A Great Deliverance

1

It was a solecism of the very worst kind. He sneezed loudly, wetly, and quite unforgivably into the woman’s face. He’d been holding it back for three-quarters of an hour, fighting it off as if it were Henry Tudor’s vanguard in the Battle of Bosworth. But at last he’d surrendered. And after the act, to make matters worse, he immediately began to snuffle.

The woman stared. She was exactly the type whose presence always reduced him to blithering idiocy. At least six feet tall, dressed in that wonderfully insouciant mismatch of clothing so characteristic of the British upper classes, she was ageless, timeless, and she peered at him through razor blue eyes, the sort that must have reduced many a parlour-maid to tears forty years ago. She had to be well over sixty, possibly closer to eighty, but one could never tell. She sat bolt upright in her seat, hands clasped in her lap, a fi nishingschool posture which made no concessions towards comfort.

And she stared. First at his Roman collar, then at his undeniably dripping nose.

Do forgive, darling. A thousand apologies. Let’s not allow a little faux pas like a sneeze to come between such a friendship as ours. He was always so amusing when engaged in mental conversations. It was only aloud that everything became a terrible muddle.

He snuffled again. Again she stared. Why on earth was she travelling second class? She’d swept into the carriage in Doncaster, like a creaking Salome with rather more than seven veils to her ensemble, and for the remainder of the trip she’d alternated between imbibing the railway’s foul-smelling tepid coffee and staring at him with a disapproval that shouted Church of England at every available opportunity.

And then came the sneeze. Unimpeachably correct behaviour from Dancaster to London might have somehow excused his Roman Catholicism to her. But alas, the sneeze condemned him forever.

“I…ah…that is…if you’ll excuse…” It was simply no good. His handkerchief was deep within his pocket. To reach it he would have to loosen his grasp on the battered attaché case in his lap, and that was unthinkable. She would just have to understand. We aren’t talking about a breach of etiquette here, madam. We are talking about MURDER. Upon that thought, he snuffled with self-righteous vigour.

Hearing this, the woman sat even more correctly in her seat, every fibre of her body straining to project disapproval. Her glance said it all. It was a chronicle of her thoughts, and he could read each one: Pitiful little man. Pathetic. Not a day under seventy-fi ve and looking positively every second of it. And so very much what one would expect of a Catholic priest: a face with three separate nicks from a poor job at shaving; a crumb of morning toast embedded in the corner of his mouth; shiny black suit mended at elbows and cuffs; squashed hat rimmed with dust. And that dreadful case in his lap! Ever since Doncaster he had been acting as if she’d boarded the train with the deliberate intention of snatching it from him and hurling herself out the window. Lord!

The woman sighed and turned away from him as if seeking salvation. But none was apparent. His nose continued to dribble until the slowing of the train announced that they were finally approaching their journey’s end.

She stood and scourged him with a fi nal look. “At last I understand what you Catholics mean by purgatory,” she hissed and swept down the aisle to the door.

“Oh dear,” muttered Father Hart. “Oh dear, I suppose I really have…” But she was gone. The train had come to a complete halt under the vaulted ceiling of the London station. It was time to do what he had come to the city to do.

He looked about to make sure that he was in possession of all his belongings, a pointless operation since he had brought nothing with him from Yorkshire save the single attaché case that had as yet not left his grip. He squinted out the window at the vast expanse of King’s Cross Station.

He had been more prepared for a station like Victoria-or at least the Victoria he remembered from his youth-with its comforting old brick walls, its stalls and buskers, these latter always staying one step ahead of the metropolitan police. But King’s Cross was something altogether different: long stretches of tiled floor, seductive advertisements hanging from the ceiling, newsagents, tobacconists, hamburger shops. And all the people-many more than he had expected-in queues for tickets, gobbling down hurried snacks as they raced for trains, arguing, laughing, and kissing goodbye. Every race, every colour. It was all so different. He wasn’t sure he could bear the noise and confusion.

“Getting out, Father, or planning to stop t’ night?”

Startled, Father Hart looked up into the ruddy face of the porter who had helped him find his seat earlier that morning upon the train’s departure from York. It was a pleasant, north country face with the winds of the moors etched upon it in a hundred separate blood vessles that rode and broke near the surface of his skin.

His eyes were flinty blue, quick and perceptive. And Father Hart felt them like a touch as they slid in a friendly but querying movement from his face to the attaché case. Tightening his fingers round the handle, he stiffened his body, hoping for resolution and getting an excruciating cramp in his left foot instead. He moaned as the pain balled hotly to its zenith.

The porter spoke anxiously. “Maybe you oughtn’t be travellin’ alone. Sure you don’t need no help, like?”

He did, of course he did. But no one could help. He couldn’t help himself.

“No, no. I’m off this very moment. And you’ve been more than kind. My seat, you know. The initial confusion.”

The porter waved his words away. “Don’t mind that. There’s lots of folks don’t realise them tickets means reserved. No harm done, was there?”

“No. I suppose…” Father Hart drew in a quick, sustaining breath. Down the aisle, out the door, find the tube, he told himself. None of that could be as insurmountable as it seemed. He shuffled towards the exit. His case, clutched two-handed upon his stomach, bounced with each step.

Behind him, the porter spoke. “’Ere, Father, the door’s a bit much. I’ll see to ’t.”

He allowed the man space to get past him in the aisle. Already two surly-looking railway cleaners were squeezing in the rear door, rubbish sacks over their shoulders, ready to prepare the train for its return trip to York. They were Pakistani, and although they spoke English, Father Hart found that he couldn’t understand a single word beneath the obfuscation of their accents.

The realisation filled him with dread. What was he doing here in the nation’s capital where the inhabitants were foreigners who looked at him with cloudy, hostile eyes and immigrant faces? What paltry good could he hope to do? What silliness was this? Who would ever believe-

“Need some help, Father?”

Father Hart finally moved decisively. “No. Fine. Simply fi ne.”

He negotiated the steps, felt the concrete platform beneath his feet, heard the calling of pigeons high in the vaulted ceiling of the station. He began to make his distracted way down the platform towards the exit and Euston Road.

Behind him again he heard the porter. “Someone meeting you? Know where you’re going? Where you off to now?”

The priest straightened his shoulders. He waved a goodbye. “Scotland Yard,” he replied fi rmly.

St. Pancras Station, directly across the street from King’s Cross, was such an architectural antithesis of the latter that Father Hart stood for several moments simply staring at its neo-Gothic magnifi cence. The clamour of traffic on Euston Road and the malodourous belching of two diesel-fuelled lorries at the pavement’s edge faded into insignifi cance. He was a bit of an architecture buff, and this particular building was architecture gone wild.

“Good heavens, that’s wonderful,” he murmured, tilting his head to have a better view of the railway station’s peaks and valleys. “A bit of a cleaning and she’d be a regular palace.” He looked about absently, as if he would stop the next passerby and give a discourse on the evils that generations of coal fires had wrought upon the old building. “Now, I wonder who…”

The two-note siren of a police van howled suddenly down Caledonian Road, shrieking through the intersection onto Euston. It brought the priest back to reality. He shook himself mentally, part in irritation but another, greater part in fear. His mind was wandering daily now. And that signalled the end, didn’t it? He swallowed a gagging lump of terror and sought new determination. His eyes fell upon the scream of a headline across the morning paper propped up on a nearby newsstand. He stepped toward it curiously. RIPPER STRIKES AT VAUXHALL STATION!

Ripper! He shrank from the words, cast a look about, and then gave himself over to one quick paragraph from the story, skimming it rapidly lest a closer perusal betray an interest in morbidity unseemly in a man of the cloth. Words, not sentences, caught his sight. Slashed…semi-nude bodies…arteries…severed… victims male…

He shivered. His fingers went to his throat and he considered its true vulnerability. Even a Roman collar was no certain protection from the knife of a killer. It would seek. It would plunge.

The thought was shattering. He staggered back from the newsstand, and mercifully saw the underground sign a mere thirty feet away. It jogged his memory.

He groped in his pocket for a map of the city’s underground system and spent a moment painstakingly perusing its crinkled surface. “The circle line to St. James’s Park,” he told himself. And then again with more authority, “The circle line to St. James’s Park. The circle line to St. James’s Park.”

Like a Gregorian chant, he repeated the sentence as he descended the stairs. He maintained its metre and rhythm up to the ticket window and did not cease until he had placed himself squarely on the train. There he glanced at the other occupants of the car, found two elderly ladies watching him with unveiled avidity, and ducked his head. “So confusing,” he explained, trying out a timid smile of friendship. “One gets so turned about.”

“All kinds is what I’m tellin’ you, Pammy,” the younger of the two women declared to her companion. She shot a look of practiced, chilling contempt at the cleric. “Disguised as anything, I hear.” Keeping her watery eyes on the confused priest, she dragged her withered friend to her feet, clung to the poles near the door, and urged her out loudly at the very next stop.

Father Hart watched their departure with resignation. No blaming them, he thought. One couldn’t trust. Not ever. Not really. And that’s what he’d come to London to say: that it wasn’t the truth. It only looked like the truth. A body, a girl, and a bloody axe. But it wasn’t the truth. He had to convince them, and…Oh Lord, he had so little talent for this. But God was on his side. He held onto that thought. What I’m doing is right, what I’m doing is right, what I’m doing is right. Replacing the other, this new chant took him right to the doors of New Scotland Yard.

“So damned if we don’t have another Kerridge-Nies confrontation on our hands,” Superintendent Malcolm Webberly concluded. He paused to light a thick cigar that immediately permeated the air with a nasty pall of smoke.

“Christ in heaven, Malcolm, open a window if you insist on smoking that thing,” his companion replied. As chief superintendent, Sir David Hillier was Webberly’s superior, but he liked to let his men run their individual divisions in their own way. He himself would never dream of launching such an olfactory assault so shortly before an interview, but Malcolm’s ways were not his own and they had never been proven ineffectual. He moved his chair to escape the worst of the fumes and let his eyes take in the worst of the offi ce.

Hillier wondered how Malcolm ever managed his department as efficiently as he did, given his bent for chaos. Files and photographs and reports and books covered every surface. There were empty coffee cups and overfull ashtrays and even a pair of ancient running shoes high on a shelf. Just as Webberly intended, the room looked and smelled like the disordered digs of an undergraduate: cramped, friendly, and fusty. Only an unmade bed was missing. It was the sort of place that made gathering, lingering, and talking easy, that bred camaraderie among men who had to work as a team. Clever Malcolm, Hillier thought. Five or six times shrewder than his ordinary, stoop-shouldered, over-plump looks would indicate.

Webberly pushed himself away from his desk and played about with the window, grunting and straining with the latch before finally forcing it open. “Sorry, David. I always forget.” He sat back down at his desk, surveyed its litter with a melancholy gaze, and said, “What I didn’t need was this right now.” He ran one hand back through his sparse hair. Ginger once, it was now mostly grey.

“Trouble at home?” Hillier asked carefully, eyes fixed on his gold signet ring. It was a difficult question for both of them since he and Webberly were married to sisters, a fact that most of the Yard knew nothing about, one of which the two men themselves rarely spoke.

Their relationship was one of those quirks of fate in which two men find themselves locked together in a number of ways which are generally better not discussed between them. Hillier’s career had mirrored his marriage. Both were successful, deeply satisfying. His wife was perfection: a rock of devotion, an intellectual companion, a loving mother, a sexual delight. He admitted that she was the very centre of his existence, that his three children were merely tangential objects, pleasant and diverting, but nothing at all of real importance compared to Laura. He turned to her- his first thought in the morning, his last thought at night-for virtually every need in his life. And she met each one.

For Webberly it was different: a career that was, like the man, plodding along, one not brilliant but cautious, filled with countless successes for which he rarely took credit, for Webberly simply was not the political animal he needed to be to succeed at the Yard. Thus, no knighthood loomed seductively on his professional horizon, and this was what had put the enormous strain upon the Webberly marriage.

Knowing that her younger sister was Lady Hillier clawed at the fabric of Frances Webberly’s life. It had turned her from a shy but complacent middle-class housewife to a social climber of the pushiest kind. Dinner parties, cocktail parties, dreary buffets which they could ill afford were given for people in whom they had no interest, all of them part of what Frances perceived as her husband’s climb to the top. And to them all the Hilliers faithfully went, Laura out of sad loyalty to a sister with whom she no longer lovingly communicated and Hillier himself to protect Webberly as best he could from the piercingly cruel comments Frances often made publicly about her husband’s lacklustre career. Lady Macbeth incarnate, Hillier thought with a shudder.

“No, not there,” Webberly was responding. “It’s merely that I thought I’d got Nies and Kerridge sorted out years ago. To have a confrontation crop up again between them is disconcerting.”

How typical of Malcolm to take responsibility for the foibles of others, Hillier thought. “Refresh my memory on their last fray,” he said. “It was a Yorkshire situation, wasn’t it? Gypsies involved in a murder?”

Webberly nodded. “Nies heads up the Richmond police.” He sighed heavily, forgetting for a moment to blow the smoke from his cigar towards the open window. Hillier strained not to cough. Webberly loosened his necktie a fraction and absently fingered the frayed collar of his white shirt. “An old gypsy woman was killed up there three years ago. Nies runs a tight CID. His men are meticulous, accurate to the last detail. They conducted an investigation and arrested the old crone’s son-in-law. It was an apparent dispute over the ownership of a garnet necklace.”

“Garnets? Were they stolen?”

Webberly shook his head, tapping his cigar against a dented tin ashtray on his desk. The action dislodged debris from previous cigars, which drifted like dust to mingle with papers and manila folders. “No. The necklace had been given to them by Edmund Hanston-Smith.”

Hillier sat forward in his chair. “Hanston-Smith?”

“Yes, you’re remembering it now, aren’t you? But that case was after all this. The man arrested for the old woman’s murder-Romaniv, I think his name was-had a wife. About twenty-five years old and beautiful in the way only those women can be: dark, olive-skinned, exotic.”

“More than a bit enticing to a man like Hanston-Smith?”

“In truth. She got him to believe that Romaniv was innocent. It took a few weeks-Romaniv hadn’t come up before the assizes yet. She convinced Hanston-Smith that the case needed to be reopened. She swore that they were only being persecuted because of their gypsy blood, that Romaniv had been with her the entire night in question.”

“I imagine her charms made that easy to believe.”

Webberly’s mouth quirked. He stubbed out the tip of his cigar in the ashtray and clasped his freckled hands over his stomach. They effectively hid the stain on his waistcoat. “From the later testimony of Hanston-Smith’s valet, the good Mrs. Romaniv had no trouble keeping even a man of sixty-two more than busy for one entire night. You’ll recall that Hanston-Smith was a man of some considerable political influence and wealth. It was no difficult matter for him to convince the York-shire constabulary to become involved. So Reuben Kerridge-he’s still Yorkshire ’s chief constable in spite of all that happened- ordered Nies’s investigation reopened. And to make matters worse, he ordered Romaniv released.”

“How did Nies react?”

“Kerridge is his superior officer, after all. What could he do? Nies was wild with anger, but he released Romaniv and ordered his men to begin again.”

“It would seem that releasing Romaniv, while making his wife happy, would bring a premature end to Hanston-Smith’s joy,” Hillier noted.

“Well, of course Mrs. Romaniv felt duty-bound to thank Hanston-Smith in the manner to which he’d become so accustomed. She slept with him one last time-wore the poor bloke out until the wee hours of the morning, if I have the story straight-and then let Romaniv into the house.” Webberly looked up at a sharp knock on the door. “The rest, as they say, is a bit of bloody history. The pair murdered Hanston-Smith, took everything they could carry, got to Scarborough, and were out of the country before dawn.”

“And Nies’s reaction?”

“Demanded Kerridge’s immediate resignation.” The knock sounded again. Webberly ignored it. “He didn’t get it, however. But Nies’s mouth has been watering like the devil for it ever since.”

“And here we are back with them again, you say.”

A third knock, much more insistent. Webberly called entrance to Bertie Edwards, the Met’s head of forensics, who entered the room in his usual brisk manner, scribbling on his clipboard and speaking to it at the same time.

To Edwards, the clipboard was as human as most men’s secretaries.

“Severe contusion on the right temple,” he was announcing happily, “followed by the main laceration to the carotid artery. No identification, no money, stripped down to the underclothes. It’s the Railway Ripper, all right.” He finished writing with a fl ourish.

Hillier surveyed the little man with profound distaste. “Christ, these Fleet Street appellations. We’re going to be haunted by Whitechapel till the end of time.”

“Is this the Waterloo corpse?” Webberly asked.

Edwards glanced at Hillier, his face an open book in which he considered whether he should argue the merits of nameless killers being dubbed something-anything-for the sake of public awareness. He apparently rejected that line of communication, for he wiped at his forehead with the sleeve of his lab coat and turned to his immediate superior.

“ Waterloo.” He nodded. “Number eleven. We’ve not quite finished Vauxhall yet. Both are typical of the Ripper victims we’ve seen. Transient types. Broken nails. Dirty. Badly cut hair. Body lice as well. King’s Cross is still the only one out of sync, and that’s the bloody devil after all these weeks. No ID. No missing-person’s call on him yet. I can’t make it out.” He scratched his head with the end of his pen. “Want the Waterloo snap? I’ve brought it.”

Webberly waved towards the wall on which were already posted the photographs of the twelve recent murder victims, all of them killed in an identical manner in or near London train stations. Thirteen murders now in just over fi ve weeks. The papers were screaming for an arrest. As if he were oblivious to this, Edwards whistled airily between his teeth and rooted on Webberly’s desk for a drawing pin. He carried the latest victim to the wall.

“Not a bad shot.” He stepped back to admire his work. “Sewed him up quite nice.”

“Jesus!” Hillier exploded. “You’re a ghoul, man! At least have the decency to remove that filthy coat when you come here! Have you no sense at all? We’ve women on these floors!”

Edwards wore the guise of patient attention, but his eyes flicked over the chief superintendent and lingered longest on the fleshy neck that hung over his collar and on the thick hair that Hillier liked to have called leonine.

Edwards shrugged at Webberly in mutual understanding. “Quite the gent, he is,” he commented before leaving the room.

“Sack him!” Hillier shouted as the door shut behind the pathologist.

Webberly laughed. “Have a sherry, David,” he said. “It’s in the cabinet behind you. We none of us ought to be here on a Saturday.”

Two sherries considerably palliated Hillier’s irritation with the pathologist. He was standing before Webberly’s display wall, staring morosely at the thirteen photographs.

“This is one hell of a mess,” he noted sourly. “Victoria, King’s Cross, Waterloo, Liverpool, Blackfriars, Paddington. God damn it, man, why can’t he at least be alphabetical!”

“Maniacs often lack that little organisational touch,” Webberly responded placidly.

“Five of these victims don’t even have names, for God’s sake,” Hillier complained.

“ID is always removed, so are money and clothes. If there’s no missing-person report filed, we start with prints. You know how long something like that takes, David. We’re doing our best.”

Hillier turned around. The one thing he knew for a certainty was that Malcolm would always do his absolute best and would quietly remain in the background when the kudos were given. “Sorry. Was I frothing?”

“A bit.”

“As usual. So this new Nies-Kerridge squabble? What’s it all about?”

Webberly glanced at his watch. “Another Yorkshire murder being disputed, no less. They’re sending someone down with the data. A priest.”

“A priest? Christ-what kind of case is this?”

Webberly shrugged. “Evidently he’s the only third party that Nies and Kerridge could agree upon to bring us the information.”

“Why’s that?”

“Seems he found the body.”