The House That Jack Built

Chapter Seven

The stalk was in James Maybrick's blood, hot fire that only the red stuff of a life pouring out across his hands could quench. The wild night, with its gusting rainshowers and biting cold winds, spoke to the demons raging in his soul. It called them forth, hungering and slavering, until they ran barefooted through the flames of his own private hell. She shall pay! By God, the bitch shall pay, her and her whoremaster both! All London knows my work, now, and she trembles with fear when people speak of Sir Jim's deeds. Soon, I will pay her the same as I gave the others, whores all ... and my knife will drink the bitch's blood, as well... Maybe I'll take her before I rip her open ... take her while her whoremaster watches, then rip them both, God damn them!

James Maybrick held in his mind the face of his beautiful, stupid wife, who had whored herself again and again with that fool Brierly. He summoned up the memory of the terror he'd inflicted on that prostitute in Manchester, the even more delicious terror of Polly Nichols and Annie Chapman here in London, painted that same wild-eyed fear across his wife's vapid face... and smiled as he watched his mentor close in on the common streetwalker chosen as Maybrick's next victim. Maybrick's blood pounded in anticipation.

The potent medicine Lachley gave him each time he visited London left James absolutely invincible, stronger and more sure of himself than he'd felt in his entire fifty years of life. He laughed behind his moustaches, laughed at the notion of Abberline and those bumbling idiots in the Metropolitan Police Department actually catching anyone, let alone Sir Jim and his personal god. So many constables and fine inspectors, wasting their time searching for a foreign Jew to hang!

The game delighted him. That leather apron left in the basin beside Annie Chapman had been a most diverting clue. It had sent the idiots of Whitechapel's H Division chasing after the wrong sort of man. They'd actually arrested a fellow over that lovely apron, so they had! A dirty Jewish boot finisher they'd desperately wanted to be guilty.

Too bad he'd had an alibi, an unshakeable one, at that. Not that they'd have believed him guilty for long, when other filthy whores had to be punished, had to be ripped with his shining knife. No, they wouldn't have held Mr. Pizer forever, certainly not past tonight. Tomorrow, all London would quake in its shoes at the work he would perform, he and John Lachley. A clever cotton merchant from Liverpool and a doctor of occult medicine from London's own SoHo, playing them all for the fools they were...

Rain spattered down from dirty skies, black and cold as last winter's ashes. The whore they'd been following for almost two hours, now, was a filthy foreigner. Lachley had told Maybrick about her. She frequently went begging at the Swedish parish church, spinning lies about a nonexistent husband and children. She'd supposedly lost them ten years previously, when the saloon steamer Princess Alice had collided with the steamship Bywell Castle in the Thames, killing nearly seven hundred people. Lachley's inquiries, quiet but thorough, had revealed that the bitch's real English husband had died of heart failure only four years previously, in 1884, not in the famous steamship collision. Children, she had apparently never had.

The one thing about Liz Stride that fretted Maybrick was her nephew, or rather, the late John Stride's nephew, who was a member of the bloody Metropolitan Police Force, of all things. But that didn't worry James too much. Clearly, the nephew couldn't care overly much for his aunt, not if Liz Stride were living in Whitechapel, charring for Jews and mending their garments for them, selling her body to whatever man would have her. He must remember to leave some nasty little clue on the streets, tonight, pointing the finger of suspicion at the foreign Jews again, he really must. He'd remembered to bring his chalk, this time, too.

But he couldn't write out any messages until his knife had drunk its fill.

After witnessing Catharine Eddowes' arrest for public drunkenness, they spent hours searching pubs for Stride and finally caught up to her shortly before eleven P.M. on Settles Street, at the Bricklayer's Arms Public House. Alarmingly, they found her in the company of a short, well-dressed man she laughingly called Llewellyn. A Welshman! Maybrick darted a glance at Lachley, who watched the couple narrowly from the shadows.

The whore and her Welshman stood in the doorway of the pub, waiting for the driving rain to slacken. Her customer was eager enough for it, kissing her and carrying on like some low sailor, rather than the respectable tradesman he clearly was, probably some arse of a merchant up from Cardiff on business, slumming in the East End where a man could have whatever he wanted for the price of a glass of cheap gin.

Two workmen, also taking refuge from the rain, ordered ale and watched the antics in the doorway, clearly bemused. One nudged the other. "Hey, Liz, why don't you bring your fella in and 'ave a drink, eh?" The tall woman glanced around, laughter shaking her strong-boned face, then whispered something to her customer. The man shook his head, intent on pawing at her bosom under her drab coat. The man who'd invited them in snorted knowingly. His friend called over the noise of laughing, swearing, singing voices, "Better watch out, Liz, that's Leather Apron trying to get round you!"

Laughter greeted this assessment, since the man clearly was not an Eastern European Jew. He was obviously too new to town even to understand the reference. James Maybrick smiled into his own ale glass, delighted. Leather Apron, now there's a lovely joke, indeed! Little do they know Leather Apron's sitting right here, watching, waiting for that bastard to finish, so Sir Jim can have his own chance at her. Not that Sir Jim would actually taste her dirty wares. That wasn't what he was here for. Sir Jim could take a whore anytime he wanted, just by bedding his wife.

Shortly after eleven, Liz Stride and her importunate Welshman left the Bricklayer's Arms, heading out into the rainy night for a tryst in a dark stairwell on Goulston Street. From his place of concealment at the foot of that stairwell, Maybrick could hear her asking the man to read a letter for her, one she had in her pocket.

"Read a letter for you?" he gasped out, clearly giving her the business while she asked her question. "Are you daft?"

"It's in Welsh."

The man grunted. "I didn't come to London to read somebody else's letters. And only the lower classes bother learning to read Welsh. Good God, woman, if a Welshman wants to rise above the handicap of being born Welsh, he'd better scrap everything Welsh he can. Coarse brown bread, coarse Welsh language, all of it. Great Christ, woman, hold still, I haven't finished yet!"

James Maybrick, hat pulled low against the cold wind and rainsqualls, smiled behind his moustaches. Long Liz's customer didn't know it, but his lack of ability to read his own native language had just saved his life. Clearly, Elizabeth Stride was none too pleased that her Welshman's sense of inferiority had turned him into a greater English snob than most Englishmen.

When she emerged at last from the stairwell, her color was high and so was her temper. "Ta very much, luv," she snapped, pocketing a few coins.

The Welshman, looking bewildered, watched her storm away down the street, muttering, "What the devil is it these creatures really want? Now, where's my hotel, I wonder..." He peered about him, squinting into the rain, then set off briskly, heading west.

What Elizabeth Stride wanted, at any rate, was clear. Over the next thirty minutes, James Maybrick and his mentor shadowed her across most of the East End, from Whitechapel down through Wapping, east into Poplar, a wretched stretch of dockside gambling dens and gin palaces where—so rumor had it—Long Liz and her late husband had once run a profitable little coffee shop, but never once catching her alone. She was being careful, obviously, to stay in the well-crowded streets. It was in Poplar that Stride picked up the sailor. He reeled out of a pub in the company of several of his mates, singing off-key about his long-lost and sorely missed Cardiff. By eleven forty-five, she and her sailor, a young man in a cutaway black coat and ubiquitious sailor's hat, were strolling down Berner Street, back in Whitechapel, where they paused in the doorway to number 64, waiting out another brief rain shower. A passerby glanced up and noticed them kissing, but failed to notice either Maybrick or Lachley where they stood across the road in the shadows, watching and listening.

"You would say anything but your prayers," the sailor laughed, voice carrying across Berner Street. And a moment after that, when the passerby had turned onto Fairclough Street and was out of earshot, "How about it, then? Will you?"

" 'Course I will, there's a nice quiet spot just down the street, Dutfield's Yard, where they used to make carts. Nobody uses the yard at midnight, luv. Mr. Dutfield moved his cart-making business over to Pinchin Street and the sack maker's shop next to it's closed this time of night. And there's a dry stable in there, empty now the carts have gone."

"Ah... Sounds perfect, then. Lead on, angel."

When they emerged from the doorway to number 64, the young sailor's black trousers bulged noticeably in front. Maybrick, hand thrust deep into his pocket, gripped his knife and breathed harder. Dutfield's Yard... He knew the place. It was perfect. Completely closed in, only one way in or out, and that through a narrow alley eighteen feet long. The yard could only be reached through a pair of wooden gates set into the street between a row of terraced cottages, occupied by cigarette makers and tailors, and the Jewish International Working Men's Club on the opposite side of the alleyway.

A meeting of some kind was in progress at the Club. Maybrick could hear voices speaking half a dozen different languages, English, Russian, Hebrew, French, Italian, something Slavic that might have been Polish or Czech... They came from halfway across Europe to this miserable little meeting hall where upwards of two hundred working-class louts and their women crammed themselves in to give plays and musical concerts, all of them hideously amateur, not to mention the radical meetings that attracted troublemakers from all over the East End. Maybrick detested them, agitators with wild notions about the manumission of the labouring classes. Why, they and their kind would bring down the Empire, so they would, them and their dirty whores, the ruination of decent British morals...

Elizabeth Stride, as foreign a bitch as the workers in the lively hall opposite, was taking her time, back there in Dutfield's Yard. Was the sailor reading out the letter for her? Maybrick caressed his knife. He didn't give a damn about the sailor, although he would have to die, too, if he'd translated Dr. Lachley's letter for the dirty screw. Christ, they were taking their time about it! He eased his pocket watch out, peering at the crystal face in the dim light filtering out through the Workers' Club windows opposite. Bloody near twelve-thirty A.M.! He was cold and tired and wet, had spent five miserable hours on a train today, just getting here from Liverpool, and they'd had to walk across the whole bloody East End since his arrival.

Get on with it! He snapped shut his watch with a savage motion, thrust it back into his waistcoat pocket. Impatience was making him edgy. Once already tonight, he'd primed himself to strike, only to have the chance snatched away, thanks to Catharine Eddowes' drunkenness. By the time Stride finally emerged, James Maybrick was ready to do a violence worse than anything he'd unleashed to date. By God, the moment Lachley had his letter, he would knock the bitch into that alleyway, throttle her, then slash and slash until the fury was finally spent...

"Sorry about the note in your pocket, darlin'," the sailor was saying as they stepped out of the black little alleyway. "I can read me own name, just about, but not anything else. Never went to any school."

"Oh, it isn't your fault," she said, voice peevish. Clearly, she was no happier about this customer's lack than the previous one's. "I'm beginning to think there's not a Welshman in all of Britain can read his own language!"

The sailor laughed. "Give me a kiss, then. I'd better be off and find me mates, they'll wonder where I've got to."

If Maybrick hadn't been so feverishly furious to strike, he'd have laughed aloud. Poor, dirty whore, had a letter in her pocket worth a king's ransom—literally—and she couldn't find a soul to read it to her. The sailor gave her a lusty kiss, then strode off toward Poplar and the docks. Maybrick stepped forward, seething with impatience, only to curse under his breath when a young man in a dark coat and deerstalker hat left the Workman's Club, carrying a newspaper-wrapped parcel some six inches high and eighteen inches long. He was moving fast, eyes clearly not yet adjusted to the darkness beyond the club, because he very nearly ran her down.

"Oh, I am sorry!" he exclaimed, steadying her on her feet. His accent marked him as a foreigner.

"Give me a fright, you did," she gasped, managing a smile for him.

"You are not hurt, then?"

"No, I'm fine, honest. I don't suppose you'd know anybody hereabout who reads Welsh?"

The young man looked startled, but shook his head. "No, I'm afraid I do not. I am Hungarian, have not been long in England."

"Oh. Well, maybe you might walk me back to my rooms, eh? It's not far and I'm that nervous, with this madman walking about the streets..."

"Of course, madam."

He escorted her across the street, straight toward Maybrick's hiding place. Maybrick all but crushed the handle of his knife under his fist and shrank back into the darkness of the doorway he stood in. God above, would this lousy whore never spend two minutes alone? If she made it all the way back to her doss house with the blasted Hungarian, they'd never have a chance at her! Then another set of footsteps coming along the pavement sent Maybrick even deeper into the shadows. Holy Christ, it's a bloody police constable! Pulse thundering, he stood paralyzed, watching the constable approach Stride and her Hungarian. The constable frowned at her, moustaches twitching. " 'Ere, now, move along, Liz, none of your dirty business along 'ere."

Liz Stride drew herself up, drunk and beginning to show the effects of her own night's frustration. "I never asked this gentleman a thing like that! He nearly knocked me down, coming out that door." The Hungarian doffed his hat nervously and muttered something about getting home, then fled down Berner Street in the opposite direction from the constable. The policeman shrugged and moved on, leaving Stride to mutter a curse after him.

"Well, at least I got enough for the doss house. Bloke might not've been able to read, but he had money in his trous, sure enough." She sighed, then headed back across Berner Street, clearly intent on giving up her quest for the night.

And finally, God, finally, she was alone.

Across the street, John Lachley moved in fast, stepping out of his concealment and hurrying toward her. "Madam? I say, madam, I couldn't help overhearing you just now." He was speaking in a very low voice, but Maybrick, senses twitching, heard every breath drawn, every syllable uttered. "You said you were looking for someone who reads Welsh?"

Liz Stride paused, taken by surprise. "Welsh? Why, yes, I am."

He doffed his rough black cap, gave her a mock bow. "I'm Welsh, as it happens. What were you looking to have read?"

Eagerness flooded across her face and she reached toward her pocket, then she paused, sudden wariness stealing across her features. "You couldn't help overhearing?" she repeated nervously. "How long have you been watching me?"

"Why, madam, not long at all. Here, do you want me to read this letter out for you or don't you?"

She backed away from him, toward the alleyway to Dutfield's Yard. "I never said it was a letter."

Anger flushed Lachley's face. He was as impatient as Maybrick, maybe more so, having waited two full weeks for this moment, while Maybrick had been busy with his work in Liverpool and the children and a household to run. "Of course it's a letter! What else would it be? Oh, for God's sake, just hand the bloody thing over!"

"I've got to go, have a friend waiting for me at the pub down the street, there..."

She started to step away and Lachley's temper snapped. He grabbed her by the arm, flung her back toward the alley. "Give me the letter, you stinking whore!" When she tried to break free, Lachley slammed her to the muddy ground. A tiny scream broke loose from her throat, then two more. She was trying to scramble to her feet, digging for something in her pocket. Maybrick, pulse racing, reached for his knife, started out into the open, then heard footsteps coming and swore under his breath. He fumbled out his pipe instead, lit it with shaking hands just as Lachley glanced up.

"Lipski!" The warning burst from Lachley, galvanizing the short, dark little man approaching. Already in the act of crossing the street to avoid the altercation at the gate, the heavily bearded man, obviously Jewish from the prayer shawl visible under his coat, started walking much faster. Maybrick went after him, so furious at yet another interruption he was ready to slash anything and anyone who got in his way. The Jew broke into a run and Maybrick pelted after him, chasing the interloper all the way down to the railway arch. He finally realized that Lachley would be back at Dutfield's Yard, securing his letter. Chasing a damned interfering Jew wasn't why he was out here tonight, wasn't why he'd spent the whole stinking night in the cold rain.

Maybrick turned and hurried back to the alleyway, where Lachley had finally snatched his letter from the whore's pocket. He'd forced her back against the gate, one hand across her mouth, his arm pressed against her throat, cutting off her air and trapping her against the gate. Murderous rage had twisted Lachley's face—and mortal terror had twisted hers. Her eyes rolled as Maybrick approached, hope flaring wildly.

"Not in the street!" Maybrick hissed as he came closer. "That bloody constable might come back any moment! Get her into Dutfield's Yard..."

Keeping her safely throttled, they dragged Elizabeth Stride back into the blackness, down the eighteen feet of blind alleyway and along the wall in the yard beyond. She fought them with every scrap of strength in her brawny frame, giving them a dreadful time, subduing her. Lachley, wheezing and panting, finally threw her against the brick wall and pinned her with one arm across her chest, bruising her while his hands closed around her throat; Maybrick held a gloved hand clamped across her mouth while Lachley strangled her, to keep her screams from alerting the crowd in the hall just above their heads.

"I want her!" Maybrick hissed.

"When I've bloody well finished!" Fury cracked through Lachley's voice. She was struggling, but more feebly now, losing consciousness. Maybrick had his knife out, shaking with need. At length the struggles ceased, her life fading away with a harsh rattle in her throat; then Lachley was shoving her down into the mud. "Got to make it look like she was back here for the sex," he was muttering, voice a bare whisper. Maybrick could hear the doctor searching her pockets. "Ahh... that's grand, a packet of Cachous..."

Ahh, indeed ... Maybrick smiled. Pills used by smokers to sweeten the breath. When the constables found her, they would think she'd taken them out to chew before servicing her customer, never dreaming she'd been strangled to death and cut open for the letter Lachley was stuffing into his coat pocket. On the heels of that thought, Lachley swore. "Christ! The bitch had a knife in her pocket!" He came up holding a short, wicked little blade Maybrick could just make out in the near blackness. "Bloody bitch! All right," the doctor hissed at last, "she's yours! Make it fast!"

"Give me her knife!" Maybrick gasped, wanting to do her with her own blade. Lachley handed it over and Maybrick crouched down, delighting in the shock against his hand as he slashed through the throat. He reached for her skirts, wanting to rip at her gut—

And the gate at the end of the alleyway rattled open.

A horse's hooves struck the bricks sharply, heading straight toward them. Maybrick stood up so fast, he went dizzy. Lachley grabbed his arm, dragged him deeper into the yard, back toward the stable. Maybrick's heart thudded, heavy and hard and terrified. Hot blood trickled down his hands, which shook wildly out of control as the pony cart clattered right into the yard with them.

Dear God, we're going to hang for this goddamned slut!

The pony nearly trod on the bitch's body. The animal snorted and shied at the last moment, obviously having caught the scent of blood, and tried to avoid the bundle on the ground.

"What's got into you?" a man's voice muttered, heavily accented. "What did I do with that whip? Eh, is there something on the ground?" They could hear the man scraping and probing downward into the blackness. "Who's this? Are you drunk? Get up, you're blocking the way." Then, voice suddenly uncertain. "Maybe she's ill." He jumped down from his cart, hurried back down the alleyway. "I must fetch help, get a lantern, it is black as pitch in here..."

Oh, my God, he's leaving!

"Quick!" Lachley's voice hissed into his ear.

Maybrick needed no second prompting. His legs shook violently as they made their escape, silent on their rubberized servants' shoes. Thank God Lachley had thought of using them when this business began, they'd have been overheard leaving the yard for certain, without them. He still couldn't quite believe they were going to make their escape. He shoved both knives into his coat pockets as they hurried down Berner Street, while the cart driver entered the noisy Working Men's Club behind them.

"What is it, Diemschutz?" a man's voice floated to them.

"A woman, collapsed in the Yard. Get a lantern..."

The man's name burned in Maybrick's mind. Diemschutz! Another stinking Jew! He would hunt the bastard down, so he would! Slit his goddamned throat, how dare he interrupt like that? He'd had no time to do more than cut her throat, curse it!

"Keep your hands in your pockets," Lachley hissed. "They're covered with blood. We'll have to get underground as fast as possible."

"But I didn't get to rip her!"

Fury blazed in his mentor's eyes. "I don't give a bloody damn what you didn't get to do! You sodding maniac, we were damn near caught! And the whole East End is going to be crawling with constables inside a quarter of an hour!" Lachley's cheeks had gone ashen.

"I know we were almost caught, blast it!" Maybrick hissed, gut churning with frustrated rage. "But we weren't, were we? And the bloody buggers won't be looking for us, they'll be looking for a lone man. A stinking foreign Jew, walking by himself!"

Lachley's breaths slowed perceptibly. His jaw, knotted with anger, gradually relaxed. "Right. All right, then, we walk along together. Just a couple of jolly mates, 'aving a bit of a bobble on a Saturday night, out for a quick one down to boozer."

Maybrick blinked in surprise. "Good God. You really have lived in these streets before, haven't you? I didn't quite believe..."

"Of course I have, idiot!" Lachley hissed, moving down the pavement at a more leisurely pace. "How the bloody hell do you think I know the sewers so well?"

"Oh, I hadn't thought of that, really..."

"Just shut up, James, for God's sake, just shut the bloody hell up!"

He considered arguing, but one look into Lachley's eyes told Maybrick that his mentor was in no mood for trouble, not even from him. He walked along in broody silence, the blood on his hands drying into a sticky mess. When they passed a gutter with a broad puddle, he paused and glanced both directions down the street, then crouched and rinsed off his hands and his whore's knife. Her blade was sticky with its owner's lifeblood. His hands were still unsteady as he shook the muddy water off and thrust the prostitute's knife back into his other coat pocket, opposite his own, longer-bladed weapon. He shoved his hands into his pockets to hide the bloodstains on his white cuffs.

"I want to get right out of Whitechapel," Lachley muttered, moving steadily west. "Forget about your rooms in Middlesex Street. If there's an inquiry, if that bloody Jew on Berner Street identifies us to the constables, I want to be out of Metropolitan Police jurisdiction, fast."

They were already in Commercial Road, walking steadily west toward the point where Commercial Road took a sharp bend toward the north to become Commercial Street. Once past Middlesex Street and the Minories, along Aldgate, they would be in the jurisdiction of The City of London, with its own Lord Mayor, its own city officials and—ah, yes, Maybrick smiled, clever Lachley!—its own constabulary. As they passed a nasty little alley, they nearly stumbled over a drunk, who lay snoring in the gutter. Lachley paused, cast a swift glance around, then stooped and pulled the drunken sailor deeper into the alley.

"Well, don't just stand there! That miserable Jew can describe these clothes!"

Lachley was stripping off his dark coat, peeling off the sailor's jacket and grimy shirt. "Here, put this shirt on, your cuffs are bloody."

The idea of putting on a filthy sailor's unwashed shirt did not appeal to James Maybrick. But neither did the gallows. He stripped off his shirt in haste, switching his blood-stained one for the sailor's. Lachley had appropriated the man's jacket for himself, dropping his own coat over Maybrick's arm. Maybrick slithered into it, then dumped his coat, the sleeves spattered with Stride's blood, across the drunk's naked torso. When they stepped back into the light, Lachley wore a grey cap instead of the black one he'd left behind, a salt-and-pepper grey jacket, too loose for him, and a red kerchief knotted around his neck, nautical fashion.

"You don't look the same man at all," Maybrick said softly, studying Lachley with a critical mein. Then, wistful and frustrated, "You don't suppose those sodding constables at Bishopsgate have let that drunken bitch Eddowes out yet?"

Lachley stared at him, then gave out a short, hard bark of laughter. "Great God, you do enjoy dangerous living, don't you? One wife in London, another wife and a bloody mistress in Liverpool, every week you swallow enough arsenic to poison all Bethnal Green, and now you want to stop at the police station and ask if the nice whore they arrested for impersonating a fire engine has sobered up enough to go home!"

"What I want," Maybrick growled, "is what I didn't get with the whore in Dutfield's Yard."

Lachley, equilibrium restored by their semi-miraculous getaway and a change of disguise, laughed again, harsh and wild as the rain-lashed night. "All right, damn your eyes, we'll just go along and see! The fastest route from here," he peered at their surroundings, "would be down Houndsditch from Aldgate."

As they were currently in Aldgate High Street, it was a matter of perhaps two minutes' walk to reach Aldgate proper, then they swung sharply northward up the long reach of Houndsditch, moving away from the Minories to the south. The clock on a distant brewery up in Brick Lane chimed the half hour. One thirty A.M. and his blood was high, the terror of having nearly been caught now transformed into a feral sort of euphoria. Pure excitement flowed through his veins, hot and electrically charged, as though he'd just taken a dose of his arsenic. Sir Jim was invincible, by God! All he asked was to get his hands on that other bitch he'd been promised. He'd cut her with all the wildly charged strength in him, rip her to pieces and leave some jolly little rhyme for the City Division's bumbling fools to puzzle over. His brother Michael, who could rhyme like anything, sat in his lovely rooms over in St. James's writing songs the whole sodding country was singing. If Michael could do it, so could he. He'd think up a right saucy little rhyme to tantalize the police, maybe stir up more trouble with the Jews. Yes, a truly fine way to cap off the evening...

As they approached Duke Street, a short, auburn haired woman emerged from that narrow thoroughfare, moving with angry strides and muttering to herself. A dark green chintz skirt with three flounces picked up the light from a distant gas lamp, revealing yellow flowers of some kind in the cloth. Her black coat had once been very fine, with imitation fur at the collars, cuffs, and pockets. A black straw bonnet trimmed with green and black velvet and black beads was tilted rakishly on her hair. The woman was strikingly familiar, Maybrick couldn't immediately think why.

"... lousy bastard," she was growling to herself, not having seen them yet, "give you two whole florins, I will, he says, if you can get me to spend! How was I to know he was so sodding impotent, he hadn't managed it in a whole year... Half a damned hour wasted on him and not tuppence to show for it! I've got to find somebody who can read that blasted letter of Annie's, that's what, get some real money out of it. The newspapers will give me a reward, that's what I told the superintendent of the casual ward, and I meant it, by God! If I could just get a reward, now, maybe I could take John to a regular hospital, not a workhouse infirmary..."

Lachley closed his hand around Maybrick's wrist, halting him. Recognition struck like a rolling clap of thunder. Catharine Eddowes! Wild exultation blasted straight through him. Lachley hissed, "I'll lure her down to Mitre Square, in City jurisdiction..."

Yes, yes, get on with it! His hand already ached where he gripped his own long-bladed knife. Maybrick faded back into the shadows, leaving Lachley to approach the angry prostitute, whom they'd last seen so drunk she could scarcely stand up. Clearly, the evening's stay in jail had sobered her up nicely. Good! Her terror would be worse, cold sober.

" 'Ello, luv," Lachley said with the voice of a rough sailor, a voice that matched his stolen jacket and cap and neckerchief. "You're a right comfy sight, so y'are, for a bloke wot's far from 'ome."

Catharine Eddowes paused, having to look up a long way into Lachley's face. She was barely five feet tall, nearly seven inches shorter than the man smiling down at her. "Why, hello. You're out late, ducks, the pubs have all closed. I know," she said with a wry smile, "because I wanted a drink tonight and couldn't get one."

"Well, now, I can't say as I could 'elp you to get boozey, but a body don't need gin to 'ave a good time, now does a body?" Lachley dug into his pocket, came out with a shining coin. "Just you 'ave a butcher's at this, eh? Sixpence, shiny an' new."

Catherine's eyes focused sharply on the coin Lachley held up between gloved thumb and forefinger. Then she smiled and moved closer to him, rested a hand on his chest. "Well, now, that's a pretty sixpence. What might a lady have to do, to share it?"

Further along Duke Street, where lights blazed in a local meeting hall known as the Imperial Club, three men emerged into the wet night, glancing toward Lachley and Eddowes. They moved off in the opposite direction, giving the woman and her obvious customer their privacy. James Maybrick watched them go and smiled in the darkness from his hiding place on Houndsditch.

"Let's take a bit of a stroll, shall we?" Lachley suggested, following the men who'd just left the Imperial Club, but moving at a far more leisurely pace to give the talkative trio plenty of time to lose themselves in the streets ahead. "Find us someplace nice an' comfy to share?"

Her low laughter delighted Maybrick. The song she started singing left him laughing softly to himself. The silly screw had perhaps ten minutes left to live, at best, and here she was, walking arm in arm with the man who was going to kill her, singing as though she hadn't a care in the world. Maybrick laughed again.

Soon enough, she wouldn't have.

After two solid weeks in a saddle, short of sleep and in dire need of a shower, Kit Carson was in no shape for a face-to-face with Senator John Caddrick and half the newsies in the northern hemisphere. But he didn't have much choice. They were waiting as soon as he stepped into the station through the Wild West Gate. Guides bringing back Julius and the murdered tourist followed on his heels. Screams and a roar of voices broke out, a solid wall of noise.

"Jenna!" Senator Caddrick's voice cut through the chaos. The senator was bolting past the ropes... "Jenna!" A Time Tours employee caught the senator and held him back. His expression twisted through a whole range of emotions.

"Senator Caddrick," Kit told the ashen politician, "it isn't your daughter. Neither of them is."

Visibly shaken, Caddrick, gasped out, "Not my daughter? Then where is she? Why isn't she with you?" Sudden fury crackled in the senator's eyes. He shook off the hands holding him back and advanced menacingly. "What are you doing back if you haven't found her? Explain this immediately!"

"She isn't with us because we didn't find her."

Newsies were crowding against the lounge's velvet-rope barriers, shouting questions. Barricades fell with a crash, spilling newsies into the chaos as the returning tour reeled back into the station. Skeeter Jackson, gaunt from hard riding, came through the open gate just ahead of Sid Kaederman and Paula Booker. A steady stream of returning tourists and guides began to pour through the gate as Senator Caddrick dragged his gaze from the body bags to his exhausted detective and back to Kit's face. "Didn't find her? Why not?"

"Because we have excellent reason to believe your daughter never left TT-86 through the Denver Gate at all. I'd rather not say more until we've spoken in private." Kit glanced toward shocked Time Tours employees. "Could someone notify Ronisha Azzan we need a meeting with her? Thanks. No, I'm sorry, there will be no further comments at this time."

He waded against the tide of shouting newsies and shaken tourists, heading for the aerie, then decided he didn't want to risk the kind of fireworks that would explode if he took the entire search team with him. So he shoved his way through the chaos in Frontier Town and muttered, "Paula, get out of here. Kaederman, go with Skeeter to Connie Logan's. Start outfitting for the Britannia."

"Right, boss!"

"You got it, Kit."

Skeeter peeled off so fast, news crews were left stammering in the vacuum. Paula took advantage of their surprise to haul Sid Kaederman away in his wake.

"What's going on?" Caddrick demanded.

"I'll brief you at the station manager's office," Kit growled.

"But—"

Kit left him standing in the midst of an unholy, shrieking mob of newsies. The senator, trailing reporters like a school of noisy fish, caught up and stalked along in thin-lipped silence. At the aerie's elevator access, Kit threw a body check to hold out the crowd on their heels and mashed the button for the top floor. The elevator rose swiftly toward uncertain sanctuary. When the doors slid open, Kit discovered just how uncertain that sanctuary was. Along one glass wall, lined up like so many gargoyles, sat three stone-faced men and women from the Inter-Temporal Court of the Hague, their uniforms glittering with brass officialdom. Like it or not, I.T.CH.'s grand inquisitors had arrived.

Kit held back a sigh and entered the glass-walled office anyway. The I.T.C.H. agents were stiff in their spotless uniforms, while Ronisha Azzan stood in cool elegance behind Bull Morgan's immense desk, which left Kit feeling even dirtier, grittier, and wearier than before. He rearranged grime on the back of his neck, then stalked over to the nearest chair and promptly folded up into it. Tired as he was—and stolid as the Grand Inquisitors were—Kit didn't miss the slight shuffle in chairs as his pungent perfume, the accumulation of fourteen days on a horse, wafted across the office.

"Welcome home, Kit," Ronisha Azzan greeted him quietly. "If I could have your report, please?"

Kit told the Deputy Station Manager what they'd found in the mining camp, bringing everyone up to date in a few brief sentences. When he finished, utter silence held the glass-walled aerie. Senator John Caddrick's expression was a study in lightning-fast realizations: shock, dismay, anxiety, and oddly, triumph. Then Caddrick's face went slowly purple as anger—or something approximating it—won out over the other emotions. "Benny Catlin? Do you mean to tell me you've wasted two entire weeks chasing the wrong tourist? When my daughter has been lost down your godforsaken Britannia Gate this whole time?"

"It wasn't wasted!" Kit snapped. "We know a great deal more than we did two weeks ago. One of our residents was murdered, down the Denver gate! That boy hadn't even turned seventeen, Caddrick, and he took a bullet meant for your daughter!"

Caddrick had enough sense, at least, to shut up. He sat breathing hard for long moments. Ronisha Azzan sat back in her chair, looking abruptly tired and grey around the lips and nostrils. Kit sympathized. He felt grey all over. Ronisha shoved herself to her feet and poured out three stiff scotch-and-sodas. Caddrick's hand was shaking as he lifted his drink, nearly sloshing it down his expensive suit jacket. Kit drained his own glass at one gulp. "Thanks, Ronnie. God, I needed that. So... What we're trying to determine now is our best chance of tracing Benny Catlin in London. Dr. Paula Booker is probably the best bet we've got for identifying Jenna, since she's the surgeon who gave Jenna a new face."

"I want to see this doctor," Caddrick growled. "I want to know how my little girl was when she came through this station, who was holding her prisoner, why the surgeon didn't report any of this—"

"Dr. Booker didn't report it for the simple reason there was nothing to report. Your daughter came in voluntarily, alone, claiming to be a grad student. Paula gave her a set of false whiskers, surgically implanted. The very next day, Paula left for her own vacation down time. You're damned lucky, Senator, to have any witness at all. When we caught up to Dr. Booker, trying to trace Armstrong and his prisoners, she and her guide had been bushwhacked by a gang of local bandits. If we hadn't come along, Paula might well have been murdered in cold blood."

Caddrick glared at him, his mouth tightened into a thin white line. "Live witnesses won't do any good if Jenna's already dead in London! For your information, Carson, my daughter was nearly killed her first night there. Twice! Then she disappeared, leaving two dead men behind her. And now you tell me you've got two more men murdered in cold blood down the Denver Gate? Not to mention a known international terrorist who escapes with three hostages—and you don't even bother to follow? My God, mister, of all the careless, irresponsible—"

"That is enough!" Kit Carson had the lungs to be heard when necessary.

Caddrick slammed the scotch glass down, knuckles white. "Don't you dare use that tone with me—"

"Gentlemen!" Ronisha bellowed, towering over both of them. "Senator! You will remain civil or you will leave this meeting! Is that understood? Kit Carson has just risked his life, not to mention two weeks of unpaid time away from his business, looking for your little girl. In my book, you owe Mr. Carson a very serious apology! As well as whatever humble thanks you can muster up as a parent. You ought to be dancing for joy he's discovered as much as he has, considering what he was up against, out there!"

Caddrick clearly didn't intend to dance for anybody, much less for joy. He sat glaring at Ronisha for a long, dangerous instant, then glowered at Kit, obviously waiting for further explanations. Kit considered walking out, then considered unemployment and life as suffered up time. Speaking coldly, he said, "Suppose you tell me just what I was supposed to do, Senator? Spend the next five years combing the North American continent for Armstrong? When we had a positive lead on your daughter's whereabouts? The Time Tours guides we left in Colorado are still searching for Armstrong and his hostages, will be for months to come, down the Wild West Gate. But this search and rescue mission was charged with finding your little girl. And that's exactly what it's going to do. Find your daughter. In London. Ronnie, what's the news from Spaldergate House?"

Ronisha sighed. "We know Benny Catlin was involved in two fatal shootings, leaving two baggage handlers dead and a carriage driver wounded. Malcolm's been searching, of course, but no one in London has any inkling that Benny Catlin is Jenna Caddrick."

Kit grunted. "Sounds to me like Jenna's managed to escape, which means our searchers will have to split up to locate Jenna and whoever took her through the gate. I pity the searchers. They'll have a helluva time, covering London for two separate targets with a three-week lead on them."

"They?" Caddrick echoed. "What do you mean, they? You're the team leader, Carson! I insist you continue to lead this mission!"

"I can't," Kit said bluntly, rubbing sweat and grit from his brow. "And it's got nothing to do with your lack of gratitude or my pressing business interests, so forget the protests. I already exist in September of 1888. I'd shadow myself and die instantly if I attempted to enter London during the next four months. Someone else has to head up search and rescue operations there. I'd suggest Skeeter Jackson, working closely with Malcolm Moore. Skeeter's already—"

"Now, wait just a minute! I've done some checking on this Jackson. Not only is he the same little creep who assaulted me at Primary, I've heard more than enough to know I don't want a con-man and thief heading up the search for my little girl!"

Kit silently counted ten. "Skeeter Jackson is not conning anybody, Senator. I hired him as my own hotel house detective and believe me, it takes a helluva lot of trust to hire somebody for that job. As for the so-called assault..." Kit swallowed the words poised on the tip of his tongue. "Just be forewarned. If you press assault charges against him, I'll be damned sure he countercharges you with criminal battery."

John Caddrick's entire face went white.

Even the I.T.C.H. inquisitors shifted in their chairs.

When Caddrick started to sputter, Kit overrode him. "Forget it, unless you really want the fight of the century on your hands. We've got photographic evidence of the whole incident, Senator. I, for one, will not allow a personal vendetta against Mr. Jackson to cripple this search mission. There's too much riding on the outcome. Skeeter's more than proven himself. Virtually every breakthrough in this case has been made by Skeeter Jackson, whereas your detective is virtually useless. I told you Sid Kaederman wasn't qualified for a down-time mission, whereas Skeeter's already experienced down the Britannia Gate. And he'll be working with Malcolm Moore, who specializes in London tours. Jackson and Moore head up the London mission, whether you like it or not, Senator. Unless, of course, you want your little girl killed?"

Senator John Caddrick's normally florrid jowls faded to the color of old wax. He opened his lips several times, but no sound came out at all. He glanced once at the I.T.C.H. inquisitors, then swallowed and sat motionless in his chair for long moments. The only sound in the room was the whir of the air-conditioning fans. Caddrick finally managed a faint, "All right. I don't see that I have much choice." His voice strengthened into a low growl. "But I will not be browbeaten and threatened, is that clear?"

If he stayed, Kit knew he would say something the entire station regretted. So he stood up, heading for the elevator. "Quite. Now, if you'll excuse me, we have a lot of work to do before the Britannia opens again. And frankly, I need a shower and a shave before I do any of it. And a cold beer."

Kit stalked into the elevator before Caddrick could protest.

On his way down toward the howling mob of newsies, he thought bleakly of Margo, already in London, and of poor Julius, no older than his granddaughter, who lay dead with a bullet in his gut. Kit wondered with a chill just how many of the searchers on this hunt were likely to come out alive?