City of Light (City of Mystery) (2 page)

The clouds had
shifted and the sun was stronger now.  It fell across his face.  Rayley closed
his eyes, pushed his tongue against the roof of his mouth, let the tartness of
the cherries dissolve into the cream beneath them and the crunch of the crust
beneath that.  One could so easily become intoxicated on sheer sensation, he
thought.  One could become drunk with desire.  Because even though his analysis
had failed to yield a single arguable reason why the woman across from him
might be called beautiful - or at least notably more so than any other lady in
this courtyard - something in her had drawn and held his attention.  He sat
very still, waiting for the flavors to dissipate.  The cream first, then the
crust, and the cherries he swallowed last of all.  Je veux, he thought.  Of all
the pastries on this tray, of all the pedals in this street, of all the
pleasures in this bright and spinning city, I want her.

 When he opened his
eyes, she was gone. 

He put his fork down
on the table.  This was another of his private little brags, that he could
taste something without devouring it in its entirety, that he was capable of
moderating even the most exquisite pleasure.  He had always known what it meant
to have enough, and again he thought of Trevor, how lacking in restraint the
man was, always reaching across the pub table to grab the unfinished portions
of Rayley’s own meal, saying guiltily, “You don’t mind, do you, man?” as he
popped the last bites into his mouth.  Trevor would go to fat before he was
forty, to gout by fifty, and probably the grave shortly thereafter, but Rayley
missed the man and indeed all the lads back in London.  Their cheerful crudity,
their slaps and farts and beer and bawdy jokes.  The French were pleasant
enough, he supposed, careful to see to the needs of their esteemed guest and
fellow criminologist.  And yet the first day, when he had presented his
credentials, branded with the golden crest from Her Majesty the Queen, had he
imagined that the lips of the chief coroner had turned up in a slight sneer? 

He certainly hadn’t
imagined the snickering he’d heard later in the lab, the whisper of “Veek-tor-e-ah”
drawn out in that damp French hiss, that sound that could make the names of the
saints seem vulgar.  The Queen was not popular here in Paris.  Her refusal to
attend the Exposition Universelle had been taken as a slap in the face, and Rayley
shifted again in his seat, looking over his shoulder at the broad gray base of Eiffel’s
half-constructed tower. With its four steel legs dug into the red soil, the
base reminded Rayley of some great claw, a talon prepared to uproot anything
that stood in its way.  The tower was little more than a machine posing as art,
but the French were very proud of it and everything having to do with their
upcoming world’s fair, their paean to scientific advancement and republican
government.  A tribute to everything that was modern and egalitarian and
free-thinking, and thus the opposite of Veek-tor-e-ah and the thin bookish detective
who’d come cross the water bearing her seal.     

The French police
found him pretentious and old-fashioned, this much he knew.  He was never
invited for a drink after work and they must stop off for a drink after work,
must they not?  All detectives did.  Part of him wondered if their cool reserve
might result from the fact he was Jewish, but this was unlikely, since the size
and prosperity of the ghetto stood proof to the claim Paris was an ecumenical
city, with opportunity – if not friendship - for all.  Once he had started to
ask his translator what was the French word for “camaraderie” before he had
caught himself just in time.  How they would have snickered over that.

The tart before him remained
a nearly full red circle, only a single bite missing as proof of his presence,
his carefully monitored appetites.  Rayley checked his bill and left coins,
undoubtedly too many.  Closed his little journal and returned it to his breast
pocket.  Rose and walked past the table the woman and the man had so recently
vacated.  For just a moment he indulged himself there, let his hand drag along
the back of the chair where she had been sitting, glanced down at the cutlery
and dishes she had touched, the glass she had lifted to her lips. 

And then he saw the
picture she’d been sketching, a single sheet raggedly ripped from a notebook,
left behind in what must have been a hasty departure. 

Without thought, he picked
it up and turned it over.

It was his own
face.  She had been drawing him.     

CHAPTER TWO

London

April 16, 1889

7:14 PM

Trevor Welles
crouched low over the slate kitchen floor of socialite Geraldine Bainbridge and
peered at the still form of her butler, Gage.  Blood was splattered across the
front of the man’s starched white shirt and had puddled beneath his shoulders. 

“Now,” he said. 
“What can we conclude?”

“From the splatter
formation, it’s clear that an artery was severed,” said Tom Bainbridge,
Geraldine’s great-nephew and Trevor’s fledgling medical examiner.  “Most likely
with a notched knife, given the ragged nature of the wound.”

“A bread knife,”
Davy Mabrey ventured. “Taken from the block on the counter.”

Trevor nodded at the
young bobby, then rocked back on his heels.  “And was the deceased attacked
from the front or the back?”

“The front,” Davy
said.  “That’s why the wound is deeper at the top, because it was the initial
entry point and then the knife point was dragged, just so…” He crouched too and
traced the imaginary arc of the assailant’s knife down the still form of the
butler. 

“I’d say from
behind,” Tom said. 

Davy frowned. “Why?”

“No defensive
wounds. He didn’t see it coming, and thus there was no struggle.”

“You both make solid
points,” Trevor said, rising awkwardly to his feet and using the sink, just for
an instant, to steady his sizable frame. “Fortunately, there was a witness to
the crime and perhaps she can tell us more.”

The eyes of all
three men turned to the seated figure of Emma Kelly, Geraldine’s maid and
companion, who had withdrawn to the rocker by the fire and was already shaking
her head. 

“I’ve told you,” she
said irritably. “It happened so fast that I was too unnerved to notice
anything.”

Even though he
didn’t want to further distress the girl, Trevor knew he couldn’t let it go at
that.  It was the fourth session of their Tuesday Night Murder Games and at the
first three staged crimes scenes, Emma had been his star pupil, surprising
everyone by outstripping the observations of both Tom, who was within a term of
completing medical school, and Davy, who had two years as a bobby under his
belt.  She seemed to have a gift for inference, so Trevor was sorry to see her
so dispirited tonight.

It was his own
clumsy fault.  He hadn’t wanted the excitement of their evenings to flag, so
he’d upped the stakes.  Paid a boy from a theater troupe a few pounds to drop
by Geraldine’s home in the fashionable neighborhood of Mayfair, where the
forewarned Gage had left the kitchen door unbolted.  The lad had taken his task
entirely more to heart than Trevor had intended, and had arrived in full stage
make-up and an ill-fitting pirate costume.  No doubt indeed Emma had been
startled and nothing short of terrified when he’d sprung through the kitchen door,
shouting seafaring threats at Gage, who had responded with quite the
performance of his own, letting fly with a fearful shriek before sinking to the
floor.

They had timed the
attack for the hour when Gage and Emma would be in the kitchen preparing the
evening meal and Trevor had anticipated it as the latest and most demanding test
of the girl’s powers of observation.  But when Trevor slipped into the kitchen
he had found Emma pale and clammy, trembling so violently that he had escorted
her promptly to the chair where she now sat.  

Trevor silently
cursed himself.  He’d become so obsessed with testing his three apprentices that
he had failed to factor in that Emma’s own sister had been killed with a knife
no more than six months earlier, the last known victim of Jack the Ripper. 
Emma had assured Trevor that she wanted to join the Murder Games, and the
initial thought was that her knowledge of foreign languages would prove useful
to their studies of forensics, especially in light of the fact so many of the
procedural documents Rayley Abrams was providing were still in their original
French.  It had been an unexpected bonus when she’d furthermore proven a quick
study at the simulated crime scenes.  She had been, in fact, the only one of the
three to notice the fraying of the noose in the tableau Trevor had dubbed
“Suicide or Something More Sinister?”

But this clearly had
been too much – the actor rushing through the door, the fact the victim was her
friend Gage, the choice of a knife as a weapon.  Emma had disconnected from the
activity around her and now sat staring into the fire. 

“You remember
nothing?” Trevor questioned gently, lowering himself to the chair opposite hers. 
“Perhaps the clothing?”

“He wore a red
vest,” she said with a sigh. “His boots were…high.”

“High like those of
a coachman?”

She paused. “No, more
like a boatman.”

“His height?”

“Shorter than Gage,
of course.  Everyone is shorter than Gage.  And taller than me.”  She glanced
at Trevor, gave a bitter little laugh.  “Not very good, is it?”

He smiled.  “It does
give us a considerable range.”

Emma turned in her
chair and perused the crime scene.  “Close to the height of Tom, I’d say.  Yes,
closer to Tom than anyone else in the room.  And he was young.  Not yet twenty.”

“Good,” said Trevor.
“Very good. Hair?”

“Slicked back with
oil.  Dark, but perhaps it only seemed that way because of the oil.”  She
frowned.  “Could he have been wearing….he was very pale.  Unnaturally so. 
Could he possibly have had white powder on his face?”

“He could and he did. 
Excellent, Emma.”  Trevor felt a surge of optimism.  If she wanted to continue
with the forensics team, Emma would have to face a death by stabbing at one
point or another, so as difficult as the experience had been, at least it was
now behind them.  He snuck a quick glance down at his pocketwatch.  He would
have Emma questioned again in five minutes, this time by Davy.  It was part of
a more personal experiment Trevor was doing on changes in recall over time.  He
suspected that the truest impressions were the first, and that almost immediately
thereafter the witness would have already begun to tell themselves a story
about what they had seen.  A story which may be the mind’s attempt to comfort
itself or explain away troubling details, and thus could fail to accurately
reflect the true facts.

“Something here,
Sir,” Davy called.  “We have possibly found the murder weapon.” He was standing
by a wooden block in which the hilts of twelve knives, a full set, was visible.
“Tom, I mean the medical examiner, Sir, estimates a blade length of six inches
and only one of the serrated knives is that long.”

“It’s clean?”

“Yes, Sir, suspiciously
so.  The cleanest in the block.”

“Ah,” said Trevor,
coming to stand beside him.  “Used, wiped down, and concealed among the other knives. 
Odd for several reasons, I would venture.  Why would the killer not bring his
own weapon?”

Davy’s brow puckered. 
“Didn’t intend to kill, Sir?  Didn’t expect anyone to be at home?”

“A robbery gone
wrong,” Tom offered, looking up from the floor where he was bending over the
supine form of Gage with a ruler, measuring the distance between blood spots. 
“He encounters Gage unexpectedly and is forced to seize whatever’s close at
hand.”

“Indeed.  See the
bread on the counter?” Davy was gaining confidence.  One of the servants is
slicing bread for dinner, thus a serrated knife is on the counter.  The killer
grabs it up, does the deed, then wipes it down and replaces it in the knife
block with the others.”

“It explains it
all,” Tom said.

“Does it?” Trevor
asked sharply.  “Even if I accept your unlikely premise that our would-be thief
was unable to predict the presence of servants in a kitchen an hour before meal
time, there are still many questions that remain unanswered.  Precisely where
was the butler standing when the first blow was struck?  Why did he not fight
back?  Did he die on the spot or move about after the first cut?  Could he
possibly have struck a retaliatory blow?  What do the blood stains tell us?  And
the maid…where was she in all this?  Why was she not beset upon too or why did
she not attempt to come to the aid of her fellow?”

“She screamed,” Tom
said.  “We heard her in the parlor.”

“Indeed.  But at
what point did she scream? And if she was in the kitchen, why did the killer
take the time to calmly wipe his knife and replace it in the wooden block?”

“I was in the
pantry,” Emma called out from the hearth.  “I heard a scuffle and I –“

“Thank you, dear,”
Trevor said tersely. “But my goal is for our young scholars to deduce that without
your help.”

“Here’s how I see
it,” Davy said.  “Emma was the one slicing bread and she stops, halfway through
her task, to fetch something from the pantry.  The killer enters through the
back door, intent on robbery, and sees Gage at the sink, his back turned toward
him.  He seizes the knife Emma was using, swipes at Gage’s throat from behind. 
Wipes the knife before he goes to replace it, although I’m not sure why.”