Military Romance Collection: Contemporary Soldier Alpha Male Romance (137 page)

The rattle of tack and the clop of horse hooves on the wet cobblestone echoed through the dark London streets.  Wrapping her light knit shawl tighter around her body against the damp of an unseasonably cool July evening, Daniella Forrester hurried through the fog on her way home from the music hall where she waited tables.  Stories of a murderer roaming around Whitechapel for the past three years, preying on young women while eluding the Metropolitan Police – Scotland Yard, as it had come to be called only recently – filled her with fear.  She found herself wishing she had taken up the offer from one of the men at the pub, a regular customer and elderly gentleman recently widowed, to see her home.  Daniella had declined, believing she would be safe.  As rumor had it, all the victims had been ladies of ill repute, and while she took work where she could – a bookseller by day and the music hall by night – she felt confident she would not invite the attention of the so-called “Ripper.”

As she passed an alley, she heard a soft whimper, followed by a child’s voice crying out, “You’re hurting me!”  Daniella hesitated.  Heart pounding, everything told her to keep going, but the very thought of a child in trouble tugged at her conscience.   She looked around.  With a mysterious killer still on the loose, Scotland Yard had ordered a greater presence of law enforcement.  But since leaving the hall, Daniella had seen only one constable on patrol.

“Stop, please!” the child – a little boy, from the sound of it – whined from the shadowy passage.  There followed a noise, like a hand striking flesh, followed by another desperate wail.  “I want my mummy!”

Daniella could not bear to listen, but she could also not simply continue on her way, even to go in search of a policeman.   Picking up her skirts, she took a step toward the mouth of the alley.  “You, there!” she called into the darkness, her words quivering with uncertainty even as she did her best to come across as assertive.  “Whatever you’re doing to that child, I must insist you stop this instant!  The police have been alerted and are on their way here right now!”  The last bit was a lie, of course, but she hoped it would startle the child’s abuser.  She waited, listening for any movement, any other sounds from the boy.  Only eerie silence reached her ears.  Heart beating rapidly in her breast, Daniella pulled her wrap tighter around herself and swallowed.  “Hello?  Did you hear me?”

The scrape of a shoe on pavement made her retreat a step.  She could hear someone coming toward her, moving through the alley.  She backed up toward the dim pool of light at the base of a nearby lamp post.  Instinct told her to be on her way, to flee as quickly as possible. 

A skinny little boy, possibly seven years of age, staggered out of the shadows.  He wore not a stitch of clothing; his face and torso appeared to be smeared in blood and dirt.  He stopped, swaying, and looked at Daniella with large, vacant eyes, his mop of blond curls wet and sticking to his pale brow.  In his right fist he clutched a small doll clothed in rags.  His lips moved and it seemed to take effort for him to speak.  “Help me,” he whispered at last, just before collapsing to the cold stone pavement.

“Oh, dear!”  With no more thought to her own safety, Daniella rushed to the child’s side.  “Little boy?  Little boy!”  She dropped to her knees beside him and reached out hesitantly to touch his shoulder.  “Dear Lord, you’re cold as ice!”Pulling her shawl off her shoulders, she used it to cover the naked child, tucking it around him for warmth.  She tried to find a source of all the blood, but other than a swelling of his bruised cheek, she could see no wounds.  Looking around, Daniella began to shout.  “Help!  Someone, please – help!”

Lights began to come up in the windows of surrounding buildings.  Curtains opened and faces appeared.  Daniella continued to scream for help, until she heard the policeman’s tinny whistle and the pounding of boots racing over pavement.   Daniella looked down at the child.  “Help is coming,” she told him.  She reached up to stroke his head, to offer some kind of comfort.  Brushing his matted hair off his brow, she exposed a strange, raised mark – a broken scab, in the shape of what appeared to be the number “69.”

With a gasp, the boy opened his eyes, startling Daniella in the process.  He looked around before his wild gaze found the young woman bending over him.  “He is coming,” the child rasped.  Lifting his arm, he held out the doll to Daniella with a trembling hand.  “He will be here, soon.”

“Who?” Daniella asked, shaking her head in confusion.  “Who is coming?”

It took great effort on the boy’s part, but he managed to push out the words.  “
The angel.
”  All the breath he had within him seemed to come out all at once in one long, shuddering exhalation.  His arm fell to his side and he went still.

“Oh, God.”  Daniella crossed herself and pressed her hand over her mouth even as tears filled her eyes.  She sank back on her heels.  This mysterious child, naked and injured, had just stumbled out of the darkness and died right before her.  She never learned his name, nor did she know who did this to him.  She looked down at his hand.  His fingers had uncurled slightly and the doll he had tried to offer her now lay in his open palm…and in the dim lamplight, she saw the wooden head sculpted to resemble the grinning face of Death.

***

Inspector Logan Tummond’s pale grey eyes gazed down at the doll resting in his palm, a skillfully carved wooden skull attached to a body made of black rags.Blackened hollows for eyes stared back at him, the rictus grin of lipless teeth almost mocking, as if to say
I know something and you never will. 
Last night, a naked boy covered in blood had died while holding this macabre toy.  “Tell me your secrets,” Logan muttered to the doll.  “Is the person who made you also responsible for the death of this child?”

“It’s Thomas Cotton, all right.”

Logan looked up, turning to see his second in command and good friend, Sergeant Victor MacCulloch, squatting down beside the body.  MacCulloch nodded to the morgue workers who had waited to collect the remains, giving them wordless permission to do their duty.

“And you are certain of this?” Logan asked.

The diminutive Scotsman rose up.  At full height, he stood a head shorter than Logan, but what he lacked in stature he made up for in strength and dry wit.  He turned deep set blue eyes on Logan and heaved a lilting sigh.  “Aye, as much as I hate to say it.  This is the lad who went missing sometime last week – vanished completely, according to his governess, whilst they were visiting Hyde Park.”

“Thomas Cotton,” Logan repeated under his breath.  He recognized the name.  “The son of one of Prime Minister Salisbury’s diplomats recently sent abroad to Brussels to attend the anti-slavery conference.”

“The lad was naught but ten years of age,” Victor said, “but he was known for being a bit of an imp, always running off, making his governess search for him to the point of panic before turning up again.”  He shook his head.  “This time, he never returned.  The family was wont to believe he’d been snatched, and snatched he was.”

“And yet, there was no ransom demand,” Logan said, mulling over the facts of the case in his mind.  “Until last night, no one at Scotland Yard had a clue as to what might have happened to him.”

“Then there’s the state in which he was returned,” Victor said, sweeping back the sides of his short frock coat to place his hands on his hips.  He nodded in the direction of the coroner’s wagon.  “Did you see the mark upon the boy’s forehead?  He’d been branded with a hot iron, as surely as if he were no more than common livestock.  Seeing as he was still alive, according to the lass who came upon him last night – one Miss Daniella Forrester, local tavern maid – that and all the other visible wounds upon his body…”  He shook his head again and regarded Logan with a look that was part anger, part anguish.  “It was torture, Logan.  Pure and simple
torture
.”  His quick to rise temper began to make itself evident, as was always the case whenever dealing with younger victims of violent crimes.  “Who
does
that, to a
child
?”

“The answer may lie in the meaning behind the brand,” Logan said solemnly.  He touched Victor’s shoulder.  “We will need the boy’s parents to come down to give a positive identification of the body.  I am entrusting you with the duty of going to the Cotton household to deliver this news and to escort the father to the morgue personally.”

“I shall be certain to speak to Mr. Cotton privately, and not in the company of the boy’s mother,” Victor said with a grim nod.  “Best to wait to tell her until after he’s confirmed the child’s identity, although in all likelihood she already knows.”

Logan frowned at him, confused.  “How’s that?”

“Well, a mother always knows,” Victor said.  “At least, that’s how it was with
my
mum, when my older brother died in Kabul during the second war in Afghanistan.  Just days before the official word came, she claimed she ‘felt’ something was amiss with Duncan.  Said he had even visited her in a dream, dressed in uniform and covered in blood.  After that, she would sit by the window until the news came.  Wasn’t long after that a carriage rolled up to the gate bearing a special courier with a letter of regret from Her Majesty.”  Victor pressed his ruddy lips together in a hard line.  “It would not surprise me at all if Lady Cotton already knows the fate of
her
son.”

“All the same, it would be best to allow Mr. Cotton to pass the news on to his wife, himself,” Logan said.  “As for myself, I will be returning to the station to see what other clues can be found through the autopsy.”

They parted ways.  Logan followed the coroner’s cart back to the station house.  As they day progressed, the midsummer heat became oppressive.  Sweat soaked through his shirt and waistcoat as he stood against the wall, silent, as the medical examiner worked, arms folded across his chest.“Have you been able to determine the cause of death, Zachariah?” Logan asked, after an hour had passed.

The coroner shook his head.  “The wounds to his body are not enough to suggest internal bleeding,” he said.  An thin, older man with receding hair of silver and a deep, commanding voice, Dr. Zachariah Peabody had a degree in medicine and when he was not at his own practice he could be found here assisting the police with their investigations.  He peered over the rims of his spectacles at Logan.  “Although there is extensive bruising, leading me to believe whoever had him had not been very gentle.”  He placed one hand, fingers spread, over a series of bruises on the boy’s shoulder.  “You see this?  Finger marks from being held down with considerable force – which, of course, would not take much given the victim’s size and age.”  He moved his hand to the throat and lay his fingers along more bruises.  “These would indicate an attempt at strangulation but not enough to crush the windpipe.  Just enough pressure to damage the upper layer of flesh, and cause minor choking, but otherwise?  Non-fatal.  Even the cuts he received were minor, not deep enough to make him bleed out, and avoided major arteries.”

“He was alive when he emerged from the alley, according to the last person who saw him alive,” Logan murmured.  “He had walked out on his own only to die within moments.”

“There are still several other possibilities to consider,” Zachariah said.  He offered a reassuring smile, the corners of his brown eyes creasing.  “Not to worry, Inspector – I shall leave no stone unturned.”  He returned to his examination.  After a few moments, he grunted.  “Well, this is unsettling.”He looked up at Logan.  “This child was brutalized
rectally
.”

Logan felt his blood chill within his veins.  His eyes widened and his mouth went slack in horror.  “You’re telling me he was sodomized?”

“Yes, but it does not appear to be in the conventional sense.  There is no evidence of semen.  Only…this.”Peabody lifted a pair of metal tongs, which he had used to extract something from between the child’s buttocks.

Logan moved closer, leaning in and squinting for a better look at the object which resembled a feather but was in fact a plant – an inch in length, the thin twig bore a series of small, narrow, waxy leaves.  Logan’s brows drew together in a frown.  “It appears to be a sprig from some sort of evergreen,” he remarked. 

“Indeed it is, Inspector,”Dr. Peabody said.  “
Taxus baccata. 
A yew, to be precise.  There are several more pieces, which leads me to believe they had been bundled together before being inserted.” 

“Dear God.”Victor’s words echoed in Logan’s mind. 
Who does that, to a child? 
In his years of police work, Logan had witnessed many gruesome crime scenes.  He had seen bodies in various forms of decay – burned, pulled from rivers after days of being submerged – and yet, none of those things turned his stomach as much as the thought of someone shoving tree branches up a child’s bum.  “Excuse me, Doctor, but I feel I must take your leave.”

Zachariah gave him a look of gentle understanding along with a dismissive wave of his hand.  “Go,” he said.  “I shall make note of any other findings in my report and deliver it to you as soon as I am finished, here.”

“Good man.”  In sudden need of fresh air, Logan decided to abandon his morgue post and returned to his office upstairs.  The mysterious doll lay upon his desk.  While he himself could not understand it, he knew one person who might have the answers they needed.  He had to be discreet, of course, in acquiring this knowledge.  Consulting someone outside the Yard was often frowned upon.  If the Chief Superintendent were to find out Logan’s source was a
woman
?  Well, he would surely lose his badge.