulder. "Could be another answer, guv, if ‘e never got clean away from th' blokes wot attacked ‘im outside the opera. Alfie's ‘eadin' straight for ‘olywell Street. Might've been brought down ‘ere for reasons I'd as soon not say in front o' the ladies."
A chill touched Malcolm's spine. Dear God, not that... . The dog was dragging them past Newcastle Street directly toward the cramped, dark little lane known as Holywell, which ran to the left of the narrow St. Mary le Strand church on a course parallel to the Strand. On the Strand itself, Malcolm could just see the glass awning of the Opera Comique, a theater sandwiched between Wych and Holywell Streets, reachable only through a tunnel that opened out beneath that glass canopy on the Strand. The neighborhood was cramped and seemingly picturesque, with exceedingly aged houses dating to the Tudor and Stuart periods crowding the appallingly narrow way.
But darkened shop windows advertising book sellers' establishments the length of Holywell were infamous throughout London. In the shops of "Booksellers' Row" as Holywell was sometimes known, a man could obtain lewd prints, obscene books, and a pornographic education for a mere handful of shillings. And for a few shillings more, a man could obtain a young girl—or a young boy, come to that, despite harsh laws against it. The girls and young men who worked in the back rooms and attics of these nasty, crumbling old shops had often as not been drugged into captivity and put to work as whores, photographed nude and raped by customers and jailors alike. If some wealthy gentleman, with or without a title, had requested a proprietor on Holywell Street to procure a young man of a specific build and coloring, Benny Catlin might well have been plunged into a Victorian hell somewhere nearby.
Although the shops were closed for the night and certainly would have been closed when Benny Catlin had passed this way earlier in the evening, women in dark skirts were busy carrying out hasty negotiations with men in rough workingmen's garments. Several of the women cast appraising glances at Malcolm, who looked—to them—like a potential wealthy customer passing by in the close darkness, despite the presence of ladies with him.
"What does Mr. Shannon mean?" Margo whispered sotto voce. "What is it about Holywell Street that's so awful he won't say?"
M
alcolm cleared his throat. "Ah... perhaps some other time might be better for explanations, Miss Smith? I rather doubt that what Mr. Shannon referred to is what has actually happened." Malcolm wished he could be as certain as he sounded, but he had no intention of requiring Margo to play out her role by displaying complete hysterics over the notion of her fiancé having been sold to someone to be photographed and raped by a dealer in pornographic literature.
The rough-clad women watching them so narrowly were clearly trying to judge whether or not to risk openly approaching him with their business propositions. Had Malcolm been quite alone, he suspected he would have been propositioned no fewer than a dozen times within fifty paces. And had he been quite alone, Malcolm's hand would never have left the pocket concealing his pistol. A man dressed as Malcolm was, venturing unaccompanied into the deep, semi-criminal poverty of Holywell, would be considered fair game by any footpad who saw him. There was more safety in numbers, but even so, Malcolm's hand never strayed far from the entrance to his pocket.
When Malcolm spotted a woman lounging by herself against a bookshop wall, standing directly beneath a large, projecting clock that stuck out perpendicularly from the building, Malcolm paused, carefully gesturing the ladies on ahead with Mr. Stoddard. A gas street lamp nearby shed enough light to see her worn dress, work-roughened hands, and tired face beneath a bedraggled bonnet.
"Good evening, ma'am."
She stood up straighter, calculation jumping into her eyes. "Evenin', luv. Whatcher' wantin', then?"
"I was wondering if you might have seen someone pass this way earlier this evening? A gentleman dressed much the same way I am? My cousin's gone missing, you see," he added at the sharp look of distrust in her face. "I'm quite concerned over my cousin's safety and his fiancée, there, is in deep distress over it." He gestured toward Margo, who was clinging to Shahdi Feroz and biting her lip, eyes red and swollen. He must remember to ask her how she managed to conjure tears on command.
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