Ripped (34 page)

Katie nodded. “But we can't rule out Reverend Pinker as a suspect. He was alone with Georgie. Maybe Georgie said something. Or
sang
something that upset him. Maybe Reverend Pinker
is
Jack the Ripper.”

“No,” Toby said with finality. “It's Major Gideon Brown. I'd stake my life on it. He's setting up the Reverend. It's easy to do. Pinker's weak, he gets befuddled, and he works in the East End. He wears a preacher's collar. He'd be trusted by his victims. That's the way Major Brown's going to present his case.”

“If this was an Agatha Christie murder mystery—”

“Agatha who?”

“Christie. She wrote Golden-Age detective stories. Grandma Cleaves says you can always figure out who the murderer is in Agatha Christie novels once you've figured out who stands to gain financially.”

“Major Brown gains financially in this case if he marries Lady Beatrix. She has one of the largest dowries in all of England.”

“Toby . . .” Katie said gently. “Tell me about Dark Annie. Did you go to Hanbury Street with Major Brown?”

Toby nodded. A film veiled his eyes. “Major Brown made us accompany him to Georgie's grandmother's—he didn't want to let Collin or me out of his sight. But I'd rather not talk about it, Katie. Not now, not ever.” He rested his head wearily against the back of the armchair.

“You have to! It could save lives. It could save
Lady Beatrix
'
s
life. Please, Toby. If we work together on this . . . we might save those other girls. ”

Toby winced, then his mouth settled into a grim frown. He took his time before continuing. “It was like this,” he said in a harsh whisper. “The cab splashed up to the curb in front of number twenty-nine Hanbury Street at half-past eleven. It was raining. The first floor windows were alight. I could see a fire-glow through the curtains. Nothing gave me pause. Nothing alerted me to danger . . .

“We left Collin in the back of the cab—brooding. His face was bruised and bloody; his left eye, swollen shut. He refused to come with us. I didn't want to go in, but Major Brown shoved me out of the cab, and I didn't want to upset Dark Annie more than she already was.

“Outside, the pavement was wet and slick. ‘Sit there like a toad on a log, for all I care,' Major Brown shouted over his shoulder at Collin. ‘The day of reckoning for both you lads will come soon enough.' Then he hollered like a madman, ‘You can bloody well run, but you can't hide . . . not from me. Never from me! Idiots, the two of you. More fool me for ever trusting you, Toby. You've ruined any future you might have had at Scotland Yard. I'll go the extra mile to see you're never recruited.'

“I ignored him. He was showing the true colors of a bully. And I'm not afraid of him. Inside, we warmed our hands by the kitchen fire. Major Brown seemed distracted and nervous, and whenever he glanced at me, he was scowling. Georgie's grandmother asked me to fetch some fresh water from the pump out back in the courtyard, but Dark Annie said she preferred to go. I think Major Brown's anger distressed her and she wanted to get away from him. Five minutes later, when she didn't return, Major Brown went looking for her. All seemed quiet enough, but when he returned several minutes later, there was blood on his hands. Mrs. R's back was to him. She was toasting bread over the fire on a long, two-pronged fork. She didn't see him. He motioned me to follow and called out over his shoulder: ‘Stay put, Mrs. Richardson. We'll be back in a moment.' His voice was soothing and as if nothing in the world were out of place . . . as if he had no blood on his hands. He led me through a room full of ticking clocks and stacked boxes, out back, down the stairs into a shared courtyard with a recessed garden.

“ ‘There, over there—,' Major Brown said.

“I heard the clocks ticking inside my head. Through the light drizzle of rain, and in the half-light from the moon, I saw Annie Chapman's body on the ground looking like nothing more than a bundle of wet rags against the dark paving stones.

“ ‘Miss?' I remember saying as if she could hear me. ‘Are you all right, Miss Annie?' I thought she'd stumbled. I wanted to help her get up. But of course I couldn't. No one could—”

Toby was silent for a long time.

“Go on,” Katie urged, gripping her hands together.

“She was dead. Or nearly so,” Toby answered, releasing his breath. Then he sat back with a jerk.

What Toby didn't tell Katie was how he felt when he saw Dark Annie's entrails spilling from her gutted stomach over her hips, onto the wet pavement. It was as if he'd been caught in an exposed place, in front of a firing squad, rifles aimed straight at him. Fear gripped him so intensely, he quite literally couldn't walk. He went down on his knees and crawled to her side. Her cheeks were warm; her eyelids, too. And when he closed them he tried hard not to look at the steam rising from her still warm, pulsing innards, as if her soul was a vaporous mist trying to ascend upward into heaven. But there was no avoiding the moist, coppery smell of her raw, open flesh. Or the fact that her heart was still beating. That's when he vomited.

It was a long while before Toby resumed his narrative. When he finally did, his voice held a tremor of rage.

“Major Brown ordered me to wash my blood-smeared hands at the pump and return to the cab, and then get Collin safely back to Twyford Manor. I was to speak to no one. And like a frightened animal, I blindly did as he instructed. Collin was waiting in the cab. I told him nothing. But I instructed the cabbie to go immediately back to Dark Annie's house, not Twyford Manor.

“When we arrived, Dora Fowler was climbing the stoop, said she was visiting Dark Annie. Collin leaned out of the hansom window, all talkative and animated now that he saw Dora. She invited us to join her after at the Cock and Bull. Collin said yes. I said no and told him he was to stay put.

“When I rang the bell, an upstairs tenant let me in, but the door to Dark Annie's apartment was locked. No amount of pounding could rouse Reverend Pinker, who, I supposed, had fallen asleep, so I stole back outside and climbed into Georgie's window. The one I'd unlocked earlier.”

Toby continued staring into the fire. He knew he couldn't tell Katie about this new horror. How Georgie lay dead on the walnut cot. How his mouth, slack in his dead face, still retained traces of the bright, promising young man he might have been. How his arms, draped over the top of the patchwork quilt, were soft and plump, and as lifeless as putty. Yet everything else in the room had looked the same. The faded blue wallpaper. The dark water stains near the ceiling. The porcelain trinkets on the mantelpiece. The sewing basket stuck full of pins . . .

All precisely as before. Except that Georgie's curly hair was fanning outward against the grey mattress. A portion of Toby's brain noticed that the pillow was missing, but couldn't make sense of it at first. Not until he began methodically searching the room and found it wedged in the bottom drawer of the low chest next to the rocking chair.

And so it was that Georgie Cross, the market porter boy from Hanbury Street, who loved to sing and dance, and who fell in love with a different twist 'n' swirl every month . . . had been discovered dead, smothered to death. Toby had hurried into the front parlor, but Reverend Pinker was nowhere to be found. His leather Bible, with its gold clasp, lay upside down on a side table, splayed open, as if hastily thrown down.

Toby blinked up at Katie.

His eyes looked so haunted, she rose from her fireside chair and took his hands. His fingers didn't respond at first, just lay limp in hers. But when she squeezed, and he returned the pressure, she leaned over and brushed her lips across his. He tugged her toward him and returned the kiss, his lips hard and demanding.

All too soon, he pulled away. He kept seeing Dark Annie's consumptive eyes.

“I tell myself she hadn't long to live, Katie. Then I tell myself a dog shouldn't have to die the way that she did. And Georgie . . . Georgie had his whole life ahead of him. Georgie wouldn't hurt a fly. I keep asking myself who could have wanted them both dead?

“The answer is the same person who bashed Georgie's skull in at his grandmother's house. The same person who was looking for something and said, ‘
Hand it over!
' Georgie had something his attacker wanted. The pawn shop ticket. The opera glasses—”

“
Major Brown
,” they said in unison.

Chapter Forty

Go Up and Go Down say the Bells of London Town

“
W
e need to tell the Duke
.”

“
But it
'
s two o
'
clock in the bloody morning
!
”

“No choice,
To-bi-yas
—” Katie enunciated his name, hoping to make him smile. She'd never called him by his given name before. “We've got to tell the Duke about Major Brown.”

They argued until Katie finally got her way. The Duke of Twyford was a member of the House of Lords and had been the former Home Secretary as well as Director of Covert Operations for the Crown. He had the Queen's ear and knew every influential person in Parliament. “We need his help,” Katie insisted.

Grudgingly acquiescing, Toby threw open the door of Collin's bedchamber and they moved along the hallway in the direction of the west wing. Katie lifted her skirts so as not to trip as they made their way past the marble staircase with its stained glass window and then, moments later, took a dogleg turn down a winding corridor. It was so quiet at this hour that each padded thud of their footsteps seemed to reverberate down the long, drafty passageway. Gas jets in their wall sconces had been turned down so low as to be mere flickers in the gloom, throwing elongated shadows of their tiptoeing silhouettes across the carpeted path.

Leaving the main part of the manor house behind, they moved across bare floorboards, making it impossible to stifle the clumping sound of their footfalls. China bowls brimming with rose petals and orange peel had been set into wall niches to mask the odor in the ancient hallway. And even though the passage was deserted, it felt to Katie as if the ancestral portraits hanging on the walls were eyeballing her.
It
'
s like a movie set
, Katie thought.
Any minute the director will swoop out from behind the wings, shouting at us to take it from the top
.

“Katie?” Toby whispered. “What's wrong? Not getting squeamish, are you? The Duke's bark is worse than his bite . . . sometimes.”

Katie stared at the faded, Rembrandt-brown portraits of her dead ancestors in their starched collars and hilted swords, and had an overwhelming premonition of disaster. Two people had died tonight. And although this was the past, and everyone in it as long dead as the dour-faced Twyfords staring down at her from their gilded frames, the reality of Georgie Cross and Annie Chapman's murders weighed as heavily upon her as if it were all real.
But it is! This is happening in the here and now! It
'
s me who
'
s not real . . .
I haven
'
t been born yet!
Katie's stomach clenched and twisted like a dishcloth being wrung out to dry. She shuddered.

Toby spoke softly but clearly. “Go back to your room, lass. I'll handle this. 'Twas folly on my part to take you with me to speak to the Duke. In all likelihood the guv'nor will take one of his hulking daisy roots, give me a swift boot in the Khyber Pass, and send me packing. Katie?” He peered hard at her. “Have you heard a word I said?”

Katie glanced around the shadowy hallway decorated with frowning ancestors. She still couldn't shake the feeling that a stage door would pop open any minute revealing the film crew of some clever reality TV show. But instead of
So You Want to Be a Millionaire?
this one was
So You Think You Can Go Back in Time?

“I want to vote myself off this island,” Katie whispered.

“Island? What island? Katie, luv. Go back to your room. I'll handle this,” he gave her a gentle shove back down the hall.

“My name is Katie Lennox. I was born in Boston, Massachusetts. I'm in the nineteenth century.” She closed her eyes and clicked her heels as if, like Dorothy, she could magically wish herself home to Kansas. But when Katie opened her eyes, her own yellow brick road took the form of a gloomy, dark hallway stretching out in front of her.

The low-flame gas jets in the wall sconces flickered on and off like lightning bugs. Katie blinked around.
I can
'
t go home yet. Not yet
.

Toby took her wrist. “I'll take you back to your bedchamber and ring for Lady Beatrix's maid. She'll fix you a tonic to help you sleep.”

“No.” Katie's voice sounded determined and slightly breathless. She tried to make her racing heart calm down. “I'm fine, Toby. I was just . . . thinking . . . maybe
hoping
. . . this was all an illusion. All these deaths. This house. Even you, Toby. Maybe
you
'
re
not real. Maybe I have a concussion and am dreaming. . . or maybe I have amnesia.”

“Am what?”

Katie blinked at him. Who had coined the term amnesia? Sigmund Freud?

Against the gas-glimmer in the hallway, Katie could see Toby's worried face. “I'm okay, Toby. Come on. We have to talk to the Duke. We have to convince him to help us.”

“You risked too much coming here . . . across time. Leave the rest to me. I'll save those girls . . . and Lady Beatrix, too. This is a job for a man, not a wee lass.”

“I didn't risk anything coming here, Toby. I didn't come voluntarily. But I'm
staying
of my own free will. I can return home any time I want, through the London Stone. But I'm staying.
And as for a job for a man!
Of all the sexist, pig-headed, macho, bull—”

She was about to say “bullshit” but changed it to “bull-ony. Total baloney.”

Toby stared at her. Katie's face was pale; her body, rigid with fright or indignation, he wasn't sure. He knew he oughtn't to have let her bamboozle him into coming with him to speak to the Duke, but something about this girl compelled him to do things against his better judgment. When he was eleven, right after his mother died, Toby had been given a gift of a theft-key from his Uncle Kittrick. It was an instrument used to rifle locked rooms at hotels and gentleman's clubs. The tool could unlock a door from the outside, then lock it back again, making it appear as if the room had never been burgled. Toby had never used the pin-wheel contraption, hooked like a darning needle, but the very idea that he owned such an object had given him great satisfaction. And Katie, he believed, was like that theft-key. She held the power to unlock these deaths and lock their secrets back up. She was an unwitting instrument, a tool of some sort, to be used . . . but by whom and for what purpose, Toby wasn't sure.

Toby took Katie's wrist and began tugging her back to the main part of the house, but she resisted. Straining to wrench free, she began to tug in the opposite direction. A brief contest of wills carried them halfway down the hall until they were standing squarely in front of the servants' staircase. Katie seized the banister rail and held tight.

Toby gripped her wrist more firmly.

“Leave off, Katie. I'll not argue with you. You're to stay away from whatever madness has descended on the Twyford household. I'll not allow you to bedevil my wits again. It was foolish of me—”

“Oh, cut it out, Toby. Give me a break! I'm not some simpering nineteenth-century girl who faints dead away in a crisis. I'm here — I'm not sure why—but I
am
here to see this thing through to the end. I'm going to solve these murders with or without your help.
Put that in your damn pipe and smoke it
!
”

Startled, Toby loosened his grip, but not entirely. The girl could blaspheme the very act of smoking!

“Release me, right now,” Katie demanded, squirming and tugging.

Toby clamped on harder. The little vixen was not going to have her way this time. Not if he had anything to do with it.

Seeing his mouth set in a firm line, Katie had a jolt of inspiration. “If you don't release me this instant, I'll—”

Toby braced for Katie to yank more forcefully, but instead, she stopped struggling, rose on tiptoe, and planted a warm, moist kiss on his lips. And it was not a chaste kiss, or a sisterly peck, nor even a cousinly hit-or-miss pucker. It was a deep, resolute, single-minded, intense, lip-locking kiss. Toby opened his mouth, and his tongue found hers. A Cockney expression, “When tongues mate, the devil takes your fate,” rang through his mind. For a moment he struggled hard with his intense desire to demonstrate a respectful show of propriety, but he rapidly descended past any concern for her honor, her reputation, or even her station in life. The girl had bewitched him, and now she should give a care for her own safety because he had lost all ability to do so.

A door down the hall banged open.

“
God
'
s elbow
!”
bellowed a voice from the end of the dimly lit passage. “What in blazes do you two think you're doing? Bloody hell!” roared the Duke, looming large in a dark-green robe and velvet nightcap.

Toby instantly loosened his grip on Katie and just as quickly tightened his grip on the banister. It took every ounce of concentration to turn and face Sir Godfrey without exhibiting any outward signs of physical ardor. He thought about Dark Annie, and the vision of the dead woman cooled his emotional temperature.

“
Tobias
!”
the Duke hollered. “You scoundrel! Of all the lowdown, treacherous, deceitful, unreliable —” He took a deep breath and swiveled his angry gaze toward Katie.
“
Miss Katherine
!”

“Sir Godfrey?” Katie returned without a tremor. In fact, just the opposite, a bit of humor, or so it seemed to Toby. “Just the person we came to talk to!” Katie said and strode down the hall toward the Duke, chin held high. “We need to discuss something urgent with you, sir.”

Toby blinked at Katie's retreating figure.
The lass has guts.
He took a deep breath, squared his shoulders for the harsh reprisal that would inevitably ensue, and followed in the girl's shadowy wake.

“A matter of life and death, you say?” the Duke responded to Katie's assertion when they entered his sitting room. “Your life . . . and this young fathead's
death?
Is that it? Shall I skin him alive? Maybe disembowel the blighter? Just say the word, m'girl. He's a bloody anvil round my neck as it is. I was about to have my manservant fetch the blundering numbskull and demand an accounting of my grandson's whereabouts. But you've saved me the trouble.”

Katie blinked at the Duke. Death by disembowelment was an unfortunate choice of words. She glanced over her shoulder at Toby standing in the doorway, and saw it in his face, too. He had paled considerably. They were in the Duke's chambers, in his sitting room.

Sir Godrey tugged off his nightcap and clamped murderous eyes on Toby. “So! Tell me, you insolent little pup, you fatheaded numbskull”—the Duke snorted like an elephant about to charge— “why it is that you arrived home
without my grandson?
Jeffries informed me, over an hour ago, that Collin did not return home, but that you had . . .
alone!
Your one and only job is to stay with my grandson and keep the blistering idiot out of mischief.
Bah!
And now I find you manhandling this little-bitty slip of a girl,
my goddaughter!
What in blazes is going on in that fatheaded brain of yours? You dimwitted Casanova! No! Don't answer that. It's a rhetorical question, you bloody fool. But this one isn't. Where's that nincompoop grandson of mine? What mischief is Collin up to now, eh? I'll skin you both alive, that's what I'll do! Boil you in oil.
God
'
s eyeballs
, I'll rid the world of fatheads if it's the last thing I do!”

The stained-glass lampshade on the only burning lamp in the Duke's chamber was throwing a kaleidoscope of colors onto the wall. Its jeweled glow, mingling with the firelight, made the room appear deceptively inviting. Even the crown of leaves perched atop the marble head of Caesar Augustus above the mantel appeared to blaze in an explosive palette of neon.

“
Miss Katherine,
”
Sir Godfrey growled, snatching up his cane. “Will you be kind enough to wait here whilst I have a little chat in the next room with this odious scalawag? What I have to say to him will have nothing to do with a razor strop or the back of my hand—though
God
'
s teeth
, I've a mind to use both. But I assure you, m'girl, you needn't concern your pretty little head with the likes of him again! You have my assurance you'll have no further cause for alarm. I shall banish young Romeo here, from—”

“Oh, he did nothing wrong, sir. I encouraged him to kiss me. In fact, I insisted. I was trying to comfort him. You see, he's had quite a shock tonight. A double shock to be exact. Which is why we're here. Toby witnessed two mur—”