City of Light (City of Mystery) (32 page)

Isabel sat down on a
red velvet armchair and gazed up at her portrait.  It was hung over the settee,
the largest and most dominant piece of art in this artful room.  Each picture
has its personal code, James had often told her, with the clues plain enough to
anyone with the eyes to perceive them.  But so few people really look.  They
see what they expect to see, nothing more, and Isabel’s entire life has been
built on this principle.  It is not hard to fool people when they do not want
to know the truth.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Paris

3:15 AM

If Tom Bainbridge
had not been so exhausted and worried, he would have laughed.  He and Emma had
slipped out of the apartment in full darkness so as not to waken Trevor or
Geraldine – an unlikely complication since, just as Emma had predicted, both of
them had begun loudly snoring within minutes of closing their bedroom doors.  It
was not until Tom and Emma were standing outside beneath a streetlight that he
got his first proper look at her ensemble.  She had borrowed a man’s shirt and
trousers from a bureau, but Geraldine’s cousin evidently had the shape of a
bear.  Although it had been wrapped three times, the belt barely managed to
keep the trousers attached to Emma’s slender waist and, despite the fact she
had carefully rolled both the pants legs and shirt cuffs, the slightest
physical effort would undoubtedly unfurl them.

“Those clothes are
so ridiculously large that you’re swimming already,” Tom said. “When the cloth
gets wet, you’ll be pulled straight under.”

Emma lifted her
small pointed chin. “I’m a good swimmer.”

“No one is that good
a swimmer.”

“Then when we get to
the river, you can give me your clothes and take these.”

It was not a bad
suggestion.  If they exchanged garments, they would both be in clothes that
were, while definitely too large, at least not floppy enough to drown them.

“Perhaps,” Tom said
cautiously, a bit ashamed that his first thought had not been the viability of
the idea but that it meant he’d get a chance to glimpse Emma naked. “But first
we have to get to the river.”

They scuffled to the
nearest avenue where they were both surprised to see that there was a good
amount of activity.  This hour would find the streets of Mayfair completely
empty, but Paris were still bustling and Tom did not have the slightest trouble
in hailing a cab.  It took them to the bridge where Graham’s body had been
found, which they had deemed as good a starting point as any.  Once there, they
left the lighted world of the street to pick their way down the increasing
darkness leading to the riverbank. 

On a rainy night
there would have been any number of indigents sleeping beneath the bridge for
shelter, but this night was clear and calm.  Therefore, the unfortunates of Paris
were scattered about the bank, looking a bit like bodies on a battlefield, as
if each had simply fallen wherever he was struck.  In this case, it was
undoubtedly alcohol rather than bullets which had felled them, but it was still
a bit startling to see so many people - men, women, and children alike - dotting
the ground.  Tom had almost tripped over one black-swathed form, which had
growled in protest before returning to slumber.  But their eyes eventually adjusted
and, holding hands, Emma and Tom found their way to the bottom of the slope.

Since they could
scarcely float along with Tom’s pocket watch in their possession, they had
earlier determined that they would enter the river precisely as the church
bells struck four, then leave the water when the same obliging chapel released
a single peal to indicate the half hour. But the fact that they had found a cab
more easily than expected now left them with more than twenty minutes to idle until
the hour rang.  It was very dark on the bank, as if they had been sunk into a
great teacup with the lighted rim of the street above, and, with a perfunctory
look around her in all directions, Emma turned her back and resolutely began
unhitching the belt which held her trousers. Tom turned in the opposite
direction and did the same until, having tossed their castoff clothing one item
at a time over their shoulders, each had assumed the outfit of the other.

Then there was
nothing to do but sit on the ground and wait.  It was hard to see the actual
river from this angle, but the bank did not look particularly steep and the
gentle murmur of the water suggested that the current would not be especially
strong.  Emma closed her eyes, already dreading the icy sting that would come
with their first immersion.

“When you float,”
she said to Tom, “keep your legs straight out in front of you and headed
downstream. Then, if there are any boulders in the water, you will strike them
with your feet and not your head.”

“Indeed,” Tom said. 
“But there shouldn’t be many large rocks, should there?  The river is used for
commerce, so they’ve doubtless cleared the worst of them out.”

“Boulders on the
shore, I meant.”

“Ah, yes.  Quite
right.” 

A moment of silence,
and then Tom added, “And keep your head up out of the water as best you can.  City
rivers are fed by sewers, not springs, and the less we expose our facial
apertures to contagion, the better.”

“Facial apertures?”

“Mouth, nose, eyes,
ears. That sort of thing.”

“Oh.  Oh yes, I see
what you mean.”

Another expanse of
silence.  Each waited for the bells, but none came.

“How did you know
the bit about keeping the feet out first?” Tom finally ventured.

In the darkness,
Emma smiled. “I was raised in the country, remember?  This will not be the
first river I’ve swum.”

Tom smiled as well. 
“Lest you forget, I was raised in the country too.   When we were children at
Rosemoral, Leanna and I once pirated our grandfather’s little skiff from the
dock house and attempted to-“

Just then, the first
bell.

4:00 AM

At the sound of the
bells, Rayley stirred, causing his entire body to throb in protest.  His
muscles, his skin, the joint of his left elbow.  All pulsing with pain and he
could taste the salty warmth of blood in his mouth.   He probed with his
tongue.  Two teeth loose, possibly three.  But all still embedded into the gum,
it would appear, and this was most fortunate.

The beating had been
bad… but not nearly as bad as it could have been.  This he knew even as he
ventured to stretch and felt his shoulders spasming in response, even as he
began to sense the contusions and cuts along his arms and hands.  This had been
a surface beating, with no serious blows to the ribs or abdomen – no more than a
warning, a metaphorical shot across the bow.  Gerard was certainly capable of
more brutality and in fact had probably had trouble muting the force of his
punches.  His restraint was undoubtedly due to very specific orders from Armand
Delacroix.  The man had wanted Rayley frightened, but not immobilized.  He
wanted him to sense rather than experience Gerard’s potential force, to be
stunned into submission, unnerved enough to betray Isabel’s hiding place. 

Rayley put a
throbbing finger to the corner of his split lip.  He’d had nothing to confess
to Delacroix, even if he had been willing to do so, and in terms of his own
fate, he suspected it didn’t matter either way.  Delacroix could hardly kidnap
a Scotland Yard detective, reveal his identity to that same detective, and then
let him go free.  No matter what secrets were told or withheld, Armand’s
willingness to personally appear in the cell had made one thing clear: this
captivity would ultimately end in Rayley’s death.

That is, unless…

Trevor was in Paris. 
While Armand Delacroix had learned nothing from Rayley Abrams in this opening
skirmish, the opposite had not been true.  In fact, the conversation had been a
bounty of information.  Trevor had come to Paris, evidently bringing Tom, Emma,
and – for reasons Rayley could not begin to fathom – Geraldine Bainbridge along
with him.  Rayley knew his only hope for survival was to either stay alive long
enough to give Trevor and the others time to find him or to devise some means
of escape.

But how?  He was
trapped in a room with nothing but a high window, a bed, and a bucket.  And his
wits, he supposed, although they had been compromised by steady doses of drugs
and the almost complete disorientation that extended stretches of captivity can
impose on the mind.  Still, there had to be some way.

Gerard was coming to
the cell twice a day to bring food, water, and chloroform.  There was no evidence
the man spoke English, and Rayley’s French was hopeless.  So it was unlikely he
would be able to trick Gerard into betraying some vital piece of information, and
even less likely he would find some way to bribe him or appeal to any residual
sense of mercy. 

Rayley pulled back
his finger, stared at the slight smear of blood, barely visible in the dull
reflected glow of the streetlight.  Across the room, something scuttled.  A
wharf rat, no doubt. They had been coming and going through the last
forty-eight hours, taking more interest in the mushy potatoes Gerard delivered
than Rayley had been able to muster.  As he watched, the rat ran up the wall
and out through the narrow window, his tail flicking against the rusty iron
bars as it slipped out of sight.  Rayley sank back on his bed, deep in thought.

4:10 AM  

Tom couldn’t decide
if he had merely adjusted to the cold of the water or was in the first stages
of hypothermia.  He and Emma had bobbed along for several minutes now, and it
was becoming abundantly clear that their primary problem was not crashing into
boulders or drowning beneath the weight of their oversized clothing, but rather
moving at all.  The Seine had turned out to be a stagnant river, faintly malodorous
and slow.  As they had expected, Tom’s heavier body had floated slightly faster
than Emma’s, but only marginally so, and they had stayed with sight of each
other for the whole of their limited journey.

“It’s certainly
shallow,” she called up to him.  “My feet keep scraping the bottom.”

“Try and keep them
up,” he called back.  “We need to measure how fast bodies float, not how fast
we can walk.”

“I know that,” she
snapped. “But the current is so weak that I keep sinking.   Are you sure we
can’t lie back in the water and travel like a proper pair of corpses?”

Tom tried to weigh
the risks.  She was right, their absurd efforts to remain upright in the water
were forcing them to paddle and thus they were scarcely reproducing the
movements nor the pace of the original two bodies. “All right then, lie back,”
he finally yelled over his shoulder. “But keep your face out of the water.  And
thrust your fingers in your ears.”

“With pleasure,”
Emma muttered. She released herself into the water, looking up into the night sky,
and almost immediately began to float faster.  The same was probably true for
Tom, she thought, perhaps to the degree that their paths would diverge or that
his increased weight would stretch the distance between them in the river.  As
annoying as it was to have Tom give advice about her own experiment, she didn’t
really want to lose him in this darkness or in this cold river.  Didn’t really
want to lose him at all. 

She drifted on,
straining to arch her neck and keep her mouth and nose free from any splashing. 
The cold was gripping into her.  The fingers she had thrust into her ears had
gone completely numb, as had her feet.  Her scalp was pricking with icy needles
and Emma felt as if she were caught between two worlds of darkness. The moving
one beneath her, which gently lifted and then lowered her body, as if the Seine
was somehow keeping time with the pattern of her own breathing.  And then the
other great darkness above, the night sky stretched like a blue-black cloth
punctured with stars.  

There are times, she
thought, when we are lifted quite out of ourselves, when we could be any
person, in any place and time in history.  The last six months had changed her beyond
comprehension. In fact you might say that Jack the Ripper had turned Emma Kelly
from one person into another, snatching away any hope of reconciliation with
her sister but also giving her this unlikely new job and a life that was
suddenly full of passion and purpose.  Fate drives cruel bargains.  We must always
release one thing before we can grasp something else, Emma reflected, and with
a strange internal jolt she wondered if Isabel Blout had ever felt this way. 
If so, she had come to the right city.  Paris, so bright and full of hope.  That
wildly manic painter she had met at the party tonight, the one who had told her
that he wanted to go to Tahiti.  Gauguin had been his name and he had looked at
Emma with such emotion that she had turned away, almost embarrassed, as if the
man were exposing his very soul to her in the middle of the crowded party.

“This urge to
reinvent yourself is very strong,” Gauguin had said.  “I believe you may feel
it as well, do you not?”  He had leaned towards her to whisper, bringing his
lips very close to her ear.  Impossible rudeness, unthinkable presumption, an
act of such raw intimacy that she had flushed with the feel of his breath on
her cheek.  And he had murmured, “Yes, Miss Kelly, I somehow sense that you
do.”