Toby regarded her with skepticism, then his strong jaw relaxed, and the squint lines around his eyes deepened into amusement. “It doesn’t take a bleedin’ Oxford scholar to figure out that you’re either an incredibly good actress or completely deranged.”
“None of the above,” Katie muttered, folding her arms firmly across her chest.
“Above what?” yelped Collin, clearly puzzled.
Katie stared at him. “None of the above” was probably an expression used to fill out computer forms. “None of those choices,” she quickly amended.
“Prove it,” Toby said. The hostile gleam in his dark eyes had returned. “Lock the grady moore, Collin,” he instructed without taking his eyes off Katie.
Collin scrambled across the floor and shot the bolt in the door.
“This is the last jellied eel you’re likely to get from me, Miss Katherine. Prove that you are indeed a hocus-pocus mind reader, or I’m going to take you over my knee and wallop the living pony and trap out of you.”
“Okay. That’s it, buster!” Katie sprang to her feet. “Have you ever heard of women’s liberation? You lay a hand on me and I’ll karate chop you in the solar plexus so hard you won’t sit down for a week! Take that jellied eel and shove it up your—”
“April in Paris?” Toby raised an amused eyebrow.
“If that means—”
“Arse!” Collin squealed.
“Then yes, Toby,” Katie said, breathing hard. “You can shove it up your April in Paris!”
Toby leaned closer. His lips brushed across her cheek making her shiver as he whispered softly in her ear, “I’m assuming that women’s liberation has something to do with John Stuart Mill and the suffragette movement. But it’s of no consequence. If you prove that you’re clairvoyant, you can wallop me in the solar plexus as hard as you want. Otherwise, make no mistake, I’m marching your April in Paris to Major Brown’s lodgings, and he can handle this as he sees fit. That’s a right fair jellied eel, Miss Katherine, now isn’t it?”
Chapter Seventeen
Pray When Will That Be? say the Bells of Stepney
“Okay, Toby. Close your eyes and conjure up a picture of the dead girl,” Katie instructed.
Toby stared at her, his gaze never wavering from her face, but Collin squeezed his eyes tightly shut.
Katie closed her own eyes and pretended deep concentration. “I see . . . a girl . . . whose throat has . . . been slit . . . but there’s more. She’s been eviscerated. Disemboweled.” Katie opened her eyes. “Am I correct?”
“Jumping Jehoshaphat!” Collin cried, striking his fists together. “Katherine, you’re a mind reader! That’s exactly what I was thinking! A naked girl all cut up to ribbons. Blood everywhere! Lots and lots of blood. Toby! Katherine is a blooming mind reader! God’s truth! She read my mind. She did!”
Katie looked at Collin. “I didn’t read your mind, Collin. You weren’t at the morgue. I was picking up Toby’s thoughts.”
“No. No. You were picking up mine! Lord love a duck! That’s exactly what I was thinking! Exactly, Katherine!”
“Before we go any further,” Katie said, “may I ask a favor of both of you? At home everyone calls me Katie to avoid confusing me with my aunt Katherine, so I’m not used to being called Katherine. You are both welcome to call me Katie.”
Just then, one of the candles on the desk spluttered and puffed out.
Katie cast her mind back, trying to dredge up details about the first victim from the Madame Tussauds Jack the Ripper exhibit. “There wasn’t a lot of blood was there, Toby? The police officer who found her, or maybe it was a doctor or coroner or undertaker — whoever it was, didn’t pick up on the fact that Mary Ann Nichols was disemboweled because . . . because . . . I’m not sure exactly . . . Maybe her clothing was covering it up. Am I right?”
Collin gestured with his arms. “I tell you, in my mind I saw lots of blood! And I was thinking about that cat! Did you see a cat, Katherine?” And then as though defending a point, Collin said eagerly. “You did, didn’t you? I knew it.”
Katie looked at Toby’s scowling face. “Words can’t describe the horror of it, or accurately convey what happened to that poor girl. And it’s horrible talking about her like this. But am I right, Toby? Do we have a deal?”
Toby remained mute, but Katie charged on. “The reason you can’t tell Major Brown or any other policeman is because the person who did this—and who will kill more girls if we don’t stop him—might be a police officer.”
“Major Brown!” Collin whooped. “It’s him, isn’t it? He’s a bad lot. I’ve known it all along. I hate that blighter. I’ve always hated him. Now the Governor will have to put a stop to his involvement with Beatrix. I’ve been right about Major Bumble-Brain from the start. If only people would listen to me—”
“Major Brown is not the culprit.” Toby’s eyes were cold, his voice hard as steel. “Major Gideon Brown would no more kill an innocent girl than you or I could fly to the moon or travel through time. He’s an honorable, decent man. To accuse him is an unjust, wicked—”
“But it’s true! It has to be. Katherine saw it in her visions. She’s clairvoyant! A soothsayer!”
“No, Collin. That’s not what I said and not what I saw.”
“But—”
“I said it’s a possibility that the killer is a police officer. Whoever’s doing this will continue, and it’s going to get worse. The killer will be someone who can walk the streets of London undetected. Someone above suspicion . . . like a police officer, a minister, a doctor . . . someone you wouldn’t expect. A woman for instance, or—”
“A woman!” Collin bristled, his eyes bulging out like the stuffed trout hanging over his desk. “Never! The gentler sex couldn’t perpetrate such a dastardly—”
“Or a man dressed as a woman. Any number of people, Collin. The point is, the killer has to be caught before he murders more innocent girls, especially his last victim. We’ve got to stop him. We have to find him.”
“Just gaze into your crystal ball, Katherine. Dash it all, you’re the clairvoyant one.” Collin stumped over and flopped himself into the armchair by the fire. “You need to tell us who this blighter is.”
“It’s not like that, Collin. I don’t have a crystal ball. I only know that he’ll strike again. And the papers will call him Jack the Ripper.”
“Surely you can conjure this killer up in your mind and” — Collin snapped his fingers.—“Poof! He’ll come to you. Close your eyes and give it a try—”
“No, I can’t.”
“But mightn’t this Jack-of-all-Trades killer just pop into your mind when you least expect it?”
“No. That’s not how . . . er . . . my gift works.”
Collin scratched his chin. “If you can’t predict who the killer is, how do you know there will be more murders? You have a gift, as you call it. I’ll accept that. But if you can’t tell us the identity of this Jack-of-Hearts killer, how can we trust that your visions are, er, trustworthy? You said you wanted to return home, Katherine. Are you afraid of this rum bloke, is that it? You’re having nightmares about him, and that’s why you crept into my room like a sleepwalker?”
“No. I mean, yes. I mean, no. I’m not having nightmares. Well, I am sort of . . . having nightmares,” she ended lamely.
“Toby, old boy? What are you thinking?” Collin asked from his slouched position in the chair. “You’re awfully quiet. Not still contemplating hauling Katherine off to prison, are you?”
“I’m thinking that Miss Lennox might not be a mind reader after all. Perhaps she knows the killer. Perhaps the killer gave her all this information.”
“Killer? How? When? The only person she’s been with is me. You don’t think I’m the killer? Shall I confess, then?” Collin said almost eagerly. “There’s a jellied eel for you. I confess. It was me. I killed that poor girl and . . . the cat, too. My blimey motive would be, er . . . er . . .” He stuck his neck in and out of his robe’s collar l
ike a turtle. “Hmmm, what motive? I hate women, that’s it! All women. I’m a misogynist through and through so I went to the East End, found a lusty wench and—” he drew his finger across his throat.
“I’m not accusing you of anything, Collin,” Toby said quietly.
“Well, that’s a first.” Collin grinned, then turned to Katie and said in a conspiratorial whisper, “I’m always in the soup with Toby or my grandfather.”
“I don’t believe in hocus-pocus,” Toby said, glancing from Katie to Collin and back again. He shook his head. Like most Cockneys, he had a superstitious bent, yet he scoffed at people who were ruled by portents and bad omens. And as for predicting the future, that would mean that man did not have free will. Toby definitely did not believe that one’s life was set in stone and everything was preordained.
“So, Miss Katherine,” Toby pronounced his words slowly, his eyes never wavering from hers. “If you can foresee the future, and I say if because I don’t believe such a thing is possible. But if it were possible, and we could catch this phantom killer and stop other girls from being butchered, does that mean the future—as you foresee it—is changeable and not set in stone?”
Set in stone. At the mention of the familiar phrase, Katie thought about the London Stone. Nothing is set in stone, she thought. Or maybe everything is! Maybe time is a continual loop with the past, present, and future on a circular continuum.
“I don’t know, Toby,” Katie answered. “I just don’t know. If you’d asked me that question several days ago I’d have said the future hasn’t happened so it can’t possibly unfold in any predictable fashion — every decision, every action a person makes, or a thousand people make, can trigger another action or reaction, and therefore the future hasn’t happened and can’t be predicted. But now I’m not so sure. Maybe the future, like the past, has already happened. Maybe we can travel back and forth through time—”
“And maybe man will fly to the moon,” Collin scoffed, rolling his eyes.
“And walk on it,” Katie said, holding back a smile.
“And I’m a monkey’s uncle,” Collin mocked.
“Maybe you are . . . or descended from one.” Katie sighed. In the next century Collin and Toby would face a barrage of new inventions and modern technology. Telephones, airplanes, automobiles, electric lighting, phonographs, radios, refrigeration, flush toilets, vaccines. If they lived long enough, they would also see two world wars, rocket ships, computers, medical advances.
“So, what number am I thinking of?” Collin demanded, squeezing his eyes shut again. “It’s between one and ten.”
The gas jets on either side of the mantel threw spangles of light across his scrunched-up face.
“I can’t read minds, Collin. I can only see images . . . sometimes. Blurry images. Pictures in my head. That’s all.”
Collin sprang from the chair and thrust out his open hand. A strange, almost wild expression had settled on his face. “Read my palm, then,” he insisted. “What’s in my future? Am I to have a long, happy life like the old gypsy in Hyde Park tells me whenever I cross her palm with a heaping lot of chinking coins? Better yet, am I going to come face to face with this Ripper-Van-Winkle bloke?”
“Collin. I can’t read palms. I’m not a fortune-teller.”
“Dashed useless then, aren’t you?” Collin blinked myopically down at his open palm, but when he glanced up, he was grinning. “It’s all right, Katherine. We’re going to help you. We’re going to track down this Jackass the Slasher.”
“Jack the Ripper.”
“Him, too. Isn’t that right, Toby?”
Toby’s eyes had never left Katie’s. “I’m going to need something more tangible,” he answered in a heavy, unemotional voice.
“More tangible? More tangible than a dead girl?” sputtered Collin.
Chapter Eighteen
I Do Not Know say the Great Bells of Bow
In front of them, the stone church showed pinpoints of flickering light through its stained-glass windows. High above, fast-moving clouds whirled across the sky with such dizzying speed it made the church steeple appear to be in motion and the clouds, stationary.
Katie had spotted the churchyard with its moss-covered headstones long before the four-wheeler slid into the shadows at the curbside. And it would have been a pleasant enough ride from Twyford Manor through the cobbled streets of London had Toby not scowled at her the whole time.
Katie thought about the jellied eel she had made with Toby. If her plan worked, it would be nothing short of a miracle. Her spirits lightened just thinking about it. But as she climbed out of the swaying carriage, drops of condensation fell from the coach’s roof ledge and splattered her face. Collin laughed when she looked up at him sputtering. He adroitly avoided the drips by leaping onto the ground, with Toby following close behind.
With an exaggerated flourish of gallantry, Collin offered Katie his pocket handkerchief, but she wiped her face with the sleeve of her velvet jacket instead and scurried on down the brick path.
A man in clerical robes walked with absentminded briskness toward a group of people huddled near a gravestone in the far corner of the churchyard. A small boy dressed all in black stared thoughtfully down at the newly turned earth, a bouquet of violets clutched in his tiny hands.
As Katie and Toby strode along the path, Collin hung back, swirling and jabbing his umbrella in the air like a sword. “Those winged cherubs, there,” he said, poking at a carved angel on a headstone, “seem dreadfully solemn, don’t you think? I ought to be a stone mason. I’d teach these somber blighters a thing or two. See that one over there? Instead of a skeleton holding a scythe, I’d have a mermaid strumming a lyre.”
Katie bit back a smile.
“This place positively reeks of death and bereavement,” Collin chortled. “Needs to be livened up, I tell you! Death isn’t half as bad as it’s made out to be. Dying is all part of the game, don’t you see? All part of life. The flip side of the coin. Heads you win, tails you lose. We’re all going to come a cropper sooner or later. We’re all going to throw tails on the coin of life.”
Collin grinned and tapped his chin. “The profundity of my insights often astounds even me. The coin of life . . . like the fountain of youth, or good versus evil. It’s all one and the same, don’t you know? Mustn’t wax maudlin over the inevitable, eh?”
As Collin jabbed his sword-stick umbrella around the churchyard, Katie glanced at Toby, whose dark eyes stared back at her with cold skepticism. With his boxer’s nose and the thin scar slashed across his cheekbone, Toby’s face reflected an angry disdain. She didn’t blame him. Not after last night. Not after what she’d promised. And yet . . . if her plan worked, Toby would have to honor his end of the bargain. It was a risk, but she might be able to pull it off. If not—as Collin had so aptly put it last night—Katie would be in the soup.
Well, here goes, she thought. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. But once ventured, she could lose everything . . .
•
As they crossed the churchyard toward the iron gate leading to the London Stone, Toby stared at Katie and felt a jolt in his gut.
Last night had been long and frustrating for Toby, and he was not blessed with a patient nature. He knew he should have informed Major Brown right away that Katie knew intimate details about the dead girl’s murder, yet he had kept quiet. Something about this American twist ’n’ swirl knocked him totally off balance. He had known her for only a few days, but already she had the ability to tie his emotions in knots. That she had this unearthly hold over him wasn’t an easy admission for Toby to make. He prided himself on his ability to keep his emotions in check. But the viselike grip she held him in had happened so suddenly, so overwhelmingly, Toby hadn’t realized that his feelings for someone—anyone—could be so explosive, so all-consuming. He’d been furious when he caught her in Collin’s bedchamber last night, but had masked his emotions by being overly harsh with her. Yet he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that he
had to steel himself against the clasp she wielded over him. He was determined not to make the same ill-fated mistake as his mother, who had fallen in love above her station—and his father, who had fallen in lust below his. Keeping a level head was an attribute that Toby held as dear as life itself.
Toby noted that Katie’s face was ghostly pale, outlined against the harsh grey of the large stone. Legend had it that the London Stone could grant three wishes for those who were pure of heart. But legend also claimed that the stone was the very one that King Arthur had pulled his sword from.
Toby watched as a spray of damp curls fell across Katie’s forehead. When she looked at him it was with an expression of fear, and the gut-wrenching spark in those eyes seemed to glaze over, as if she were about to swoon. He reached his hand out to steady her.
Clutching her arm, Toby thought about the jellied eel he had made with her, and the message he’d left in the stuffed vulture in the Duke’s study. He laughed at the lunacy of it. There was no denying that the girl tugged at his heartstrings like none other. Why else would he have agreed to such foolishness?
She might be an accomplice to a murder. She might be any number of things. But of one thing Toby was sure: He must never show the girl what he felt about her or she’d possess a power over him that would destroy him. He knew this as surely as he knew she was no more clairvoyant than he was. Less so, probably, for he came from a long line of fortune-tellers and soothsayers. His own mother was the seventh child of a seventh child and possessed second sight. This girl was gifted, but not with second sight. Toby would stake his life on it. In a manner of speaking, he already had. If by twelve noon she could not tell him what he’d written on the parchment he put into the stuffed vulture, which he’d then sewn shut again, Toby would cease doing Katie’s bidding. If, on the other hand, she succeeded, Toby vowed he’d follow her anywhere. Even to hell and back.
Ripped, a Jack the Ripper Time-Travel Thriller Page 14
