A Hunt By Moonlight (Werewolves and Gaslight Book 1) (17 page)

He ground his teeth; she could see it in the movement of his jaw.

“I do my duty, Miss Fairchild. No more and no less.”

***

For once, Royston left work almost on time. Nothing would keep him from being seated by curtain-rise for Willie’s opening night.
Lear
wasn’t his favorite of Shakespeare’s works— the tragedy seemed too all-encompassing in its hopelessness and it lacked the poignancy of
Hamlet
or the nobility of
Julius Caesar
. Still, it was Shakespeare, with all the glorious language and meter. There was a reason the man’s work had survived from Elizabethan times.

He tried not to feel guilty about taking this one evening off while Doctor Death still stalked London. Godwin had taught him that when a problem seemed insoluble, often the best thing to do was to step away for a while and come at it from a new perspective. His mother would tell him that it was important to find time for music and theater, for things edifying and uplifting, as these were the things that separated us from the dumb beasts. Willie would tell him that he bloody well deserved a life, too.
 

By the time he had shaved and dressed, he had to take a hansom cab to arrive on time. He took his seat just before the lights went down, and he had only to allow himself to be transported. The sets and the costuming were rudimentary at best, but the actors were good, delivering their lines with feeling and masterful elocution. His chest filled to tightness with that warm, content feeling brought on by well-crafted prose, beautiful music, or well-done theater.
 

Had Royston not known that this was Willie’s first time on stage, he never would have guessed, and he ceased to wonder why the company would grant such a large part to a rank beginner. Willie’s natural charm made it entirely believable that he could sway two women into betraying their husbands. Willie seemed to find subtle depths to the villainous Edmund that Royston, in his many readings of the play, had never found. Royston now saw another level of tragedy in the play, the tragedy of the bastard shut out from any hope of inheritance by circumstances of his birth, circumstances that were someone else’s sin that he was forced to pay for while the guilty party prospered. He saw beneath Edmund’s ruthless seduction of the two sisters a sort of desperate vulnerability, a need to prove that he was capable of winning love and therefore worthy of it.

He, himself, might have turned out much like Edmund, had it not been for his mother’s loving influence and Godwin's mentorship?

Perhaps Willie had finally found his true calling.

Royston sent a congratulatory note backstage after the curtain fell, and moments later, Willie came bounding out through the crowd. Traces of greasepaint remained around his eyes, making him look like a deranged clown.

“Wasn’t it just brilliant?” Willie clapped Royston on both shoulders.

“You have definite talent. How long is the run?”

Willie bounced on the balls of his feet like the excitable boy he’d once been. “A week, at least. More if we get held over. I’m sure we’ll get held over. We’re doing
Romeo and Juliet
next. I’m a natural for the lead, don’t you think?”

Royston smiled and withheld comment. That Willie could talk a girl into bedding an enemy of her family, he had no doubt. But to play the part of a sincere lover? Well, that was why they called it acting, he supposed.

“You have to come out with the cast to celebrate!”

Two nights out drinking with Willie in a week? But how often did a friend have his first opening night? “Take the rest of that paint off your face, or you’ll have us both picked up by a constable for indecency,” Royston said with a laugh. “Then we can go out.”

***

The sky had gone from black to gray to rose-gold before Royston stumbled to his bed that night. Sleep was sweet. . .

The pounding at the door echoed the pounding in Royston’s skull. He fumbled for the pocket watch he’d left on the nightstand. It was not quite seven in the morning.
 

“Sir, it’s Constable Parker, sir. I’m sorry to disturb you, but they’ve found another one. Winchell’s landlady found the body in his laboratory and contacted the Yard straightaway.”

Ten

Someone had found the off-switch for the automaton wolf before he got there, and it stood in frozen vigilance in the entry hall. A woman in a plain dress and apron, presumably the housekeeper, was sobbing and shaking in the sitting room, attended by one of the constables and a maid with smelling salts.

The basement laboratory had no windows. The reek of formaldehyde threatened to overwhelm Royston’s head, still suffering the ill-effects of last night's pickling on top of the dregs of a cold. Royston looked toward the center of the room—and backed away, dry-heaving, eyes tight shut against the horror of the sight he’d take to his grave.

A woman’s body lay on the table, viscera removed and dumped into a bucket, the skinning process begun. By the table stood the metal aperture for taxidermy of a female human form complete with the gears and levers for movement. Royston staggered back until he hit a wall. He slid down the welcome support until he reached the floor, the formaldehyde, the hangover, and the horror combining to rob him of his ability to function.

Before noon they had Winchell in custody. Maybe at some point he would feel the pride of vindication, but at the moment, all he could manage was numb relief that the man’s reign of terror was over. He went back home, crawled into bed, and slept for ten hours.

***

Cool air drifted in from London’s twilight, awakening him in the failing light and prompting him to drag himself out of bed to shut the window. The thin glass was adequate against the night breezes of summer, though come winter it did little to keep the bitter cold out or to keep the warmth of the coal fire in. He was glad for this season’s respite from buying coal. Every little bit extra he could squirrel away in savings was that much distance from the desperate poverty of his childhood, that much more security against any small disaster that might come along to destroy him.

His stomach reminded him that he hadn’t eaten anything in nearly a day. The pantry was empty—he couldn’t say when he had last thought to get in food.

Winchell was in custody. A celebratory dinner wouldn’t be quite right, not with all those girls dead. But he could at least have a stroll and treat himself to fish and chips. He had been back to the stand where Molly worked exactly once—to contribute to the collection the owners had started to pay for a decent burial. No stone—that would have been beyond reach, but at least her poor body hadn’t been tossed coffinless into a pit with a dozen others.

 
He had stopped a time or two at a competing stand a block down and across the street. Disloyal, maybe, but he couldn’t bear to go back to the one where poor Molly had worked. Next to the stand, a boy hawked the evening extra. The headlines stopped him cold.

Winchell Freed! Yard Apologizes, Says Doctor Death Still At Large.

Eleven

Royston stared at the headline in numb disbelief, reading it over and over again as though the words would somehow rearrange themselves into something that made sense. At last he rummaged into his pocket for a coin and bought the paper, taking it home to read, his earlier errand quite forgotten.

A spectacular raid on an upstanding citizen came to naught. A brief investigation revealed that renowned scientist and philanthropist Dr. Edmund Winchell is far from being the brutal murderer Inspector Jones would have him be.

Winchell claimed that the body was of Mrs. Annabelle Downs, a woman who had died from consumption. Her young husband, devastated by grief, had brought the body to him, pleading that the good doctor might do something so that he could have some semblance of his beloved Annabelle with him for all time. So moved was Dr. Winchell by the man’s despair that he agreed despite the moral ambiguity of the request. He even waived his normal fee, knowing that the husband was of modest means and such a fee would leave the man destitute.

The poor woman’s husband corroborated the story, calling Winchell a true gentleman and a living saint. The article portrayed him as being quite distraught that his gentle Annabelle’s body had been carted off to the coroner’s office “as though she were some common hussy who had met with a bad end.”

Royston still saw the horror of the wire aperture and the gutted body when he closed his eyes, imagined a human woman moving with the eerie, dead-eyed stiffness of the poor wolf Winchell had made. That wasn’t grief—that was madness.

“Ordinarily my housekeeper stays out of my laboratory,” Winchell was quoted as saying. “Poor thing. I don’t blame her for being startled or for contacting the police. But really, I would have hoped Scotland Yard would employ rational men who would make civilized inquiries before they raid a gentlemen’s home with constables and coroners. I shall certainly call upon the mayor to look into the quality of men employed by our police force. I understand this man Jones has no formal education and comes from a questionable background. The mother was taken with flights of fancy about her betters. Such things run in the blood, as it is well known.”

Royston crumpled the paper and threw it across the room.

***

Royston didn’t even get to his desk Monday morning before one of his colleagues, Inspector Browne, informed him that the Commissioner wanted to see him immediately. He gave him a sympathetic smile that Royston didn’t quite believe. Browne always smiled, and, like everything else about the man, his smiles were charming and insubstantial.

Browne had risen fast in the ranks, and was everything Royston was not. Tall, charismatic, confident with women. He was even from a respectable family, (father a clerk in some government office, mother the daughter of a successful merchant). He hadn’t
quite
descended in taking a position with the Yard, but everyone knew it was a stepping-stone to bigger things.
 

He was also Miss Chatham’s new fiancé.

“Good luck,” he said now, and though he was Royston’s junior, it was the insincere gesture of a superior toward one of his men.

“Thanks,” Royston said with the greatest civility he could muster.

He had enough enemies without alienating his colleagues, and Browne, no doubt, would be Chief Inspector one day if not Commissioner. Which did not bode well for the Yard. The man wasn’t stupid, exactly. But he lacked the ability to turn the facts around in his head, like glass bits in a kaleidoscope, until the picture made sense.

The door to the Commissioner’s office opened. Royston braced himself, but it was just Miss Chatham, leaving. Lovely as always, her electric blue walking dress seemed to brighten the dull surroundings and her smile made his heart lift. “Good morning, Miss Chatham," he said. "A pleasure to see you.”

“It is a fine morning, isn’t it?” she answered with an enthusiasm that made the rote words sincere. “And it is always good to see you.”

Browne was a better match to her station, and he couldn’t bring himself to resent her choice. Much. Not when she was so kind when they met.
 

“Adela—Miss Chatham,” Browne broke in. “How does your mother?”

Browne might have the right to use Miss Chatham’s Christian name in private, given their engagement, but he was being shockingly forward to use it here in front of colleagues. Royston had no doubt that the slip had been for his benefit. Gloating, probably. Browne couldn’t possibly consider Royston as any kind of a rival.

The Commissioner started in on Royston as soon as he stepped into the office. “Damn it, Jones, did I not specifically tell you to quit making a nuisance of yourself among your betters?”
 

“Sir, with what the housekeeper found, I would have been remiss if…"

The Chief stood up and slammed his hands down on the desk. “The man is a gentleman and a noted scientist and philanthropist. Did it not even
occur
to you to start with a discreet inquiry rather than invading the man’s home and embarrassing him and the Yard both?”

Royston squared his shoulders and held his ground. “And tip off a suspect, give him a chance to destroy evidence?”

“There was no evidence, because there
was no crime!”

The gutted corpse, the wire aperture. “No crime? What I saw was abuse of a corpse, at the least.”

“Abuse of a corpse is a vague law, at best. In light of the man’s status and the honor of his intentions, I would say the law doesn’t apply.”

Royston took a deep breath. And another. “Just because the man wasn’t guilty of murder in this instance doesn’t clear him as a suspect in the other cases. Anyone who could do
that
to a woman’s body, in my opinion…“

“Your opinion doesn’t matter, Jones. You’re off the case.”

“What? You can’t…"

“I think you’ll find I can,
Constable
Jones.”

Cold sluiced through his veins. “You mean to demote me?”

“Mean to? I have done so. Be lucky I have not fired you outright. You were warned.”

“Sir, he was trying to make an automaton out of a woman’s body!”

“Which fact was easily explained away, were you not so keen to treat a learned member of society as you would an Irish sailor. Speaking of, I understand you reeked of alcohol that morning as though you
were
a sailor.”